"Mount Charity by Edgar Pangborn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Award Stories 7)

I've felt worse .... )Vow it will heal. Your kindness is spring in
winter. Peregrine, go on with what you were telling him. Mm, those pygmies! I did get rather cross.

yes, you expressed your thoughts with some freedom. Well, Doctor, it was after we had witnessed the decay and near-death of learning in what you call the early Middle Ages that Hanuman began work on his record. That dreary collapse, from the fourth century on, that blackout of Western culture for something like a thousand years, made clear to us how easy it is for a society as imperfectly developed, as precariously balanced in nature as yours, to let its light go out. Maybe there is a recurrent mental fatigue in human cultures, induced by the short periods of enterprise. You push on with your grand vigor for a while, and then slump; abdication of intelligence as the governing force, and of course if that's complete enough it drags down virtually everything in a long ruin.

It seemed to us that in our limited way we might function as preservers of history. We thought that a detailed, scrupulously truthful record of all we knew, all we had observed from our detachment, might someday be a thing of value to you, even a source of guidance. Surely it's true, if a culture that forgets history is condemned to repeat it, the complement of the proposition ought to be true.

Qualify it, Peregrine-I imagine the Doctor will agree. No culture as yet has actually forgotten history because no culture has really possessed more than fragments of it. With that allowed for I guess the old saying may be true enough. I suppose a knowledge of history adequate for a trustworthy guide has never been possessed by more than a handful of scholars. Some have done their best to transmit it, but who reads? Men at large simply don't know their own past. Snippets hastily gulped in school-by those who have schools; simple and popular generalizations, mostly false and harmful.

I am forced to agree, Lykos.

Lykos is more a pessimist than I, maybe for the very reason that his affection for humanity is deeper.

Maybe. Never think I doubt the value of our record. I only wonder whether these volatile short-lived beings will ever find the wit to use it.

He and I speak alike, Doctor; think very much alike. But Lykos thinks in privacy, like all sentient beings. You might have to know us a hundred, years or so to discover in how many ways we are persons. Ophis was our humorist. Had a sweet small thorn in her speech that could make even Hanuman smile. He's all meditative thought, logic, philosophy-and compassion. His hands have changed visibly with that endless writing; both somewhat enlarged-he writes with either hand and deep black grooves in thumbs and middle fingers.

We began our record in your ninth century A.D. We had hoped to give it to you in a time when you had begun to show, as a society of intelligent beings, more signs of intelligent behavior. Under present conditions we can hardly wait any longer for that. We may have waited too long already, counted too much on the power of your often brilliant individuals and minorities. The record is not finished. Hanuman has been able to bring it only a short way into your twentieth century .... Lykos, my throat is tired.

I'll go on, in my grumbling way. Are you sure, Doctor, that we're safe from interruption? I'm not prepared to meet anyone but you.

The kids all took o-f to a movie in the village and won't be back till after dark-you'll hear the two cars. No one else comes to see me here, or if anyone does, that door has a loose latch 1 didn't shut You could push it open and then get into a closet or under my bed.

I'm housebroken, too. (Peregrine, I don't feel that shrinking,
when he strokes my head.) -

(Good. You were always a sentimental pup.)

That was your private language, wasn't it?

Yes, I was telling old Feather puff I like your touch. We conceived the idea of that record suddenly, but it took years to find a place to work on it and keep it safe. At length we chose a cave in the foothills of the Dinaric Alps. The entrance was larger than we liked; we did what we could with brush barricades. It seemed
remote enough. Swarming Italy lay more than a hundred miles away across the Adriatic. Around our cave, gaunt wilderness, here and there goat trails, six miles away a mountain track that was used, but very little, by carts and horsemen. From our cliff we looked down on the distant roofs of a peasant village, but we were sheltered from it not only by our height, but by ugly gorges, dense woods, tumbled rocks. Bears, the beasts in my shape, and that was also a country thick with belief in vampires, witches, all manner of spooks. No man ventured far alone, even by day, and two or more men together are sure to make a noise. Our secret trail was easy for Hanuman. I had enough trouble with parts of the climb so that I was sure no other wolf would try it, and men would be deterred unless they had some compelling motive. Ophis knew many little approaches but preferred to ride my neck-that trifling weight ....

Come back to the story, Lykos.

Yes. That cave served us five hundred years. Hanuman developed the full plan of his work. No feeling of immediate urgency was pushing us in those centuries, only the larger sense of it, awareness of the insecurity of all things living. We could not be certain the civilization of Europe would recover any force and virtue, but by that time we had our own perspective. We were in touch with the rest of the world, with men's continual failures, recoveries, groping advances.

Peregrine of course was Hanuman's best reporter, traveling wherever wings can go. We knew of the Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, the primitive peoples, the tribal groups and young civilizations in this northern continent. China, the Mongols, India, the shut-away people of Australia, the human experience in jungle, veldt, seacoast of Africa. In our record is more than you can ever learn elsewhere of the wonderful voyages that carried men to the islands of the Pacific. There's no settled place in the world from the Arctic to Patagonia where Peregrine has not listened in the dark to the talk of men. I myself made many journeys, with Ophis and then alone.

Often Hanuman left his work to come with me, because he was

our best thief. In those centuries the monasteries were almost our only source of parchment, vellum, other writing fabrics. Hanuman made ink from gum and soot, and slotted bamboo pens long before Europe had anything better than the quill; papers we had to steal. Robbing the poor monks' scriptoria was often easier than getting what we needed from cellars or other storage places, and it was always more fun. In the monastic records of eastern Europe from the ninth into the fourteenth century, there may well be here and there an embarrassed mention of the theft of writing materials by the Devil; if so, Devil is to be taken in the Pickwickian sense. Then we'd have the stiff task of conveying our loot by secret ways to the cave. Hanuman was writing at that time in the compact, rather inflexible Latin of the Augustan age, and he wrote with almost no margins in a script hardly thicker than the legs of a millipede; nevertheless our greed for the precious material was insatiable For Hanuman-always the master intelligence of our company, before whom we others are only loving fools-would not leave out one fact that might be of importance to men, and he was bound to have it all in such perfect order that the record could be used by any human scholar with ability to read and courage to endure the truth.

Our plunder had to travel mostly on my back. I had narrow escapes. Sometimes I had sore feet. But it was worth any effort. And that part of it, that product of five hundred years of toil, was all destroyed.

The year was 1348, the month of May. Ophis had died two hundred years before. I was traveling southward through France, where the Hundred Years' War had already built up the true monument to princely quarrels-ruin and desolation. And as I started down the Rhone valley I began to overhear men talk of that other plague, the Black Death, for it was then, as we knew, in full fury at Avignon. My mind was drenched with the presence of death, when Peregrine found me with the news of our own disaster.

A young man out hunting very bravely alone had taken a fall
into a spot from which he could see our cave entrance. Intent at his work, Hanuman had not been aware of him until he tumbled and cursed in pain. Then from behind the brush barricade Hanuman watched him, not too badly hurt, limping and scrambling nearer. He had saved his bow and hunting knife in the fall, but lost his arrows; he was bleeding, lamed, scared, and wanted shelter because the sky was churning with the threat of storm. Hanuman stayed motionless in the barricade until the young man pushed aside part of it and entered the cave. Then he moved to better concealment and called in a human voice: "Go away! Go away!" He had a desperate hope that if the boy could be frightened off there might be a chance to get the record out of danger before others were brought to look at the place.