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

****
The next day they presented me with the Codexes I've holocopied in the Appendix.
I've been working on them ever since. There are structural echoes of an ancient script, one of our
protolanguages ... I could be wrong. Remember that Linear B I mentioned? There were so many echoes
it seemed to me hallucinatory, like living out a parable or a dream. How to account for it? Earlier
contact? Coincidence?

Copernicus/SciCom was no help. When they could be dragged away from either nav data or mineral
samples they only shrugged. It wasn't clear if the way Hess was treated rubbed off on the rest of us. I've
never really been able to translate the language--there's another level of coding in it, I'm certain. There
was a lot of confusion that week. I suppose there still is.
****
Ten days after we had first touched down, the aliens declared a citywide holiday in our honor. Their
voices naturally produced an overtone, so their singing was particularly alien, aggressive and sad at once.
We sat with them, tried their words, handled their tools, played with their pets. They taught our marines
an exercise with the rods, then challenged them to ritual sports. Aside from the rods, they threw
copper-like stars with sharpened points well enough to bring down a deer at thirty meters. Vrask and her
people showed off their own skills, hand to hand stuff, target work with those compound crossbows they
train with. The aliens loved the handheld hologames. They loved them. The remains of any shadow
seemed to lift and we stopped thinking about the business with Grace. By then most of the crew got a
turn downplanet, even the hydroponics team. In the end there was a dance. Those tubes are musical
instruments, that moving line a dance. Can you see how it replicates the figure on the elder's cape? To tell
you the truth, it felt wonderful to move in a natural gravity. Just being alive seemed a wonder.

I suppose SciCom had it right. The aliens thought of us as emissaries of one of their sky gods, his name
all long vowels. The god, in person, they figured was Hess. Hess just grinned and took mineral samples.
He ate the food. He was afraid of nothing. The only one who never broke quarantine was Adamowski.
For all those weeks when the rest of us downplanet were feasting and basking in our kinship with a god,
he was up there, locked in containment.

Grace was desperate to redeem himself. That's why he took them for trips in the cargo sled. That's why
he showed them how the shuttle worked, how you could run anything, really, with just a keypad
controller from the hologames and the right codes.
****
I'll try to stick to the main things, to what happened. It's just that certain details seem preternaturally clear
now--the human cry of the deer, the aliens' four-fingered hands, strong enough to crush a man's
windpipe, their children's wooden toys, which seemed so human. Hess showed me a mineral once that
changed color when he shattered it, exposed it to atmosphere, rainbow sand running through his fingers.

And I remember those pink clouds and the blue of the sky. Have you ever seen a robin's egg? When I
looked up I squinted and I thought I saw heaven. But some nights I would look up and see only strange
stars in alien constellations and I would feel lost beyond any recovering.

Have I told you what they did with the blood? About the ritual at the cave? To mark the end of their
training, their ceremonial guards are taken, blindfolded, at night, to the scene of a fresh battle at the edge
of their territory. That's how the planet's organized--one self-sufficient city against the next, shifting
alliances, constant low-level war on their perimeters. In torchlight, the initiates kneel, cup their hand
against a fresh wound. Then they are told to bring their hands to their mouth and drink the blood.

Did I tell you our marines were invited along? That some of the marines drank the blood as well? Some