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

explosion to date. An interracial sociological situation such as we had on Utword was like a half-filled toy
balloon. You squeezed it flat in one place and it bulged someplace else. The pressure our planters put on
the maturing Klahari made the five-year ones, the post-seniors, organize as they had never needed or
wanted to do before.
The number of our planters had been growing in the seventeen years since the last Klahari generation.
Now it was no longer possible to ignore the opposition, obvious in the cleared fields and houses and
Strongpoints, to any post-senior Klahari's dream of a jungle kingdom.
So the Klahari had got together and made plans without bunching up. Then, all in one night, they
formed. An armyтАФwell, if not an army, a hordeтАФtwenty to thirty thousand strong, moving in to overrun
all signs of human occupancy in the jungle.
We, the human soldiers, retreated before them, like a thin skirmish line opposed to a disorganized,
poorer armed, but unstoppable multitude. Man by man, sweating through the depths of that jungle, it was
hardly different from a hundred previous skirmishes we'd had with individual bunchesтАФexcept that the
ones we killed seemed to spring to life to fight with us again, as ever-fresh warriors took their place.
There would be a rush, a fight, and a falling back. The half an hour, or an hour perhaps, in which to
breatheтАФand then another rush of dark forms, crossbow bolts and lances against us again. And so it
went on. We were killing tenтАФtwentyтАФto one, but we were losing men too.
Finally, our line grew too thin. We were back among the outermost planters' places now, and we
could no longer show a continuous front. We broke up into individual commands, falling back toward
individual Strongpoints. Then the real trouble beganтАФbecause the rush against us now would come not
just from the front, but from front and both sides. We began to lose men faster.
We made up our ranks a little from the few planters we picked up as we retreatedтАФthose who had
been fool enough not to leave earlier. Yes, and we got there too late to pick up other such fools, too.
Not only men, but women as well, hacked into unrecognizability in the torn smoke-blackened ruins of
their buildings.
тАж And so we came finally, I, the three soldiers and one planter who made up what was left of my
command, to the place of Pelang Dupres.
I knew we were getting close to it, and I'd evolved a technique for such situations. We stopped and
made a stand just short of the fields, still in the jungle. Then, when we beat back the Klahari close to it,
we broke from the jungle and ran fast under the blazing white brilliance of distant Achernar, back toward
the buildings across the open fields, black from the recent plowing.
The Klahari were behind us, and before us. There was a fight going on at the buildings, even as we
ran up. We ran right into the midst of it; the whirl of towering, dark, naked, ornamented bodies, the yells
and the screeches, the flying lances and crossbow bolts. Elmire Dupres had been dragged from the house
and was dead when we reached her.
We killed some Klahari and the others ranтАФthey were always willing to run, just as they were always
sure to come back. Pelang seemed nowhere about the place. I shoved in through the broken doorway,
and found the room filled with dead Klahari. Beyond them, Jean Dupres, alone, crouched in a corner
behind a barricade of furniture, torn open at one end, the DeBaraumer sticking through the barricade,
showing a pair of homemade bayonets welded to its barrel to keep Klahari hands from grabbing it and
snatching it away. When he saw me, Jean jerked the rifle back and came fast around the end of the
barricade.
"My mamaтАФ" he said. I caught him as he tried to go by and he fought meтАФsuddenly and without a
sound, with a purposefulness that multiplied his boy's strength.
"Jean, no!" I said. "You don't want to go out there!"
He stopped fighting me all at once.
It was so sudden, I thought for a moment it must be a trick to get me to relax so that he could break
away again. And then, looking down, I saw that his face was perfectly calm, empty and resigned.
"She's dead," he said. The way he said them, the words were like an epitaph.
I let him go, warily. He walked soberly past me and out of the door. But when he got outside, one of