"Blish, James - Bindlestiff - txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

CASE BUT BY NO MEANS UNHEARD OF. HOWEVER,
THERE ARE TRACES OF FORMS WHICH MIGHT BE
DEGENERATES OF ENGLISH, AS WELL AS STRONG EVIDENCES OF DIALECT MIXTURES SUGGESTING A
TRIBAL SOCIETY. THIS LATTER FACT IS NOT CONSONANT WITH THE POSSESSION OF RADIO NOR WITH
THE UNDERLYING SAMENESS OF THE PATTERN. UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES WE MUST POSITIVELY FORBID ANY MACHINATIONS BY MR. HAZLETON ON THIS
VENTURE.Ф
УI didnТt ask them for advice,Ф Amalfi said. УAnd what good is a lesson in etymology at this point? Still, Mark, watch your stepЧФ
УRemember Thor V,Ф Hazleton said, mimicking the mayorТs father-bear voice to perfection. УAll right. Do we land?Ф
For answer, Amalfi grasped the space stick, and the city began to settle. Amalfi was a true child of space, a man with an intuitive understanding of the forces and relationships which were involved in astronautics; in delicate situations he invariably preferred to dispense with instruments. Sensitively he sidled the city downward, guiding himself mainly by the increasingly loud chanting in his earphones.
At four thousand meters there was a brief glitter from amid the dark-green waves of the treetops. The proxies converged upon it slowly, and on the screens a turreted roof showed; then two, four, a dozen. There was a city thereЧa homebody, grown from the earth. Closer views showed it to be walled, the wall standing just inside a clear ring where nothing grew; the greenery between the towers was camouflage.
At three thousand, a flight of small ships burst from the city like frightened birds, trailing feathers of flame. УGunners!Ф Hazleton snapped into his mike. УPosts!Ф
Amalfi shook his head, and continued to bring his city closer to the ground. The fire-tailed birds wheeled around them, dipping and flashing, weaving a pattern in smoky plumes; yet an Earthman would have thought, not of birds, but of the nuptial flight of drone bees.
Amalfi, who had never seen a bird or a bee, nevertheless sensed the ceremony in the darting cortege. With fitting solemnity he brought the city to a stop beside its jungle counterpart, hovering just above the tops of the giant cycads. Then, instead of clearing a landing area with the usual quick scythe of the mesotron rifles, he polarized the spindizzy screen.
The base and apex of the Okie city grew dim. What happened to the giant ferns and horsetails directly beneath it could not be seenЧthey were flattened into synthetic fossils in the muck in a split secondЧbut those just beyond the rim of the city were stripped of their fronds and splintered, and farther out, in a vast circle, the whole forest bowed low away from the city to a clap of sunlit thunder.
Unfortunately, the Twenty-third Street spindizzy, always the weakest link, blew out at the last minute and the city
dropped the last five meters in free fall. It arrived on the surface of the planet rather more cataclysmically than Amalfi had intended. Hazleton hung on to his bucket seat until City Hall had stopped swaying, and then wiped blood from his nose with a judicious handkerchief.
УThat,Ф he said, Уwas one dramatic touch too many. IТd best go have that spindizzy fixed again, just in case.Ф
Amalfi shut off the controls with a contented gesture. УIf that bindlestiff should show,Ф he said, УtheyТll have a tough time amassing any prestige here for a while. But go ahead, Mark, itТll keep you busy.Ф

THE mayor eased his barrel-shaped bulk into the lift shaft and let himself be slithered through the friction fields to the street. Outside, the worn facade of City Hall shone with sunlight, and the CityТs mottoЧMOW YOUR LAWN, LAIW?
Чwas clear even under its encrustation of verdigris. Amalfi was glad that the legend could not be read by the local folkЧit would have spoiled the effect.
Suddenly he was aware that the chanting he had been hearing for so long through the earphones was thrilling through the air around him. Here and there, the sober, utilitarian faces of the Okie citizens were turning to look down the street, and traces of wonder, mixed with amusement and an unaccountable sadness, were in those faces. Amalfi turned.
A procession of children was coming toward him: children wound in mummylike swatches of cloth down to their hips, the strips alternately red and white. Several free-swinging panels of many-colored fabric, as heavy as silk, swirled about their legs as they moved.
Each step was followed by a low bend, hands outstretched and fluttering, heads rolling from shoulder to shoulder, feet moving in and out, toe-heel-toe, the whole body turning and turning again. Bracelets of objects like dried pods rattled at wrists and bare ankles. Over it all the voices chanted like water flutes.
AmalfiТs first wild reaction was to wonder why the City Fathers had been puzzled about the language. These were human children. Nothing about them showed any trace of alienage.
Behind them, tall black-haired men moved in less agile pro-
cession, sounding in chorus a single word which boomed through the skirl and pitter of the childrenТs dance at widespaced intervals. The men were human, ~too; their hands, stretched immovably out before them, palms up, had five fingers, with fingernails on them; their beards had the same topography as human beards; their chests, bared to the sun by a symbolical rent which was torn at the same place in each garment, and marked identically by a symbolical wound rubbed on with red chalk, showed ribs where ribs ought to be, and the telltale tracings of clavicles beneath the skin.
About the women there might have been some doubt. They came at the end of the procession, all together in a huge cage drawn by lizards. They were all naked and filthy and sick, and could have been any kind of animal. They made no sound, but only stared out of purulent eyes, as indifferent to the Okie city and its owners as to their captors. Occasionally they scratched, reluctantly, wincing from their own claws.
The children deployed around Amalfi, evidently picking him out as the leader because he was the biggest. He had expected as much; it was but one more confirmation of their humanity. He stood still while they made a circle and sat down, still chanting and shaking their wrists. The men, too, made a circle, keeping their faces toward Amalfi, their hands outstretched. At last that reeking cage was drawn into the double ring, virtually to AmalfiТs feet. Two male attendants unhitched the docile lizards and led them away.
Abruptly the chanting stopped. The tallest and most impressive of the men came forward and bent, making that strange gesture with fluttering hands over the street. Before Amalfi quite realized what was intended, the stranger had straightened, placed some heavy object in his hand, and retreated, calling aloud the single word the men had been intoning before. Men and children responded together in one terrific shout, and then there was silence.
Amalfi was alone in the middle of the circle, with the cage. He looked down at the thing in his hand.
It wasЧa key.

