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

"A man," said Flavius, "who is re-living the life of Akhnaton."
"Who's that?" said the Lord Sto Odin, who knew history, but wanted to see how much his robots knew.
"A king, tall, long-faced, thick lipped, who ruled the human world of Egypt long, long before atomic power. Akhnaton invented the best of the early gods. This man is re-enacting Akhnaton's life step by step. He has already made a religion out of the sun. He mocks at happiness. People listen to him. They joke about the Instrumentality."
Livius added, 'We saw the girl who loves him. She herself was young, but beautiful. And I think she has powers which will make the Instrumentality promote her or destroy her some day in the future."
"They both made music," said Flavius, "with that piece of the congohelium. And this man or god-this new kind of Akhnaton, whatever you may want to call him, my Lord-he was dancing a strange kind of dance. It was like a corpse being tied with rope and dancing like a marionette. The effect on the people around him was as good as the best hypnotism you ever saw. I'm a robot now, but it bothered even me."
"Did the dance have a name?" said Sto Odin.
"I don't know the name," said Flavius, "but I memorized the song, since I have total recall. Do you wish to hear it?"
"Certainly," said the Lord Sto Odin.
Flavius stood on one leg, threw his arms out at weird, improbable angles and began to sing in a high, insulting tenor voice which was both fascinating and repugnant:
Jump, dear people, and I'll howl for you. Jump and howl and I'll weep for you. I weep because I'm a weeping man. I'm a weeping man because I weep. I weep because the day is done,
Sun is gone,
Home is lost,
Time killed dad.
I killed time.
World is round.
Day is run,
Clouds are shot,
Stars are out,
Mountain's fire, Rain is hot, Hot is blue. I am done. So are you.
Jump, dear people, for the howling man. Leap, dear people, for the weeping man. I'm a weeping man because I weep for you!
"Enough," said the Lord Sto Odin.
Flavius saluted. His face went back to amiable stolidity. Just before he took the front ends of the shaft he glanced back and brought forth one last comment:
"The verse is skeltonic."
"Tell me nothing more of your history. Take me there." The robots obeyed. Soon the chair was jogging comfortably down the ramps of the ancient left-over city which sprawled beneath Earth-port, that miraculous tower which seemed to touch the stratocumulus clouds in the blue, clear nothingness above mankind. Sto Odin went to sleep in his strange vehicle and did not notice that the human passers-by often stared at him.
The Lord Sto Odin woke fitfully in strange places as the legionaries carried him further and further into the depths below the city, where sweet pressures and warm, sick smells made the air itself feel dirty to his nose.
"Stop!" whispered the Lord Sto Odin, and the robots stopped. "Whom am I?" he said to them.
"You have announced your will to die, my Lord," said Flavius, "seventy-seven days from now, but so far you name is still the Lord Sto Odin."
"I am alive?" the lord asked. "Yes," said both the robots. "You are dead?"
"We are not dead. We are machines, printed with the minds of men who once lived. Do you wish to turn back, my Lord?"
"No. No. Now I remember. You are the robots. Livius, the psychia-
trist and general. Flavius, the secret historian. You have the minds of men, and are not men?"
"That is right, my Lord," said Flavius. "Then how can I be alive-I, Sto Odin?"
"You should feel it yourself, sir," said Livius, "though the mind of the old is sometimes very strange."
