Path part 1-6

They sang a round dance and pulled me to the table to eat a cake, my mother brought it, I saw it through the window and put it on the veranda of the group. A hefty cake by the way, well, for twenty-one people in one bite. A hefty pot of compote was brought here from the dining room. And as it turned out here, neither Turians nor Quarians have any dextroamines. And the blood of all races, without exception, is red, differing only in shades and composition, of course. And of course, all races have dietary restrictions. So my cake is universal, suitable for all races, which, alas, does not add to its taste qualities.

That reminds me! When Uncle Duck came to visit us with his family, his wife and three children, his eldest sons are the same age as my older brothers, and since we are also neighbors, they are bosom friends, and all the mischief in the village is the work of my brothers and their Turian friends plus Dr. Ray's daughters. As it turned out, she's also our neighbor. Her name is Rayan T'rann. Uncle Duck's wife is named Kaadi and she is a former soldier of the Black Guard, an incredibly cool aunt. So when they all came to us for the first time, my younger brother turned exactly one year old. The first thing that caught my eye was that the Turians have FIVE fingers on their hands, not four. When I was stunned to see this miracle and, out of excitement, confused in words, I asked Duck about it, the answer amazed me. In fact, male Turians have five fingers on their hands, just the ring finger and the little finger fused together. It happened in some very ancient times. When the Turians on Palaven still lived in trees, Men mostly hunted and usually on the surface, when the mutation occurred it is impossible to establish, but the four fingers gained an advantage in hunting due to a stronger grip, well, this is according to theory. No one really knows what happened. The women did not come down from the trees, but were mainly engaged in gathering. Therefore, women still have five fingers on their hands and toes, the fingers are much longer and more mobile than men's, although the foot itself is smaller. The foot of the Turians looks amazing, as far as I have seen Nain in the pool and in pictures on the Web. Four fingers look forward, and the index and little fingers are almost the same size, thick with powerful sharp claws, the middle and ring fingers are much shorter and with flat thick nails!! The thumb is turned back and for men, by and large, it has completely atrophied into a heel, but for women, although in a greatly reduced version, it has been preserved, and Turians can firmly grasp a pliable surface like a tree with their foot, and even hang upside down without any harm and consequences for themselves. Which Nain has shown me more than once.

Wow, we ate the cake and drank the compote. Now let's go to the pool, there's just a great pool in the garden, and I love swimming. The Turians really don't like this business very much, but they're much deeper and don't pull, let them be broke. In general, the Azari love the pool the most, they are like fish in it. Then people come here as everyone wants, who loves, who doesn't. Batarians are indifferent. Turians rather do not like, although they swim with pleasure on the shoals. But our Drell doesn't wear it. They built a dry room for him in the pantry, where the humidity is about five percent and there are some salts in the air that are useful for drells. It's probably from Kapral's syndrome. And his name is Feron!

Two months later.

The Whisper Ranch

It's vacation time, so I'm sitting on the porch of our house with an album on my lap, pretending to draw. In fact, I shamelessly warm my ears listening to the conversation between my father and his Batarian assistant, Koel Natol, sitting on wicker chairs in the middle of the lawn. Gina is sitting next to him, with the same album on her lap and her tongue sticking out from diligence, drawing something with colored pencils. In general, she has a real gift for drawing, and what I do with effort, she somehow comes out by herself. After introducing her to the album and showing her the basics, I was just amazed at how fast she was progressing. To be her artist. And now, looking into her album, I saw our cat, lying on the grass with a lazy expression on his face, and all this in small strokes and so accurately conveys the mood, alas, I will never be able to do that.

"Listen to the Call." Says the father. "What's wrong with you, you haven't been yourself for the second week, what happened?"

"I haven't heard from my brother for a long time, neither from myself nor from his family. Saer is worried!"

"So, I thought you said that his contract was ending, I got him engaged to us, agreed with Tael, he punched the management. Everyone agrees to accept him and his family."

"That seems to be the problem, someone must have betrayed his brother, that he lathered up to us, and in the Hegemony they look askance at this."

"This way, normal conditions would be created for the reasonable, and they would not have to catch their own population trying to run away wherever they want, just to get away from their native state."

"This is what you have here at RM, the order is like in the legends. At first, we all couldn't believe that this was happening. I kept waiting for a trick, when they would start to squeeze. It was only a year later that I believed that everything that was written in the contract was being fulfilled."

