"Carter, Raphael - The Fortunate Fall" - читать интересную книгу автора (Carter Raphael)
I thanked her for the editing and God for not letting me make that mistake live. Take a note, Maya: no more banter.
Voskresenye was staring at my encyclopedia, a mocking smile curling his lips. It was the Postcops' joke on me, though not their last or cruelest: seeing an encyclopedia in my head makes people magnify my lapses and minimize any knowledge I display. It's like being caught with crib notes.
"I don't really use that," I said. "It doesn't even work right anymore--" And what kind of idiot would wear a broken chip? I was making matters worse with every word.
But Voskresenye's eyes were not unkind. "I see no moral difference between keeping knowledge in one's head and on a chip," he said.
I wanted to protest again, but it was no use. And besides, when was the last time I'd gone live without a gigabyte of background research whispering into my ear from a moistdisk? It wouldn't hurt if it weren't partly true.
"I suppose," I said, "your generation was the last to spend its childhood memorizing facts, and mine the last to feel guilty about not doing it."
"A man is fortunate if he has nothing worse than that to feel guilty about," Voskresenye said sententiously. "However, the endeavor of memorization is a noble one. Once knowledge is centralized on the Net, it becomes very easy to change--Queen Mab need only ride the world-mind once, new dreams for old. And so in the modern age, the amasser of useless facts is your only hero. An encyclopedia that was not new twenty years ago at least provides a point of reference."
I pulled my pride away from that last sentence, the way you'd pull a dog from a sprayed fencepost. "Does the knowledge really have to be useless?" I said.
"It need not be," he said, "but the sort of person who will cram his head with facts, as a squirrel crams his cheeks with nuts, will most often do it for its own sake, with no thought of future use. Certainly that is the sort of person I was, as a student. Even if I had taken my degree, I don't know what I would have done with it. I honestly don't think I ever thought that far ahead. Of course I could not teach in the universities. No doubt I would have wound up riding herd on second-graders in Kazakhstan for a couple of years until the next purge of ethnic intellectuals."
"What happened?"
"Two things. First, impatience. I had a fair command of Latin, but for my degree I also had to learn Greek, and I did not look forward to the years of study that would be required; nor did I want to wait so long for Homer. So I got drilled for my first socket-- which was illegal for me, you understand, because I was not one of them. The law was not strictly enforced, but occasionally the Guardians would decide to make an example of someone. The socket was a small one, and I was able to hide it, but the need for secrecy gradually increased my awareness of what the Guardians were doing to our nation and its people. So I began to develop a vague, unformed, and still largely selfish political conscience--and that helped prepare me a little for what happened next."
At this point the waiter arrived with our food, and Voskresenye was distracted by the need to dissect his pirozhki before tasting them. To get him back on track, I restated the obvious: "It doesn't sound like you were the kind of person to defy the Guardians."
" 'Defy' sounds as if I was hurling insults at them on the street. The reality was more like a whisper in a darkened room that the wrong person overheard. And even that I would never have done, if not for a fellow student named Katya Andersohna."
I didn't need a moistdisk to recognize that name. "Any relation to Harold Anderson?"
"She was his daughter."
"A dangerous person to know, then."
He nodded, his hands pausing above the plate. "Yes, very much so. But not for the reason you think. She was a four-nine."
"Harold Anderson's kid was a dissident? That's hard to believe."
"Katya Andersohna was dissidence at MGU. Without her there would have been nothing. She was an amazing person; she had inherited her father's genius and her mother's beauty, and to that she added humanity, a trait neither of her parents appeared to possess. Perhaps compassion is an environmental illness rather than a genetic disorder. Or I should say, a bacillus, for she was quite successful at infecting others.... But I'm getting ahead of myself," he said, shaking his head a little, as though this Katya were a subject whose gravitation he escaped with difficulty. He turned his attention to his plate. I groped for some banal question in order to fill in the dead audio time, then stopped: to watch him eat was fascination enough. Before each cut, he rotated the plate to the correct angle, as if the dance of his knife and fork were programmed and immutable. The swift, practiced movements of his hands made me think of a sign language, or of a series of magical passes by which the food was made to disappear.
Voskresenye raised an eyebrow, and I realized that I'd been watching him too long. "I'm sorry," I said. "Staring's an occupational hazard."
"Not at all. If my being a freak will get people to listen, I am pleased to be one."
I let that sink in and then asked: "How did you get mixed up with Katya Andersohna?"
"Not by choice, that's for certain," he said, laying down his knife. "I had no idea she was a dissident, nor did I know her by the Russian form of her name. To me she was Catharine Anderson, the chief of propaganda for the Student League, a thing to be feared; and the daughter of the Heptarch, all the more terrifying. I rarely saw her, and when I did, I deemed it prudent to go the other way."
"Then how did it happen?"
As he spoke I tapped into my imagination chip and visualized the scene. I didn't know what Andersohna looked like, so I pictured her with long, dark hair, shaved a little on the left side to expose the sockets. When I made her flip her hair, Keishi responded with a soft "ooh," and I knew I'd hit the right gesture.
"Well, my cheeks were burning, as you can imagine," he continued. "Hatred of us was rarely so overt; they saved their venom for Kazakhs and Arabs for the most part. I was not used to it. I wanted to throw the pamphlet away, but that would have seemed like defiance, so I marked my place in Aeschylus with it and left, trying not to run. But as I did, I noticed something strange. The covers of all the leaflets the others were reading were white on red. Mine, and only mine, had black lettering as well.
