"Smith, Cordwainer - On the Gem Planet UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Cordwainer)

ON THE GEM PLANET By Cordwainer Smith

CONSIDER the horse. He climbed up through the crevasses of a cliff of gems; the force which drove him was the love of man.

Consider Mizzer, the resort planet, where the dictator Colonel Wedder reformed the culture so violently that whatever had been slovenly now became atrocious.

Consider Genevieve, so rich that she was the prisoner of her own wealth, so beautiful that she was the victim of her own beauty, so intelligent that she knew there was nothing, nothing to be done about her fate.

Consider Casher O'Neill, a wanderer among the planets, thirsting for justice and yet hoping in his innermost thoughts that 'justice' was not just another word for revenge.

Consider Pontoppidan, that literal gem of a planet, where the people were too rich and busy to have good food, open air or much fun. All they had was diamonds, rubies, tourmalines and emeralds.

Add these together and you have one of the strangest stories ever told from world to world.

When Casher O'Neill came to Pontoppidan, he found that the capital city was appropriately called Andersen.

This was the second century of the Rediscovery of Man. People everywhere had taken up old names, old languages, old customs, as fast as the robots and the underpeople could retrieve the data from the rubbish of "forgotten starlanes or the subsurface ruins of Manhome itself.

Casher knew this very well, to his bitter cost. Re-acculturation had brought him revolution and exile. He came from the

dry, beautiful planet of Mizzer. He was himself the nephew of the ruined ex-ruler, Kuraf, whose collection of objectionable books had at one time been unmatched in the settled galaxy; he had stood aside, half-assenting, when the colonels Gibna and Wedder took over the planet in the name of reform; he had implored the Instrumentality, vainly, for help when Wedder became a tyrant; and now he travelled among the stars, looking for men or weapons who might destroy Wedder and make Kaheer again the luxurious, happy city which it once had been.

He felt that his cause was hopeless when he landed on Pontoppidan. The people were warmhearted, friendly, intelligent, but they had no motives to fight for, no weapons to fight with, no enemies to fight against. They had little public spirit, such as Casher O'Neill had seen back on his native planet of Mizzer. They were concerned about little things.

Indeed, at the time of his arrival, the Pontoppidans were wildly excited about a horse.

A horse! Who worries about one horse? Casher O'Neill himself said so. 'Why bother about a horse? We have lots of them on Mizzer. They are four-handed beings, eighty1 times the weight of a man, with only one finger on each of the four hands. The fingernail is very heavy and permits them to run fast. That's why our people have them, for running.'

'Why run?' said the Hereditary Dictator of Pontoppidan. 'Why run, when you can fly? Don't you have ornithopters?'

'We don't run with them,' said Casher indignantly. 'We make them run against each other and then we pay prizes to the one which runs fastest.'

'But then,' said Philip Vincent, the Hereditary Dictator, 'you get a very illogical situation. When you have tried out these four-fingered beings, you know how fast each one goes. So what? Why bother?'

His niece interrupted. She was a fragile little thing, smaller than Casher O'Neill liked women to be. She had clear grey eyes, well-marked eyebrows, a very artificial coiffeur of silver-blonde hair and the most sensitive little mouth he had ever seen. She conformed to the local fashion by wearing some

kind of powder or face cream which was flesh-pink in colour but which had overtones of lilac. On a woman as old as twenty-two, such a coloration would have made the wearer look like an old hag, but on Genevieve it was pleasant, if rather startling. It gave the effect of a happy child playing grown-up and doing the job joyfully and well. Casher knew that it was hard to tell ages in these off-trail planets. Genevieve might be a grand dame in her third or fourth rejuvenation!

He doubted it, on second glance. What she Said was sensible, young, and pert: ' *Х

'But uncle, they're animals I'

' I know that,' he rumbled.

'But uncle, don't you see it?'

'Stop saying "but uncle" and tell me what you mean,' growled the Dictator^ very fondly.

'Animals are always uncertain.'