"Joe Haldeman - Seasons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

SEASONS

Transcripts edited from the last few hundred hours of recordings:

Maria

Forty-one is too young to die. I was never trained to be a soldier. Trained to survive, yes,
but not to kill or be killed.
That's the wrong way to start. Let me start this way.
As near as I can reckon, it's mid-noviembre, AC 238. I am Maria Rubera, chief
xenologist for the second Confederacion expedition to Sanchrist IV. I am currently
standing guard in the mouth of a cave while my five comrades try to sleep. I am armed with
a stone axe and flint spear and a pile of rocks for throwing. A cold rain is misting down,
and I am wearing only a stiff kilt and vest of wet rank fur. I am cold to the very heart but
we dare not risk a fire. The Plathys have too acute a sense of smell.
I am subvocalizing, recording this into my artificial bicuspid, one of which each of us
has; the only postтАУStone Age artifacts in this cave. It may survive even if, as is probable, I
do not. Or it may not survive. The Plathys have a way of eating animals head first,
crunching up skull and brain while the decapitated body writhes at their feet or staggers
around, which to them is high humor. Innocent humor but ghastly. I almost came to love
them. Which is not to say I understand them.
Let me try to make this document as complete as possible. It gives me something to do. I
trust you have a machine that can filter out the sound of my teeth chattering. For a while I
could do the Zen trick to keep my teeth still. But I'm too cold now. And too certain of
death, and afraid.
My specialty is xenology but I do have a doctorate in historicultural anthropology, which
is essentially the study of dead cultures through the writings of dead anthropologists. In the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, old style, there were dozens of isolated cultures still
existing without metals or writing or even, in some cases, agriculture or social organization
beyond the family. None of them survived more than a couple of generations beyond their
contact with civilization, but civilization by then could afford the luxury of science, and so
there are fairly complete records. The records are fascinating not only for the information
about the primitives, but also for what they reveal of the investigating cultures' unconscious
prejudices. My own specialties were the Maori and Eskimo tribes, and (by necessary
association) the European and American cultures that investigated and more or less
benignly destroyed them.
I will try not to stray from the point. That training is what led to my appointment as
leader of this band of cold, half-naked, probably doomed, pseudo-primitive scientists. We
do not repeat the errors of our forebears. We come to the primitives on equal terms, now,
so as not to contaminate their habit patterns by superior example. No more than is
necessary. Most of us do not bite the heads off living animals or exchange greetings by the
tasting of excrement.
Saying that and thinking of it goads me to go down the hill again. We designated a
latrine rock a few hundred meters away, in sight of the cave entrance but with no obvious
path leading here, to throw them off our scent at least temporarily. I will not talk while
going there. They also have acute hearing.
Back. Going too often and with too little result. Diet mostly raw meat in small amounts.
Only warm place on my body is the hot and itching anus. No proper hygiene in the Stone
Age. Just find a smooth rock. I can feel my digestive tract flourishing with worms and
bugs. No evidence yet, though, nor blood. Carlos Fleming started passing blood, and two