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

eight-sided plaza. They wouldn't look directly into his eyes. The cape was blue and gold, but it otherwise
matched the folds of a cape on a statue to one side of the temple door.

They had decided that Hess was something like a god.

The tall alien we had seen earlier made a speech from the foot of the central stairs of the temple, which
the crew asked me to translate, so I made my guesses and said welcome, god from the sky. Hess still
didn't quite get it. He asked me, How much longer? I told him he had to respond, and he just looked at
me, annoyed and confused. It was an awkward moment.

That's when Grace stepped forward, reached around behind his neck and pulled off his breathing helmet.

So he was the one who broke our promise to Adamowski. Grace waved his arms in a wide circle, raised
them to the sky and took a deep breath. The rest of us were transfixed at the breaking of quarantine.

Before anybody could stop him Grace stepped out of his jumps and started chanting a greeting he'd
composed. You could tell he'd poured himself into it, thought it out as best he could, and rehearsed. He
had their vocal range, for what it was worth, and his hand movements were a semiotic catalogue of
compliance and interest. He knew Hess didn't quite get what was going on. Grace was trying to negotiate
contact.

At what turned into the end of his performance, he touched the tall alien in the yellow and red cape, just
touched him. Understand that that same alien had put his hands on Grace before he'd pulled his helmet
off. He'd touched his suit, his faceplate, his gloved hand.

But when Grace touched him, the ceremonial guard surged forward. Grace was challenged with a
weapon, one of those rods, but this one crackled with energy. Grace fell back with a burn on his
shoulder.

The tall alien apparently was something like a god, too.

Grace pushed himself up, bent with pain. In slow motion, head lowered, hands open, he moved through a
vocabulary of conciliatory body language. I thought he might be killed until Hess stepped forward. Hess
had this flat, firm voice, and he gave a long speech about misunderstanding protocol as if he was lecturing
to lab assistants. His confidence was a wonder--he still didn't know what was going on but to the aliens,
anyway, he acted like a god. That's why we survived. We were all of us anxious from the bloody show
we'd been seeing with the deer. That day it seemed like every hour you could hear one cry.

In the meantime, Vrask had moved to one side and slipped out of her helmet too, to protect Grace, I
guess. You could hear her breathing hard. When she peeled off her jumps she was strapped with
weapons, and the weapons distracted the ceremonial guard while Hess was speaking. By then Vrask's
troops were shedding helmets and suits, too. And then when I looked, of all things, Vrask begins
showing an alien her weapon, turning it in her hands, clearing its chamber, offering its stock to an alien
elder. In a blink, the aliens visibly relaxed, and the marines were smiling, and they were comparing
weapons with the aliens again, now the other way around. The tension dissolved between them, or
maybe it was never there for the leaders to exploit. That's why I used the word "bonding."

Captain Hess read into the log that we "shook it off" once we were all of us out of our suits. The air
smelled sharp and fresh, like cut grass--it was wonderful to take off that breathing helmet. But I didn't
know what to think.