"Joanna Russ - When It Changed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russ Joanna)

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We met them in the kitchen of the farmhouse near the place where they had
landed; the windows were open, the night air very mild. We had passed all
sorts of transportation when we parked outside, steam tractors, trucks, an
I.C. flatbed, even a bicycle. Lydia, the district biologist, had come out of
her Northern taciturnity long enough to take blood and urine samples and was
sitting in a corner of the kitchen shaking her head in astonishment over the
results; she even forced herself (very big, very fair, very shy, always
painfully blushing) to dig up the old language manualsтАФthough I can talk the
old tongues in my sleep. And do. Lydia is uneasy with us; we're Southerners
and too flamboyant. I counted twenty people in that kitchen, all the brains of
North Continent. Phyllis Spet, I think, had come in by glider. Yuki was the
only child there.
Then I saw the four of them.

They are bigger than we are. They are bigger and broader. Two were taller than
me, and I am extremely tall, 1m, 80cm in my bare feet. They are obviously of
our species but off, indescribably off, and as my eyes could not and still
cannot quite comprehend the lines of those alien bodies, I could not, then,
bring myself to touch them, though the one who spoke RussianтАФwhat voices they
have!тАФwanted to "shake hands," a custom from the past, I imagine. I can only
say they were apes with human faces. He seemed to mean well, but I found
myself shuddering back almost the length of the kitchenтАФand then I laughed
apologeticallyтАФand then to set a good example (interstellar amity, I thought)
did "shake hands" finally. A hard, hard hand. They are heavy as draft horses.
Blurred, deep voices. Yuriko had sneaked in between the adults and was gazing
at the men with her mouth open.

He turned his headтАФthose words have not been in our language for six hundred
yearsтАФand said, in bad Russian:

"Who's that?"

"My daughter," I said, and added (with that irrational attention to good
manners we sometimes employ in moments of insanity), "My daughter, Yuriko
Janetson. We use the patronymic. You would say matronymic."

He laughed, involuntarily. Yuki exclaimed, "I thought they would be
good-looking!" greatly disappointed at this reception of herself. Phyllis
Helgason Spet, whom someday I shall kill, gave me across the room a cold,
level, venomous look, as if to say: Watch what you say. You know what I can
do. It's true that I have little formal status, but Madam President will get
herself in serious trouble with both me and her own staff if she continues to
consider industrial espionage good clean fun. Wars and rumors of wars, as it
says in one of our ancestor's books. I translated Yuki's words into the man's
dog-Russian, once our lingua franca, and the man laughed again.

"Where are all your people?" he said conversationally.