"Kevin O'Donnel Jr. - The Journeys of McGill Feighan 01 - Caverns" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Jr Kevin)

tangible; there it occupied a volume defined by the culture's age, population,
and geographic distribution. Expand as it would, though, no people could
ever completely fill its sphereтАФbecause its persons were unique, almost
random, while its growth pattern was determined by its mean ability to
perceive, to describe, and to deal with reality without destroying it: senses,
language, technology and mores, in other words. But the space not filled by
the society was not, could not be, empty. There lived the anticultures, the
yins to the primary's yang .
The Organization was a very large anticulture. A parasite, if you will. It
could exist only because its hosts left room for it, and food, and members. It
could prosper only by drawing more food, room, and members, but that
was dangerous: if it milked too much, it could starve its host to death. Yet if
it took too little, it would disintegrate into a swarm of leaderless fleas. It was
Hommroummy's duty to strike the balance.
That was not an easy assignment. Earth reacted to parasites as an animal
would: that which perceptibly annoyed it was attacked, unless Terran
civilization itself sheltered it, as a dog's belly does a worm.
So part of his job was to minimize the pain The Organization caused
Earth, to make it invisible. He reined in his subordinates, forced them to
lead lives that casual observers would find unremarkable. His Number
Three, for example, administered an operation that satisfied 150,000,000
addicts dailyтАФ but the strongest drugs in Number Three's own cabinet
were caffeine and aspirin. Similar rules held for everyone, and ignoring
them meant death.
Another part of it was to evolve a symbiotic interface between The
Organization and EarthтАФto raise a two-faced layer of cells, as it were, white
on one side and black on the other. The cells on the skin of a culture, those
whose actions help determine the shape of a society, are those responsible
for defending that civilization. Policemen, judges, legislators, executives,
ministers, media personnelтАФonce recruited by Hommroummy and
subsumed into The Organization, they couldn't jeopardize it without
endangering themselves. He gave them roles in the night that they could do
well because of what they did in the light.
But his main task was to make his branch office profitable. As The
Organization operated on 693 worlds, each having from one to one hundred
eighty-three legal systems, it was complex to the point of self-contradiction.
On Auxytrgn III, for example, the natives would sell their grandmothers for
contraband Terran beer. Literally. But dealing in those grandmothers was a
losing proposition because there was no market for them, not even on
Markurilla V, where private zookeepers would pay dearly for smuggled
grandmothers from anywhere but Auxytrgn IIIтАж cold and analytical,
Hommroummy knew this, for he understood profitable crime as a scorpion
knows the desert. He insulated himself with layers of fall-takers, yet planned
their moves like a drillmaster. Inhumanly sensitive to new opportunities, he
always wrote his bottom lines in black.
Now, looking into a glass-walled cube filled with 1000 cubic meters of
blue and gold gases, he wondered again why they wouldn't mix. He also
wondered if the container held Gryll, the alien which claimed to live inside
it. He was talking to a transceiver mounted on its side, but that meant
nothing. Organization toppos liked to play games. How would Gryll react if,