"Cordwainer Smith - The Best of Cordwainer Smith" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Cordwainer)

Robot, the Rat and the Copt, whose visions are referred to in Norstrilia and elsewhere; nor what
ultimately becomes of the cat-people created in "The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal."
Then there is that unfulfilled sense of anticipationтАФwhere was Smith leading us? What comes after
the Rediscovery of Man and the liberation of the underpeople by C'mell? Linebarger gives hints of a
common destiny for men and underpeopleтАФsome religious fulfillment of history, perhaps. But they
remain hints.
The work of Cordwainer Smith will always retain its enigmas. But that is part of its appeal. In
reading his stories, we are caught up in experiences as real as life itself-and just as mysterious.
тАФJohn J. Pierce
Berkeley Heights, New Jersey January, 1975



SCANNERS LIVE IN VAIN
Here, humanity is still emerging from the Dark Age that is more fully described in the stories
"Queen of the Afternoon" and "Mark Elf" and which reveal the "Beasts" to be mutated
intelligent animals and the "manshonyaggers" to be old German killing machinesтАФtaken from
Menschenj tiger, or "hunter of men." At the time Smith wrote the story in 1945, there was an
abandoned shop in his neighborhood called The Little CranchтАФwhat "cranch" meant, he had no
ideaтАФbut he used the word anyway. The "ancient lady" ancestress of Vomact was one of the
VomAcht sisters mentioned in Dark Age storiesтАФwhich one, we don't know.

Mantel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room
by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci's
face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg was broken. It was not.
Scanner to the core, he had to scan himself. The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included
his legs, abdomen, chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face and back with the mirror. Only then did
Martel go back to being angry. He talked with his voice, even though he knew that his wife hated its
blare and preferred to have him write.
"I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch. It's my worry, isn't it?" When Luci answered, he saw
only a part of her words as he read her lips: "Darling ... you're my husband ... right to love you ...
dangerous ... do it ... dangerous ... wait ... "
He faced her, but put sound in his voice, letting the blare hurt her again: "I tell you, I'm going to
cranch."
Catching her expression, he became rueful and a little tender: "Can't you understand what it means
to me? To get out of this horrible prison in my own head? To be a man againтАФhearing your voice,
smelling smoke? To feel againтАФto feel my feet on the ground, to feel the air move against my face? Don't
you know what it means?"
Her wide-eyed worrisome concern thrust him back into pure annoyance. He read only a few words
as her lips moved: " ... love you ... your own good ... don't you think I want you to be human? ... your
own good ... too much ... he said ... they said ... "
When he roared at her, he realized that his voice must be particularly bad. He knew that the sound
hurt her no less than did the words: "Do you think I wanted you to marry a scanner? Didn't I tell you
we're almost as low as the habermans? We're dead, I tell you. We've got to be dead to do our work.
How can anybody go to the up-and-out? Can you dream what raw space is? I warned you. But you
married me. All right, you married a man. Please, darling, let me be a man. Let me hear your voice, let
me feel the warmth of being alive, of being human. Let me!"
He saw by her look of stricken assent that he had won the argument. He did not use his voice again.
Instead, he pulled his tablet up from where it hung against his chest. He wrote on it, using the pointed
fingernail of his right forefingerтАФthe talking nail of a scannerтАФin quick cleancut script: Pls, drlng, whrs