"Smith, Cordwainer - The Crime And The Glory Of Commander Suzdal" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Cordwainer)

And the method of their survival was so sharp, so fierce, that it was indeed a difficult thing to understand.
In less than four hundred years the Arachosians had civilized into groups of fighting clans. They still had just one planet, around just one sun. They lived in just one place. They had a few spacecraft they had built themselves. Their science, their art and their music moved forward with strange lurches of inspired neurotic genius, because they lacked the fundamentals in the human personality itself, the balance of male and female, the family, the operations of love, of hope, of reproduction. They survived, but they themselves had become monsters and did not know it.
Out of their memory of old mankind they created a legend of Old Earth. Women in that memory were deformities, who should be killed. Misshapen beings, who should be erased. The family, as they recalled it, was filth and abomination which they were resolved to wipe out if they should ever meet it.
They, themselves, were bearded homosexuals, with rouged lips, ornate earrings, fine heads of hair, and very few old men among them.
They killed off their men before they became old; the things they could not get from love or relaxation or comfort, they purchased with battle and death. They made up songs proclaiming themselves to be the last of the old men and the first of the new, and they sang their hate to mankind when they should meet, and they sang "Woe is Earth that we should find it," and yet something inside them made them add to almost every song a refrain which troubled even them,
And I mourn maul
They mourned mankind and yet they plotted to attack all of humanity.
The Trap
Suzdal had been deceived by the message capsule. He put himself back in the sleeping compartment and he directed the turtle-men to take the cruiser to Arachosia, wherever it might be. He did not do this crazily or wantonly. He did it as a matter of deliberate judgment. A judgment for which he was later heard, tried, judged fairly and then put to something worse than death.
He deserved it.
He sought for Arachosia without stopping to think of the most fundamental rule: How could he keep the Arachosians, singing monsters that they were, from following him home to the eventual ruin of Earth? Might not their condition be a disease which could be contagious, or might not their fierce society destroy the other societies of men and leave Earth and all of other men's worlds in ruin? He did not think of this, so he was heard, and tried and punished much later. We will come to that.
The Arrival
Suzdal awakened in orbit off Arachosia. And he awakened knowing he had made a mistake. Strange ships clung to his shell-ship like evil barnacles from an unknown ocean, attached to a familiar water craft.
He called to his turtle-men to press the controls and the controls did not work.
The outsiders, whoever they were, man or woman or beast or god, had enough technology to immobilize his ship. Suzdal immediately realized his mistake. Naturally, he thought of destroying himself and the ship, but he was afraid that if he destroyed himself and missed destroying the ship completely there was a chance that his cruiser, a late model with recent weapons, would fall into the hands of whoever it was walking on the outer dome of his own cruiser. He could not afford the risk of mere individual suicide. He had to take a more drastic step. This was not time for obeying Earth rules.
His security officer-a cube ghost wakened to human form-whispered the whole story to him in quick intelligent gasps:
"They are people, sir.
"More people than I am.
"I'm a ghost, an echo working out of a dead brain.
"These are real people, Commander Suzdal, but they are the worst people ever to get loose among the'stars. You must destroy them, sir!"
"I can't," said Suzdal, still trying to come fully awake. "They're people."
"Then you've got to beat them off. By any means, sir. By any means whatever. Save Earth. Stop them. Warn Earth."
"And I?" asked Suzdal, and was immediately sorry that he had asked the selfish, personal question.
"You will die or you will be punished," said the security officer sympathetically, "and I do not know which one will be worse."
"Now?"
"Right now. There is no time left for you. No time at all."
"But the rules . . . ?"
"You have already strayed far outside of rules."
There were rules, but Suzdal left them all behind.
Rules, rules for ordinary times, for ordinary places, for understandable dangers.
This was a nightmare cooked up by the flesh of man, motivated by the brains of man. Already his monitors were bringing him news of who these people were, these seeming maniacs, these men who had never known women, these boys who had grown to lust and battle, who had a family structure which the normal human brain could not accept, could not believe, could not tolerate. The things on the outside were people,
and they weren't. The things on the outside had the human brain, the human imagination, and the human capacity for revenge, and yet Suzdal, a brave officer, was so frightened by the mere nature of them that he did not respond to their efforts to communicate.
He could feel the turtle-women among his crew aching with fright itself, as they realized who was pounding on their ship and who it was that sang through loud announcing machines that they wanted in, in, in.
Suzdal committed a crime. It is the pride of the Instrumentality that the Instrumentality allows its officers to commit crimes or mistakes or suicide. The Instrumentality does the things for mankind that a computer cannot do. The Instrumentality leaves the human brain, the human choice in action.
The Instrumentality passes dark knowledge to its staff, things not usually understood in the inhabited world, things prohibited to ordinary men and women because the officers of the Instrumentality, the captains and the subchiefs and the chiefs, must know their jobs. If they do not, all mankind might perish.
Suzdal reached into his arsenal. He knew what he was doing. The larger moon of Arachosia was habitable. He could see that there were Earth plants already on it, and Earth insects. His monitors showed him that the Arachosian men-women had not bothered to settle on the planet. He threw an agonized inquiry at his computers and cried out:
"Read me the age it's in!"
The machine sang back, "More than thirty million years."
Suzdal had strange resources. He had twins or quadruplets of almost every Earth animal. The Earth animals were carried in tiny capsules no larger than a medicine capsule and they consisted of the sperm and the ovum of the higher animals, ready to be matched for sowing, ready to be imprinted; he also had small life-bombs which could surround any form of life with at least a chance of survival.
He went to the bank and he got cats, eight pairs, sixteen Earth cats, Fells domesticus, the kind of eat that you and I know, the kind of eat which is bred, sometimes for telepathic uses, sometimes to go along on the ships and serve as auxiliary weapons when the minds of the pin-lighters direct the cats to fight off dangers.
He coded these cats. He coded them with messages just as monstrous as the messages which had made the men-women of Arachosia into monsters. This is what he coded:
Do not loreed true.
Invent new chemistry.
You -will serve man.
Become civilized.
Learn speech.
You will serve man.
When man calls you -will serve man.
Go hack, and come forth.
Serve man.