"Alan Dean Foster - The Founding of the Commonwealth 1 - Phylogenesis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

PHYLOGENESIS
Book One of The Founding of the
Commonwealth

Alan Dean Foster
 PROLOGUE

Things have a way of working out, if not always as planned. So it
was with the Amalgamation that marked the estab-lishment of the
sociopolitical organization that came to be known as the Humanx
Commonwealth. Contact having been established and maintained for some
sixteen years, it was assumed by those advising both of the hesitant,
uncertain species that procession to second-stage contact would take
place within a predesignated time frame and would involve the
implementation of carefully considered procedures, intri-cately
designed programs, and closely scrutinized agendas.
That it did not happen this way was no fault of those charged
with implementing the voluminously compiled and mutually agreed-upon
contact strategy. All those involved, thranx and human alike, had done
their work conscientiously and well. It was simply that, as history
shows, there are times when events do not occur as planned. Physics
included, the universe is not a perfectly predictable place. Action
super-cedes fabrication. Stars that are not supposed to go nova for a
billion years do. Flowers that are expected to blossom die.
Anticipated ambassadors did not have the opportunity to exchange
formal greetings. Innumerable carefully drawn covenants withered for
lack of execution, made superflu-ous by unexpected realities. Formal
protocols were rendered extraneous. Thus are the ways of virtuous
diplomacy foully ambushed.
Chance chose a poet as its champion, while coarse circumstance on
its behalf conscripted a murderer.
Chapter One

No one saw the attack coming. Probably someone, or sev-eral
someones, ought to have been blamed. Certainly there was a convulsion
of recriminations afterward. But since it is an unarguable fact that it
is hard to apportion blame-or even to assign it-for something that is
without precedent, nascent calls for castigation of those responsible
withered for lack of suitable subjects. Those who felt, rightly or
wrongly, that they bore a share of the responsibility for what happened
punished themselves far more severely than any traditional queen's
court or council of peers would have.
For more than a hundred years, ever since there had been contact
between AAnn and thranx, animosity had festered between the two
species. Given such a fertile ground and suf-ficiency of time, mutual
enmity had evolved to take many forms. Manifesting themselves on a
regular basis that var-ied greatly in degree, these were usually
propagated by the AAnn. While a constant source of vexation to the
ever-reasonable thranx, these provocations rarely exceeded the bounds
of irritation. The AAnn would probe and threaten, ad-vance and connive,