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

At first, Palinurus seemed to him to be remarkably earth-like, with a few differences, to be sure, but these much smaller than the many similarities. The people were small primates, reminding Jack irresistibly of picture-book illustrations of gnomes; and the landscape was completely industrialized, reminding Jack of the steadily expanding city limits of Gary, Indiana, which, since his boyhood, had been threatening to swallow up the whole of several states. Here apparently they had swallowed a planet. Otherwise, Palinurus seemed to present him with nothing in the least unexpected.
But in the course of directing the loading of the gig, he gradually became aware of something very singular and strange. Though the gnarly, knobby people were co-operative and even cautiously friendly, they all seemed dazed and without any real comprehension of what it was they were doing, even where the task was relatively small. All of Jack's instructions had to be given to the computers that ran the spaceport on which the gig was set down, and every significant response that he got to anything he asked also came from the machines. The people merely scurried, toted, and scurried again.
Thoroughly puzzled, Jack sought an opportunity to look about the spaceport in hopes of seeing what these people did when they were not waiting upon him. In so far as he could tell, the answer appeared to be: polishing metal. Since everything that he saw being polished was stainless steel, there was no obvious reason for even this activity.
Along with the supplies, he took this report back to Dr Langer, who said slowly, 'So that's it. I had been wondering. While you were down there, I was monitoring the radio transmissions on this world, and I was unable to pick up anything but coded reports from one machine to another -not a sound of one living being talking to another, except for a single channel that seems to be devoted to an almost brainless kind of entertainment, worse than twentieth century commercial television. It fits in quite neatly with what you tell me. Evidently on this world the machines are in charge.'
'A revolt of the robots?' Sandbag said. 'I thought it had been proven that that couldn't happen.'
'And so it can't, but there are greater and more subtle dangers in a machine civilization, Jerry. One thing that can happen - and it's obviously happened here - is that people may become so dependent upon the ultra-high speed of computer thinking as to trust every decision that a computer makes, no matter how vitally it affects the life of the people who are supposed to be the machine's bosses. If, for instance, you trust machines to help you carry on a foreign policy, the machines, which have no sense of values, may very well come up with "solutions" which, on the machines' terms, are technically victories, yet they will fail to preserve a single one of the non-material values you wanted your foreign policy to protect. The danger is always inherent in the theory of games, of which a computer is only a physical embodiment. It's all very well to maximize your gains and minimize your losses, but there are some things you can't weigh by addition and subtraction - things like freedom, privacy, equality before the law, and what I will have to call, rather vaguely, the unique: a moment of understanding, a work of art, a human life. It's one hundred per cent impossible to teach machines this, and those who would be the masters of machines have to keep that fact in mind, or go under - as they obviously have down below.'
It was then that the question of giving a private name to the unhappy, totally mechanized world had come up. It had been interrupted by the necessity to put the Argo back on the Standing Wave on time and on course, but as soon as that was accomplished, it resumed promptly.
'Why did you want to call it "Erewhon", sir?' Jack said.
'Because precisely the same situation obtained on Butler's reverse Utopia. He proposed then that the time might come when the machines would be so important in the life of man that he would be reduced simply to crawling over them and tickling them a little bit, like plant lice crawling over a leaf. A lot of people scoffed at the notion, but actually the human race escaped that outcome by the narrowest of margins. On Palinurus, it has come to pass very much as he foresaw it. But there's lots more to Butler's book than just this idea, which is why I said that Jerry's name for the world struck me as a better idea than mine.'
'I think I can see why Palinurus belongs to the Hegemony, too,' Sandbag said. 'Like the water world, it's a stable society, so the Heart Stars have to have it. And, of course, the Heart Stars give it protection.'
'I think both those reasons apply,' Dr Langer said slowly. 'But I have had a dreadful additional thought about which I can only hope that I'm totally wrong. Those machines, we know, are not running Palinurus for the benefit of its live people; what they do and what they produce has very little relationship any more to what the people need. This makes it a very nice property for a larger political entity. If the Heart Stars suddenly need two million cases of plastic doughnuts, Palinurus can fill the order - and never mind whether the people of Palinurus can eat plastic doughnuts or not. Judging by what Jack saw, the people could be dispensed with entirely. And the Hegemony is ruthless enough to do exactly that.'
