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

taboo myself. You remember that village we saw coming in? I asked Ovancha's
wife about it last night, and she sent the kids out of the room. It's where
the Flenni live. She said they were silly people, or little people. I asked
her if she meant childish-at least I think that's what I said. That's when she
sent the kids out. Why | don't they hurry up and invent that telepathic
translator the videos show?" "Maybe it's some tie-up with child ... baby ...
birth." "No, I think it's the Flenni. Because of what happened today. I was
out on that geosyncline back of the port and I heard music- from the village.
I started over, but suddenly here comes Ovancha in the university roller and
tells me to go back. He said there was sickness there. He almost hauled me
into the roller." "Sickness? And Ovancha was right there? Indeed I do agree
with you. Pax. I'm very glad that you thought of telling me about this. And as
nominal head of this mission," I continued in a tone that brought his stare
around to me, "I want you to stay away from the Flenni and any other sensitive
subjects you happen across. I'm responsible for getting us out of here in one
piece, and there's something about this place that worries me. Call me what
you like, but stick to rocks. Right?" For the next two weeks we were model
agents. Pax made a brief coastal profile, and I buried myself in routine
taxonomy. One of my chores was to compile a phylogenetic survey of native life
forms based on the Esthaan's own data. Their archives were a curious jumble of
literary bestiaries, and morphological botany, topped off by a surprisingly
large collection of microscopic specimens. It was abominably muddled and
dispersed. To my astonishment, in a packet of miserable student mounts of
rotifers I came upon what I realized must be Harkness's work. Back at base
they had told me that all Harkness's data vanished with him. I had taken the
trouble to look up the old report of the ISB inquiry. There seemed to be no
doubt that Harkness had been running a still, and that there had been a big
fire. The only note the ISB team found was on a scrap of paper in a drain. In
a large and wavery script were the words, "MUSCI! They are BEAUTIFUL!!!" Musci
are, of course, terrestrial mosses, unless Harkness had been abbreviating
Muscidae, or flies. Beautiful mosses? Beautiful flies? Clearly, Harkness was a
rumhead. But he was also a first-rate xenobiologist when sober, and his
elegant mounts, still clear after a century, saved me a lot of work. The neat
marginal chromosome counts were accurate. There were other brief notations,
too, which began to get me very excited as my data piled up. Harkness had been
finding something-and so was I. The problem of getting human gametes receded
while I chased down the animal specimens needed to fill in the startling
picture. In our free evenings, Pax and I took to cheering ourselves with song.
It turned out we were both old ballad buffs, and we worked up a repertory
including "Lobachevsky," Beethoven's "Birthday Calypso," and "The Name of
Roger Brown." When we added an Esthaan mouth organ and a lute I noticed that
our Esthaan house-factor was wearing small earmuffs. Our reward for all this
virtue arrived one morning in the form of Ovancha with a picnic
hamper. "Reshvidi!" he beamed. "Perhaps today you would like to visit the
Flenn?" We trundled out across the spaceport and over a range of low hills in
bloom. Then the roller lurched into a gorge under a shower of flowers, and
jolted up a stony pass in which there were suddenly adobe walls, brilliantly
colored in hot pink, greens, electric blue, purple, dry-blood color and
mustard. I caught the start of an amazing smell as we burst over the hilltop
and into a village square. It was empty. "They are timid," said Ovancha