"slide39" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John - Gaea 03 - Demon 1.1.html)

---

THIRTEEN

Rocky didn’t like police duty. He wasn’t alone in this; none of the Titanides cared for it. But the Captain had promised them most solemnly that this was the way to get the Child back, so he patrolled diligently.
It had been an interesting time.
On the first day he had participated in a raid on a Boss’s headquarters that had left three hundred dead, including one Titanide who had taken an arrow through the head. Rocky himself had received an arrow wound, not serious but painful, in the left hindquarter. He was still favoring that leg.
That had not been the worst raid. One Boss had held out for almost a hundred revs. The Titanides besieged the building and built fires all around it to make the interior as unpleasant as possible. At the end, the Boss’s troops had thrown the man’s head out the front door and surrendered. Three Titanides had died in that action.
Altogether, Rocky knew of a dozen Titanide deaths. The human deaths were in the thousands, but most of them had come in the first forty revs, with another brief spurt when the disarmament policy went into effect. Now all the gangs were dispersed. Humans eyed Rocky with suspicion and fear, but no one had taken any action against him in quite a while.
So he strolled his beat, his sheathed sword tapping against his left foreleg, and looked for trouble, hoping not to find any. From time to time he passed a human of the kind Cirocco called crazy, but who Rocky thought of as having worms in the head. All humans were crazy, it was well-known, but with most of them it was a glorious thing. A minority were something else. The English word for it was psychopath, but the word held no flavor for Rocky. They were the ones he knew should be killed on the spot, as the only question about them was not if they would have to be killed, but when.
But the Captain had said no one was to be killed unless caught “red-handed,” to use her phrase, in a capital offense.
Actually, by now that was fine with Rocky. He had seen enough killing. Let the humans kill their own mistakes.
Rocky preferred to think of more pleasant things. He smiled, startling a human woman who, after a brief hesitation, smiled back. Rocky tipped his ridiculous hat in her direction, then scratched under his shirt. Clothes bothered the hell out of him. Sometimes even the Captain had to be humored in her craziness. Wear the uniforms, she said, so Rocky did, and scratched all the time.
He heard the vague, dark thoughts of Tambura in his mind, and smiled again.
Tambura was his daughter. She wasn’t very old yet. Valiha had kept the semi-fertilized egg for a while, waiting for a good time to approach the Wizard. Cirocco had given her permission, and a decarev before the invasion of Bellinzona Serpent had quickened the egg in Rocky’s womb. And there she nestled in her third decarev of life. She was just a microscopic smudge of dividing cells now, with a brain the size of a walnut—a brain that had once been Valiha’s egg. Within the crystalline egg structure were molecular lattices organized quite differently from those of the human brain. The ability to sing was already programmed in. Many things Valiha had learned in her life were stored in there, too, including all of the English language. There were memories of Valiha’s life, and of all her foremothers stretching back to the foremother of the Madrigal Chord, Violone. To a lesser extent, the forefathers and hindfathers were represented, in the only form of immortality that mattered to a Titanide.
Rocky tried not to be chauvinistic, but it seemed a more compassionate system than the mad brawl of human genetics. Humans evolved through horror and maladaption, through the cold mercilessness of chance, through endless defectives who, through no fault of their own, came squalling into the world with no chance of survival. At the best of times a human was a series of compromises between dominant and recessive genes. And the only programming in their infant brains, it seemed, was left over from ravenous animals who had lived in trees before Gaea began to spin.
This all explained, to Rocky, the cancer that was Bellinzona.
Titanides got a hard, basic, and practical education from their foremothers while they were still eggs, long before there was any awareness. The machine-like structures in the developing egg filtered the frontal semen for information and traits that would be useful, ran test simulations, rejected those that could not work, and then hardened into a potential. The egg did not take DNA helter-skelter, the good with the bad, but tore it apart, evaluated it, and used the bits that would be sensible.
If the embryonic Titanide got all things practical and much historical from the foremother, it got everything else from the hindmother. Rocky wondered if he wasn’t prejudiced—being hind-pregnant himself—but it seemed to him this was the most important part.
Tambura was alive and aware and in communication with Rocky at all times. It was not verbal—though Tambura had words—nor was it musical—though Tambura spent much time singing the strange songs of the womb. As her outer brain grew into something quite similar to a human brain, but with a cybernetic egg at its core, Rocky filled the developing layers with his love, his song . . . his soul.
In many ways, for a Titanide, pregnancy was the best part of life.
