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

The little Beldene looked up, paintbrush in hand, eyes wide. "Tomiko, that was a dirty thing to say."
"Why?"
"It would be vile! I'm not attracted to Osden!"
"I didn't know it mattered to you," Tomiko said indifferently, though she did know. She got some
papers together and left the cabin, remarking "I hope you and Harfex or whoever it is finish by last bell;
I'm tired."
Olleroo was crying tears dripping on her little gilded nipples. She wept easily. Tomiko had not wept
since she was ten years old.
It was not a happy ship; but it took a turn for the better when Asnanifoil and his computers raised
World 4470. There it lay, a dark-green jewel, like truth at the bottom of a gravity well. As they watched
the jade disc grow, a sense of mutuality grew among them. Osden's selfishness, his accurate cruelty,
served now to draw the others together. "Perhaps," Mannon said, "he was sent as a beating-gron. What
Terrans call a scapegoat Perhaps his influence will be good after all." And no one, so careful were they to
be kind to one another, disagreed.
They came into orbit. There were no lights on nightside, on the continents none of the lines and clots
made by animals who build.
"No men," Harfex murmured.
"Of course not," snapped Osden, who had a viewscreen to himself, and his head inside a polythene
bag. He claimed that the plastic cut down on the empathic noise he received from the others. "We're two
light centuries past the limit of the Hainish Expansion, and outside that there are no men. Anywhere. You
don't think Creation would have made the same hideous mistake twice?"
No one was paying him much heed; they were looking with affection at that jade immensity below
them, where there was life, but not human life. They were misfits among men, and what they saw there
was not desolation, but peace. Even Osden did not look quite so expressionless as usual; he was
frowning.
Descent in fire on the sea; air reconnaissance; landing. A plain of something like grass, thick, green,
bowing stalks, surrounded the ship, brushed against extended view cameras, smeared the lenses with a
fine pollen.
"It looks like a pure phytosphere," Harfex said. "Osden, do you pick up anything sentient?"
They all turned to the Sensor. He had left the screen and was pouring himself a cup of tea. He did not
answer. He seldom answered spoken questions.
 The chitinous rigidity of military discipline was quite inapplicable to these teams of mad scientists; their
chain of command lay somewhere between parliamentary procedure and peck-order, and would have
driven a regular service officer out of his mind. By the inscrutable decision of the Authority, however, Dr.
Haito Tomiko had been given the title of Coordinator, and she now exercised her prerogative for the first
time. "Mr. Sensor Osden," she said, "please answer Mr. Harfex."
"How could I 'pick up' anything from outside," Osden said without turning, "with the emotions of nine
neurotic hominids pulsating around me like worms in a can? When I have anything to tell you, IтАЩll tell you.
I'm aware of my responsibility as Sensor. If you presume to give me an order again, however,
Coordinator Haito, IтАЩll consider my responsibility void."
"Very well, Mr. Sensor. I trust no orders will be needed henceforth." Tomiko's bullfrog voice was
calm, but Osden seemed to flinch slightly as he stood with his back to her, as if the surge of her
suppressed rancor had struck him with physical force.
The biologist's hunch proved correct. When they began field analyses they found no animals even
among the microbiota. Nobody here ate anybody else. All life-forms were photosynthesizing or
saprophagous, living offlight or death, not off life. Plants: infinite plants, not one species known to the
visitors from the house of Man. Infinite shades and intensities of green, violet, purple, brown, red. Infinite
silences. Only the wind moved, swaying leaves and fronds, a warm soughing wind laden with spores and
pollens, blowing the sweet pale-green dust over prairies of great grasses, heaths that bore no heather,
flowerless forests where no foot had ever walked, no eye had ever looked. A warm, sad world, sad and