"When I had put some distance between me and the library, I checked to make sure. Yes. Beneath the white title, 'Kazakhs versus Animals at Square-Mile-on-Volga,' someone had written with a ballpoint pen, in English, 'A Modest Proposal.' And the handwriting was quite recognizable. It was my own."
"Andersohna forged your writing? She was trying to frame you?"
"That was my first thought. I turned and made for the incinerator, planning to throw it in. But I stopped short. If Harold Anderson's daughter had taken a dislike to me, burning one leaflet was not going to change my fate. I might as well look at it; perhaps I'd learn why I'd been singled out. I stood close to the incinerator, opened the door so I could throw it in at once if anyone came by, and began to read."
"It was dissident literature?"
"For me it was, yes. To anyone else, it would just have been another purple-faced leaflet from the Ministry, marked up by an even more zealous student. Where the leaflet said, 'One would not subject an innocent animal to this treatment, though one would never hesitate to inflict it upon prisoners who have been guilty of such heinous crimes,' this fellow had put, 'Such as being born Kazakh!' And where it said, 'This will help reduce the dimensions of the Kazakhi tumor,' neat proofreading marks emended this to 'Senses, organs, dimensions, passions,' and added in the margin, 'Let us prick them and see if they will bleed.' All this was, for a student of what we were then misguided enough to call the classics, highly suggestive stuff."
I took another sip of ice water as he went on.
"Even then I would not have been sure that it meant what it meant, except for that scrawled subtitle: 'A Modest Proposal.' In the eighteenth century, in what you'd call Ancient Britain, a four-nine by the name of Jonathan Swift had written a satire by that title, pointing out that the problems of overpopulation and famine could be solved simultaneously if we would simply begin eating the children of the poor. I used the memory chip I was wearing beneath my cap to call up the moment when she'd tossed her hair. Yes: she'd been showing me the English Literature textbook in her socket.
"What I was holding, then, was a satire after the example of Swift. If a Guardian read it, he would see in it nothing more than overexuberant patriotism: 'Since we have so many human subjects available at the Square Miles for our experiments, why ship in animals?' A noble but impractical thought, by Guardian standards. Read it with a different eye, and it said, 'What the Guardians do to Kazakhs, you wouldn't wish on a dog.' But this meaning only fell into place with that obscure allusion written on the cover-- something that no board of inquiry would ever catch. And on top of that, all these little hints were in my own script, so that if the leaflet should fall into the hands of someone else that could understand it ... well, I'd be an ethnic with an illegal socket who claimed the Heptarch's daughter did it in his handwriting."
"That's a lot of thought to put into recruiting one person," I said.
"For anyone else it would have been. But Katya was, even unenhanced, a brilliant propagandist, and besides that she had the best moistware her father's blood money could buy. For her it was the sort of thing one dreams up on a break between classes. Katya never did anything with less than three layers of deception."
He looked down at his plate and cut off another bite, but did not eat it. When he continued his story it was in a quieter voice.
"I didn't dare keep the leaflet, of course. Yet I knew I had to talk to Catharine Anderson. The leaflet she had written had done what she meant it to. It had forced me to think about things I had been ignoring for twenty years. I had to see her. So I found another, unmarked leaflet--they were all over campus within a day-- and wrote on the cover with a black ballpoint pen. And for a week I spent every waking hour in the library, hoping to run into her again.
"Finally, one afternoon when I had given up and was on my way out, I passed her in the foyer. She was talking to a friend, some one on the Student League. I was almost at the door by the time I saw her, so I stopped and went back to the book return, as though I had forgotten something. I pulled out Aeschylus, took the leaflet from him, and, even though he was not a library book, I dropped him into the return slot. So much for the classics; I never saw him again. Then I opened the leaflet, as if I had just noticed it there, and stood for a while pretending to read it. She glanced at me for one instant--that was all it took for her to understand--and, quickly but unhurriedly, took leave of her friend. She walked out and, cautiously, I followed her.
"She led me all the way across campus without acknowledging my presence, and after a while, I began to think she hadn't noticed me at all. Then suddenly she was nowhere to be seen. I stopped, looking around. But to stand there craning my neck like that was too suspicious, so I started to leave. As I did, she reached out for me and pulled me back behind the shrubbery where she was hiding. She pushed me against the wall and covered my mouth with her hand.
" 'Never call me Catharine,' she hissed. 'Don't even think of me by that name. Only Katya--you understand?'
"I nodded as best I could with my head pinned to the wall. She took her hand away from my mouth and said, 'Now tell me why you're smart enough not to approach me, but not smart enough to burn your leaflet.'
"I reached into my pocket, as she watched me warily, and took out the leaflet to show her. On the cover where Katya's subtitle should have been, I had written, 'Paper due 11/IX Greek.'
"She looked at me differently then. 'It's about time the gods sent me someone with half a brain. You won't be too bad once we get your head out of the clouds.'
" 'There are others?' I said.
" 'Well, of course there are others. You don't think that some floatheaded Classics major was the first person I went after? I wouldn't have bothered if not for that horrible cap--I hoped you were hiding a socket under there.'
"I took the cap off to show her.
" 'Sense and a socket. More than I'd hoped for. Come to the coffeeshop in the Student Union at seven tomorrow.'
© 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org
(support [a t] reallib.org)
(support [a t] reallib.org)