"Blish, James - Mission To The Heart Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

Here in the vast nucleus of the Milky Way, the brilliance of the skies was overwhelming. Although Jack had known in advance that the distances between suns here averaged only one light year, instead of the four that was normal to the part of the galaxy he had come from, he had not stopped to think of what the result would be in terms of vision. Faced with such a spangling of stars, how could any people ever have begun to group them into constellations, even through an atmosphere which would cut down their apparent numbers somewhat?
Malis itself was quite as astonishing in its own way. Technically, it was an Earth-type planet, but of that class it was a monster, a good 10,000 miles in diameter, or about 31,500 miles around at its equator. And yet, like all Earth-type planets, it was only a minor member of its system. Its sun, a blue-white giant, had a family of twenty-four planets, of which the grandest was a gas giant so huge that it was almost a 'grey ghost' - a dwarf semi-star just slightly short of the mass that would have kindled it into nuclear flame. This body had nineteen satellites, one of which was itself as big as Venus or the Earth; the number of satellites in the Malis system as a whole was more than a hundred. The outermost world of this immense, complex array was almost a third of a light year away from its primary. Anyone unfortunate enough to have to live on its eternally frozen surface would have been unable to tell by the naked eye which of the thousands of stars in his sky was his sun.
And someone did live there. The computer, making a quick sweep with all the Argo's detectors, reported that all of the planets, except the fourteen gas giants, and every satellite with a diameter greater than a thousand miles were occupied in one way or another. Some of these settlements, like the one on the outermost planet, were obviously only the equivalents of small garrisons; others, like the one on the Earth-size satellite of the grey ghost, were so large that one would have to call the world 'populated'. Of these, which were only colonies and which were truly inhabited was a question the computer found itself unable to settle, except for Malis itself which was so obviously the kingpin of the whole complex that the computer did not hesitate to rule that the race that lived on Malis had evolved there.
'Surface gravity, one point-six-seven gees,' Sandbag reported. 'Getting around down there is going to be like trying to walk in the world's worst express elevator. The air looks all right: oxygen, about five per cent, but the computer says the surface air pressure is twenty-one pounds per square inch, so we won't have to wear respirators.'
'Anything potentially poisonous, Jerry?'
'No, sir; nothing but the situation. But there is one oddity. The spectograms show almost all the noble gases. It's strongest on xenon, but there's even a faint helium line.'
'Not too surprising,' Dr Langer said. 'Anybody who could charge the inside of a Martian satellite with xenon had to have a readily available supply of it. And that, in turn, presupposed a big, heavy planet But what about radon? Inert or not, I don't think I'd want to breathe much of that. After all, it's radioactive, and this planet is plenty big enough to have held on to its whole supply since creation.'
'Almost none,' Sandbag reported. 'Only the helium line is fainter.'
Looking very pleased with himself, Dr Langer addressed himself to the keyboard of the computer. The machine promptly clattered and spat out a piece of tape.
'Just on the basis of simple radioactive decay, this planet is a minimum of six million years older than the Earth is. The more likely figure is about thirty-five million years. No doubt about it - Malis had to be the dominant world in all the Heart Stars, and is probably the world that organized the Hegemony in the first place. Gentlemen, we are about to meet a people that has been civilized for longer than the whole evolutionary history of the human race.'
Jack mopped his forehead. 'It makes me feel like a fly looking down the mouth of a cannon.'
'Hmmm,' Dr Langer said. 'Now there's an idea! Nobody ever aims a cannon at a fly intentionally. Do you gentlemen think you might manage to impersonate flies while we're on Malis? You especially, Jerry?'
'Why -I guess so, sir. Sure! Why not? No, what I mean is - sure. But why?'
'Well, I think we've pretty much had our fill of being pets. And I think that the more insignificant we make ourselves seem, the more we're likely to come through this all right and with the information we were sent out to get. Nobody ever makes pets of insects, either - not that I ever heard of.'
'I'm going to enjoy watching Sandbag trying to be insignificant,' Jack said, grinning.
'Why, you ape, I can be twice as insignificant as you without half trying!'
'And in twice as loud a voice, too.'
'Stow that,' Dr Langer said sharply. 'Prepare for landing.'
