Anne McCaffrey - Dull Drums

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 29.4KB 14 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Dull Drums

By Anne McCaffrey

THE TROUBLE WITH STUDENT-ISSUE CLOTHING

was not its neutrality, thought Nora Fenn, but its in-stability. Did the suppliers think students doddered

about the academic cloisters like pensioners? She fingered together the rent across her hip, hoping that

no one would brush against her and widen the tear. She must have overstressed the fabric when she

stamped out of Con's last night. Wouldn't you know it'd be on the left side, where her tights had run this

morning?

Doggedly she continued along the pedestrian way, toward the Metropolis' Main Computer Block,

twist-ing through and dodging clumps of slower-moving citizens.

It had been such an honor to qualify for the special Cybernetics course, given by Master Scholar Siffert

himself, that Nora didn't mind the twenty-minute commute from the University Complex to the

Com-puter Block no matter how the others in the class complained. (Not much suited them anyhow!)

After nearly a year, she still reacted to the metropolitan life with added alertness. Just to walk the

pedestrian ways, to look at the variety of faces and costumes and shops was a treat for a Farm

Complexbred girl. She usually started for this class early so she'd have time to window-shop and

people-watch. But today Con's mean words leapt about her mind.

"Yeah, you say you like people, Nora Fenn, but I never saw anyone communicate less in my life."

"Just because I'm not always gibbering . . ." she'd said in self-defense.

Con had thrown back his head and howled. "The very notion of you . . . you . . . gibbering! May I be

around to see the day!"

There was nothing wrong, Nora told herself stoutly, in taking pleasure in just being among people. You

didn't have to participate actively ...

But last night's scathing accusations rang in her ears.

"You can't be a parameter cloddie forever, Nora. You'll never really know what life is about until you

start communicating and experiencing actively. And don't tell me you're in computer programming

be-cause that's your aptitude. That's your cop-out so you won't have to live and feel. If your Guidance

Officer had wit one about him, he'd have phased you out of Computer Science, and shoved you into the

Human-ities. And opened wide holes in your father's home-brewed homilies."

"My father . .."

"Your father," and Con was so incensed the cords stood out in his neck, "your father is a throwback to

all the parental autocracies, the chauvinistic, narrow-minded, sex-blocked, inhibiting, maladjusting,

mar-tyrizing, egotistical, possessiveness that our present system of social harmony is supposed to

correct!"

"How dare you say such things!"

"Because you have! Only you're still too much under your father's domineering influence to realize how

much you resent him."

"I don't resent my father. I understand his-"

"Understand?" Con threw his arms up in dramatic frustration. "Understand why he's refused to give you

any decent credit allowance? By the printed cir-cuits which feed us, every other Complex manager

would do without so he could budget something for any youngster his unit can send on to Academic

Ad-vancement! And for a kid on unlimited Academic Advancement . . . Wake up, Nora. Your

ever-loving father has never forgiven you, his daughter, much less the Educational Committee, for letting

you go on to university instead of the male, his son, your brother."

"I don't need credit allowances." Nora tried to

sound convincing, but she'd been hurt and confused by her father's parsimony. "I got an academic bonus

of a hundred credits first term."

Con shook his finger right under her nose.

"You can fool yourself, Nora Fenn, but you, sure as zero times zero is zero, don't fool me! Your

pater-nal parent has royally screwed you, and why you persist in trying to prove you're worth his

disdainful notice, even if you are female, I don't understand. He isn't worth the effort."

Con had stepped forward then, his expression hard and angry as he grabbed her arms and gave her a

good shaking. His manner was frighteningly different from the jovial, joke-cracking clown pose he usually

affected.

"Abort the Computer courses, Nora. Get into Hu-manities. Take some Behavorial Psych. See

objec-tively how futile it is to try and win your father over. And then grow up and live as Nora Fenn

instead of George Fenn's unwanted female child."

"Thank you, Connor Clarke, for your lecture and your advice. Send me the bill! But don't try my

num-ber. I'm writing you out of my program from now on."

She had grabbed up her cloak and strode from his room, racing down the hall to the anti-grav shaft.

She'd entered it fast-that's probably when she'd torn her tunic-and cried all the way down the a.g. shaft

to her own level, cursing Con under her breath and desperately trying not to remember what he'd said.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Anne McCaffrey - Dull Drums.pdf

共14页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Anne McCaffrey - Dull Drums

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: