Damia Read Online Free

creatures, objects, and flowers from colored sheets.
    “Old-fashioned sea sailors used to carve things in their off-duty hours,” Damitcha explained, deftly making a bird he called a heron, with outstretched wings, long legs, and neck. “Scrimshaw, they called it. Have museums of the stuff on old Earth, and I seen it once on leave there. But spacemen gotta watch weight, and so paper’s perfect. Beats the hell outa watching fractiles or such like. Keeps my fingers supple for finicky board repairs, too.”
    When Afra begged to be taught how to do origami foldings, Damitcha produced an instruction tape for him and even gave him several sheets of his special colored papers. Afra told Goswina about this hobby, but Goswina was so involved with being a new Tower technician and wife that her response was more automatic than enthusiastic: all part of her detachment from her previous ties. Afra did understand that she had other claims on her time, that she still loved him but that working in the Tower was far more exciting than listening to her little brother. Hasardar was handier and could be relied on for approval and amazement at what Afra could create out of a sheet of paper. He pinned samples of Afra’s handiwork on his bulletin board and took the manipulable ones home to amuse his children.
    On his next trip into Capella, Damitcha presented Afra with a box of origami papers, all sizes and many beautiful shades and patterns. He brought historical tapes about Oriental arts and even a small paper book on Japanese brush calligraphy.
    As Afra grew older, and assumed other duties, Damitcha would join him in Hasardar’s office for chats, for meal breaks, for long evening discussions. So Afra learned far more details about other systems than were taught in his classroom.
    Damitcha retired from active service with the freighting company and, though he frequently sent messages to his“pint-sized greenie” to which Afra usually responded, the boy did not find another so congenial. The curiosity that Damitcha had generated in the young Afra would never fail, and the boy continued to make far more contact with other cultures than his parents knew, or would consider advisable for their impressionable son.
    However, that same curiosity troubled Afra, for it made him uncomfortably aware that he found great interest in matters his family considered quite trivial or useless. Afra spent hours in his early teen years examining his inner self, trying to find the flaw in him that wanted more than he could have on Capella; that was fascinated by “otherworldly notions”; that resented the loving supervision of his parents and the path they had chosen for him to follow. The fact that he knew they loved him burdened him in his striving to be different. Their main concern was to keep the family’s honor unsullied, which meant adhering to proven ways. With their love, wisdom, and (they thought) insight into the characters and abilities of their children, Gos Lyon and Cheswina were convinced that they knew what was best. Especially for Afra.
    From Goswina on down, his siblings were quite willing to have their lives ordered by their parents. As minor Talents, they each moved serenely into secure careers in the service of FT&T and that was as far as any of them looked. Goswina’s happy marriage and her skills as a technician made her conclude that following parental example would also lead Afra to happiness. So she did not understand his rebellion, nor that he had been exposed to different standards over the years.
    Certainly his interest in “other-worldly” things extended to unusual species, like the barque cats on the liner
Bucephalus.
Damitcha had told him about these strange, space-faring variants of Terran felines.
    “We don’t have one, but next time the old
Buc
cradles down here, ask the chief—a woman named Marsha Meilo—if you can see theirs. They gotta new litter, but—sorry, lad, they’re not planet beasts. They stay in