"Gordon Dickson & Harry Harrision - Lifeship Lp Ebook Txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

The Captain turned away. As if this action were a signal, a number of voices called out from among the arbites—all of which the Captain ignored. The voices died away as the tall form returned to the control area and from a compartment there took out a rectangular object wrapped in golden cloth, and held it ceremoniously at arm's length for one still moment before putting it down on a horizontal surface of the control panel. The Engineer moved to stand alongside, as the Captain put one finger on the surface of the cloth. Both then bent their heads in silence above it, motionless.

"What is it?" asked the voice of Groce, behind Giles. "What's that they've got?"

"Be quiet," said Giles, sharply. "It's their sacred book—the Albenareth astrogational starbook holding their navigation tables and information."

Groce fell silent. But the determined voice of Mara, ignoring his order, took up the questioning.

"Honor, sir," she said in Giles' ear. "Will you tell us what's happening, please?"

Giles shook his head, and put his finger to his-lips, refusing to answer until the two aliens had raised their heads and begun to unwrap the golden cloth from about their book. Revealed, it was like something out of the human past—as it was indeed out of the Albenareth past—a thing of animal-skin binding and pages of a paper made from vegetable pulp.

"All right," said Giles at last, turning around to find the arbite girl right behind him. He spoke to her and to all the rest as well. "Spacegoing and religion are one and the same thing to the Albenareth. Everything they do to navigate this lifeship or any other space vessel is a holy and ritual act. You should all have been briefed about that when you were sent to board the spaceliner, back on Earth."

"They told us that much, sir," said Mara. "But they didn't explain how it worked, or why."

Giles looked at her with a touch of irritation. It was not his duty to be tutor to a handful of arbites- Then he relented. It would probably be better if they were informed. They would all be living in close quarters under harsh conditions for some days, or even weeks. They would adapt better to their privations if they understood.

"All right. Listen, then, all of you," he said, speaking to them all. "The Albenareth think of space as if it were heaven. To them, the planets and all inhabited solid bodies are the abode of the Imperfect. An Albenareth gains Perfection by going into space. The more trips and the more time spent away from planetfall, the more Perfection gained. You noticed the Captain identified himself as *Rayumung' and the Engineer as 'Munghanf.' Those aren't names. They're ranks, like stair-steps on the climb to a status of Perfection. They've got nothing to do with the individual's duties aboard a space vessel, except that the more responsible duties go to those of higher rank, generally."

"But what do the ranks mean, then?" It was Mara again. Giles gave her a brief smile.

"The ranks stand for the number of trips they've made into space, and the time spent in space. There's more to it than that. The rougher the duty they pull, the greater the count of the time involved toward a higher rank. For example, this lifeship duty is going to gain a lot of points for this Captain and Engineer—not because they're saving our lives, though, but because to save us they had to pass up the chance to die in the spaceliner when it burned. You see, the last and greatest goal of a spacegoing Albenareth is to die, finally, in space."

"Then they won't care!" It was an abrupt cry, almost a wail, from someone else in the crowd, a dark-haired arbite girl as young as Mara, but without the marks of character on her face. "If anything goes wrong they'll just let us die, so they can die!"

"Certainly not!" said Giles sharply. "Get that idea out of your heads right now. Death is the greatest achievement possible to an Albenareth, but only after one of them has done his best to fulfill his duties in space for as many years as possible. It's only when there's no place else to turn that the Albenareth let death take them."

"But what if these two decide suddenly there's no place to turn, or something like that? They'll just go and die—" "Stop that sort of talk!" snapped Giles. Suddenly he was tired of explaining, ashamed and disgusted for them all—for their immediate complaints, their open and unashamed display of fears, their lack of decent self-restraint and self-control, and their pasty faces which had obviously spent most of their lives indoors away from the sunlight. All that was lower-class about them rose in his throat to choke him.

"Be quiet, all of you," he said. "Get busy now and pick out the cot you want, beside whoever you want for a neighbor while we're in this lifeship. The one you pick is the one you'll have to stick with for the rest of the time we're aboard. I'm not going to have arguments and fights over changing places. After I've looked the lifeship over I'll get your names and tell you how you're to act until we reach planetfall. Now, get busyi"

They all turned away immediately, without hesitation— except, perhaps, the girl Mara. It seemed to Giles that she paused for fust a second before moving to obey, and this puzzled him. It was possible she was one of those unfortunate arbites who had been unnaturally pampered, petted, and brought up by some Adelman family to feel almost as if she was one of the upper classes. Arbites hand-raised—so to speak—in such a manner were always maladjusted in latter life. They had not acquired proper habits in their early, formative years and as adults were never able to adapt to social discipline in normal fashion. If that was the case, it was a pity. She had so much else to recommend her.

He turned away from the arbites, dismissing them from his mind, and began a closer examination of the lifeship. It bore little or no similarity to the luxuriously comfortable and highly automated private spacecraft he, like most of the Adelbom, had often piloted among the inner worlds of the Solar System.

"Sir..." It was a whisper behind him. "Do you know—are they females?"

Giles turned and saw that the whisperer was Groce. The man's face was white and sweating. Giles glanced back for a moment at the two aliens. The Albenareth were almost indistinguishable as far as sex went, and both served indiscriminately at duties aboard spacecraft—and everywhere else on the alien worlds, for that matter. But the extra length of the Captain's torso was a clue and the particular erectness of that officer's stance. She was a female. The Engineer was a male.

Giles looked back at the sick paleness of fear on Grace's face. Among the arbites there were a thousand horror stories about the behavior of Albenareth females under certain glandular conditions, not merely toward their own "males" but—arbite superstitions had it—toward any other intelligent male creature. The basis of all the tales was the fact that the Albenareth "female"—the two sexes of the aliens did not really correspond equivalently to human male and female—when in estrus, required from the "male" not merely the specific and minute fertilizing organism he had produced for the egg she carried, but the total genital area of "his" body. This she took complete into her egg sac, where it became connected to her own bloodstream, part of her own body, and a source of nourishment for the embryo during its period of intrauterine growth.

The acquisition of the "male's" genital area, entirely normal by Albenareth standards, in human terms represented a rather massive mutilation of the "male" by the "female." It effectively desexed the male until his genital area should grow back, which took about two years, roughly, by Earth time—long enough for the single Albenareth offspring to be bom and learn to travel with comfort upright on its two legs. Human xenobiologists had theorized that in prehistoric times the evolutionary principle behind the desexing of the Albenareth "male" had been to ensure his protection and assistance to the particular "female" carrying his progeny, during the vulnerable period before she and it were fully able to take care of themselves.

But such sophisticated understanding of alien instincts, thought Giles, would be beyond the comprehension of arbites whispering among themselves in dark corners- Groce, evidently, had the human lower-class horror and fear of what the alien "female" might do to him, specifically, under certain conditions of glandular excitation. And probably every other arbite male aboard would react the same way if any of them suspected the Captain's sex.

"They're officers!" Giles snapped. "Do they look like females to you?"

Relief flooded back into Groce's face.