"How can I be alive?" asked Sto Odin, staring around the city. "How can I be alive when the people who knew me are dead? They have whipped through the corridors like wraiths of smoke, like traces of cloud; they were here, and they loved me, and they knew me, and now they are dead. Take my wife, Eileen. She was a pretty thing, a brown-eyed child who came out of her learning chamber all perfect and all young. Time touched her and she danced to the cadence of time. Her body grew full, grew old. We repaired it. But at last she cramped in death and she went to that place to which I am going. If you are dead, you ought to be able to tell me what death is like, where the bodies and minds and voices and music of men and women whip past these enormous corridors, these hardy pavements, and are then gone. How can passing ghosts like me and my kind, each with just a few dozen or a few hundred years to go before the great blind winds of time whip us away-how can phantoms like me have built this solid city, these wonderful engines, these brilliant lights which never go dim? How did we do it, when we pass so swiftly, each of us, all of us? Do you know?" The robots did not answer. Pity had not been programmed into their systems. The Lord Sto Odin harangued them nonetheless:
"You are taking me to a wild place, a free place, an evil place, perhaps. They are dying there too, as all men die, as I shall die, so soon, so brightly and simply. I should have died a long time ago. I was the people who knew me, I was the brothers and comrades who trusted me, I was the women who comforted me, I was the children whom I loved so bitterly and so sweetly many ages ago. Now they are gone. Time touched them, and they were not. I can see everyone that I ever knew racing through these corridors, see them young as toddlers, see them proud and wise and full with business and maturity, see them old and contorted as time reached out for them and they passed hastily away. Why did they do it? How can I live on? When I am dead, will I know that I once lived? I know that some of my friends have cheated and lie in the icy sleep, hoping for something which they do not know. I've had life, and I know it. What is life? A bit of play, a bit of learning, some
words well-chosen, some love, a trace of pain, more work, memories, and then dirt rushing up to meet sunlight. That's all we've made of it -we, who have conquered the stars! Where are my friends? Where is my me that I once was so sure of, when the people who knew me were time-swept like storm-driven rags toward darkness and oblivion? You tell me. You ought to know! You are machines and you were given the minds of men. You ought to know what we amount to, from the outside in."
"We were built," said Livius, "by men and we have whatever men put into us, nothing more. How can we answer talk like yours? It is rejected by our minds, good though our minds may be. We have no grief, no fear, no fury. We know the names of these feelings but not the feelings themselves. We hear your words but we do not know what you are talking about Are you trying to tell us what life feels like? If so, we already know. Not much. Nothing special. Birds have life too, and so do fishes. It is you people who can talk and who can knot life into spasms and puzzles. You muss things up. Screaming never made the truth truthful, at least, not to us-."
'Take me down," said Sto Odin. "Take me down to the Gebiet, where no well-mannered man has gone in many years. I am going to judge that place before I die."
They lifted the sedan-chair and resumed their gentle dog-trot down the immense ramps down toward the warm steaming secrets of the Earth itself. The human pedestrians became more scarce, but under-men-most often of gorilla or ape origin-passed them, toiling their way upward while dragging shrouded treasures which they had filched from the uncatalogued storehouses of Man's most ancient past. At other times there was a wild whirr of metal wheels on stone roadway; the under-men, having offloaded their treasures at some intermediate point high above, sat on their wagons and rolled back downhill, like grotesque enlargements of the ancient human children who were once reported to have played with wagons in this way.
A command, scarcely a whisper, stopped the two legionaries again. Flavius turned. Sto Odin was indeed calling both of them. They stepped out of the shafts and came around to him, one on each side.
"I may be dying right now," he whispered, "and that would be most inconvenient at this time. Get out my manikin meee!"
"My Lord," said Flavius, "it is strictly forbidden for us robots to touch any human manikin, and if we do touch one, we are commanded to
destroy ourselves immediately thereafter! Do you wish us to try, nevertheless? If so, which one of us? You have the command, my LoftL"
4
He waited so long that even the robots began to wonder if he died amid the thick wet air and the nearby stench of steam and oil.
The Lord Sto Odin finally roused himself and said:
"I need no help. Just put the bag with my manikin meee on my lap."
"This one?" asked Flavius, lifting a small brown suitcase and handling it with a very gingerly touch indeed.
The Lord Sto Odin gave a barely perceptible nod and whispered, "Open it carefully for me. But do not touch the manikin, if those are your orders."
Flavius twisted at the catch of the bag. It was hard to manage. Robots did not feel fear, but they were intellectually attuned to the avoidance of danger; Flavius found his mind racing with wild choices as he tried to get the bag open. Sto Odin tried to help him, but the ancient hand, palsied and weak, could not even reach the top of the case. Flavius labored on, thinking that the Gebiet and Bezirk had their dangers, but that this meddling with manikins was the riskiest thing which he had ever encountered while in robot form, though in his human life he had handled many of them, including his own. They were "manikin, electro-encephalographic and endocrine" in model form, and they showed in miniaturized replica the entire diagnostic position of the patient for whom they were fashioned.