"William Tenn - Null-P" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

Outstanding cultural phenomena of this period were carefully rhymed and ex-actly metered poems
addressed to the nondescript beauties and vague charms of a wife or old mother. Had not anthropology
disappeared long ago, it would have be-come a matter of common knowledge that there was a startling
tendency to unifor-mity everywhere in such qualities as bone structure, features and pigmentation, not to
mention intelligence, musculature, and personality. Humanity was breeding rap-idly and unconsciously in
toward its center.
Nonetheless, just before the exhaustion of coal, there was a brief sputter of intel-lect among a group
who established themselves on a site northwest of Cairo. These Nilotics, as they were known, consisted
mostly of unreconstructed dissidents expelled by their communities, with a leavening of the mentally ill and
the physically handi-capped; they had at their peak an immense number of technical gadgets and
yellow-ing books culled from crumbling museums and libraries the world over.
Intensely ignored by their fellowmen, the Nilotics carried on shrill and intermi-nable debates while
plowing their muddy fields just enough to keep alive. They con-cluded that they were the only surviving
heirs of Homo sapiens, the bulk of the world's population now being composed of what they termed
Homo abnegus.
Man's evolutionary success, they concluded, had been due chiefly to his lack of specialization. While
other creatures had been forced to standardize to a particular and limited environment, mankind had been
free for a tremendous spurt, until ultimately it had struck an environmental factor which demanded the fee
of special-ization. To avoid war, Man had to specialize in nonentity.
Having come this far in discussion, the Nilotics determined to use the ancient weapons at their
disposal to save Homo abnegus from himself. However, violent dis-agreements over the methods of
reeducation to be employed led them to a bloody internecine conflict with those same weapons in the
course of which the entire colony was destroyed and its site made untenable for life. About this time, his
coal used up. Man reentered the broad, self-replenishing forests.
The reign of Homo abnegus endured for a quarter of a million years. It was dis-puted finallyтАФand
successfullyтАФby a group of Newfoundland retrievers who had been marooned on an island in Hudson
Bay when the cargo vessel transporting them to new owners had sunk back in the twentieth century.
These sturdy and highly intelligent dogs, limited perforce to each other's growling society for several
hundred millennia, learned to talk in much the same manner that mankind's simian ancestors had learned
to walk when a sudden shift in botany destroyed their ancient arboreal homesтАФout of boredom. Their
wits sharpened fur-ther by the hardships of their bleak island, their imaginations stimulated by the cold,
the articulate retrievers built a most remarkable canine civilization in the Arctic before sweeping
southward to enslave and eventually domesticate humanity.
Domestication took the form of breeding men solely for their ability to throw sticks and other
objects, the retrieving of which was a sport still popular among the new masters of the planet, however
sedentary certain erudite individuals might have become.
Highly prized as pets were a group of men with incredibly thin and long arms; another school of
retrievers, however, favored a stocky breed whose arms were short, but extremely sinewy; while,
occasionally, interesting results were obtained by in-ducing rickets for a few generations to produce a pet
whose arms were sufficiently limber as to appear almost boneless. This last type, while intriguing both
esthetically and scientifically, was generally decried as a sign of decadence in the owner as well as a
functional insult to the animal.
Eventually, of course, the retriever civilization developed machines which could throw sticks farther,
faster, and with more frequency. Thereupon, except in the most backward canine communities, Man
disappeared.


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