Rocky broke off his communication with his daughter when he smelled violence. There was a change in the way the air felt. He had felt that change often lately.
Looking ahead along the causeway he saw the source. He felt tired, and wondered how human cops had handled their jobs. The situations were so predictable, and yet each one was dangerously different.
He took his hand-weapon out of his pouch and checked the magazine. It was a totally different type of weapon from the one he had carried, reluctantly, that day so many revs ago when he had come to Bellinzona to operate on his Captain. This was a twenty-second century weapon, and had been designed and ordered with Gaean conditions in mind. Most of the principles were the same, but the materials were different. Rocky’s gun contained no metal. It looked like a long, narrow cardboard roll attached to a grip. There were short fins around the middle of the carbon-ceramic barrel; these glowed bright red for a second when the gun was fired.
The grip—which was too small for Rocky’s hand—contained forty tiny rockets tipped with lead. The projectile was eased through the barrel at a relative snail’s pace, then accelerated fiercely, cracking the sound barrier within one meter of the muzzle.
It was a marvelous weapon. Rocky hated it. From the way it felt in his pouch to the ugly results of its terrible accuracy, it was an evil thing through and through. He hoped the day would come when all such things could be erased from the land of Gaea.
In the meantime, he approached the shouting people.
A man had taken a woman by the upper arm and was pulling her along behind him as she shouted obscenities at him. He returned them, insult for insult. A crying child was following the two. A small group had formed to watch, but not to interfere. Rocky had seen the same events a dozen times, it seemed.
As he approached, the man—who must not have seen Rocky—finally stopped and hit the woman with his fist. He hit her again, and a third time  . . .  and then both of them noticed there was a Titanide standing very close with a gun pointed at them.
“Release her at once,” Rocky said.
“Look, I didn‘t mean—”
Rocky tapped him lightly on the head in the place he had been taught would produce the fewest side-effects later, and the man crumpled. The woman, as Rocky had half-expected, quickly knelt beside the fallen man and began to cry as she held his head.
“Don’t take him in!” she sobbed. “It was my fault.”
“Stand up,” Rocky ordered her. When she did not, he pulled her up. She wasn’t wearing enough to conceal a weapon. He reached behind him, into his saddlebag, and came up with a short steel knife of the type already labeled “nutcutters” by the Bellinzonans.
“You are advised to carry this at all times,” he told her.
“I won’t! I don’t need a knife.”
“As you please.” Rocky returned it to its place. “Today you’re okay. In another hectorev you will be in violation of the law if you do not go armed. The penalty will be one kilorev in a labor camp for the first offense. Check the community bulletin boards for specifics, as ignorance is not acceptable as an excuse. If you cannot read, an interpreter will—”
She came at him, fists flying awkwardly. He had expected it. He wanted witnesses, and he wanted her to hit him, mostly because he didn’t like the idea of leaving the crying child with her. He let her land a few blows, then made her unconscious.
“Assault on a police officer,” he informed the crowd, and no one had any objection. The child cried louder. He was about eight, Rocky thought, but he could have been wrong. Ages of human children were tough for Titanides.
“Is this woman your mother?” he asked the child, who was too upset to even hear the question. Rocky looked at the crowd again.
“Does anyone know if this is the child’s mother?”
One man stepped forward.
“Yeah, he’s hers, or that’s what she says.”
It was possible that she was his natural mother. Rocky suspected she was, because she didn’t seem to him the sort of woman who would adopt one of Bellinzona’s endless foundlings.
“Is there anyone who is willing to take responsibility for him in this community?” That was a laugh, Rocky thought. Community. Still, it was the prescribed procedure, and Cirocco maintained that communities would develop. “If not, I will take him to the community creche, where he will be cared for until his mother returns from the labor camp.”
Surprisingly, a man stepped forward.
“I’ll take him,” he said.
“Sir,” Rocky began. “Your responsibilities in this situation are—”
“I know what they are. I read the goddamn bulletin boards. Very carefully. You just run along with those two, and I’ll see this fellow has a place to sleep.”
There was some anger in the man’s words, some defiance. Humans will take care of their own, was the implication. But there was a grudging respect. Either way was fine with Rocky. He had the authority to make field decisions of this nature, and judged the boy would be all right in the man’s care.
So he bound the prisoners and slung them over his back and headed for the jail. On the way there Tambura intruded into his mind again.
*Mother, what hurts?* Tambura’s question was both much simpler and much more complex than the English translation. “Mother,” for instance, was a gross oversimplification for the Titanide noun Tambura used. The question itself was more in the form of a wave of emotion.
*Events. Interpersonal and interspecies relations. Life.*
*Mother, do I have to be born?*
*You will love life, my child. Most of the time.*

