"James P. Hogan - Giants 4 - Entoverse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

The atmosphere also had a high neon content, which with its relatively low
discharge voltage added an almost continual background of electrical activity
that appeared in the form of diffuse, orange-red streaks and streamers.
This was where, fifty thousand years previously, after the destruction
of Minerva, the Thurien Ganymeans installed the survivors of the Lambian
branch of protohumanity, when the Cerian branch elected to be returned to
Earth. Thereafter, the Jevlenese were given all the benefits of Thurien
technology and allowed to share the knowledge gained through the Thurien
sciences. The Thuriens readily conferred to them full equality of rights and
status, and in time Jevlen became the center of a quasi-autonomous system of
Jevlenese-controlled worlds.
As the Thuriens saw things, a misguided worldview resulting from the
Lunarians' predatorial origins had been the cause of the defects that drove
them to the holocaust of Minerva. It wasn't so much that the limited
availability of resources caused humans to fight over them, as most Terran
conventional wisdom supposed; rather, the instinct to fight over anything led
to the conclusion that what was fought over had to be worth it, in other
words, of value, and hence in scarce supply.
But once the Lunarians absorbed the Ganymean comprehension that the
resources of the universe were infinite in any sense that mattered, all that
would be changed. Unrestricted assimilation into the Thurien culture and
access to all the bounties that it had to offer would allay aggression,
relieve insecurities and fears, curb the urge for domination and conquest, and
build in their place a benign, homogeneous society founded on grateful
appreciation. Freed, like the Thuriens, from want, doubt, and drudgery, the
Jevlenese would unlock the qualities that were dormant inside them like the
potential waiting to be expressed in a seed. No longer fettered by time or
space, nor constrained to the things that one mere planet had to offer, they
would radiate outward in a thousand life-styles spread across as many worlds
to complete the upward struggle that had begun long before in Earth's primeval
oceans, and thence become whatever they were capable of.
At least, that was the way the Thuriens had imagined it would be.
But in all those millennia the Thuriens had learned less about human
perversity than Garuth, former commander of the Ganymean scientific mission
ship Shapieron, from ancient Minerva, had in six months on Earth.
For self-esteem could only be earned, not given. Dependence bred
feelings of inadequacy and resentment. The results were apathy, envy,
surliness, and hate.
The more ambitious minority who gained control of Jevlenese affairs had
lied, schemed, and eventually gained control of the surveillance operation set
up by the Thuriens for monitoring developments on Earth. They had intervened
covertly to keep Earth backward while they built up a secret military
capability, and almost succeeded in a plan that would have enabled them to
overthrow the Thuriens. Although Thurien technology had been indispensable in
thwarting the Jevlenese, what had actually saved the situation had been the
Thuriens' decision to open direct contact with the Terrans -- when the
Shapieron's story from Earth contradicted the Jevlenese version -- and thus
involve other minds capable of working at comparable depths of deviousness.
But the circumstances of the greater mass of Jevlenese were very
different from those of the minority who rose to take charge. For them, the