"So Kol. The main resource of any state, corporation, or even family is people. These are not factories, steamships, ships and junk. These are the ones who create, produce, mine, build, transport, and raise the next generation. Invest in the sensible ones and you'll get a hundredfold return. RM has been pursuing such a policy for two hundred years, so the corporation is in third place in the list of the strongest companies in the Alliance of Systems, and it is included in the hundred of Citadel space. And what about the Hegemony!?"

"So I'm not arguing, Michael. I'm not arguing... I'm just worried about my brother."

"Can we have a drink? Would you like some cognac?!"

"What?! The real one! Terran?!"

"Yeah! Moldavian. Maybe not the best, but still. A friend gave it to me, my friends on Earth bought it, and they sent the box to me."

"Ah! .... Pour it out. I'll try again."

My father came into the house, and Coel stared at the sky with a kind of detached look. His emotions were filled with longing and fear, but there was a faint glimmer of hope. That's right, Uncle Coel is a normal guy. He's a good hard worker, a great specialist, and his arms are straight. Dad is very pleased with him. And Hegemony is just such a dump, with slavery, with bonded contracts, and wolfish capitalism in all its glory. I asked him once, Uncle Coel, why your people put up with all this, instead of taking up arms and restoring order in the country. He replied that only overseers, police, army and family members of corporate heads can have weapons in the Hegemony. The rest of them, if they get caught with a gun, are immediately dead. Well, except for the pirate squads, they are actually supported and under the roof of the same corporations. In general, hopelessness. That leaves the Batarians to run anywhere, mostly to Omega.

"Da-ad! Da-ad! Look at how I drew the Barsik." Gina skipped over to him.

"Well, let me see." Coel took the album and stared at the drawing with admiration.

"Do you like it?!" Gina asked, looking lovingly at her father.

"Very!" Coel answered and hugged his daughter tightly to him. He loved his daughter. His loved her so much. That I felt it from afar, mine also loves me very much, of course, but here it was just painful. Gina feels it and twists the ropes out of her father just like that. Even now, he's clutching her so tightly, as if he's afraid she'll disappear.

"Dad! You'll strangle me!" Gina wheezed.

Then my father came out of the house, holding a bottle and two glasses in his left hand, and a saucer with sliced lemon in his right. He put everything on the table, sat down in an armchair, opened a bottle that made a "pou" sound, and poured the golden liquid into glasses.

"Well, Kol. For luck! Your brother will need it!"

"Good luck, Michael."

They clinked glasses. And Gean is already back next to me on the porch and is drawing something on a new sheet again, glancing at me from time to time. Her emotions are filled with fun and some kind of adoration, that's why she treats me like this, I just don't understand.

I myself am red-haired and green-eyed, and my hair is such a bright color that among the kindergarten kids, I stand out like a fly agaric in moss. Seen from afar. And my eye color is malachite green, bright and saturated, the doctors were perplexed at first, they said that people do not have such an eye color. Dad also kept wondering who I was like, there had never been any redheads in the family, either on my father's side or on my mother's. My father himself is light-haired and light-blue-eyed, a true Aryan, my mother is dark-haired with almost steel-gray eyes. And all my brothers, who are like my father, who are like my mother, I'm the only redhead. Anyway, we decided to check it out. They took my blood, went to the hospital in the city, and did an analysis with the construction of a model for decoding the gene code. And they got a light blue-eyed blonde. Fucked up. rechecked, the result has not changed. Then Uncle Duck and Aunt Ray got caught up in professional curiosity about how this could be. They picked up the mother's medical record, checked all the events during pregnancy and found out that at the 6th month, an accident occurred at the enrichment complex, a pipeline with some kind of terrible chemical reaction broke to extract useful substances from the rock. By the way, they extract the Zero element there! A lot of people got killed, thank God they didn't get killed. Well, then my mother worked in a factory emergency room, and helping the victims, she also got poisoned. That's what the reagent did to me. We had a lot of arguments about this in the kitchen. The advantage was that there was exposure to the "zero element", but so far no consequences are noticeable. I'm pretty good with red hair.

"Hey! Eugene! Je-an! Let's go for a walk!" There was a loud shout from the gate, and Nain was swinging on it like on a swing.

"And where will we go?" Jean asked.