After a long moment, Jack said: 'I'm not so sure Palinurus is a good name, after all. How did Aeneas ever get to Italy without a helmsman? It looks to me as though, if you lose your helmsman, you are lost with all hands.'
'Not quite,' Dr Langer said. 'Somebody may take you in tow. But, of course, you may not want to go where he's going.'
Within the humming, echoing cave of the Argo, it was becoming more and more difficult to believe that any other world existed, particularly during the long weeks while the great hull was riding the Standing Wave, a universe in itself. But regularly there came through that closed universe the undeniable, uniformly shaped pips of the Hegemony's detection beams, reminding the Argo's crew that though they could see nothing of the galaxy while they were in transit, the Heart Stars were watching them constantly.
Then the Argo burst once again out of its self-made, invisible cocoon, and beneath it rolled a world of green hills and cloud-dappled blue skies so like the Earth that Jack felt an acute pang of homesickness. Surely this planet, so calm, so pastoral, so domesticated, could not present any unpleasant surprises. That just wouldn't be fair.
But it did. Earth-like the planet was, geophysically, but its people had never heard of the Earth and had no intention of living like Earthmen. The life that they lived in the gigantic stone temples they had built upon pylons in the middle of the sea was centred in music, which in turn was based upon the ceaseless rolling of the broad combers of the waves. They vaguely understood that the gig was something like the small, high-pooped, lateen-sailed carracks with their dragon's-head forecastles in which they cruised their ocean, but they looked with horror out of their frog-like eyes upon the star travellers, and were obviously happy to be rid of them. They did not fit anywhere into the completely ritualized life of this culture, where even the smallest act or gesture was ceremonial as well as functional and had its appropriate five-note melody. The last thing Jack and Sandbag heard as they quitted that world was a cacophonous skirling of pipes and horns, at once both mournful and aggressive, as though the people were hoping to blow them off the face of the planet.
Yet the world from which these constant chants and pipings arose was immensely wealthy, and immensely powerful. It was the first Heart Star planet that they had seen that was impressive enough, despite its peculiarities, to seem to merit full membership in a union as all-embracing as the Hegemony of Malis.
'All the same,' Sandbag said, 'if I ever get to be Earth's ambassador to that crew, the first thing I'm going to do is turn off my hearing aid.'
Far behind them, quite another sort of argument was going on, though no human being could have recognized it as an argument, let alone understood what it was all about. Even the stage on which it was taking place would have been strange to all but a few Earthly eyes. It lay inside that vast dust cloud called the Greater Coal Sack, near the constellation of Cygnus or the Northern Cross, visible to the naked eye from Earth only as a 'hole' in the Milky Way. It is, in fact, not enormously far from Earth as interstellar distances go, for it lies in the real vicinity of 61 Cygni, a star so close that it was the first to have its distance measured by the parallax method, and the first sun other than our own to be discovered to have planets.
But the actors in the drama were not planet-bound. Their country, their home, their nest - no word in human experience quite covered what it actually was - was nothing less than the whole of the nebula itself. Inside the curtaining storms that bordered the nebula was a cluster of new-born stars, almost all of them of type B; Earth's sun was a thousand times older than they. Their formation had swept that heart of the nebula free of gas and dust, creating there a hidden universe in miniature. Some of these stars had planets, but they were even younger than their primaries: cold, lifeless aggregations of rubble, awaiting the passage of millions of years for gravitation pressure and radioactivity to heat them up enough to begin their unpredictable histories.
Here, in their thousands, the Angels orbited and danced, creatures older than the planets, older than the suns, many of them as old as the universe itself. Every now and then they had young, born by the same process that had given birth to the suns, but they died only of the rarest and most improbable accidents.
To the human eye, an Angel is a glowing ball of light four to seven feet in diameter, ranging in colour from yellow to deep red, with a rapidly changing, complex internal structure. What the Angels actually were still could not be said exactly. The best speculation was that they were stable, self-contained electromagnetic fields, rather like ball lightning, but this description did not satisfy anyone, since nobody understood ball lightning, either.
