"Cordwainer Smith - Under Old Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Cordwainer)

UNDER OLD EARTH
I need a temporary dog For a temporary jola On a temporary place Like Earihl
-Song from The Merchant of Menace
1
THERE WERE the Douglas-Ouyang planets, which circled their sun in a single cluster, riding around and around the same orbit unlike any other planets known. There were the gentlemen-suicides back on Earth, who gambled their lives-even more horribly, gambled sometimes for things worse than their lives-against different kinds of geophysics which real men had never experienced. There were girls who fell in love with such men, however stark and dreadful their personal fates might be. There was the Instrumentality, with its unceasing labor to keep man man. And there were the citizens who walked in the boulevards before the Rediscovery of Man. The citizens were happy. They had to be happy. If they were found sad, they were calmed and drugged and changed until they were happy again.
This story concerns three of them: the gambler who took the name Sun-boy, who dared to go down to the Gebiet, who confronted himself before he died; the girl Santuna, who was fulfilled in a thousand ways
before she died; and the Lord Sto Odin, a most ancient of days, who knew it all and never dreamed of preventing any of it.
Music runs through this story. The soft sweet music of the Earth Government and the Instrumentality, bland as honey and sickening in the end. The wild illegal pulsations of the Gebiet, where most men were forbidden to enter. Worst of all, the crazy fugues and improper melodies of the Bezirk, closed to men for fifty-seven centuries-opened by accident, found, trespassed in! And with it our story begins.
2
The Lady Ru had said, a few centuries before: "Scraps of knowledge have been'found. In the ultimate beginning of man, even before there were aircraft, the wise man Laodz declared, Water does nothing but it penetrates everything. Inaction finds the road.' Later an ancient lord said this: 'There is a music which underlies all things. We dance to the tunes all our lives, though our living ears never hear the music which guides us and moves us. Happiness can kill people as softly as shadows seen in dreams.' We must be people first and happy later, lest we live and die in vain."
The Lord Sto Odin was more direct. He declared the truth to a few private friends: "Our population is dropping on most worlds, including the Earth. People have children, but they don't want them very much. I myself have been a three-father to twelve children, a two-father to four, and a one-father, I suppose, to many others. I have had zeal for work and I have mistaken it for zeal in living. They are not the same.
"Most people want happiness. Good: we have given them happiness.
"Dreary useless centuries of happiness, in which all the unhappy were corrected or adjusted or killed. Unbearable desolate happiness without the sting of grief, the wine of rage, the hot fumes of fear. How many of us have ever tasted the acid, icy taste of old resentment? That's what people really lived for in the Ancient Days, when they pretended to be happy and were actually alive with grief, rage, fury, hate, malice and hope! Those people bred like mad. They populated the stars while they dreamed of killing each other, secretly or openly. Their plays concerned murder or betrayal or illegal love. Now we have no murder. We cannot imagine any land of love which is illegal. Can you imagine the Murkins with their highway net? Who can fly anywhere today
without seeing that net of enormous highways? Those roads are ruined, but they're still here. You can see the abominable things quite clearly from the moon. Don't think about the roads. Think of the millions of vehicles that ran on those roads, the people filled with greed and rage and hate, rushing past each other with their engines on fire. They say that fifty thousand a year were killed on the roads alone. We would call that a war. What people they must have been, to rush day and night and to build things which would help other people to rush even more! They were different from us. They must have been wild, dirty, free. Lusting for life, perhaps, in a way that we do not. We can easily go a thousand times faster than they ever went, but who, nowadays, bothers to go? Why go? It's the same there as here, except for a few fighters or technicians." He smiled at his friends and added, ". . . and lords of the Instrumentality, like ourselves. We go for the reasons of the Instrumentality. Not ordinary people reasons. Ordinary people don't have much reason to do anything. They work at the jobs which we think up for them, to keep them happy while the robots and the un-derpeople do the real work They walk. They make love. But they are never unhappy.
"They can't be!"
