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

Humans prided themselves on their work- an emotion felt, so far as anyone knew, only
by humans, as most other starfaring races considered "work" a sign of serfdom, which
among them it invariably was. Earthers felt differently. They had their own Exploration
and Survey Corps, ESC, and their own Planetary Protection Institute, PPI, a branch of the
Interstellar Planetary Protection Alliance, of which Earth was a member. More
importantly, Earthers were a settling type of people who seemed not to mind staying in
one place as long as it took to do an adequate job of assessing new planets. Accordingly,
Earth Enterprises, on behalf of PPI and ESC, was awarded a contract by the Derac to
explore and survey, using, of course, the IPPA guidelines governing such activities on
newly discovered worlds.

Accordingly they came. They saw. They were conquered.

Two-thirds of the planet's surface was taken up by the mosslands where the Earthers
sought to answer IPPA's primary question: Did a native people exist? Time spun by, a
silver web; they felt what they felt and saw what they saw, but they could not prove
what they felt or saw was real. They thought, they felt there was a people, peoples upon
Moss, but did a people really exist?

Did the men and women of PPI themselves exist? Their days on Moss went by like
dreams passed in a chamber of the heart, a systole of morning wind, a throb of noon sun,
an anticipatory pulsation of evening cool that was like the onset of apotheosis, a day
gone by in a handful of heartbeats as they waited for something marvelous that would
happen inevitably, if they were simply patient enough.

Patience wasn't enough. IPPA required specific information about newly discovered
worlds. Was the ecology pristine or endangered? Were there intelligent inhabitants, and
if there were, were they indigenous, immigrants, or conquerors? Did they occupy the
entire planet? Were they threatened? Did they consider themselves a part of or the
owners of the world on which they lived? Were other races of intelligent creatures native
to the world, or had any been imported or rendered extinct? If there were various views
on these matters among the inhabitants, might they be amenable to referring the matters
to IPPA for resolution? These questions had to be answered! These and a thousand
more!

Moss could not be opened to habitation, trade, or visitation until it was certified by
IPPA. Moss could not be certified by IPPA until the information was received. The
information could not be received until the blanks in the forms were filled in, but the
blanks in the forms remained exactly that.

How could one determine prior claims from creatures that fled like visions? Were they
inhabitants? Possibly, though they were as likely to be events. Often, truly, they seemed
to be hallucinogenic happenings, light and motion flung together by wind and
imagination. Perhaps they were a new kind of creature: ecological animations! Such
suggestions met with incomprehension back on Earth, where the carbon life-form branch
office of IPPA was located.

Where IPPA was all judgment, Earth's own ESC made no judgments at all. The only task
of Exploration and Survey was to record everything, to take note of everything, to
determine the history of everything and establish not only how one thing related to