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

another, but also whether each thing fit into a category that would be meaningful to
intelligent persons of various races. Though Exploration and Survey Corps was a
subsidiary of Earth Enterprises, a purely human organization, operated for profit and
without any interstellar governing body, the Corps had to interface with IPPA and
therefore used IPPA categories and definitions for its reports.

There was no IPPA category for beautiful. Humans had several times suggested such a
category to IPPA, but no other race had a similar concept. Beauty was not quantifiable,
said IPPA. The Tharst recognized a quality they called Whomset. The Quondan spoke of
the quality of M'Corb. Neither race could define these things, though they said they
knew it when they encountered it. IPPA did not recognize things that couldn't be
defined and measured by proprietary devices, mechanical, electronic, or biotech. For
IPPA's purposes, human beings along with most other beings were biological devices
that lacked standardization. No race with such sayings as "Beauty is in the eye of the
beholder," or "There's no accounting for tastes," could pretend to define beauty in terms
the various races would accept.

The lack of Beauty-as well, possibly, as the lack of Whomset or M'Corb-was crippling on
Moss. How did one record odors that seemed to be presences? What was the meaning of
these rioting colors: these flaming scarlets so joyous as to make the heart leap, these
greyed purples so somber as to outmourn black? What was the relationship among
these thousand tints and hues, pure, mixed, nacreous, opalescent, ever shifting? What
profit was there in this giddy growth and incessant motion?

On Moss, the winds were sculptors, molding the stuff as it grew, weaving tasseled ropes
into swaying ladders from high branch to high branch, shredding chiffon tissue into
feathered fringes along bare boughs, sometimes puffing beneath a fragile carpet and
lifting it to make a glowing gossamer tent between the sky and those who walked
beneath. Such constructions were often ephemeral, no sooner seen with breath-caught
wonder than they dissolved into a momentary aureole suffused with sun-shattered rays
of amber, scarlet, and coral. Strictly speaking, moss did not flower, but on Moss it
pretended to do so, in clamorous colors and shapes out of drugged fantasy.

As their separate purposes demanded, ESC and PPI approached their tasks differently.
ESC lived behind force screens on a small island in a large lake, an island that had been
ringed and roofed with force shields then cleaned down to the bedrock with flame and
sterilants to protect the workers from any Mossian scintilla afloat in the atmosphere. On
the island, the Earthers walked freely, but when they came ashore, they wore noncons,
noncontact suits. They did not breathe the air or drink the water on the mainland, they
did not put their skin against the skin of the world. They received reports from PPI,
which they remeasured and requantified before filing, or, if measurement was
impossible, which they filed under various disreputable categories such as "alleged,"
"professed," "asserted." With ESC, nothing was sensed directly; everything was
measured by devices. It was said of ESC personnel that they were the next thing to
hermits, monks, or robots, and it was true that Information Service selected persons who
were loners by nature, content with silence.

PPI, on the other hand, had to experience a world to make judgments about it, and its
people fell into Moss as into a scented bath, only infrequently coming up for air. Baffled
by change, assaulted by sensation, each day confronting a new landscape, PPI people