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

All the same, from the planet to the Argo poured a steady stream of information and directions, in machine-translated and hence readily understandable English. There was a civilization here, a civilization with an advanced technology, and one with access to the knowledge and resources of the Heart Stars. But where was it?
Obviously it was under water. Jack had immediately suspected a dominant creature something like Earth's dolphins but with flukes sufficiently modified to handle and make tools, and with a civilization centred, most probably, around underwater cities built inside the lagoons formed by the atolls. But the picture that gradually emerged contradicted his idea at almost every point.
There were whale-like mammals here, all right, but they were not the planet's rulers, were not, in fact, as far advanced as their parallels on Earth. The dominant creature was actually not even a vertebrate. It was a mollusk or something very like one.
The closest resemblance to an earthly animal Jack could think of was the octopus, which has marvellously developed eyes rivalling those of any mammal and is capable in a crude way of learning from experience. There was nothing crude about the decapod squids of this planet, however. They were vastly intelligent in a quite inhuman way - garrulous, solemn, self-important, seemingly quite without humour or any sense of beauty.
'That's not an unknown combination of character traits among human beings,' Dr Langer said when Jack reported this impression, for it was to Jack that the task of talking to the decapods had been assigned. 'But I agree that among humans it's never been wide-spread. All the same it's common elsewhere. All hive cultures are like that.'
This is a hive culture?' Sandbag said in astonishment 'How could such a thing evolve among free-swimming animals?'
'Bees are free-flying,' Dr Langer pointed out.
'Yes, but they go through the whatyoumaycallum insects go through - the metamorphosis. They're born as grubs that have to be protected.'
'Well, something like that is going on here,' Dr Langer said. 'What do you make of those big hydra-like things, like animated trees or giant sea anemones, that build the coral reefs?'
'Just what you just said,' Jack said promptly. 'They're hydroids; they belong to the coelenterates, not to the mollusks. They're as far away from the decapods on the evolutionary line as the decapods are from us.'
'Jerry, do you agree? No connection between the atoll creatures and the decapods?'
'I can't see any,' Sandbag said. These atolls sure aren't the squid cities we first guessed they were.'
'But they are,' Dr Langer said calmly. 'We were just using the wrong definition of a city.'
There's nothing in them, sir,' Jack objected. 'Nothing in the lagoons but fish, and nothing on the reefs but the hydroids. The decapods have their machinery scattered all over the ocean floor; they ignore the reefs entirely.'
True,' Dr Langer said. 'Because the reefs are hives, not centres of commerce or thought. A hive is a breeding machine. You see, gentlemen - to put a complicated matter as simply as it allows - we were guilty of thinking too rigidly in terms of what we know on Earth, where there's a long distance between the mollusk and the coelenterate. But evolution didn't follow the same course here as it did on Earth, and here there's no such firm distinction. Here the decapods and the hydras are both the same creature.'
'But, sir,' Jack said. The hydras are just vegetables! I don't mean that they're plants. But they're rooted to the spot; they don't do anything but catch fish; they don't even have a brain!'
'And they reproduce by budding,' Dr Langer added, 'all true enough. They are a little like the bee grubs Jerry mentioned. The life-cycle of these creatures is what we call "alternation of generation". The hydras reproduce without sex, by budding. But they also produce sexual buds, male on one individual, female on another. Out of the fertilized egg comes a free-swimming form, the medusoid stage. This swims around for the "balance of its lifetime, then settles down, roots itself, turns into a hydroid - and starts a new colony, a new atoll. Thus far, what I've said would apply equally well to Earth's coral polyps ... but here the medusoid stage is not a jellyfish but a squid - a molluskoid, if you like. They do the thinking and the organizing. The hydroid forms are the breeders.'
'And the reefs are the hives,' Jack said. 'It fits, all right. But what about the central lagoons of the atolls? They can't have been formed by Darwin's system, because this planet never had any low volcanic islands to sink into the sea. Still, these atolls look as if they were built up on the run of a crater. How come?'
'That's the clue that got me started thinking about this in the first place,' Dr Langer said. 'Why the similarity of shape when the mechanism couldn't be the same? But the crucial difference turns out to be one of size. The reefs we have here are very large and built on drowned plateaus of what's essentially a rather shallow sea. They have plenty of room to expand, and they do. But coral isn't a strong structural material; it's just a loose network of glassy splinters that won't bear a lot of weight. As the atoll here spreads out, its centre gets crushed down by the weight of trapped water, silt, and additional coral, and there you have your lagoon.
'Notice, by the way, that this process very much favoured the way evolution has gone here. The polyps are sessile -fixed to one spot - so they can't hunt fish; the fish have to come to them, something that even fish would have better sense than to do. On the other hand, if the molluskoid forms had to herd fish for the benefit of their sessile parents, they'd have no time to develop a civilization, especially since herding fish is by no means so easy as herding sheep. The lagoon solves that problem: fish get trapped in there by storms, by tides, by sheer blundering, and in an emergency, schools of fish can be herded in there. Thus, the hydroid stage of the creature can largely feed itself from the warehouse, so to speak, and the free-swimming form can prosecute other concerns. One of those concerns, I would guess, is protecting the defenceless hydroids from being picked off by natural enemies - sharks or whatever the local equivalent is.'
