"Robert Onopa - Republic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Onopa Robert)

Republic by Robert Onopa
Robert Onopa is a professor in the English department at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. He
has been a Fulbright lecturer in Africa, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and he taught
in New Zealand a few years ago. He has contributed a handful of stories to our pages in the past
two decades, including "The Swan," "Name That Moon," and "Geropods." He says he's currently
working on a novel set entirely in the confines of Dante's Divine Comedy and also working on a set
of science fiction stories about sports. His latest is science fiction in a classic mode.
You know of course why we left, and what crews like ours were looking for. I said, why we left. I
meant, of course, why we had to leave. Those years before The Copernicus began its passage seem
like a dream to me now, the home world a green idyll, the night sky all white moon, the sunrise off the sea
on the day we launched oranges and reds, a wild mango sky. Northward the mosquito coast shimmered
silver in the rising sun.

I'm sorry. I'm already running on. I'm old now, three times old if you count cryo sleep. There's so much
on my mind.

What I'm trying to say is, that day from docking orbit you could see the lower atmosphere smoldering
with the first city fires. All through our training years we'd seen the slow, sad, entropic fall of things,
rubble where there'd been buildings, a rabble and drum fires on streets where there'd been traffic and
order. Less than a year after docking, we left the home system. We never saw what happened, never
saw those images you've shown us now on the screen. They'll take some time to absorb.

I'll tell our story as concisely as I can. Captain Hess is dead. I don't know how much time we have to
talk--we never expected to be in communication again, never really expected to make it back. I'm the
linguist who was sent with the mission. You have to hear about what we've seen. There is another world.
****
Arcturus Wormhole--56 on the Mauna Kea grid--spun us out in a region so dense with electromagnetic
noise that we worried for our instruments. Our primary assignment was to plot the transit of the
wormhole across a navigable sun, so we buried ourselves in the work until it was done. Only then did we
really look around.

I've ported over all the recon data. You can judge for yourself. You can gauge the planetary masses, the
orbits, the size of the star. The system is so like ours that we thought that, after sixty years of travel, we
had arrived where we had begun. Our mission scientists were all either nav team or extraction geologists,
like Captain Hess. After two days, Copernicus's SciCom decided the objects were mirror worlds, sets
of shadow planets, something like that. Hess shrugged and dropped the question. An extraction geologist
doesn't care where the minerals come from.

The fourth planet classified as tropical/marine. Its atmosphere? See the data stream, the lower atomic
weights? You can imagine our excitement, our exhilaration, when that gas spectrometry came in. It's one
of the things we--the first generation crews--were sent out to find. Tropical/marine with breathable
atmosphere was the great good place, the golden fleece The Copernicus was looking for. Then X-ray
spectrometry described parallel chemical and biological processes with Earth.

Yes, biological. Now look at the EXO screen.

An intelligent race.
****
Geophysics had sent ahead an unmanned orbiter to collect data, and when we saw that EXO screen, we
realized that a series of rectilinear surface features was a chain of settlements. Two hundred clicks apart,