"Smith, Cordwainer - The Burning Of The Brain (UC)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Cordwainer)

Yet pleasant he was, though long he may have been married to Dolores Oh. Her loneliness and greed might suck at him like a nightmare, but his strength was more than enough strength for two.
Was he not the captain of the greatest ship to sail between the stars?
Even as the pinlighters smiled their greetings back to him, his right hand depressed the golden ceremonial lever of the ship. This instrument alone was mechanical. All other controls in the ship had long since been formed telepathically or electronically.
Within the planoforming room the black skies became visible and the tissue of space shot up around them like boiling water at the base of a waterfall. Outside that one room the passengers still walked sedately on scented lawns.
From the wall facing him, as he sat rigid in his Go-captain's chair, Magno Taliano sensed the forming of a pattern which in three or four hundred milliseconds would tell him where he was and would give him the next clue as to how to move.
He moved the ship with the impulses of his own brain, to which the wall was a superlative complement
The wall was a living brickwork of locksheets, laminated charts, one hundred thousand charts to the inch, the wall preselected and preas-sembled for all imaginable contingencies of the journey which, each time afresh, took the ship across half-unknown immensities of time and space. The ship leapt, as it had before.
The new star focused.
Magno Taliano waited for the wall to show him where he was, expecting (in partnership with the wall) to flick the ship back into the pattern of stellar space, moving it by immense skips from source to destination.
This time nothing happened.
Nothing?
For the first time in a hundred years his mind knew panic.
It couldn't be nothing. Not nothing. Something had to focus. The locksheets always focused.
His mind reached into the locksheets and he realized with a devastation beyond all limits of ordinary human grief that they were lost as no

ship had ever been lost before. By some error never before committed in the history of mankind, the entire wall was made of duplicates of the same locksheet.
Worst of all, the emergency return sheet was lost. They were amid stars none of them had ever seen before, perhaps as near as five hundred million miles, perhaps as far as forty parsecs.
And the locksheet was lost.
And they would die.
As the ship's power failed coldness and blackness and death would crush in on them in a few hours at the most. That then would be all, all of the Wu-Feinstein, all of Dolores Oh.
3. THE SECRET OF THE OLD DARK BRAIN
Outside of the planoforming room of the Wu-Feinstein the passengers had no reason to understand that they were marooned in the nothing-at-all.
Dolores Oh rocked back and forth in an ancient rocking chair. Her haggard face looked without pleasure at the imaginary river that ran past the edge of the lawn. Dita from the Great South House sat on a hassock by her aunt's knees.
Dolores was talking about a trip she had made when she was young and vibrant with beauty, a beauty which brought trouble and hate wherever it went.
". . . so the guardsman killed the captain and then came to my cabin and said to me, "You've got to marry me now. I've given up everything for your sake,' and I said to him, 'I never said that I loved you. It was sweet of you to get into a fight, and in a way I suppose it is a compliment to my beauty, but it doesn't mean that I belong to you the rest of my life. What do you think I am, anyhow?'"
Dolores Oh sighed a dry, ugly sigh, like the crackling of sub-zero winds through frozen twigs. "So you see, Dita, being beautiful the way you are is no answer to anything. A woman has got to be herself before she finds out what she is. I know that my lord and husband, the Go-captain, loves me because my beauty is gone, and with my beauty gone there is nothing but me to love, is there?"
An odd figure came out on the verandah. It was a pinlighter in full fighting costume. Pinlighters were never supposed to leave the piano-
forming room, and it was most extraordinary for one of them to appear among the passengers.
He bowed to the two ladies and said with the utmost courtesy, "Ladies, will you please come into the planoforming room? We have need that you should see the Go-captain now."
Dolores's hand leapt to her mouth. Her gesture of grief was as automatic as the striking of a snake. Dita sensed that her aunt had been waiting a hundred years and more for disaster, that her aunt had craved ruin for her husband the way that some people crave love and others crave death.
Dita said nothing. Neither did Dolores, apparently at second thought, utter a word.
They followed the pinlighter silently into the planoforming room. The heavy door closed behind them. Magno Taliano was still rigid in his captain's chair. He spoke very slowly, his voice sounding like a record played too slowly on an ancient parlophone.
"We are lost in space, my deaf," said the frigid, ghostly, voice of the captain, still in his Go-captain's trance. "We are lost in space and 1 thought that perhaps if your mind aided mine we might think of a way lack."
Dita started to speak.
A pinlighter told her: "Go ahead and speak, my dear. Do you have any suggestion?"
"Why don't we just go back? It would be humiliating, wouldn't it? Still it would be better than dying. Let's use the emergency return lock-sheet and go on right back. The world will forgive Magno Taliano for a single failure after thousands of brilliant and successful trips."
The pinlighter, a pleasant enough young man, was as friendly and calm as a doctor informing someone of a death or of a mutilation. "The impossible has happened, Dita from the Great South House. All the locksheets are wrong. They are all the same one. And not one of them is good for emergency return."
With that the two women knew where they were. They knew that space would tear into them like threads being pulled out of a fiber so that they would either die bit by bit as the hours passed and as the material of their bodies faded away a few molecules here and a few there. Or, alternatively, they could die all at once in a flash if the Go-captain
chose to kill himself and the ship rather than to wait for a slow death. Or, if they believed in religion, they could pray.
The pinlighter said to the rigid Go-captain, "We think we see a familiar pattern at the edge of your own brain. May we look in?" Taliano nodded very slowly, very gravely. The pinlighter stood still.
The two women watched. Nothing visible happened, but they knew that beyond the limits of vision and yet before their eyes a great drama was being played out. The minds of the pinlighters probed deep into the mind of the frozen Go-captain, searching amid the synapses for the secret of the faintest clue to their possible rescue. Minutes passed. They seemed like hours.
At last the pinlighter spoke. 'We can see into your midbrain, Captain. At the edge of your paleocortex there is a star pattern which resembles the upper left rear of our present location."
The pinlighter laughed nervously. "We want to know, can you fly the ship home on your brain?"
Magno Taliano looked with deep tragic eyes at the inquirer. His slow voice came out at them once again since he dared not leave the half-trance which held the entire ship in stasis. "Do you mean can 1 fly the ship on a brain alone? It would burn out my brain and the ship Хwould be lost anyhow . . ."
"But we're lost, lost, lost," screamed Dolores Oh. Her face was alive with hideous hope, with a hunger for ruin, with a greedy welcome of disaster. She screamed at her husband, "Wake up, my darling, and let us die together. At least we can belong to each other that much, that long, forever!"
'Why die?" said the pinlighter softly. "You tell him, Dita." Said Dita, 'Why not try, Sir and Uncle?"
Slowly Magno Taliano turned his face toward his niece. Again his hollow voice sounded. "If I do this 1 shall be a fool or a child or a dead man, but 1 will do it for you."
Dita had studied the work of the Go-captains and she knew well enough that if the paleocortex was lost the personality became intellectually sane, but emotionally crazed. With the most ancient part of the brain gone the fundamental controls of hostility, hunger and sex disappeared. The most ferocious of animals and the most brilliant of men were reduced to a common levelЧa level of infantile friendliness
in which lust and playfulness and gentle, unappeasable hunger became the eternity of their days.
Magno Taliano did not wait.