---

---

THIRTEEN

Rocky didn’t like police duty. He wasn’t alone in this; none of the Titanides cared for it. But the Captain had promised them most solemnly that this was the way to get the Child back, so he patrolled diligently.
It had been an interesting time.
On the first day he had participated in a raid on a Boss’s headquarters that had left three hundred dead, including one Titanide who had taken an arrow through the head. Rocky himself had received an arrow wound, not serious but painful, in the left hindquarter. He was still favoring that leg.
That had not been the worst raid. One Boss had held out for almost a hundred revs. The Titanides besieged the building and built fires all around it to make the interior as unpleasant as possible. At the end, the Boss’s troops had thrown the man’s head out the front door and surrendered. Three Titanides had died in that action.
Altogether, Rocky knew of a dozen Titanide deaths. The human deaths were in the thousands, but most of them had come in the first forty revs, with another brief spurt when the disarmament policy went into effect. Now all the gangs were dispersed. Humans eyed Rocky with suspicion and fear, but no one had taken any action against him in quite a while.
So he strolled his beat, his sheathed sword tapping against his left foreleg, and looked for trouble, hoping not to find any. From time to time he passed a human of the kind Cirocco called crazy, but who Rocky thought of as having worms in the head. All humans were crazy, it was well-known, but with most of them it was a glorious thing. A minority were something else. The English word for it was psychopath, but the word held no flavor for Rocky. They were the ones he knew should be killed on the spot, as the only question about them was not if they would have to be killed, but when.
But the Captain had said no one was to be killed unless caught “red-handed,” to use her phrase, in a capital offense.
Actually, by now that was fine with Rocky. He had seen enough killing. Let the humans kill their own mistakes.
Rocky preferred to think of more pleasant things. He smiled, startling a human woman who, after a brief hesitation, smiled back. Rocky tipped his ridiculous hat in her direction, then scratched under his shirt. Clothes bothered the hell out of him. Sometimes even the Captain had to be humored in her craziness. Wear the uniforms, she said, so Rocky did, and scratched all the time.
He heard the vague, dark thoughts of Tambura in his mind, and smiled again.
Tambura was his daughter. She wasn’t very old yet. Valiha had kept the semi-fertilized egg for a while, waiting for a good time to approach the Wizard. Cirocco had given her permission, and a decarev before the invasion of Bellinzona Serpent had quickened the egg in Rocky’s womb. And there she nestled in her third decarev of life. She was just a microscopic smudge of dividing cells now, with a brain the size of a walnut—a brain that had once been Valiha’s egg. Within the crystalline egg structure were molecular lattices organized quite differently from those of the human brain. The ability to sing was already programmed in. Many things Valiha had learned in her life were stored in there, too, including all of the English language. There were memories of Valiha’s life, and of all her foremothers stretching back to the foremother of the Madrigal Chord, Violone. To a lesser extent, the forefathers and hindfathers were represented, in the only form of immortality that mattered to a Titanide.
Rocky tried not to be chauvinistic, but it seemed a more compassionate system than the mad brawl of human genetics. Humans evolved through horror and maladaption, through the cold mercilessness of chance, through endless defectives who, through no fault of their own, came squalling into the world with no chance of survival. At the best of times a human was a series of compromises between dominant and recessive genes. And the only programming in their infant brains, it seemed, was left over from ravenous animals who had lived in trees before Gaea began to spin.
This all explained, to Rocky, the cancer that was Bellinzona.
Titanides got a hard, basic, and practical education from their foremothers while they were still eggs, long before there was any awareness. The machine-like structures in the developing egg filtered the frontal semen for information and traits that would be useful, ran test simulations, rejected those that could not work, and then hardened into a potential. The egg did not take DNA helter-skelter, the good with the bad, but tore it apart, evaluated it, and used the bits that would be sensible.
If the embryonic Titanide got all things practical and much historical from the foremother, it got everything else from the hindmother. Rocky wondered if he wasn’t prejudiced—being hind-pregnant himself—but it seemed to him this was the most important part.
Tambura was alive and aware and in communication with Rocky at all times. It was not verbal—though Tambura had words—nor was it musical—though Tambura spent much time singing the strange songs of the womb. As her outer brain grew into something quite similar to a human brain, but with a cybernetic egg at its core, Rocky filled the developing layers with his love, his song . . . his soul.
In many ways, for a Titanide, pregnancy was the best part of life.
Rocky broke off his communication with his daughter when he smelled violence. There was a change in the way the air felt. He had felt that change often lately.
