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

communications, a weapons expert, Dr. Morthman (who as far as I could
see, wasn’t an expert in anything), and, because of our proximity to
Colorado Springs, the head of the One True Way Maxichurch, Reverend
Thresher, who was convinced the Altairi were a herald of the End Times.
“There is a reason God had them land here,” he said. I wanted to ask him
why, if that was the case, they hadn’t landed in Colorado Springs, but he
wasn’t a good listener either.

The only progress these people and their predecessors had made by
the time I joined the commission was to get the Altairi to follow them
various places, like in out of the weather and into the various labs that had
been set up in University Hall for studying them, although when I saw the
videotapes, it wasn’t at all clear they were responding to anything the
commission said or did. It looked to me like following Dr. Morthman and the
others was their own idea, particularly since at nine o’clock every night they
turned and glided/waddled back outside and disappeared into their ship.

The first time they did that, everyone panicked, thinking they were
leaving. “Aliens Depart. Are They Fed Up?” the evening news logo read, a
conclusion which I felt was due to their effect on people rather than any
solid evidence. I mean, they could have gone home to watch Jon Stewart
on The Daily Show, but even after they re-emerged the next morning, the
theory persisted that there was some sort of deadline, that if we didn’t
succeed in communicating with them within a fixed amount of time, the
planet would be reduced to ash. Aunt Judith had always made me feel
exactly the same way, that if I didn’t measure up, I was toast.

But I never did measure up, and nothing in particular happened,
except she stopped sending me birthday cards with a dollar in them, and I
figured if the Altairi hadn’t obliterated us after a few conversations with
Reverend Thresher (he was constantly reading them passages from
Scripture and trying to convert them), they weren’t going to.

But it didn’t look like they were going to tell us what they were doing
here, either. The commission had tried speaking to them in nearly every
language, including Farsi, Navajo code-talk, and Cockney slang. They had
played them music, drummed, written out greetings, given them several
Power Point presentations, text-messaged them, and showed them the
Rosetta Stone. They’d also tried Ameslan and pantomime, though it was
obvious the Altairi could hear. Whenever someone spoke to them or
offered them a gift (or prayed over them), their expression of disapproval
deepened to one of utter contempt. Just like Aunt Judith.

By the time I joined the commission, it had reached the same state of
desperation my mother had when she redecorated the living room and had
decided to try to impress the Altairi by taking them to see the sights of
Denver and Colorado, in the hope they’d react favorably.

“It won’t work,” I said. “My mother put up new drapes and wallpaper,
and it didn’t have any effect at all,” but Dr. Morthman didn’t listen.