"C M Kornbluth - The Remorseful" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

The Remorseful



C. M. Kornbluth




The Remorseful



IT DOES NOT matter when it happened. This is because he was alone and time had ceased to have
any meaning for him. At first he had searched the rubble for other survivors, which kept him busy for a
couple of years. Then he wandered across the continent in great, vague quarterings, but the plane one
day would not take off and he knew he would never find anybody anyway. He was by then in his forties,
and a kind of sexual delirium overcame him. He searched out and pored over pictures of women,
preferring leggy, high-breasted types. They haunted his dreams; he masturbated incessantly with closed
eyes, tears leaking from them and running down his filthy bearded face. One day that phase ended for no
reason and he took up his wanderings again, on foot. North in the summer, south in the winter on
weed-grown U.S. 1, with the haversack of pork and beans on his shoulders, usually talking as he
trudged, sometimes singing.

It does not matter when it happened. This is because the Visitors were eternal; endless time stretched
before them and behind, which mentions only two of the infinities of infinities that their "lives" included.
Precisely when they arrived at a particular planetary system was to them the most trivial of irrelevancies.
Eternity was theirs; eventually they would have arrived at all of them.

They had won eternity in the only practical way: by outnumbering it. Each of the Visitors was a billion
lives as you are a billion lives- the billion lives, that is, of your cells. But your cells have made the mistake
of specializing. Some of them can only contract and relax. Some can only strain urea from your blood.
Some can only load, carry, and unload oxygen. Some can only transmit minute electrical pulses and
others can only manufacture chemicals in a desperate attempt to keep the impossible Rube Goldberg
mechanism that you are from breaking down. They never succeed and you always do. Perhaps before
you break down some of your specialized cells unite with somebody else's specialized cells and grow into
another impossible, doomed contraption.

The Visitors were more sensibly arranged. Their billion lives were not cells but small, unspecialized,
insect-like creatures linked by an electromagnetic field subtler than the coarse grapplings that hold you
together. Each of the billion creatures that made up a Visitor could live and carry tiny weights, could
manipulate tiny power tools, could carry in its small round black head, enough brain cells to feed, mate,
breed, and work-and a few million more brain cells that were pooled into the field which made up the
Visitor's consciousness.

When one of the insects died there were no rites; it was matter-of-factly pulled to pieces and eaten by its
neighboring insects while it was still fresh. It mattered no more to the. Visitor than the growing of your
hair does to you, and the growing of your hair is accomplished only by the deaths of countless cells.

"Maybe on Mars!" he shouted as he trudged. The haversack jolted a shoulder blade and he arranged a