"James Tiptree Jr. - Your Haploid Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tiptree James Jr)

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Your Haploid Heart. By James Tiptree Jr. ESTHAA (Aurigae Episilon V) Type:
Solterran .98 Dom. race: Human to undet. degree Fed. status: Pending
certification Extraplanetary delegs; embs; missions: None Esthaa, sole
inhabited planet of system, first contact from Aurigae Phi 3010 SP, native
cultural level then approx. Terran Greek city states, grouped around inland
sea on single continental mass. Navigation, wheel, money, protoalphabetic
script, numbers to zero, geometry; smelting, weaving, agriculture. Space trade
route estab. 3100 ST. Esthaan students to Gal. Fed. no perm. emigration.
Progress rapid in light metals extraction, machine tooling, assembly. Exports:
Electronic and mechanical components. Imports: Tool, vehicle and generator
prototypes, scientific instruments. Esthaan workers noted for ability to copy
complex mechanisms. Sociological: Since contact, pop. concentration in urban
complex around spaceport, becoming one-city planet. Political structure
thought to be oligarchy, or council of family heads. Religion unreported.
Language one, agglutinative. No known wars except sporadic police actions
against nomadic tribes of hinterland known as the Flenn peoples. The Esthaan
temperament reported as peaceful and friendly but remarkably
reserved. MacDorra's landsled brought us down fast-Marscots don't waste fuel.
Pax lunged across me to peer out my port. I saw the color on his high
cheekbones and the light in his eyes. His first big job. He had a severe,
luminous eye just like a certain Chesapeake retriever I recalled too
well. Reeling past below was as charming a great garden city as you could wish
for. Miles on miles of honey and cream-colored villas in a froth of
pinky-green flower trees with here and there, an administrative center or
industrial park; like plates of pastel pastry. On the far horizon a gently
glittering sea-one-city world. The spaceport showed beyond a line of wooded
hills, and the pilot finally slammed us into a wallowing stall. Suddenly there
was a blaze of color in the hills below- red, purple, orange-A carnival? No-a
warren of twisted streets alive with people! A hidden village. Then we were
back over spacious suburbs and braking into the field. When the ports cleared
we saw a human-looking figure in a soft gold uniform getting out of a
rollercar. The human-looking part was why I was there. MacDorra's pilot had us
and our equipment out into the dust before you could say "parsimony." Three
clipboards to sign, a handshake that broke my pencil-"See you in six months,
Doc, good luck!"-and we were fleeing for the roller with the field lab while
the sled's turbines howled up. The Esthaan came to help. He was big, and
seemed amused by MacDorra's operation. We sorted ourselves out in Interhuman
while the roller trundled through tree-lined avenues. Reshvid Ovancha had a
well-cultivated Gal Fed University accent. Very human, was my snap
reaction. He came with the same number of fingers and features, joints worked
like ours, and skin texture-a feature on which place great hunch reliance-was
a cream-yellow version of my own brown. His eyes were round, with laugh lines,
and his smile showed human teeth with an extra pair of frontals. All quite
standard, except that his torso looked a trifle thick or blocky. Like me, he
was beardless. I could see nothing to explain why, as of that minute, I would