"Michael Swanwick - The Wisdom of Old Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

THE WISDOM OF OLD EARTH
by Michael Swanwick
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Copyright ┬й 1997 by Michael Swanwick
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, December 1997
Reprinted in Year's Best SF 3
HarperPrism
ISBN 0-06-105901-3

eBook scanned & proofed by binwiped 11-10-02 [v1.0]




Judith Seize-the-Day was, quite simply, the best of her kind. Many another had aspired to the clarity of
posthuman thought, and several might claim some rude mastery of its essentials, but she alone came to
understand it as completely as any offworlder.
Such understanding did not come easily. The human mind is slow to generalize and even slower to
integrate. It lacks the quicksilver apprehension of the posthuman. The simplest truth must be repeated
often to imprint even the most primitive understanding of what comes naturally and without effort to the
space-faring children of humanity. Judith had grown up in Pole Star City, where the shuttles slant down
through the zone of permanent depletion in order to avoid further damage to the fragile ozone layer, and
thus from child-hood had associated extensively with the highly evolved. It was only natural that as a
woman she would elect to turn her back on her own brutish kind and strive to bootstrap-herself into a
higher order.
Yet even then she was like an ape trying to pass as a philosopher. For all her laborious ponderings,
she did not yet comprehend the core wisdom of posthumanity, which was that thought and action must
be as one. Being a human, how-ever, when she did comprehend, she understood it more deeply and
thoroughly than the posthumans themselves. As a Canadian, she could tap into the ancient and chthonic
wis-doms of her race. Where her thought went, the civilized mind could not follow.
It would be expecting too much of such a woman that she would entirely hide her contempt for her
own kind. She cursed the two trollish Ninglanders who were sweating and chopping a way through the
lush tangles of kudzu, and drove them onward with the lash of her tongue.
"Unevolved bastard pigs!" she spat. "Inbred degener-ates! If you ever want to get home to molest
your dogs and baby sisters again, you'll put your backs into it!"
The larger of the creatures looked back at her with an angry gleam in his eye, and his knuckles
whitened on the hilt of his machete. She only grinned humorlessly, and parted the holster of her ankh.
Such weapons were rarely allowed humans. Her possession of it was a mark of the great respect in
which she was held.
The brute returned to his labor.
It was deepest winter, and the jungle tracts of what had once been the mid-Atlantic coastlands were
traversable. Traversable, that is, if one had a good guide. Judith was among the best. She had brought
her party alive to the Flying Hills of southern Pennsylvania, and not many could have done that. Her client
had come in search of the fabled bell of liberty, which many another party had sought in vain. She did not
believe he would find it either. But that did not concern her.
All that concerned her was their survival.
So she cursed and drove the savage Ninglanders before her, until all at once they broke through the
vines and brush out of shadow and into a clearing.
All three stood unmoving for an instant, staring out over the clumps and hillocks of grass that
covered the foundations of what had once been factories, perhaps, or workers' housing, gasoline