M IRAMON shifted nervously in the chair, the great black sawtoothed feather stuck in his topknot bobbing uncer
tainly. It was a testimony of his confidence in Amalfi that he sat in it at all, for in the beginning he had squatted, as was customary on his planet. Chairs were the uncomfortable prerogatives of the gods.
УI myself do not believe in the gods,Ф he explained to Amalfi, bobbing the feather. УIt would be plain to a technician, you understand, that your city was simply a product of a technology superior to ours, and you yourselves to be men such as we are. But on this planet religion has a terrible force, a very immediate force. It is not expedient to run counter to public sentiment in such matters.Ф
Amalfi nodded. УFrom what you tell me, I can believe that. Your situation is unique. What, precisely, happened Сway back then?Ф
Miramon shrugged. УWe do not know,Ф he said. УIt was nearly eight thousand years ago. There was a high civilization here thenЧthe priests and the scientists agree on that. And the climate was different; it got cold regularly every year, I am told, although how men could survive such a thing is difficult to understand. Besides, there were many more starsЧthe ancient drawings show thousands of them, though they fail to agree on the details.Ф
УNaturally. YouТre not aware that your sun is moving at a terrific rate?Ф
УMoving?Ф Miramon laughed shortly. УSome of our more mystical scientists have that opinionЧthey maintain that if the planets move, so must the sun. It is an imperfect analogy, in my opinion. Would we still be in this trough of nothingness if we were moving?Ф
УYes, you wouldЧyou are. You underestimate the size of the Rift. ItТs impossible to detect any parallax at this distance, though in a few thousand years youТll begin to suspect it. But while you were actually among the stars, your ancestors could see it very well, by the changing positions of the neighboring suns.Ф
Miramon looked dubious. УI bow to your superior knowledge, of course. But, be that as it mayЧthe legends have it that for some sin of our people, the gods plunged us into this starless desert, and changed our climate to perpetual heat. This is why our priests say that we are in Hell, and that to be
put back among the cool stars again, we must redeem our sins. We have no Heaven as you have defined the termЧwhen we die, we die damned; we must win СsalvationТ right here in the mud. The doctrine has its attractive features, under the circumstances.Ф
Amalfi meditated. It was reasonably clear, now, what had happened, but he despaired of explaining it to MiramonЧhard common sense sometimes has a way of being impenetrable. This planetТs axis had a pronounced tilt, and the concomitant amount of libration. That meant that, like Earth, it had a Draysonian cycle: every so often, the top wabbled, and then resumed spinning at a new angle. The result, of course, was a disastrous climatic change. Such a thing happened on Earth roughly once every twenty-five thousand years, and the first one in recorded history had given birth to some extraordinary silly legends and faithsЧsillier than those the Hevians entertained, on the whole.
Still, it was miserable bad luck for them that a Draysonian overturn had occurred almost at the same time that the planet had begun its journey across the Rift. It had thrown a very high culture, a culture entering its ripest phase, back forcibly into the Interdestructional phase without the slightest transition.
The planet of He was a strange mixture now. Politically the regression had stopped just before barbarismЧa measure of the lofty summits this race had scaled at the time of the catastropheЧand was now in reverse, clawing through the stage of warring city-states. Yet the basics of the scientific techniques of eight thousand years ago had not been forgotten; now they were exfoliating, bearing УnewФ fruits.
Properly, city-states should fight each other with swords, not with missile weapons, chemical explosives, and supersonicsЧand flying should be still in the dream stage, a dream of flapping wings at that; not already a jet-propelled fact. Astronomical and geological accident had mixed history up for fair.

У HAT would have happened to me if IТd unlocked that cage?Ф Amalfi demanded suddenly.
Miramon looked sick. УProbably you would have been killed