Looking ahead along the causeway he saw the source. He felt tired, and wondered how human cops had handled their jobs. The situations were so predictable, and yet each one was dangerously different.
He took his hand-weapon out of his pouch and checked the magazine. It was a totally different type of weapon from the one he had carried, reluctantly, that day so many revs ago when he had come to Bellinzona to operate on his Captain. This was a twenty-second century weapon, and had been designed and ordered with Gaean conditions in mind. Most of the principles were the same, but the materials were different. Rocky’s gun contained no metal. It looked like a long, narrow cardboard roll attached to a grip. There were short fins around the middle of the carbon-ceramic barrel; these glowed bright red for a second when the gun was fired.
The grip—which was too small for Rocky’s hand—contained forty tiny rockets tipped with lead. The projectile was eased through the barrel at a relative snail’s pace, then accelerated fiercely, cracking the sound barrier within one meter of the muzzle.
It was a marvelous weapon. Rocky hated it. From the way it felt in his pouch to the ugly results of its terrible accuracy, it was an evil thing through and through. He hoped the day would come when all such things could be erased from the land of Gaea.
In the meantime, he approached the shouting people.
A man had taken a woman by the upper arm and was pulling her along behind him as she shouted obscenities at him. He returned them, insult for insult. A crying child was following the two. A small group had formed to watch, but not to interfere. Rocky had seen the same events a dozen times, it seemed.
As he approached, the man—who must not have seen Rocky—finally stopped and hit the woman with his fist. He hit her again, and a third time  . . .  and then both of them noticed there was a Titanide standing very close with a gun pointed at them.
“Release her at once,” Rocky said.
“Look, I didn‘t mean—”
Rocky tapped him lightly on the head in the place he had been taught would produce the fewest side-effects later, and the man crumpled. The woman, as Rocky had half-expected, quickly knelt beside the fallen man and began to cry as she held his head.
“Don’t take him in!” she sobbed. “It was my fault.”
“Stand up,” Rocky ordered her. When she did not, he pulled her up. She wasn’t wearing enough to conceal a weapon. He reached behind him, into his saddlebag, and came up with a short steel knife of the type already labeled “nutcutters” by the Bellinzonans.
“You are advised to carry this at all times,” he told her.
“I won’t! I don’t need a knife.”
“As you please.” Rocky returned it to its place. “Today you’re okay. In another hectorev you will be in violation of the law if you do not go armed. The penalty will be one kilorev in a labor camp for the first offense. Check the community bulletin boards for specifics, as ignorance is not acceptable as an excuse. If you cannot read, an interpreter will—”
She came at him, fists flying awkwardly. He had expected it. He wanted witnesses, and he wanted her to hit him, mostly because he didn’t like the idea of leaving the crying child with her. He let her land a few blows, then made her unconscious.
“Assault on a police officer,” he informed the crowd, and no one had any objection. The child cried louder. He was about eight, Rocky thought, but he could have been wrong. Ages of human children were tough for Titanides.
“Is this woman your mother?” he asked the child, who was too upset to even hear the question. Rocky looked at the crowd again.
“Does anyone know if this is the child’s mother?”
One man stepped forward.
“Yeah, he’s hers, or that’s what she says.”
It was possible that she was his natural mother. Rocky suspected she was, because she didn’t seem to him the sort of woman who would adopt one of Bellinzona’s endless foundlings.
“Is there anyone who is willing to take responsibility for him in this community?” That was a laugh, Rocky thought. Community. Still, it was the prescribed procedure, and Cirocco maintained that communities would develop. “If not, I will take him to the community creche, where he will be cared for until his mother returns from the labor camp.”
Surprisingly, a man stepped forward.
“I’ll take him,” he said.
“Sir,” Rocky began. “Your responsibilities in this situation are—”
“I know what they are. I read the goddamn bulletin boards. Very carefully. You just run along with those two, and I’ll see this fellow has a place to sleep.”
There was some anger in the man’s words, some defiance. Humans will take care of their own, was the implication. But there was a grudging respect. Either way was fine with Rocky. He had the authority to make field decisions of this nature, and judged the boy would be all right in the man’s care.
So he bound the prisoners and slung them over his back and headed for the jail. On the way there Tambura intruded into his mind again.
*Mother, what hurts?* Tambura’s question was both much simpler and much more complex than the English translation. “Mother,” for instance, was a gross oversimplification for the Titanide noun Tambura used. The question itself was more in the form of a wave of emotion.
*Events. Interpersonal and interspecies relations. Life.*
*Mother, do I have to be born?*
*You will love life, my child. Most of the time.*

---