"Sheri S. Tepper - The Companions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

"An intelligent race is a market," Drom mused. "And a new market is worth money, once
you find out what it wants and needs."

Bar Lukha considered this through long moments of silence, saying at last, "But the
Mossen don't need anything."

"How do we know?" Drom asked. "The Mossen don't talk. They don't do anything but
dance."

"Right." The word drawled out, spinning itself into something more than mere
agreement. Into connivance. Into complicity.

Drom said desperately, "Even if they're people, if they don't talk or interact in some way,
we can't establish intelligence. If there's no intelligence, we have to leave and let the real
estate guys take over."

Lukha kept his eyes fixed on his monitors, which were dancing for no reason. He had
not been able to find out what was happening. For days now, the monitors had been
dancing to sounds he couldn't hear, electromagnetic activity he couldn't locate. He had
finally decided the dials were doing it because they liked it, because it was more fun
than standing still.

"We'd stay if they-you know, them. If they wanted emergence," he remarked, in a
preoccupied voice.

"If they wanted emergence, yes." More than anything, Drom wanted to stay here, to do
what he had spent years doing before he had sentenced himself to confinement: take off
his clothes, wander off into the mosses, eat the sweet bulbs of dew that formed on the
stems of the blue, lie deep in the scent of the violet, thrust himself against the velvet of
the scarlet, feeling his skin prickle and burn and then flare in ecstasy that went on for a
seeming eternity. Maybe ask one of the women if she'd like to do the scarlet with him.
Oh, yes, he wanted to stay here.

"Maybe the flame folk want to meet other people," murmured Lukha.

"Prove it," challenged Drom.

"Well, they don't talk to us. Maybe they write." Bar Lukha hummed to himself. "Maybe
... we've found a message they left us."

Drum looked up in disbelief. The Maine people of Moss didn't even acknowledge that
men were there! How in heaven's name would they send any kind of... message. "It's a
mystery to me how they'd do that!"

"Mystery ... is the message," Lukha went on, as though entranced. "I think it was on a
piece of that flat, gray moss that wraps around the trees. I think they wrote with some of
the red juice of those berry kind of things."

His voice was intent, speaking of something he had obviously thought about, wondered