"Cordwainer Smith - The Lady Who Sailed The Soul" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Cordwainer)

THE LADY WHO SAILED THE SOUL
I
THE STORY RANЧhow did the story run? Everyone knew the reference to Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more, but no one knew exactly how it happened. Their names were welded to the glittering timeless jewelry of romance. Sometimes they were compared to Heloise and . Abelard, whose story had been found among books in a long-buried library. Other ages were to compare their life with the weird, ugly-lovely story of the Go-Captain Taliano and the Lady Dolores Oh.
Out of it all, two things stood forthЧtheir love and the image of the great sails, tissue-metal wings with which the bodies of people finally fluttered out among the stars.
Mention him, and others knew her. Mention her, and they knew him. He was the first of the inbound sailors, and she was the lady who sailed The Soul,
It was lucky that people lost their pictures. The romantic hero was a very young-looking man, prematurely old and still quite sick when the romance came. And Helen America, she was a freak, but a nice one: a grim, solemn, sad, little brunette who had been born amid the laughter of humanity. She was not the tall, confident heroine of the actresses who later played her.
She was, however, a wonderful sailor. That much was true. And with her body and mind she loved Mr. Grey-no-more, showing a devotion which the ages can neither surpass nor forget. History may scrape off the patina of their names and appearances, but even history
can do no more than brighten the love of Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more. Both of them, one must remember, were sailors.
2
The child was playing with a spieltier. She got tired of letting it he a chicken, so she reversed it into the fur-hearing position. When she extended the ears to the optimum development, the little animal looked odd indeed. A light hreeze hlew the animal-toy on its side, hut the spieltier good-naturedly righted itself and munched contentedly on the carpet.
The little girl suddenly clapped her hands and hroke forth with the question,
"Mamma, what's a sailor?"
"There used to he sailors, darling, a, long time ago. They were hrave men who took the ships out to the stars, the very first ships that took people away from our sun. And they had hig sails. I don't know how it worked, hut somehow, the light pushed them, and it took them a quarter of a life to make a single one-way trip. People only lived a hundred and sixty years at that time, darling, and it was forty years each way, hut we don't need sailors any more."
"Of course not," said the child, "we can go right away. You've taken me to Mars and you've taken me to New Earth as well, haven't you, Mamma? And we can go anywhere else soon, hut that only takes one afternoon."
"That's planoforming, honey. But it was a long time hefore the people knew how to planoform. And they could not travel the way we could, so they made great hig sails. They made sails so hig that they could not huild them on Earth. They had to hang them out, halfway hetween Earth and Mars. And you know, a funny thing happened . . . Did you ever hear about the time the world froze?"
"No, Mamma, what was that?"
'Well, a long time ago, one of these sails drifted and people tried to save it because it took a lot of work to huild it. But the sail was so large that it got hetween the Earth and the sun. And there was no more sunshine, just night all the time. And it got very cold on Earth. All the atomic power plants were husy, and all the air hegan to smell funny.
And the people were worried and in a few days they pulled the sail hack out of the way. And the sunshine came again."
"Mamma, were there ever any girl sailors?"
A curious expression crossed over the mother's face. "There was one. You'll hear about her later on when you are older. Her name was Helen America and she sailed The Soul out to the stars. She was the only woman that ever did it. And that is a wonderful story."
The mother dahhed at her eyes with a handkerchief.
The child said: "Mamma, tell me now. What's the story all ahout?"
At this point the mother hecame very firm and she said: "Honey, there are some things that you are not old enough, to hear yet. But when you are a hig girl, I'll tell you all ahout them."
The mother was an honest woman. She reflected a moment, and then she added, ". . . unless you read ahout it yourself first."
3
Helen America was to make her place in the history of mankind, but she started badly. The name itself was a misfortune.
No one ever knew who her father was. The officials agreed to keep the matter quiet.
Her mother was not in doubt. Her mother was the celebrated she-man Mona Muggeridge, a woman who had campaigned a hundred times for the lost cause of complete identity of the two genders. She had been a feminist beyond all limits, and when Mona Muggeridge, the one and only Miss Muggeridge, announced to the press that she was going to have a baby, that was first-class news.
Mona Muggeridge went further. She announced her firm conviction that fathers should not be identified. She proclaimed that no woman should have consecutive children with the same man, that women should be advised to pick different fathers for their children, so as to diversify and beautify the race. She capped it all by announcing that she, Miss Muggeridge, had selected the perfect father and would inevitably produce the only perfect child.
Miss Muggeridge, a bony, pompous blonde, stated that she would avoid the nonsense of marriage and family names, and that therefore the child, if a boy, would be called John America, and if a girl, Helen America.
Thus it happened that little Helen America was born with the correspondents in the press services waiting outside the delivery room. News-screens flashed the picture of a pretty three-kilogram baby. "It's a girl." "The perfect child." "Who's the dad?"
