"Gordon R. Dickson - Jean Dupres" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

"JeanтАФ" she began, but her husbandтАФhis name was Pelang, I remembered and hers was Elmire,
both of them Canadian French from around Lac St, John in Quebec, Canada, back homeтАФinterrupted
her. He sat back in his chair, beaming and rubbing the hard fat of his belly-swell under his white glass
shirt, and took the conversation away from her.
"And what would you like to be then, Jean?" he asked. "A man or a Klahari?" and he winked genially
at the rest of us.
The boy concentrated. I could see him thinking, or picturing rather, the people he knewтАФhis mother,
his father, himself, struggling with this macerated earth reclaimed from the jungleтАФand the Klahari he had
seen, especially the senior ones, slipping free through the jungle, flashing with jewels and feathers, tall,
dark and powerful.
"A Klahari," Jean Dupres said finally.
"Klahari!" His father shouted the word, jerking upright in his chair; and the boy shrank. But just then
Pelang Dupres must have remembered his guests, and caught himself up with a black scowl at Jean. Then
the man tried to pass it off with a laugh.
"Klahari!" he said. 'Well, what can you expect? He's a child. Eh? We don't mind children!" But then
he turned savagely on the boy, nonetheless. "You'd want to be one of those who'd kill usтАФwho'd take
the bread out of your mother's mouthтАФand your father's?"
His wife came forward and put her arms around the boy and drew him off away from the table.
"Come with me now, Jean," she said; and I did not see the boy again before we left.
As we did leave, as we were outside the house checking equipment before moving off, Pelang was on
the house steps watching us, and he stepped up to me for a moment.
"It's for himтАФfor Jean, you understand, Corporal," he said, and his eyes under the darkened contact
glasses were asking a favor of me. "This placeтАФ" he waved an arm at cleared fields. "I won't live long
enough for it to pay me for my hard work. But hell be rich, someday. You understand?"
"Yeah. Just stay inside the law," I said. I called the men together and we moved out in skirmish order
into the jungle on the far side of the house. Later, it came to me that maybe I had been a little hard on
Pelang.
I didn't pass by that area again that season. When I did come by at the beginning of next season I had
a squad of green recruits with me. I left them well out of sight and went and looked in from behind the
fringe of the jungle, without letting myself be seen. Pelang was seeding for his second crop of the season,
and Jean, grown an inch or so, was standing guard with the De-Baraumer again. I went on without
interfering. If Pelang would not give up his ways on the threat of being taken in, there was no point in
taking him in. He would simply pay his fine, hate me, and the whole family would suffer, because of the
time he was absent from the planting and the place. You can do only so much with people, or for them.
Besides, I had my hands full with my own job. In spite of what I had told Pelang, my real job was
being a soldier, and my work was not riding herd on the planters, but riding herd on the Klahari. And that
work was getting heavier as the seasons approached the seventeen-year full-cycle period.
My squad had broken out mealpaks and were so involved in eating that I walked up on them without
their being aware of it.
"And you want to be Rangers," I said. "You'll never live past this cycle."
They jumped and looked guilty. Innocents. And I had to make fighting men out of them.
"What cycle?" one of them asked. All of them were too young to have remembered the last time it
came around. "That and more. You are going to have to understand the Klahari. Or die. And not just
hate them. There is nothing evil in what they do. Back on Earth, even we had the Jivaros, the headhunting
Indians of the Amazon River. And the Jivaro boys were lectured daily while they were growing up. They
were told that it was not merely all right to kill their enemies, it was upstanding, it was honorable, it was
the greatest act they could aspire to as men. This code came out of the very jungle in which they were
born and raisedтАФand as it was part of them, so the way of the Klahari young men is out of their world
and part of them, likewise.
"They were born outside of this jungle, well beyond tne desert. They were raised in cities that have a