The Lady Mmona disagreed, "Life can't be as bad as you say. We don't just think they are happy. We know they are happy. We look right into their brains with telepathy. We monitor their emotional patterns with robots and scanners. It's not as though we didn't have samples. People are always turning unhappy. We're correcting them all the time. And now and then there are bad accidents, which even we cannot correct. When people are very unhappy, they scream and weep. Sometimes they even stop talking and just die, despite everything we can do for them. You can't say that isn't real!"
"But I do," said the Lord Sto Odin.
"You do what?" cried Mmona.
"I do say this happiness is not real," he insisted.
"How can you," she shouted at him, "in the face of the evidence? Our evidence, which we of the Instrumentality decided on a long time ago. We collect it ourselves. Can we, the Instrumentality, be wrong?"
"Yes," said the Lord Sto Odin.
This time it was the entire circle who went silent.
Sto Odin pleaded with them. "Look at my evidence. People don't care whether they are one-fathers or one-mothers or not. They don't know
which children are theirs, anyhow. Nobody dares to commit suicide. We keep them too happy. But do we spend any time keeping the talking animals, the underpeople, as happy as men? And do underpeople commit suicide?"
"Certainly," said Mmona. "They are preconditioned to commit suicide if they are hurt too badly for easy repair or if they fail in their appointed work."
"I don't mean that. Do they ever commit suicide for their reasons, not ours?"
"No," said the Lord Nuru-or, a wise young lord of the Instrumentality. "They are too desperately busy doing their jobs and staying alive."
"How long does an underperson live?" said Sto Odin, with deceptive mildness.
'Who knows?" said Nuru-or. "Half a year, a hundred years, maybe several hundred years."
"What happens if he does not work?" said the Lord Sto Odin, with a friendly-crafty smile.
"We kill him," said Mmona, "or our robot-police do."
"And does the animal know it?"
"Know he will be killed if he does not work?" said Mmona. "Of course. We tell all of them the same thing. Work or die. What's that got to do with people?"
The Lord Nuru-or had fallen silent and a wise, sad smile had begun to show on his face. He had begun to suspect the shrewd, dreadful conclusion toward which the Lord Sto Odin was driving.
But Mmona did not see it and she pressed the point. "My Lord," said she, "you are insisting that people are happy. You admit they do not like to be unhappy. You seem to want to bring up a problem which has no solution. Why complain of happiness? Isn't it the best which the Instrumentality can do for mankind? That's our mission. Are you saying that we are failing in it?"
"Yes. We are failing." The Lord Sto Odin looked blindly at the room as though alone.
He was the oldest and wisest, so they waited for him to talk.
He breathed lightly and smiled at them again. "You know when I am going to die?"
"Of course," said Mmona, thinking for half a second. "Seventy-seven days from now. But you posted the time yourself. And it is not our
custom, my Lord, as you well know, to bring intimate things into meetings of the Instrumentality."
"Sorry," said Sto Odin, "but I'm not violating a law. I'm making a point. We are sworn to uphold the dignity of man. Yet we are killing mankind with a bland hopeless happiness which has prohibited news, which has suppressed religion, which has made all history an official secret. I say that the evidence is that we are failing and that mankind, whom we've sworn to cherish, is failing too. Failing in vitality, strength, numbers, energy. I have a little while to live. I am going to try to find out."
The Lord Nuru-or asked with sorrowful wisdom, as though he guessed the answer: "And where will you go to find out?"
"I shall go," said the Lord Sto Odin, "down into the Gebiet."
"The Gebiet-oh, no!" cried several. And one voice added, "You're immune."
"I shall waive immunity and I shall go," said the Lord Sto Odin. "Who can do anything to a man who is already almost a thousand years old and who has chosen only seventy-seven more days to live?"
"But you can't!" said Mmona. "Some criminal might capture you and duplicate you, and then we would all of us be in peril."
"When did you last hear of a criminal among mankind?" said Sto Odin.
"There are plenty of them, here and there in the off-worlds."
"But on Old Earth itself?" asked Sto Odin.
She stammered. "I don't know. There must have been a criminal once." She looked around the room. "Don't any of the rest of you know?"