"Unhuman Sacrifice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

UNHUMAN SACRIFICE

BY KATHERINE MACLEAN



Katherine MacLean is not nearly as well known as she deserves to be, partly because her career has been marked by long periods of comparative silence and partly because she has produced only a handful of novelsЧmost notably Cosmic Checkmate (1962) and Missing Man (1975).

It is in her three collectionsЧThe Diploids and Other Flights of Fancy (1962), Trouble With Treaties (1975), and The Trouble With You Earth People (1980) that her finest work can be found. She debuted with "Defense Mechanism" in 1949, and that story, like most of her work, is concerned primarily with the social sciences, especially anthropology and psychology. Her story "Missing Man" the basis of the above mentioned novel, won a Nebula Award in 1971.

"Unhuman Sacrifice" is an outstanding example of what a talented science fiction writer can do with the subject of social customs. (MHG)

Knowing the absolute truth (or, to be more accurate, thinking you do) is a dangerous and hateful thing. When the Puritans settled in New England, they established Sunday as a day of rest. It was a cosmic affair, ordained by God for the whole world, as anyone could plainly see if they read the beginning of the book of Genesis.

The Puritan judges fined those misguided inhabitants of the colony who violated the Sabbath by engaging in profane activities. They also fined the Indians who had never heard of the Sabbath, and told the poor, confused aborigines that on a particular day of the week they shouldn't go hunting.

It works the other way around, too. There are factories in the United States that are now owned by Japanese gentlemen, and the Japanese owners may tell American underlings how to behave in accordance with Japanese notions of politeness.

At least, I watched on television once, as a Japanese gentleman explained that drinking from a glass of water is a rather gross thing. It is unpleasant to watch the lips open, and slobber over the rim of the glass, and water cascading into the mouth and, therefore, the thing to do when you must drink (and what a pity Nature compels us to do so ugly a thing), is to hold the glass in one hand and raise the other to hide the sight from the world. And behold, we have invented a brand-new embarrassment.

Words cannot express my indignation over this. I'm going to drink as I please, I am, and I think Katherine MacLean would agree with me. (IA)



"Damn! He's actually doing it. Do you hear that?"

A ray of sunlight and a distant voice filtered down from the open arch in the control room above. The distant voice talked and paused, talked and paused. The words were blurred, but the tone was recognizable.

"He's outside preaching to the natives."

The two engineers were overhauling the engines but paused to look up towards the voice.

"Maybe not," said Charlie, the junior engineer. "After all, he doesn't know their language."

"He'd preach anyway," said Henderson, senior engineer and navigator. He heaved with a wrench on a tight bolt, the wrench slipped, and Henderson released some words that made Charlie shudder.

On the trip, Charlie had often dreamed apprehensively that Henderson had strangled the passenger. And once he had dreamed that he himself had strangled the passenger and Henderson, too.

When awake the engineers carefully avoided irritating words or gestures, remained cordial towards each other and the passenger no matter what the temptation to snarl, and tried to keep themselves in a tolerant good humor.

It had not been easy.

Charlie said, "How do you account for the missionary society giving him a ship of his own? A guy like that, who just gets in your hair when he's trying to give you advice, a guy with a natural born talent for antagonizing people?"

"Easy," Henderson grunted, spinning the bolt. He was a stocky, square-built man with a brusque manner and a practised tolerance of other people's oddities. "The missionary society was trying to get rid of him. You can't get any farther away than they sent us!"

The distant voice filtered into the control room from the unseen sunlit landscape outside the ship. It sounded resonant and confident. "The poor jerk thinks it was an honor," Henderson added. He pulled out the bolt and dropped it on the padded floor with a faint thump.

"Anyhow," Charlie said, loosening bolt heads in a circle as the manual instructed, "he can't use the translator machine. It's not ready yet, not until we get the rest of their language. He won't talk to them if they can't understand."