"Joe Haldeman - For White Hill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

Joe Haldeman - For White Hill

1

I am writing this memoir in the language of England, an ancient land of Earth, whose tales and songs
White Hill valued. She was fascinated by human culture in the days before machines-not just thinking
machines, but working ones; when things got done by the straining muscles of humans and animals.

Neither of us was born on Earth. Not many people were, in those days. It was a desert planet then,
ravaged in the twelfth year of what they would call the Last War. When we met, that war had been going
for over four hundred years, and had moved out of Sol Space altogether, or so we thought.

Some cultures had other names for the conflict. My parent, who fought the century before I did, always
called it the Extermination, and their name for the enemy was "roach," or at least that's as close as English
allows. We called the enemy an approximation of their own word for themselves, Fwndyri, which was
uglier to us. I still have no love for them, but have no reason to make the effort. It would be easier to love
a roach. At least we have a common ancestor. And we accompanied one another into space.

One mixed blessing we got from the war was a loose form of interstellar government, the Council of
Worlds. There had been individual treaties before, but an overall organization had always seemed
unlikely, since no two inhabited systems are less than three light-years apart, and several of them are over
fifty. You can't defeat Einstein; that makes more than a century between "How are you?" and "Fine."

The Council of Worlds was headquartered on Earth, an unlikely and unlovely place, if centrally located.
There were fewer than ten thousand people living on the blighted planet then, an odd mix of politicians,
religious extremists, and academics, mostly. Almost all of them under glass. Tourists flowed through the
domed-over ruins, but not many stayed long. The planet was still very dangerous over all of its
unprotected surface, since the Fwndyri had thoroughly seeded it with nanophages. Those were
submicroscopic constructs that sought out concentrations of human DNA. Once under the skin, they
would reproduce at a geometric rate, deconstructing the body, cell by cell, building new nanophages. A
person might complain of a headache and lie down, and a few hours later there would be nothing but a
dry skeleton, lying in dust. When the humans were all dead, they mutated and went after DNA in general,
and sterilized the world.

White Hill and I were "bred" for immunity to the nanophages. Our DNA winds backwards, as was the
case with many people born or created after that stage of the war. So we could actually go through the
elaborate airlocks and step out onto the blasted surface unprotected.

I didn't like her at first. We were competitors, and aliens to one another.

When I worked through the final airlock cycle; for my first moment on the actual surface of Earth, she
was waiting outside, sitting in meditation on a large flat rock that shimmered in the heat. One had to admit
she was beautiful in a startling way, clad only in a glistening pattern of blue and green body paint.
Everything else around was grey and black, including the hard-packed talcum that had once been a
mighty jungle, Brazil. The dome behind me was a mirror of grey and black and cobalt sky.

"Welcome home," she said. "You're Water Man."

She inflected it properly, which surprised me. "You're from Petros?"