"James Alan Gardner - League of Peoples 01 - Expendable" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

My Class


As I record this, I have in front of me a picture of my class at the Academy. In the first row are the ones
with problems the camera does not reveal: Thomas, the stammerer; Ferragamo, the man whose voice did
not change at puberty; my roommate, Ullis Naar, who usually blinked convulsively every two seconds
but managed to keep her eyes open for this photo; Ghent, loudly flatulent... yes, what a joke, who could
take Ghent seriously? Not his crew-mates when Ghent was flayed alive by savages during a first contact.
A few days of superficial mourning, and then his shipmates forgot him.

The system worked.

Back to the photo. One row of visually acceptable Explorers, and behind them the rest of us: pop-eyed,
three-fingered, obese, deformed. No one in the back rows smiled for this picture. Most tried to hide
behind the heads of those in front.

What unthinking Director of Protocol demanded that we pose for such a photo? I'd always been told (in
smug, selfcongratulatory tones) that our society had progressed beyond the days of the freak show.

The majority of my graduating class could have been cured by modern medicine. We all knew it. Which
of us hadn't jacked into a medical library and pored through the texts describing our conditions? Which
of us didn't know the names of at least five techniques to make us into more-normal human beings? Yet
those remedies did not exist for us. The Admiralty had a vested interest in keeping us repugnant. As long
as we stayed as we were, no one lost sleep over sending us on dangerous missions.

Admirals need their sleep in order to make enlightened judgments.




My Duties


My most time-consuming duty was to review reports from other Explorers. The latest files were
transmitted to our shipboard computer every day and stored on bubble till I went over them. Most of the
time, the reports were simply copies of the running commentaries all Explorers gave when landing on an
unfamiliar planet.

(Upon graduation, Explorers were fitted with permanent throat transceivers that transmitted continuously
on planet-down missions. The transceivers were quite visible if you looked closely; but no one worried
about a lump on the neck ruining an Explorer's appearance.)

Some of the transcripts I listened to ended abruptly. We called those transcripts "Oh Shits" because the
Explorers often said, "Oh shit," just before their throat mikes went dead. You always wondered what
they saw just before they stopped transmitting. You seldom found out.

"Oh Shit" reports weren't marked in any special way. Whenever I audited the log of someone I knew
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html