'One thing still bothers me, sir,' Sandbag said. 'The whole set-up sounds to me like it would last for ever. The creatures don't have nations, they don't have wars. In a word, they've got it made. Why do they need to belong to the Hegemony? What good does it do them? I don't think any other planet would bother trying to conquer a thawed-out snowball like this.'
'No. Water-breathing races don't develop space flight in the first place, because they never see the sky,' Dr Langer agreed. 'So these people don't need military protection from possible predators. But, Jerry, highly stable cultures are just what the Heart Stars are interested in most of all. It's not only that they won't admit unstable cultures; they can't afford not to take in the stable ones for the sake of the overall stability of the Hegemony. I suspect that this planet joined the Heart Stars because it had to, not to protect itself from some single rival but in self-protection against the Hegemony itself.'
If you can't lick 'em, join 'em?'
That looks to me to be how it was. But it's time to lower the bucket. All we are supposed to care about here is the water. Jerry, I think it'd better be you who flies the gig down. It handles rather like a low-power Ariadne, and you've had more experience than Jack has with this kind of craft. Just make sure those water tanks are full before you come back, and if there's any sloshing, you'll be in trouble!'
'Can I go along?' Jack asked.
'What for? You'd better stay here and talk with the decapods in case Jerry runs into any hitches.'
'I don't have any good reason,' Jack admitted. 'But I was hoping for a look at the mammals - those whale-like creatures. I wish I knew better just how intelligent they are.'
'Well, so do I,' Dr Langer said. 'But I don't see any real use for the knowledge, so I'm afraid we'll have to pass it by for the time being. Our course time leaves us no margin for snooping, and I suspect that wasn't an accident.'
'I guess I agree,' Jack said reluctantly. 'But, Sandbag, keep your eyes open, will you?'

CHAPTER SIX
From Erewhon to Nowhere
When they were in flight again, Jack thought of something else that he had overlooked.
'Dr Langer, a while back you said you had an idea or two about our first contact - not the decapods but that outfit around the green star near Antares. Can you tell us what they were?'
'I don't see why not,' Dr Langer said. 'They're still on the formless side, though. It's just that I was disappointed by the utter indifference that outfit showed towards the Argo. I'd rather hoped for something a little more defensive -maybe even some outright hostility.'
'Why?' Jack and Sandbag said simultaneously.
'Well, we have to bear in mind that the attitudes - both political and technical - that were built into the Phobos station reflect what the Heart Stars were doing and thinking nearly a million years ago, when the satellite was first hollowed out. And the very first thing that it did when we got in touch with it was to threaten us. I take that to mean that the Hegemony felt vulnerable somewhere; a really invincible culture would have been aloof. Then, you'll remember, we were put in touch with the modern Heart Stars, though we still don't know exactly to whom we were talking, and they were already on the defensive because the Angels had been mentioned. That again indicates that they sense some weakness in themselves, or so I guessed. I was hoping to find that weakness and make use of it - as ordered.
'But if such a weakness exists, the people on that companion-of-Antares station have never heard of it, or their attitude towards us would have been something other than complete indifference. I suspect the safest course is to assume that it doesn't exist at all.'
'I don't see why you expected anything else, after eight hundred thousand years,' Sandbag said. 'Surely, sir, the attitudes of the modern Heart Stars have to have changed a lot, and their guns got bigger and bigger, too.'
'Inevitably,' Dr Langer said. 'Still, Jerry, the Hegemony is a highly stable society; indeed, its whole raison d'etre is its stability. I was hoping that it might turn out to be a sort of vastly augmented Egyptian empire, in which the rate of technological innovation would be extremely slow - in fact almost non-existent - compared to the rate of innovation we're used to on Earth. However, so far all the evidence is negative, and there isn't even very much of that. We're just going to have to go on as before and hope for some positive clues.'
'Any guesses about our next touchdown?' Jack said.
'No. Except that it'll be earth-like and inhabited by a highly civilized race.'
"With a kind of civilization we'd find impossible to corrupt even if we wanted to,' Jack added thoughtfully. Langer shot him a surprised look, but after a moment the surprise dissolved into a grin.
'Elementary, my dear Watson,' he said.
When they found that the inhabitants of their second stopover planet had no name for the place - or rather, had long forgotten it - Jack wanted to name the world 'Kybernetes' in dubious honour of its many machines. Sandbag promptly astonished his companions with a flashback to his compulsory classical language courses, which neither Jack nor Dr Langer would have dreamed he had retained, even in this age of intensive secondary education. 'No, let's call it "Palinurus". "Kybernetes" is Greek for "helmsman", and "cybernetics" is the science of guiding machines. But Palinurus was Aeneas's helmsman who was washed overboard on the way to Italy. And that sure is what's happened on that planet!'
'A singularly appropriate choice,' Dr Langer said. 'I was going to call the place "Erewhon", but your name is much better, Jerry.'
Now it was Sandbag's turn to look puzzled, and Jack was sure that his own expression was equally blank.
'Why "Erewhon"?' Jack said finally. 'I suppose it would help if I had read the Butler book.'
'So it would,' Dr Langer said with a wry grin. 'Tell you later.'
From the moment that the Argo had come off the Standing Wave, there had been no question but that Palinurus was inhabited. Even from two million miles away, it glittered of machinery as their preceding stop had gleamed of water. Again they were provided with ample instructions in excellent computer-translated English; and this time, since there was a large landing area which appeared to present very few problems, Jack was allowed to take the gig down to pick up the necessary supplies.