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

Sto Odin whispered to them. 'There's no helping it. Turn me up. If I die, take my body back and tell the people that I misjudged my time."
Just as he spoke, the case sprang open. Inside it there lay a little naked human man, a direct copy of Sto Odin himself.
"We have it, my Lord," cried Livius, from the other side. "Let me guide your hand to it, so that you can see what to do."
Though it was forbidden for robots to touch manikins meee, it was legal for them to touch a human person with the person's consent. Liv-ius's strong cupro-plastic fingers, with a reserve of many tons of gripping power in their human-like design, pulled the hands of the Lord Sto Odin forward until they rested on the manikin meee. Flavius, quick,
smooth, agile, held the lord's head upright on his weary old neck, so that the ancient lord could see what the hands were doing.
"Is any part dead?" said the old lord to the manikin, his voice clearer for the moment
The manikin shimmered and two spots of solid black showed along the outside upper right thigh and the right buttock.
"Organic reserve?" said the lord to his own manikin meee, and again the machine responded to his command. The whole miniature body shimmed to a violent purple and then subsided to an even pink.
"I still have some all-around strength left in this body, prosthetics and all," said Sto Odin to the two robots. "Set me up, I tell you! Set me up."
"Ace you sure, my Lord," said Livius, "that we should do a thing like that here where the three of us are alone in a deep tunnel? In less than half an hour we could take you to a real hospital, where actual doctors could examine you."
"I said," repeated the Lord Sto Odin, "set me up. I'll watch the manikin while you do it."
"Your control is in the usual place, my Lord?" asked Livius.
"How much of a turn?" asked Flavius.
"Nape of my neck, of course. The skin over it is artificial and self-sealing. One twelfth of a turn will be enough. Do you have a knife with you?"
Flavius nodded. He took a small sharp knife from his belt, probed gently around the old lord's neck and then brought the knife down with a quick, sure turn.
"That did it!" said Sto Odin, in a voice so hearty that both of them stepped back a little. Flavius put the knife back in his belt. Sto Odin, who had almost been comatose a moment before, now held the manikin meee in his unaided hands. "See, gentlemen!" he cried. "You may be robots, but you can still see the truth and report it."
They both looked at the manikin meee, which Sto Odin now held in front of himself, his thumb and fingertip in the armpits of the medical doll.
"Watch what it reads," he said to them with a clear, ringing voice.
"Prosthetics!" he shouted at the manikin.
The tiny body changed from its pink color to a mixture. Both legs turned the color of a deep bruised blue. The legs, the left arm, one eye, one ear and the skullcap stayed blue, showing the prostheses in place.
"Felt pain!" shouted Sto Odin at the manikin. The little doll returned to its light pink color. All the details were there, even to genitals, toe-nails and eyelashes. There was no trace of the black color of pain in any part of the little body.
"Potential pain!" shouted Sto Odin. The doll shimmered. Most of it settled to the color of dark walnut wood, with some areas of intense brown showing more clearly than the rest.
"Potential breakdown-one day!" shouted Sto Odin. The little body went back to its normal color of pink. Small lightnings showed at the base of the brain, but nowhere else.
"I'm all right," said Sto Odin. "I can continue as I have done for the last several hundred years. Leave me set up on this high life-output. I can stand it for a few hours, and if I cannot, there's little lost." He put the manikin back in its bag, hung the bag on the doorhandle of the sedan-chair and commanded the legionaries, "Proceed!"
The legionaries stared at him as if they could not see him.
He followed the lines of glance and saw that they were gazing rigidly at his manikin meee. It had turned black.
"Are you dead?" asked Livius, speaking as hoarsely as a robot could.
"Not dead at all!" cried Sto Odin. "I have been death in fractions of a moment, but for the time I am still life. That was just the pain-sum of my living body which showed on the manikin meee. The fire of life still burns within me. Watch as I put the manikin away . . ." The doll flared into a swirl of pastel orange as the Lord Sto Odin pulled the cover down.
They looked away as though they had seen an evil or an explosion.
"Down men, down," he cried, calling them wrong names as they stepped back between their carrying shafts to take him deeper under the vitals of the earth.
5
He dreamed brown dreams while they trotted down endless ramps. He woke a little to see the yellow walls passing. He looked at his dry old hand and it seemed to him that in this atmosphere, he had himself become more reptilian than human.
"I am caught by the dry, drab enturtlement of old, old age," he murmured, but the voice was weak and the robots did not hear him. They
were running downward on a long meaningless concrete ramp which had become filmed by a leak of ancient oil, and they were taking care that they did not stumble and drop their precious master.
At a deep, hidden point the downward ramp divided, the left into a broad arena of steps which could have seated thousands of spectators for some never-to-occur event, and right into a narrow ramp which bore upward and then curved, yellow lights and all.
"Stop!" called Sto Odin. "Do you see her? Do you hear it?"
"Hear what?" said Flavius.
"The beat and the cadence of the congohelium rising out of the Gebiet. The whirl and the skirl of impossible music coming at us through miles of solid rock? That girl whom I can already see, waiting at a door which should never have been opened? The sound of the star-borne music, not designed for the proper human ear?" He shouted, "Can't you hear it? That cadence. The unlawful metal of congohelium so terrible far underground? Dah, dab. Dah, dah. Dah. Music which nobody has ever understood before?"
Said Flavius, "I hear nothing, saving the pulse of air in this corridor, and your own heartbeat, my Lord. And something else, a little like machinery, very far away."
"There, that!" cried Sto Odin, "which you call 'a little like machinery,' does it come in a beat of five separate sounds, each one distinct?"
"No. No, sir. Not five."
"And you, Livius, when you were a man, you were very telepathic? Is there any of that left in the robot which is you?"
"No, my Lord, nothing. I have good senses, and I am also cut into the subsurface radio of the Instrumentality. Nothing unusual."
"No five-beat? Each note separate, short of prolonged, given meaning and shape by the terrible music of the congohelium, imprisoned with us inside this much-too-solid rock? You hear nothing?"
The two robots, shaped like Roman legionaries shook their heads.
"But I can see her, through this stone. She has breasts like ripe pears and dark brown eyes that are like the stones of fresh-cut peaches. And I can hear what they are singing, their weird silly words of a pentapaul, made into something majestic by the awful music of the congohelium. Listen to the words. When I repeat them, they sound just silly, because the dread-inspiring music does not come with them. Her name is Santuna and she stares at him. No wonder she stares. He is much more
tall than most men, yet he makes this foolish song into something frightening and strange.
Slim Jim.
Dim him.
Grim.