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

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Eventually, a larger group marched up from the settlement, marched in order, its hierarchy transparent.
The dozen aliens who had been with us--local farmers, it turned out--touched their foreheads to the soil
and scattered. The chiefs among the newcomers were wrapped in red and silver capes, the capes so
intricately folded they brought to mind origami. There was also a language in the folds, a hieratic
sequence, the same sequence that was conjugated in the rank words they used, a series of inflected long
vowels, shifting from a to e, so half the time you thought they were chanting. A slow-moving elder whose
cape was the most elaborate was the head of them all. The society was at least as hierarchical as ours--it
was in the way they walked, in the way they stood, it was in their silver eyes. The language mirrored it all.

A group of ceremonial guards performed a whirling dance, slicing the air with those long rods, and then
they pushed a deer-like animal into a circle. The rods functioned as weapons--they were javelins,
swords, Kendo shinai, all in one. They slaughtered the animal. Our first sight of blood. It was a ritual act,
so we tried not to draw conclusions. Still, I don't think we were prepared for the violence or for the
sound of the animal's cry. As it died it sounded human.

Anyway, the rods. Their grips were so finely worked with that intricate geometry they seemed like
jewelry, though what they were were personalized weapons. The aliens always had theirs at hand, used
them in ceremonies, even charged them electrically in a way we never quite understood.
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Hess kept his distance. The marines made the first real contact, even while they respected basic
quarantine. I mean they were the first to make any sort of connection, a kind of bonding. After a day we
sent the bulky EVA suits back up orbit and traded them for hermetic jumps and light breathing helmets.
The aliens were always nearby, and the marines were obsessed with them from the first deer. The
marines showed up each dusk when the ritual animal was released. They tracked its run, they tracked the
aliens' every move in pursuit, focused on the white knives with the same rapture you saw reflected in their
eyes in the hologames. In just a day a camaraderie developed between them and the hunters, and they
gestured in admiration narrating how the deer was brought down. They compared weapons, handled the
rods as best they could while keeping quarantine with the breathing helmets and jumps. You could see
them awkwardly stepping and swinging through the basic moves, as if they were learning a dance, a
physical language.

After three days--The Copernicus in orbit, the lander and the cargo sled shuttling down to a base they'd
laid out for us, quarantine holding--we were invited into the city. At midday we were led in a procession
through narrow streets and stone buildings and across squat bridges over a series of canals and
waterworks that ringed the city center. We finally reached an eight-sided plaza acres across at the river,
at a fortified stone bank. A temple dominated the land side. We'd seen the river from orbit. It was so
wide that from where we stood we couldn't see its opposite bank. The site had been developed with
defense in mind: the temple was protected by the rainbow of canals at its back, and by the fortified stone
bank along the river at its front.

We were so caught up in the alien architecture, the strange symbols, the high narrow doors, that most of
us missed the obvious, missed what was happening with Hess, what had been happening with Hess.
From the first the aliens had been deferential to him in the extreme; I wondered if I was misreading
language from an unfamiliar body. But that afternoon, when we entered the city, the children ran ahead
and paved the street with broad leaves for Hess to walk on. Several thousand aliens came out of their
dwellings and chanted as he passed. They kept their distance and bowed, touched their foreheads to the
soil.

The reality only became clear to me as I watched them bestow a cape on Hess's shoulders in the