This, Jack thought with no little awe, is what I've always imagined the Hall of the Mountain King would look like. The audience room of the Hegemon of Malis was so huge that its ceiling could not be seen; Jack had the uneasy feeling, which he knew to be nonsense but could not dismiss, that its roof might be obscured by clouds. It was rather like being inside the world's - or the universe's - most enormous cathedral, though there was nothing in the least cathedral-like in its atmosphere.
The place was artificially lit, and along the walls at regular intervals were placed a large number of machines, no two alike. About half of them seemed to be control consoles, but the functions of the others couldn't even be guessed. But there was no clutter; the general feeling was one of great austerity. This was the chamber of judgment of a warrior race, and if it was now becoming decadent or was in any other way in decline, as Dr Langer had hoped, Jack could see no evidence of it around them.
There was a good reason for the size of the hall. On this planet it was difficult to tell the difference between architecture and geology, especially from a distance. The Malans had long ago been through the metal-and-glass building fad and the insane waste of scarce raw materials it involved; they had gone back to the monumental masonry style of their earliest civilized ancestors, except that the present titanic piles of stone had really been built to last nearly for ever. Like the local mountains they resembled, nothing could destroy them except weathering or a geological overturn, since the Malans had built none of them in any of the planet's earthquake zones; and the Malans had so well-developed a science of volcanology that they could predict for millions of years in advance when a period of crustfolding or subsidence would begin, and where.
Yet somehow the Hegemon himself did not in the least seem dwarfed by all this giganticism. Like all his race, he was a giant himself. Jack estimated that he was more than eight feet tall, with a blocky body, and obviously powerful arms and legs which his black, undecorated tunic left bare.
His head seemed disproportionately long even for this heroic torso. Deep-sunk green eyes looked unblinkingly out from under bony ridges as prominent as those of a gorilla. His nose was extraordinarily long by human standards, and under it was a seemingly lipless mouth that ran straight across his face like a slash. And his expression never seemed to change. Indeed, he reminded Jack vividly of the pictures he had seen of the statues on Easter Island, their faces fixed in a perpetual sneer of cruel arrogance.
'You are the ephemerids whom the Banish of Bane wished to detain,' he said in perfect English. His voice was as deep as Jack had thought it would be and as expressionless as his face. At the sound, Sandbag turned white. Jack guessed that until now, the cadet had not guessed that the entity to whom he had spoken from the Argo, back above Ss'pode, was in very truth the absolute ruler of the heart of a whole galaxy.
'That is true, Your Magnificence,' Dr Langer said. Oddly, he responded in a higher voice than his normal speaking tone. Jack could not understand why, but he decided to pick up the cue anyhow - if necessary.
'No such form of address is required. I am the Hegemon,' the stony voice rumbled. 'As for the Ss'podans, the penalties for such an act are written. You are also the ephemerids who have made a treaty with the Star Dwellers - those you call the Angels.'
'Yes,' Dr Langer admitted after the slightest of hesitations. There was, after all, no way of denying the fact, since the Angels had already talked to the Hegemony about Earth several times.
'You are in no way eligible to be admitted to the Hegemony, since your stability remains untested by time,' the Hegemon said. 'That, too, is written.'
'We are well aware of that, Hegemon,' Dr Langer said, still assuming his oddly squeaky voice. 'We make no such application.'
'What you ask or would wish is not at issue here,' the star-emperor rumbled. 'We know more about you and about your history than you know yourselves. In the view of the Hegemony, you are nothing more than gnats and might in law be swatted before you can sting. There is ample precedent for this, as well.'
'We deserve no more,' Dr Langer said meekly.
That would be my order,' the Hegemon continued relentlessly, 'were it not for the machines. They point out that to do so would earn the Hegemony the certain enmity of the Star Dwellers who have powers that we do not possess. They are quite capable of collapsing an entire galaxy if they wish, and have in fact done so before, the last time as recently as three million years ago. Their reasons for this remain unknown. We have no wish to risk losing our entire, ancient realm - and the whole stellar structure upon which it is founded - merely for the relief of brushing away a minor irritation. That would be contrary to scientific principle.'
'To what science do you refer, Hegemon?' Dr Langer said.
