"Blish, James - Anywhen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

autocracy.
"In this connection, one often hears laymen ask, Why do the various worlds
and nations employ professional traitors when it is known that they are
traitors? Why would they confide to the traitors any secret valuable enough
to be sold to a third party? The answer is the same, and the weapon is the
same: money. The traitors act as brokers in a continuous. interstellar
bourse on which each planet seeks to gain afinancidl advantage over the
other. Thus the novice should not imagine that any secret put into his
hands is exactly what it is said to be, particularly when its primary value
purports to be military. He should also be wary of the ruler who seeks to
subvert him into personal loyalty, which tears the economic tissue and
hence should be left in the domain of untrained persons. For the
professional, loyalty is a tool, not a value.
"The typical layman's question cited above should of course never be
answered."
--Lord Gr6": The Discourses, Bk. 1, Ch. LVII

Simon holed up quickly and drastically, beginning with a shot of
transduction serum-an almost insanely dangerous expedient, for the stuff
not only altered his appearance but his very heredity, leaving his head
humming with false memories and false traces of character, derived from the
unknowable donors of the serum, which conflicted not only with his purposes
but even with his tastes and motives.
Under interrogation, he would break down into a babbling crowd of random
voices, as bafflingly scrambled as his karyotypes, blood groups, and
retina- and fingerprints. To the eye, his gross physical appearance would
be a vague, characterless blur of many roles-some of them derived from the
DNA of persons who had died a hundred years ago and at least that many
parsecs away in space.
26
 A Style in Treason

But unless he got the antiserum within fifteen High Earth days, he would
forget first his mission, then his skills, and at last his very identity.
Nevertheless, he judged that the risk had to be taken; for effete though
some of the local traitors (always excepting Valkol the Polite) seemed to
be, they were obviously quite capable ofpenetrating any lesser cover-and
equally obviously, they meant business.
The next problem was how to complete the mission itself -it would not be
enough just to stay alive. High Earth did not petrify failed traitors and
mortar them into walls, but it had its own ways of showing displeasure.
Moreover, Simon felt to High Earth a certain obligation-not loyalty, Gro
forbid, but, well, call it professional pride-which would not let him be
retired from the field by a backwater like Boadacea. Besides, finally, he
had old reasons for hating the Exarchy; and hatred, unaccountably, Gro had
forgotten to forbid.
No: It was not up to Simon to escape the Boadaceans. He had come here to
gull them, whatever they might currently think of such a project.

And therein lay the difficulty; for Boadacea, beyond all other colony