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

Though the song had the barbarous, ancient thrill of bagpipes in it, the melody could not counter or cancel the sane, wild rhythm of the congohelium beating at them, now, from all directions at once.
"Nice piece of sedition, that," said the Lord Sto Odin drily, "but I
like it better as music than I do this noise which is tearing its way through the depths of the world. Keep going. Keep going. I must meet this mystery before I die."
"We find it hard to endure that music coming at us through the rock," said Livius.
"It seems to us that it is much stronger than it was when we came here some months ago. Could it have changed?" asked Flavius.
"That is the mystery. We let them have the Gebiet, beyond our own jurisdiction. We gave them the Bezirk, to do with as they please. But these ordinary people have created or encountered some extraordinary power. They have brought new things into the Earth. It may be necessary for all three of us to die before we settle the matter."
"We can't die the way you do," said Livius. "We're already robots, and the people from whom we were imprinted have been dead a long time. Do you mean you would turn us off?"
"I would, perhaps, or else some other force. Would you mind?"
"Mind? You mean, have emotions about it? I don't know," said Flavius. "I used to think that I had real, full experience when you used the phrase summa nulla est and brought us up to full capacity, but that music which we have been hearing has the effect of a thousand passwords all said at once. I am beginning to care about my life and I think that I am becoming what your reference explained by the word 'afraid'."
"I too feel it," said Livius. "This is not a power which we knew to exist on Earth before. When I was a strategist someone told me about the really indescribable dangers connected with the Douglas-Ouyang planets, and it seems to me now that a danger of that kind is already with us, here inside the tunnel. Something which Earth never made. Something which man never developed. Something which no robot could out-compute. Something wild and very strong brought into being by the use of the congohelium. Look around us."
He did not need to say that. The corridor itself had become a living, pulsing rainbow.
They turned one last loop in the corridor and they were there-
The very last limit of the realm of distress.
The source of evil music.
The end of the Bezirk.
They knew it because the music blinded them, the lights deafened them, their senses ran into one another and became confused. This was the immediate presence of the congohelium.
There was a door, immensely large, carved with elaborate Gothic ornament. It was much too big for any human man to have had need of it. In the door a single figure stood, her breasts accented into vivid brights and darks by the brilliant light which poured from one side of the door only, the right.
They could see through the door, into an immense hall wherein the floor was covered by hundreds of limp bundles of ragged clothing. These were the people, unconscious. Above them and between them there danced the high figure of a male, holding a glittering something in his hands. He prowled and leaped and twisted and turned to the pulsation of the music which he himself produced.
"Summa nulla est," said the Lord Sto Odin. "I want you two robots to be keyed to maximum. Are you now to top alert?"
'We are, sir," chorused Livius and Flavius.
"You have your weapons?"
"We cannot use them," said Livius, "since it is contrary to our programming, but you can use them, sir."
"I'm not sure," said Flavius. "I'm not at all sure. We are equipped with surface weapons. This music, these hypnotics, these lights-who knows what they may have done to us and to our weapons, which were never designed to operate this far underground?"
"No fear," said Sto Odin, "I'll take care of all of it."
He took out a small knife.
When the knife gleamed under the dancing lights, the girl in the doorway finally took notice of the Lord Sto Odin and his strange companions.
She spoke to him, and her voice rode through the heavy air with the accents of clarity and death.
7
"Who are you," she said, "that you should bring weapons to the last uttermost limits of the Bezirk?"
"This is just a small knife, lady," said the Lord Sto Odin, "and with this I can do no harm to anyone. I am an old man and I am setting my own vitality button higher."
She watched incuriously as he brought the point of the knife to the nape of his own neck and then gave it three full, deliberate turns.
Then she stared and said, "You are strange, my Lord. Perhaps you are dangerous to my friends and me."
"I am dangerous to no one." The robots looked at him, surprised, because of the fullness and the richness of his voice. He had set his vitality very high indeed, giving himself, at that rate, perhaps no more than an hour or two of life, but he had regained the physical power and the emotional force of his own prime years. They looked at the girl. She had taken Sto Odin's statement at full face value, almost as though it were an incontrovertible canon of faith.
"I wear," Sto Odin went on, "these feathers. Do you know what they signify?"
"I can see," she said, "that you are a lord of the Instrumentality, but I do not know what the feathers mean . . ."
"Waiver of immunity. Anyone who can manage it is allowed to Mil me or to hurt me without danger of punishment." He smiled, a little grimly. "Of course, I have the right to fight back, and I do know how to fight. My name is the Lord Sto Odin. Why are you here, girl?"
"I love that man in there-if he is a man any more."
She stopped and pursed her lips in bewilderment. It was strange to see those girlish lips compressed in a momentary stammer of the soul. She stood there, more nude than a newborn infant, her face covered with provocative, off-beat cosmetics. She lived for a mission of love in the depths of the nothing and nowhere: yet she remained a girl, a person, a human being capable, as she was now, of an immediate relationship to another human being.
"He was a man, my Lord, even when he came back from the surface with that piece of congohelium. Only a few weeks ago, those people were dancing too. Now they just lie on the ground. They do not even die. I myself held the congohelium too, and I made music with it. Now the power of the music is eating him up and he dances without resting. He won't come out to me and I do not dare go into that place with him. Perhaps I too would end up as one more heap on the floor."
A crescendo of the intolerable music made speech intolerable for her. She waited for it to pass while the room beyond blazed a pulsing violet at them.
When the music of the congohelium subsided a little, Sto Odin spoke: "How long has it been that he has danced alone with this strange power coursing through him?"
"One year. Two years. Who can tell? I came down here and lost time
when I arrived. You lords don't even let us have clocks and calendars up on the surface."
'We ourselves saw you dancing just a tenth-year ago," said Livius, .interrupting.
She glanced at them, quickly, incuriously. "Are you the same two robots who were here a while back? You look very different now. You look like ancient soldiers. I can't imagine why ... All right, maybe it was a week, maybe it was a year."
'What were you doing down here?" asked Sto Odin, gently.
'What do you think?" she said. "Why do all the other people come down here? I was running away from the timeless time, the lifeless life, the hopeless hope that you lords apply to all mankind on the surface. You let the robots and the underpeople work, but you freeze the real people in a happiness which has no hope and no escape."
Tm right," cried Sto Odin. "I'm right, though I die for it!"
"I don't understand you," said the girl. "Do you mean that you too, a lord, have come down here to escape from the useless hope that wraps up all of us?"
"No, no, no," he said, as the shifting lights of the congohelium music made improbable traceries across his features. "I just meant that I told the other lords that something like this was happening to you ordinary people on the surface. Now you are telling me exactly what I told them. Who were you, anyhow?"