That was just the beginning. Mona Muggeridge was belligerent. She insisted, even after the baby had been photographed for the thousandth time, that this was the finest child ever born. She pointed to the child's perfections. She demonstrated all the foolish fondness of a doting mother, but felt that she, the great crusader, had discovered this fondness for the first time.
To say that this background was difficult for the child would be an understatement.
Helen America was a wonderful example of raw human material triumphing over its tormentors. By the time she was four years old, she spoke six languages, and was beginning to decipher some of the old Martian texts. At the age of five she was sent to school. Her fellow schoolchildren immediately developed a rhyme:
Helen, Helen Fat and dumb Doesn't know where Her daddy's from!
Helen took all this and perhaps it was an accident of genetics that she grew to become a compact little personЧa deadly serious little brunette. Challenged by lessons, haunted by publicity, she became careful and reserved about friendships and desperately lonely in an inner world.
When Helen America was sixteen her mother came to a bad end. Mona Muggeridge eloped with a man she announced to be the perfect husband for the perfect marriage hitherto overlooked by mankind. The perfect husband was a skilled machine polisher. He already had a wife and four children. He drank beer and his interest in Miss Muggeridge seems to have been a mixture of good-natured comradeship and a sensible awareness of her motherly bankroll. The planetary yacht on which they eloped broke the regulations with an off-schedule flight. The bridegroom's wife and children had alerted the police. The result was a collision with a robotic barge which left both bodies identifiable.
At sixteen Helen was already famous, and at seventeen already forgotten, and very much alone.
4
This was the age of sailors. The thousands of photo-reconnaissance and measuring missiles had begun to come back with their harvest from the stars. Planet after planet swam into the ken of mankind. The new worlds became known as the interstellar search missiles brought back photographs, samples of atmosphere, measurements of gravity, cloud coverage, chemical make-up and the like. Of the very numerous missiles which returned from their two- or three-hundred-year voyages, three brought back reports of New Earth, an earth so much like Terra itself that it could be settled.
The first sailors had gone out almost a hundred years before. They had started with small sails not over two thousand miles square. Gradually the size of the sails increased. The technique of adiabatic packing and the carrying of passengers in individual pods reduced the damage done to the human cargo. It was great news when a sailor returned to Earth, a man born and reared under the light of another star. He was a man who had spent a month of agony and pain, bringing a few sleep-frozen settlers, guiding the immense light-pushed sailing craft which had managed the trip through the great interstellar deeps in an objective time-period of forty years.
Mankind got to know the look of a sailor. There was a plantigrade walk to the way he put his body on the ground. There was a sharp, stiff, mechanical swing to his neck. The man was neither young nor old. He had been awake and conscious for forty years, thanks to the drug which made possible a kind of limited awareness. By the time the psychologists interrogated him, first for the proper authorities of the Instrumentality and later for the news releases, it was plain enough that he thought the forty years were about a month. He never volunteered to sail back, because he had actually aged forty years. He was a young man, a young man in his hopes and wishes, but a man who had burnt up a quarter of a human lifetime in a single agonizing experience.
At this time Helen America went to Cambridge. Lady Joan's College was the finest woman's college in the Atlantic world. Cambridge had reconstructed its protohistoric traditions and the neo-British had recap-
tured that fine edge of engineering which reconnected their traditions with the earliest antiquity.
Naturally enough the language was cosmopolite Earth and not archaic English, but the students were proud to live at a reconstructed university very much like the archaeological evidence showed it to have been before the period of darkness and troubles came upon the Earth. Helen shone a little in this renaissance.
The news-release services watched Helen in the cruelest possible fashion. They revived her name and the story of her mother. Then they forgot her again. She had put in for six professions, and her last choice was "sailor." It happened that she was the first woman to make the applicationЧfirst because she was the only woman young enough to qualify who had also passed the scientific requirements.
Her picture was beside his on the screens before they ever met each other.
Actually, she was not anything like that at all. She had suffered so much in her childhood from Helen, Helen, fat and dumb, that she was competitive only on a coldly professional basis. She hated and loved and missed the tremendous mother whom she had lost, and she resolved so fiercely not to be like her mother that she became an embodied antithesis of Mona.
The mother had been horsy, blonde, bigЧthe kind of woman who is a feminist because she is not very feminine. Helen never thought about her own femininity. She just worried about herself. Her face would have been round if it had been plump, but she was not plump. Black-haired, dark-eyed, broad-bodied but thin, she was a genetic demonstration of her unknown father. Her teachers often feared her. She was a pale, quiet girl, and she always knew her subject.
Her fellow students had joked about her for a few weeks and then most of them had banded together against the indecency of the press. When a news-frame came out with something ridiculous about the long-dead Mona, the whisper went through Lady Joan's: