"Ursula K. LeGuin - Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

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VASTER THAN EMPIRES AND MORE
SLOW
Ursula K. Le Guin
It was only during the earliest decades of the League that the Earth sent ships out on the enormously
long voyages, beyond the pale, over the stars and far away. They were seeking for worlds which had not
been seeded or settled by the Founders on Hain, truly alien worlds. All the Known Worlds went back to
the Hainish Origin, and the Terrans, having been not only founded but salvaged by the Hainish, resented
this. They wanted to get away from the family. They wanted to find somebody new. The Hainish, like
tiresomely understanding parents, supported their explorations, and contributed ships and volunteers, as
did several other worlds of the League.
All these volunteers to the Extreme Survey crews shared one peculiarity: they were of unsound mind.
What sane person, after all, would go out to collect information that would not be received for five or
ten centuries? Cosmic mass interference had not yet been eliminated from the operation of the ansible,
and so instantaneous communication was reliable only within a range of 120 lightyears. The explorers
would be quite isolated. And of course they had no idea what they might come back to, if they came
back. No normal human being who had experienced time-slippage of even a few decades between
League worlds would volunteer for a round trip of centuries. The Surveyors were escapists, misfits. They
were nuts.
Ten of them climbed aboard the ferry at Smeming Port, and made varyingly inept attempts to get to
know one another during the three days the ferry took getting to their ship, Gum. Gum is a Cetian
nickname, on the order of Baby or Pet. There were two Cetians on the team, two Hainishmen, one
Beldene, and five Terrans; the Cetian-built ship was chartered by the Government of Earth. Her motley
crew came aboard wriggling through the coupling tube one by one like apprehensive spermatozoa trying
to fertilize the universe. The ferry left, and the navigator put Gum underway. She flitted for some hours
on the edge of space a few hundred million miles from Smeming Port, and then abruptly vanished.
When, after 10 hours 29 minutes, or 256 years, Gum reappeared in normal space, she was
supposed to be in the vicinity of Star KG-E-96651. Sure enough, there was the gold pinhead of the star.
Somewhere within a four-hundred-million-kilometer sphere there was also a greenish planet, World
4470, as charted by a Cetian mapmaker. The ship now had to find the planet. This was not quite so easy
as it might sound, given a four-hundred-million-kilometer haystack. And Gum couldn't bat about in
planetary space at near lightspeed; if she did, she and Star KG-E-96651 and World 4470 might all end
up going bang. She had to creep, using rocket propulsion, at a few hundred thousand miles an hour. The
Mathematician/Navigator, Asnanifoil, knew pretty well where the planet ought to be, and thought they
might raise it within ten E-days. Meanwhile the members of the Survey team got to know one another still
better.
"I can't stand him," said Porlock, the Hard Scientist (chemistry, plus physics, astronomy, geology,
etc.), and little blobs of spittle appeared on his mustache. "The man is insane. I can't imagine why he was
passed as fit to join a Survey team, unless this is a deliberate experiment in non-compatibility, planned by
the Authority, with us as guinea pigs."
"We generally use hamsters and Hainish gholes," said Mannon, the Soft Scientist (psychology, plus
psychiatry, anthropology, ecology, etc.), politely; he was one of the Hainishmen. "Instead of guinea pigs.
Well, you know, Mr. Osden is really a very rare case. In fact, he's the first fully cured case of Render's
SyndromeтАФa variety of infantile autism which was thought to be incurable. The great Terran analyst
Hammergeld reasoned that the cause of the autistic condition in this case is a supernormal empathic
capacity, and developed an appropriate treatment Mr. Osden is the first patient to undergo that
treatment, in fact he lived with Dr. Hammergeld until he was eighteen. The therapy was completely
successful."
"Successful?"