"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 5 - Flinx in Flux" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

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Fragile bodies, the suicide supporters insisted. Or cremation in the jungle.
These were theories upon theories that brought mild‑tempered xenoarcheologists
to blows, all impossible to prove because among the millions of carvings and
records that had been left behind on small cubes of micronically etched metal,
there was not one picture of an Alaspinian. There were endless images of plants
and animals and landscapes and structures, but of the people who had recorded
them, nothing.
It was one of those worlds where the thranx were more at ease than their human
compatriots. The hot, humid climate was like a breath of fresh steamed air from
home to them. The larger permanent research installations were all staffed by
thranx, while their human counterparts came and went rapidly, gleaning bits and
fragments of knowledge suitable for a paper or thesis before fleeing for cooler,
drier worlds.
Prospectors outnumbered scientists in the frontier regions. Alaspin was rich in
valuable minerals. Many of those who called themselves prospectors, however,
avoided the rich alluvial plains of the savannas in favor of mining the
limitless ruins, where the digging was easier and the "ores" more highly
concentrated; already refined, in fact. A perpetual state of limited war existed
between prospectors and scientists.
To those engaged in research, the prospectors were despoilers of tombs and
destroyers of a still poorly understood alien heritage. Some of the more
reckless and less caring explorers would not hesitate to tear apart a newly
uncovered structure in search of a single marketable artifact, thereby rendering
the entire site useless for scientific study.
Meanwhile, the poor prospectors, unsupported by fat research grants and
surviving largely by their wits in a hostile environment, complained that the
authorities always sided with the big institutes, while they already had located
more sites and ruins than could be studied in a thousand years. They argued that
every additional site they discovered only added to, instead of subtracting
from, the sum of scientific knowledge.
In between drifted a small group of hybrids acknowledged by both sides, solitary
individuals who were both prospector and scientist, travelers in whom the desire
to learn warred constantly with greed.
Standing apart and aloof from the combatants and their eternal bickering were
those who had come to Alaspin to make their fortune by other means. They came to
serve the needs of prospector and scientist alike. For money, since no one came
to Alaspin for his health. The climate was rotten, and the native lifeforms
inimical.
Not every scientist was supported by a recognized institute. Not every
prospector was grubstaked by a large company or criminal consortium. So stores
were needed, and entertainments sufficiently simple and garish, and servicing
facilities. The people who ran those businesses were the only ones who could
really call themselves citizens of Alaspin. They depended on the planet for
their livelihood. They were there for the long haul, unlike the scientists who
dreamed of making the Great Discovery or the prospectors who pondered the one
Big Strike that lay in the next vine‑cloaked temple, the next virgin stream.