'Warfare,' the Hegemon said, and for the first time, Jack seemed to detect the faintest trace of an expression upon his granite face. It was one of surprise. 'But there is an alternative in the law. Your world may be incorporated into the Hegemony immediately, not as a member but as a subject state. Since the Dwellers have already asked that your trial period for admission be cut in half, the machines predict that such a move would not be contrary to the trend of their wishes. Therefore, I so order. You may now return to your quarters.'

CHAPTER NINE
Three Slaves
The quarters were luxurious by Malan standards; the food, though completely strange, was excellent; and the three Earthmen were unguarded. But their mood alternated only between dismay and despair. They well knew that from the moment the Hegemon had pronounced his ruling, they were slaves, with the whole population of Earth and the Sol system soon to follow.
Of course they talked about it endlessly, but the argument always seemed to be going around the same circle, with that unchanged, unavoidable fact in the centre.
'I think the first thing we have to admit,' Dr Langer said, 'is that we got what we came for, and that it's turned out to be a disaster. The Heart Stars are stable, all right, but the solution they've worked out for the problem is an absolute tyranny, and we can't accept that. From our point of view, it belongs to the intellectual childhood of our race.'
'But it certainly is stable,' Sandbag said. Even in the worst possible situation, he could never resist the temptation to play Devil's Advocate. 'And it's successful in a lot of other ways, too. For instance, they seemed to have the communications problem licked, though how they tie together so many worlds across such enormous distances still baffles me.'
'You saw the answer to that on Ss'pode,' Dr Langer said. 'Even with computer help, it would be my guess that eighty per cent of the working population of every Heart Star planet belongs to the bureaucracy.'
'Well, why not? At least they're working, and that's more than most of the population of the Earth is doing right now. Or, take warfare. If they've got it down to an exact science as that monster implies - and I don't doubt him for a minute - then, effectively, they don't have wars any more, just experiments. I'll bet that their last internal war took place back somewhere in the Miocene Era - if they ever had one at all. This campaign they're going to run off against us will be just a sort of miniature police action, and if there's any fighting at all, we'll lose all the battles. All of them - not just most!'
'I don't doubt any of those things,' Dr Langer said. 'We won't have a chance unless the Angels decide to intervene, and I'm inclined to agree with the Hegemon that they won't They've never shown any interest in what specific political structure we have on Earth, even though we've got five or six that differ interestingly from each other. And if the Angels react by collapsing the galaxy, that's not going to do us much good either - although it would destroy the Heart Stars perhaps a hundred thousand years before it wipes out the Earth.'
'Are there really such things as collapsing galaxies, sir?' Jack said.
'Yes, we know of several, although they're all very remote from our galaxy, in both space and time. They're all strong sources of radio waves, and one of them - 3C273 - is actually the brightest object in the known universe, though it's so far away that, from the Earth, it's no more than a thirteenth-magnitude star.'
'As far as eliminating warfare is concerned,' Jack said thoughtfully, 'we seem to have done that pretty successfully, too, by wiping out national boundaries, at least for all practical purposes. And I must say, I like our method much better than theirs. Turning warfare into an exact science strikes me as just another example of making the end justify the means.'
'I agree,' Dr Langer said. 'It just goes to show that it's perfectly possible to be a million years old and be dead wrong about something all the same.'
'Well, all right. Let's look at it from another angle,' Sandbag said. 'Is the tyranny really as absolute as we think it is, sir? Nothing in the World is ever going to make me like the Hegemon, but on the other hand, he doesn't strike me as being very much like any of the dictators we've had in our own history. He doesn't give orders just to please himself. Remember how many times he said that the law ruled this way or the law ruled that way? And half the time he seemed to be relying on machine interpretation.'
'He's as much a slave as we are, I'm sure.' Dr Langer said surprisingly. 'I would guess that he is chosen for his office by machine and on the basis of highest administrative aptitude, and that he had no choice whatsoever about taking on the job. But I'll also bet that those laws he invoked so frequently haven't been amended or added to for millennia and that there's no longer any way they can be changed. That's not a government of laws as we know it. What we have here is a situation of absolute legal rigidity. And social rigidity, too.