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

"One of my robots, Livius, the one imprinted by a psychiatrist general, will run with you, but I command him to forget this place and all things connected with it. Summa nulla est. Have you heard me, Livius?
You will run with this girl and you will forget. You will run and forget. You too will run and forget, Santuna my dear, but two Earthnychthe-rons from now you will remember just enough to come back here, should you wish to, should you need to. Otherwise you will go to the Lady Mmona and learn from her what you should do for the rest of your life."
"You are promising, my Lord, that in two days and nights I can come back if I even feel like it."
"Now run, my girl, run. Run to the surface. Livius, carry her if you must. But run! run! run! More than she depends upon it."
Santuna looked at him very earnestly. Her nakedness was innocence. The gold upper eyelids met the black lower eyelids as she blinked and then brushed away wet tears.
"Kiss me," she said, "and I will run."
He leaned down and kissed her.
She turned, looked back one last time at her dancer-lover, and then ran long-legged into the corridor. Livius ran after her, gracefully, untiringly. In twenty minutes they would be reaching the upper limits of the Gebiet.
"You know what I am doing?" said Sto Odin to the dancer.
This time the dancer and the force behind him did not deign to answer.
Said Sto Odin, "Water. There is water in a jug in my litter. Take me there, Flavius."
The robot-legionary took the aged and trembling Sto Odin to the litter.
8
The Lord Sto Odin then performed the trick which changed human history for many centuries to come and, in so doing, exploded an enormous cavern in the vitals of the Earth.
He used one of the most secret ruses of the Instrumentality.
He triple-thought.
Only a few very adept persons could triple-think, when they were given every possible chance of training. Fortunately for mankind, the Lord Sto Odin had been one of the successful ones.
He set three systems of thought into action. At the top level he behaved rationally as he explored the old room; at a lower level of his mind
he planned a wild surprise for the dancer with the congohelium. But at the third, lowest level, he decided what he must do in the time of a single blink and trusted his autonomic nervous system to carry out the rest.
These are the commands he gave:
Flavius should be set on the wild-alert and readied for attack.
The computer should be reached and told to record the whole episode, everything which Sto Odin had learned, and should be shown how to take counter-measures while Sto Odin gave the matter no further conscious thought. The gestalt of action-the general frame of retaliation-was clear for thousandths of a second in Sto Odin's mind and then it dropped from sight.
The music rose to a roar.
White light covered Sto Odin.
"You meant me harm!" called Sun-boy from beyond the Gothic door.
"I meant you harm," Sto Odin acknowledged, "but it was a passing thought. I did nothing. You are watching me."
"I am watching you," said the dancer grimly. Kid-nork, kid-nork went the little drum. "Do not go out of my sight. When you are ready to come through my door, call me or just think of it. I will meet you and help you in."
"Good enough," said the Lord Sto Odin.
Flavius still held him. Sto Odin concentrated on the melody which Sun-boy was creating, a wild new song never before suspected in the history of the world. He wondered if he could surprise the dancer by throwing his own song back at him. At the same instant, his fingers were performing a third set of actions which Sto Odin's mind no longer had to heed. Sto Odin's hand opened a lid in the robot's chest, right into the laminated controls of the brain. The hand itself changed certain adjustments, commanding that the robot should within the quarter-hour, kill all forms of life within reach other than the command-transmitter. Flavius did not know what had been done to him; Sto Odin did not even notice what his own hand had done.
"Take me over to the old computer," said Sto Odin to the robot Flavius. "I want to discover how the strange story which I have just learned may be true." Sto Odin kept thinking of music which would even startle the user of the congohelium.
He stood at the computer.
His hand, responding to the triple-think command which it had been
given, turned the computer up and pressed the button, Record this scene. The computer's old relays almost grunted as they came to the alert and complied.
"Let me see the map," said Sto Odin to the computer.
Far behind him, the dancer had changed his pace into a fast jog-trot of hot suspicion.
The map appeared on the computer.
"Beautiful," said Sto Odin.
The entire labyrinth had become plain. Just above them was one of the ancient, sealed-off anti-seismic shafts-a straight, empty tubular shaft, two hundred meters wide, kilometers high. At the top, it had a lid which kept out the mud and water of the ocean floor. At the bottom, since there was no pressure other than air to worry about, it had been covered with a plastic which looked like rock, so that neither people nor robots which might be passing would try to climb into it.
"Watch what I am doing!" cried Sto Odin to the dancer.
"I am watching," said Sun-boy and there was almost a growl of perplexity in his sung-forth response.
Sto Odin shook the computer and ran the fingers of his right hand over it and coded a very specific request. His left hand-preconditioned by the triple-think-coded the emergency panel at the side of the computer with two simple, clear engineering instructions.
Sun-boy's laughter rang out behind him. "You are asking that a piece of the congohelium be sent down to you. Stop! Stop, before you sign it with your name and your authority as a lord of the Instrumentality. Your unsigned request will do no harm. The central computer up top will just think that it is some of the crazy people in the Bezirk making senseless demands." The voice rose to a note of urgency, "Why did the machine signal 'received and complied with' to you just now?"
The Lord Sto Odin lied blandly, "I don't know. Maybe they will send me a piece of the congohelium to match the one that you have there."
"You're lying," cried the dancer. "Come over here to the door."
Flavius led the Lord Sto Odin to the ridiculous-beautiful Gothic archway.
The dancer was leaping from foot to foot. The congohelium shone a dull alert red. The music wept as though all the anger and suspicion of mankind had been incorporated into a new unforgettable fugue, like
a delirious atonal counterpoint to Johann Sebastian Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto.
"I am here." The Lord Sto Odin spoke easily.
"You are dying!" cried the dancer.
"I was dying before you first noticed me. I set my vitality control to maximum after I entered the Bezirk."