"Connie Willis - All Seated on the Ground" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

of a chair and glare at us, a glare that drove my mother into paroxysms of
cleaning and baking whenever she found out Aunt Judith was coming. Not
that Aunt Judith criticized Mom’s housekeeping or her cooking. She didn’t.
She didn’t even make a face when she sipped the coffee Mom served her
or draw a white gloved finger along the mantelpiece, looking for dust. She
didn’t have to. Sitting there in stony silence while my mother desperately
tried to make conversation, her entire manner indicated disapproval. It was
perfectly clear from that glare of hers that she considered us untidy,
ill-mannered, ignorant, and utterly beneath contempt.

Since she never said what it was that displeased her (except for the
occasional, “Properly brought-up children do not speak unless spoken to”),
my mother frantically polished silverware, baked petits four, wrestled my
sister Tracy and me into starched pinafores and patent-leather shoes and
ordered us to thank Aunt Judith nicely for our birthday presents (a card with
a dollar bill in it), and scrubbed and dusted the entire house to within an inch
of its life. She even redecorated the entire living room, but nothing did any
good. Aunt Judith still radiated disdain.

It would wilt even the strongest person. My mother frequently had to
lie down with a cold cloth on her forehead after a visit from Aunt Judith, and
the Altairi had the same effect on the dignitaries and scientists and
politicians who came to see them. After the first time, the governor refused
to meet with them again, and the president, whose polls were already in the
low twenties and who couldn’t afford any more pictures of irate citizens,
refused to meet with them at all.

Instead he appointed a bipartisan commission, consisting of
representatives from the Pentagon, the State Department, Homeland
Security, the House, the Senate, and FEMA, to study them and find a way
to communicate with them, and then, after that was a bust, a second
commission consisting of experts in astronomy, anthropology, exobiology,
and communications, and then a third, consisting of whoever they were able
to recruit and who had anything resembling a theory about the Altairi or how
to communicate with them, which is where I come in. I’d written a series of
newspaper columns on aliens both before and after the Altairi arrived. (I’d
also written columns on tourists, driving-with-cellphones, the traffic on I-70,
the difficulty of finding any nice men to date, and my Aunt Judith.)

I was recruited in late November to replace one of the language
experts, who quit “to spend more time with his wife and family.” I was
picked by the chair of the commission, Dr. Morthman, (who clearly didn’t
realize that my columns were meant to be humorous), but it didn’t matter,
since he had no intention of listening to me, or to anyone else on the
commission, which at that point consisted of three linguists, two
anthropologists, a cosmologist, a meteorologist, a botanist (in case they
were plants after all), experts in primate, avian, and insect behavior (in case
they were one of the above), an Egyptologist (in case they turned out to
have built the Pyramids), an animal psychic, an Air Force colonel, a JAG
lawyer, an expert in foreign customs, an expert in non-verbal