"K. D. Wentworth - Tall One" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wentworth K D)

K. D. WENTWORTH

TALL ONE

K. D. Wentworth lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a large dog and numerous finches.
She is often drawn to religious themes in her writing; last Christmas, you may
recall, she gave us a decidedly different view of holy days in "'Tis the
Season." Now she takes us to the stars with a more serious and rather luminous
story of missionaries among an alien race.

Father Johannes knelt beside the grave, his cassock bunched to protect his
knees. The cold, too-thin air of Sheah Four wheezed through his straining chest.
He bowed his head in prayer, then hoisted the final rock to the top of the
cairn. Sitting back on his heels, he ached for his native Alps, for stately old
Luzem poised like a cut jewel on its shimmering blue ice-melt lake, the pristine
swans that drifted across the mirrored surface like angels. When he closed his
eyes, he could smell the water lapping against wet stone, see the boxes of red
and pink and white flowers crowding every window.

He shuddered. When he qualified for the two-man missionary post here, he had
thought the mountains rearing up into the violet-tinged sky would feel like
home; he'd imagined small faces turned up to him, not human, of course, but
recognizably innocent and trusting, waiting for the gifts of love and salvation
he brought. Nothing in his training at the seminary had prepared him for a
malevolent yellow-white sun that burned his fair skin a leathery walnut-brown,
or dry, oxygen-poor air that made his chest ache all the time. And no one had
really explained about the khe. He lurched heavily to his feet and saw one of
the beasts sitting on its haunches behind him, its green eyes wide, neckfrill
spread to catch the sun, a study in kheish patience. Its satiny black skin
crawled with photobiotic green fire in the sunlight.

The young priest's hands trembled as he picked up the simple cross he had
crafted from native wood. Just being near one of these heathen creatures still
made him break out in a cold sweat. The blunt, lipless snout, the earless skull,
the long sinuous body, every part of it screamed serpent.

He stared at it. At this time of day, it should be perched on a rock somewhere,
soaking up the sun. What did it want? Surely not salvation. In the eight months
since he and Father Gareth had arrived, he had realized at least that much. The
khe were filthy beasts, barely sentient, uninterested in artifice or artifacts,
having nothing in common with humanity. And yet, as Father Gareth had frequently
reminded him, the Lord God had made them as surely as He had made everything
else, and therefore how could Johannes not love them?

He wedged the cross into a crevice between the stones and anchored it with
gravel. He coughed, then coughed again, a hard wracking spasm that could only be
controlled, not cured. His throat was continually raw, his cells slowly
starving, a condition that had weakened Father Gareth and ultimately killed him.
"The oxygen content there is marginal," the Placement Office had said, "but man
can survive."