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

each maybe ten clicks across. Nav was happy, we'd gotten good data on the transit, now planetary
geophysics was ringing all its bells. Before we knew it, close probes produced the miracle of a language
we could deal with. It was so much more than we'd expected.

I have to tell you right off that it was too much for our EXO to deal with, too much for the whole default
EXO program to deal with. The original EXO had a stroke and died in cryo, so they gave the job to
Lieutenant Grace, the backup shuttle pilot. Like I say, all the rest of our scientists were nav or geo; they
would have had even less idea what to do.

Anyway, from orbit we could see that the settlements were socially complex but technologically primitive.
Wheel, metals, sanitation, all of it on first glance preelectrical, and first glance had most of it right, except
for some process through which they charged their weapons. But they're not savages. They have art,
abstract processes.

And that language. From the first, the hard vowels, those inflections ... I told myself that since the
phonemes were produced by similar cranial structures, the language had to sound that way. But there
was the echo of something else, something structural. Have you ever heard of Linear B?

They are very much like us, more like us in some ways than ourselves, Grace liked to say. Not that you
would mistake them for human, as you can see from the screen. Thin as rails, articulated trunks. But that
fabric that group is swaddled in? All that geometrical body ornamentation?

Initially nav put The Copernicus in a parking orbit and we deliberated. Imagine rebreathing your own
gasses for sixty years, the three hundred of us squeezed together, recycling fluids, solid wastes. The
whole crew was fixated on the oxygen spike in the atmosphere. Adamowski, our Flight Surgeon, could
see what was coming. Eventually, he wanted protocols the rest of us couldn't deliver. When Hess
organized the first shuttle down, he had already locked himself in quarantine.

By then the marines were on high alert. I didn't like the run-up, the predation vids they immersed
themselves in. I remember Sergeant Vrask hunched in her cubicle, submerged in the glow of a bloody
hologame, her breath short and damp. It's true there was a lot of warlike activity on the surface. It's true
that within hours of landing we saw spilled blood. Rust red, if you please. But they are civilized beings.
I'm sure of it. It's in the language.
****
I was with the first downshuttle. We slid through pink cumulus towers so beautiful that some of us wept.
We landed ten clicks from a settlement, on a grassy plain away from dwellings--the far end of a farm, it
turned out.

Perhaps they'd seen us in low orbit. At any rate, we were greeted--they touched their hands to their
heads, and bowed, and kept back, then knelt, and touched their hands to their heads and bowed. That's
when we saw those geometric patterns for the first time, in their body art, in their fabrics, in their personal
effects.

There we stood in our bulky white suits. Our EXO--Lieutenant Grace--was waving through a series of
contact gestures programmed by some bloody semioticist back on Earth a century before. Nobody
knew what he was doing, not even Grace. You could see him tracking the manual on his helmet monitor.
We were all a bit giddy, even Vrask. Captain Hess started laughing. While that was going on, Mercer,
the chief scientist, knelt beside an alien, and the two of them started sorting out words with gestures and
whispers--ship, sky, rock, hand. You could see Grace's frustration. The Arcturus probes hadn't even
hinted at life. Hess had never given him time to train.