Patrimony by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online Page A

military presence significant enough to justify such an expense. The chill that was beginning to creep over him had nothing to do with the nocturnal climate. It arose from disappointment, and from within.
    Maybe the
Teacher
was right.
A waste of time,
it had called his impulsive detour to Gestalt’s system. That, and
selfish.
    He had tried the planetary Shell and found it wanting. Probed long and deep and learned nothing for his efforts. It was past time to resume the search for something more real, more tangible, in the form of the brown dwarf-sized Tar-Aiym weapons platform that Bran Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex had pleaded with him to locate. It was apparent he would learn naught here, unearth nothing on this cold, minor world, about either himself or his paternal ancestry.
    He did not cry, but he wanted to.
    On Visaria a dying Meliorare’s words had provided the best hope of finding out something about the nature and identity of his father. If despite his most intense searching they had led him nowhere but here, where would he look next? In the absence of any other clue or information, how would he pick up the DNA thread? Should he even bother to try? Perhaps it was simply one of those things he was destined never to know. He would gladly have traded it for one of the many dispiriting, somber, sobering things he did know.
    The lights had come on in the city. In the clear, oxygen-rich air Tlossene’s many-domed and gracefully curving structures took on the appearance of a fairy-tale town, albeit one in which contemporary high-tech had utterly replaced fantasy. Photoemitting walls illuminated the streets. Even at this comparatively early hour these were largely devoid of human pedestrians, though Tlel were present in number. Their guttural chuckling and gabbling filled the night with a steady burble of contented alien chatter. It was all that disturbed the otherwise perfectly still air. He kept his translator switched off. At the moment, he did not especially want to know what they were saying. At the moment, he did not want to know what anyone was saying.
    Maybe, as the
Teacher
had suggested, the devious Meliorare Cocarol
had
expired with little more than a teasing lie on his lips, sending the youth responsible for his death off on a desperate wild-goose chase. Flinx refused to countenance the possibility. Not yet, anyway. He would try again, somehow. There were other ways of finding things out. Methods that were not as fast or efficient as directly querying a planetary Shell, perhaps, but still serviceable.
    For starters, he would ask around.

CHAPTER 3

    He began the following morning, starting by accessing freely available Shell sybfiles via his communit. These readily offered up the names of a number of organizations and businesses fronted by individuals who had lived on Gestalt all their lives. They represented a broad cross section of settlers. He quickly winnowed the list down to those involved with immigration, obscure social activities, and any that might offer services to citizens who had reason to be exceptionally protective of their personal privacy. He was looking for any person or commercial concern that might have contact with other individuals who had more than the usual reasons to keep the details of their identity discreet. In particular, he was looking for one such individual who more than a quarter century earlier had sold or donated sperm to the Meliorare Society and might subsequently have fled to the minor colony world of Gestalt.
    Though still extensive, the final list represented the best he could do based on a preliminary search. He had to start somewhere. Simply checking every male inhabitant of the appropriate chronological age was certain to prove an interminable as well as unrewarding task. Furthermore, the Meliorares had manipulated his DNA to produce results to their taste, to fulfill a specific design. His paternal donor might as easily be short and dark-haired as tall and redheaded, and