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

bringing up the rear with Zebra and Zebu.




THE COMPANIONS


THE PLACE



The moss world, so said one XT-ploitation writer who had reviewed first-contact images
of it, was a Victorian parlor of a planet, everywhere padded and bolstered, its cliffs hung
with garlands, its crevasses softened with cushions, every cranny silk-woven, every
surface napped into velvet. Here were peridot parklands where moss piled itself into
caverned outcrops of sapphire shade. There were violet valleys, veiled in lavender and
wine across a mat of minuscule, multicolored moss beads. In that clearing the morning
light shone on infant parasols, ankle high, that by noon had sprung upward to become
umbrellas, guyed with hair-thin fibers, ribs flung wide to hold feather-light sails that
turned softly, softly through the afternoon, shading the sporelings beneath.

Along the canyons were fragrant forests where every footfall released scents that evoked
aching nostalgia, as though racial memory held sensations undetected for centuries:
Cedar perhaps? Sandalwood? Maybe pi├▒on or frankincense? Maybe something older
than any of those? The riversides were endless alleys cushioned in aquamarine and jade,
hung with curtains that moved like the waves of a shifting ocean, hiding, then
disclosing-so it was claimed-the flame-formed inhabitants of this place.

If, that is, the Exploration and Survey Corps really saw them. If the people from
Planetary Protection Institute really saw them. After each sighting the men sought
confirmation from their complicated devices and found no evidence of the beings they
had perceived. The machines confirmed small grazing and burrowing creatures, yes;
they confirmed tall, gaunt trees that served as scaffolding for the epiphytic fabric of the
world, but these others ... these wonders ... Everyone described the same shapes, the
same behaviors, the same colors. Formed like flames, endlessly dancing, an evanescent
blaze in the morning, a shimmering shadow in the dusk. Rarely seen, unmistakable
when seen, but never yet recorded...

"Along that ridge, shining, a whole line of them..."

"Right. I saw them. Like huge candles..."

What had they seen? That was undoubtedly the question.

A Garr'ugh shipclan of the Derac, a race nomadic by nature, had found Moss quite by
accident when their clan-ship was sucked into an instability at one arm of the galaxy and
spewed out in another. Subsequently, the exploration and survey of the three inner
planets-the rock world, the jungle world, the moss world-were farmed out on shares to
Earthian Enterprises. The Derac were accustomed to farming out work to Earthers.