"Jack Vance - The Brains of Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

THE BRAINS OF EARTH

By Jack Vance

Scanned by BW-SciFi

Copyright ┬й, 1966, by Ace Books, Inc.

All Rights Reserved

Printed in U.S.A.
 I
Ixax at the best of times was a dreary pla-net. Winds roared through the jagged black
mountains, pro-pelling jets of rain and sleet which, rather than softening the landscape, tended to
wash what soil existed into the ocean. Vegetation was scant: a few drab forests of brittle
den-drons; wax-grass and tube-wort bunching out of crevices; lichens in sullen splotches of red,
purple, blue and green. The ocean however, supported extensive beds of kelp and algae; these,
with a fairly abundant catalogue of marine ani-malculae, conducted the greater part of the planet's
photo-synthetic process.
In spite of, or because of, the challenge of the environ-ment, the original amphibian animal, a
type of ganoid ba-trachian, evolved into an intelligent andromorph. Assisted by an intuitive
awareness of mathematical justness and har-mony, with a visual apparatus that presented the
world in tactile three-dimensional style rather than as a polychrome set of two-dimensional
surfaces, the Xaxans were almost pre-ordained to build a technical civilization. Four hundred
years after their advent into space they discovered the no-palтАФapparently through the workings of
sheer chanceтАФand so involved themselves in the most terrible war of their his-tory.
The war, lasting over a century, devastated the already barren planet. Scum crusted the
oceans; the few sparse pockets of soil were poisoned by yellowish-white powder sifting out of the
sky. Ixax had never been a populous world; the handful of cities now were rubble: heaps of black
stone, liver-brown tile, chalk-white shards of fused talc, wads of rotting organic stuff, a chaos
which outraged the Xaxan compulsion for mathematical exactness and nicety. The survi-vors,
both Chitumih and Tauptu (so to transcribe the clicks and rattlings of the Xaxan communicative
system), dwelt in underground fortresses. Distinguished by Tauptu aware-ness and Chitumih
denial of the nopal, they nourished to-ward each other an emotion akin to but a dozen times more
intense than Earthly hate.
After the first hundred years of war the tide of battle ran in favor of the Tauptu. The Chitumih
were driven to their stronghold under the Northern Mountains; the Taup-tu battle-teams inched
forward, blasting the surface de-fense-ports one by one, dispatching atomic moles against the
mile-deep citadel.
The Chitumih, although aware of defeat, resisted with a fervor corresponding to their
more-than-hate for the Tauptu. The rumble of approaching moles sounded ever louder; the
outlying mole-traps collapsed, then the inner-ring of diver-sion-tunnels. Looping up from a burrow
ten miles deep, an enormous mole broke into the dynamo chamber, destroying the very core of
Chitumih resistance. The corridors went pitch-dark; the Chitumih tumbled forth blindly, prepared
to fight with hands and stones. Moles gnawed at the rock; the tunnels reverberated with grinding
sound. A gap appeared, followed by a roaring metal snout. The walls broke wide apart; there was
a blast of anaesthetic gas, and the war was over.
The Tauptu climbed down across the broken rock, search-lights glowing from their heads. The
able-bodied among the Chitumih were pinioned and sent to the surface; the crushed and mangled
were killed where they lay.