Besides, 'stable' was the wrong adjective, for the Angels were more than stable. They were multi-stable - that is, alive. They were the oldest intelligent life in the universe.
They were arguing now - partly by an exchange of radio messages on hundreds of different channels at once; partly by delicate variations in their visible light; partly by that ceaseless ballet of their movements among themselves which stitched the star-cluster in the Coal Sack together; and almost certainly by many other means unknown and not even guessed at by man. No human being could possibly have eavesdropped on them, or even identified which one was speaking at any given moment. Only the greatest of good fortune has left us a very rough record of that discussion.
Those arguing were divided into two groups: THE FIRST BORN, the oldest of the Angels; and the younger Angels, like LUCIFER who had been the first Angel to visit Earth. Though LUCIFER was not, in fact, in the Coal Sack at the time but on Earth, he might well have been a party to the argument. In any event, it is convenient to use him as a spokesman for the cadet Angels, since we cannot know the facts.
LUCIFER: The Earthlings are now deep into the Heart Stars. But they do not yet recognize what they see.
THE FIRST BORN: They are too ephemeral to understand.
LUCIFER: We underestimated them before, First Born. They are not the usual sort of ephemerids.
THE FIRST BORN: The differences are not all in their favour. They are unwontedly aggressive, for example.
LUCIFER: True. Yet despite this, they have passed the first stage of evolution for such creatures. They have come to terms among themselves.
THE FIRST BORN: The first stirrings of an infant. They still seek to take advantage of every other life form they encounter.
LUCIFER: They did not do so with us, First Born.
THE FIRST BORN: What else are they doing at this moment? Actually they are the first race of ephemerids to find it even possible to take advantage of us.
LUCIFER: In what way? I do not understand.
THE FIRST BORN: By this very venture into the Heart Stars. They seek to use our sworn agreement with them in a petty bid for temporal power. This is presumption.
LUCIFER: That is true, First Born. Yet it is also the beginning of the second evolutionary stage. They find other creatures than themselves ancient, well-entrenched, and asserting over them an authority they cannot tolerate. As pioneers, they defy this power and become the agents of change.
THE FIRST BORN: What value should we place on change, my brother? All change goes in but one direction, towards the long death of all that is. These local stirrings are but islands of organization. Quickly they decay into chaos again. How often have we seen it happen before?
LUCIFER: It always happens, First Born. But some are more elegant than others and make for a more alive time.
THE FIRST BORN: Then how should we prefer one over another? By that alive time which endures the longest? We alone were born with the universe; we alone will witness the approach of its cold ending. Of all the ephemerids, only the Heart Stars has shown the potential - and it is only that - of becoming a society of companion creatures, if only for a few more galactic years.
LUCIFER: There are hints that the Earthlings...
THE FIRST BORN: Yes. Hints, whispers, nothing more. We know what the half-life of the Heart Stars will be; there have been many such societies in this local galactic cluster. How can we expect the Earthlings to outlast them? Experience offers us no such hope.
LUCIFER: We lack evidence, First Born. If all goes well, we should have it soon. Much depends upon our absent brother.
THE FIRST BORN: Much or - little. But we shall wait. Why should we not? We have time. The First Cause has given all other races to time. We alone can wait.
Like sparks in a column of smoke, the argument whirled and danced away into the Coal Sack, and into the reaches of some topic even the rudiments of which had never entered a human mind.

CHAPTER SEVEN
The Zoo Keepers
It did not at all surprise Jack to find that the people of Ss'pode - the apostrophe stands for a suction tick, usually written 'tsk' in English, but Dr Langer thought the Swahili spelling convention a good deal more economical - were green, or rather, copper-coloured. He knew well that even on Earth, the Caucasoid complexion was a trait of only a tiny minority and might well be extinct before many more generations passed.
What did surprise Jack was that they were so human, and that all the land-dwelling aliens they had met thus far had been roughly of the humanoid type.
'When you think of all the millions of accidents that evolution depends on,' he said to the troubleshooter, 'it wouldn't have surprised me if Earthmen weren't the only humanoid types in the Universe.'