"Frank Herbert - The Featherbedders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

The Featherbedders
Frank Herbert, 1968




'Once there was a Slorin with a one-syllable name who is believed to have said: 'niche for
every one of us and every one of us in Ms niche.''
- Folk saying of the Scattership People


There must be a streak of madness in a Slorin who'd bring his only offspring, an untrained
and untried youth, on a mission as potentially dangerous as this one, Smeg told himself.
The rationale behind his decision remained clear: The colonial nucleus must preserve its
elders for their detail memory. The youngest of the group was the logical one to be
volunteered for this risk. Still ...
Smeg forced such thoughts out of his mind. They weakened him. He concentrated on
driving the gray motor-pool Plymouth they'd signed out of the government garage in the state
capital that morning. The machine demanded considerable attention.
The Plymouth was only two years old, but this region's red rock roads and potholes had
multiplied those years by a factor of at least four. The steering was loose and assorted
squeaks arose from front and rear as he negotiated a rutted down-grade. The road took them
into a shadowed gulch almost bare of vegetation and across the rattling planks of a wooden
bridge that spanned a dry creekbed. They climbed out the other side through ancient erosion
gullies, past a rone of scrub cottonwoods and onto the reaching flat land they'd been crossing
for two hours.
Smeg risked a glance at Rick, his offspring, riding silently beside him. The youth had come
out of the pupal stage with a passable human shape. No doubt Rick would do better next time
- provided he had the opportunity. But he was well within the seventy-five percent accuracy
limit the Slorin set for themselves. It was a universal fact that the untrained sentience saw
what it thought it saw. The mind tended to supply the missing elements.
A nudge from the Slorin mind-cloud helped, of course, but this carried its own perils. The
nudged mind sometimes developed powers of its own - with terrifying results. Slorin had
learned long ago to depend on the directional broadcast of the mind's narrow band, and to
locate themselves in a network limited by the band's rather short range.
However, Rick had missed none of the essentials for human appearance. He had a gentle,
slender face whose contours were difficult to remember. His brown eyes were of a limpid
softness that made human females discard all suspicions while the males concentrated on
jealousy. Rick's hair was a coarse, but acceptable black. The shoulders were a bit high and
the thorax somewhat too heroic, but the total effect aroused no probing questions.
That was the important thing: no probing questions.
Smeg permitted himself a silent sigh. His own shape - that of a middle-aged government
official, gray at the temples, slightly paunchy and bent of shoulder, and with weak eyes
behind gold-rimmed glasses - was more in the Slorin tradition.
Live on the margins, Smeg thought. Attract no attention.
In other words, don't do what they were doing today.
Awareness of danger forced Smeg into extreme contact with this body his plastic genes
had fashioned. It was a good body, a close enough duplicate to interbreed with the natives,
but he felt it now from the inside, as it were, a fabric of newness stretched over the ancient
substance of the Slorin. It was familiar, yet bothersomely unfamiliar.