"Monica Hughes - Devil On My Back" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Monica)

As they rose obediently to their feet he said quietly, "Denn, Tomi. One moment if you please."
 Again the shiver of fear down the spine.
"Sit, Young Lords."
As Tomi settled on his couch he found himself staring straight into Lord Vale's eyes. They were a
pale blue, with a sorrow in them from which Tomi turned his own eyes away.
"I believe you Young Lords were close friends of both Grog and Farfat. You must be feeling sad
and bewildered and perhaps even angry at their failure."
Tomi's head jerked up. Did Lord Vale know everything? Perhaps that was the reason for the
sadness in his eyes... but that couldn't be right. Knowledge was power and power was splendid!
"Why do we access this way if it is so easy to fail?" He blurted out. "Is it only luck that separates
us Lords from soldiers or workers or even slaves? I don't understand anything." He stopped, close to
tears.
Lord Vale smiled a faint humorless smile. "That is the first step on the path to true learning. Grog
dreamed of gaining access to all knowledge. He was wrong, wrong! What I can teach you is only the
beginning. You ask if it is all luck? Perhaps it is. All life is luck if you look at it one way. It is luck that
your ancestors were part of the ArcOne team during the Disaster. It is luck that your forefathers lived
safely underground through the Age of Confusion. It is luck that you were born as sons of Lords. It is all
luck. Now ask yourself: is that a useful thing to know?"
"But why must we access this way?" Tomi cut into the gentle flow of words and then blushed for
his rudeness. "I am sorry, my Lord. But surely there must be other ways of learning?"
"Of course. In the bad old days you would have sat for seven or eight hours a day for twelve
years on a hard chair, while a teacher tried to implant knowledge out of books into your heads. It was an
inefficient system and the knowledge acquired was spotty and incomplete. There is too much to learn and
man no longer has the memory to retain it without help."
"What is 'memory'?"
"Memory is the ability to recall material stored in the brain without computer help. In the ancient
days man was skilled at memorizing, but even before the Disaster it was a dying art. The result was
ignorant specialists: scientists who made decisions about the future of mankind without knowledge of his
previous history. Well, you know where that has brought us." He shrugged his bent shoulders. "To the
Age of Confusion."
"So we must learn to access the computer directly?"
"The computer is your memory and mine. With every pak you access you become closer to the
ideal of a perfect thinking being, with a balanced knowledge of history and engineering, science and
philosophy. It is the only way to restore Mankind to its proper place and begin to set the world aright."
"Are we going to do that?"
"My goodness, no!" Lord Vale was horrified. "Even your learned father, my dear Tomi, has not
achieved perfect access. There is always more to learn. But with each generation we come a little closer
to being the perfect man who will be fit to inherit the Earth."
"But..." Tomi struggled with new thoughts. "Aren't the scientists and engineers and philosophers
discovering new things all the time?"
"Stupid," hissed Denn. "That's what ArcOne's for. Isn't it, Lord Vale?"
"Correct. But you should not call your fellow student stupid."
Tomi wasn't paying attention. "Doesn't each Lord share his new knowledge with the computer
and so with every other Lord?"
"Of course."
"Then each generation is going to have more and more to access. I don't see how we can ever
catch up and be perfect enough to go Outside again."
Lord Vale nodded approvingly. "Good. You have hit upon an important concern. A dozen Lords
are working on the problems of whether Learning is a finite or an infinite series."
Tomi's brain automatically accessed Math and Philosophy and grasped Lord Vale's meaning.