"It doesn't matter. Let's go to Uncle Tael and let him tell us a story about the navy."

"Come on!" I say and throw the album on the porch. Gina puts hers carefully, before closing and putting the pencils in the box.

"Keep an eye on them." I hear my father's voice, and when I turn around, I see a Barsik trotting after us.

Chapter 3.

Eugene (Mendoir October-November 2358)

Picnic.

The city of Leonov on October 10, 2358

I'm sitting high and looking far away! I'm over a meter and a half tall, and I have the back of my head with blond curly hair between my legs, and skinny boyish shoulders under my ass. I hold my brother's forehead with my hands and prevent him from turning his head, which he periodically resents. Little fox! Take your hands off, I can't see anything under my feet! Come on! There are roots all around! Eugene! Let's crash now! And you squint your eyes! That's how it will be seen! I'll tell you what! Crab-crab! My eyes are not on stalks!

"Then I'll hold on to your hair. They're long and soft, just for my hands!"

"Oh no! Not by the hair! Little fox! You're going to rip them all out for me!"

"I won't rip anything out! They're sitting tight!"

Nearby, Vasil listens to our bickering, blazing with merriment. For my brothers, Vaska, and for me, for some time, Vasenka. That's what I called her in the summer when I asked my brothers to go fishing, but they didn't want to take her. So I plugged it in. I cried into her lap, she felt sorry for me, and she attacked my brothers, but they can't refuse Vasil. This is myalsnon markhta. I've been calling her Vasenka ever since.

"A fox cub... What are you going to do there?!"

"I'll give you a head massage now, Deniska!" I say and start gently massaging my brother's head with my fingers.

"Then I'm definitely going to fall!"

"I'll fall for you! Okay, you drop me, so you can still spill two buckets of barbecue, and it's not just me! No one will forgive you for that!"

"Ha haha! We definitely won't forgive that! Vasya laughs loudly!"

"Oh, yes! They turned on poor me! Wow! A woman's conspiracy! I won't carry you back in the evening, you'll know, you red-haired arrogant!"

"Well, Dishya!" I hug my brother's head and speak softly in his ear. "I'm sorry, asshole, I won't do this anymore!"

"I won't give it to you! Do the massage next, and I'll keep a better eye on my feet. Heh heh!"

"Ah ha haha! Clowns! No circus is needed! Vasya is bursting!"

I'm looking at her with a smile! Gently massaging his brother's head. He grunts with pleasure and slowly turns his head, putting different places under my fingers.

We're all going on a picnic together, everyone, this is my family, the Tanir family in full, Tael'Rigar, Aunt Ray with her daughter Vasil and Gina with her mother Saer plus Polkasha and Bars. Today is October 10, colony Day, on this truly historic day for Mendoir, the first colonist set foot on its surface 13 years ago, and even though there were sixty thousand of them. Gina's father is the senior shift engineer on duty today, and his brother Bael is his assistant. Yes, my brother was found, he flew in at the end of June. At that time, my father was urgently taken to the port of Gagarin along with Koel, right from Deniska's birthday. When they returned, a couple of hours later, a tall, thin Batarian, who looked exactly like Coel, only ten years younger, and his brother's young, thin Batarian wife got out of our flyer with them. And they don't have any children yet.

Polkan is running around the park like a gray shaggy torpedo, pestering other groups of walkers, no one is afraid of him, on the contrary, everyone is squeezing and trying to shove delicious things, which this shameless gobbler uses, especially since he knows most of the inhabitants of the town by sight because he often walks with his older brothers in the park.

Polkan is a unique dog, the only dog in the entire Mendoire from the "GUARDIAN" program. These dogs were jointly developed by Terran and Salarian geneticists, according to a common program for the protection of hazardous industries and special facilities.

"My maternal uncle gave it to me as a gift from the command in connection with my retirement." How he got him is beyond comprehension, these dogs are still microscopically few. Well, there's probably a lot available to the Rear Admiral, Deputy Commander of the Fifth Fleet of the Alliance of Systems. My mother's maiden name was Hackett, guess who my uncle is. It's not surprising that he pushed all the hemorrhoids of the alliance onto the hero in the game, so it's probably like a family thing. Barsik was pacing sedately behind Deniska and me, while not taking his attentive green eyes off me. He's not a simple cat either, but as it turned out from the CADIZ Alliance program.