"Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 03 - Soldier Ask Not" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

But, if you still are one of those, like my uncle Mathias Olyn, who think us
utterly bypassed, then I direct you to the Exotic-supported Enclave at St.
Louis, where forty-two years ago, an Earthman named Mark Torre, a man of great
vision, first began the building of what a hundred years from now will be The
Final Encyclopedia. Sixty years from now will see it too massive and
complicated and delicate to endure Earth's surface. You will start to find it
then in orbit about the Mother Planet. A hundred years from now and it will—
but no one knows for sure what it will do. Mark Torre's theory is that it
SOLDIER, ASK NOT •
will show us the back of our heads—some hidden part of the basic Earth human
soul and being that those of the younger worlds have lost, or are not able to
know.
But see for yourself. Go there now, to the St. Louis Enclave, and join one of
the tours that take you through the chambers and research rooms of the
Encyclopedia Project; and finally into the mighty Index Room at their very
center, where the vast, curving walls of that chamber are already beginning to
be charged with leads to the knowledge of the centuries. When the whole
expanse of that great sphere's interior is finally charged, a hundred years
from now, connections will be made between bits of knowledge that never have
been connected, that never could have been connected, by a human mind before.
And in this final knowledge we will see—what?
The back of our heads?
But as I say, never mind that now. Simply visit the Index Room—that is all I
ask you to do. Visit it, with the rest of the tour. Stand in the center of it,
and do as the guide tells you.
—Listen.
Listen. Stand silent and strain your ears. Listen— you will hear nothing. And
then finally the guide will break the reaching, almost unendurable silence,
and tell you why he asked you to listen.
Only one man or woman in millions ever hears anything. Only one in millions—of
those born here on Earth.
But none—no one—of all those born on the younger worlds who has ever come here
to listen has ever heard a thing.
It still proves nothing, you think? Then you think
• Gordon R. Dickson
wrong, my friend. For I have been one of those who heard—what there was to
hear—and the hearing changed my life, as witness what I have done, arming me
with self-knowledge of power with which I later turned in fury to plan the
destruction of the peoples of two Friendly worlds.
So do not laugh if I compare my wrath to the wrath of Achilles, bitter and
apart among the boats of his Myrmidons, before the walls of Troy. For there
are other likenesses between us. Tarn Olyn is my name and my ancestry is more
Irish than otherwise; but it was on the Peloponnesus of Greece that I, like
Achilles, grew to be what I became.
In the very shadow of the ruins of the Parthenon, white over the city of
Athens, our souls were darkened by the uncle who should have set them free to
grow in the sun. My soul—and that of my younger sister, Eileen.
CHAPTER 2
It was her idea—my sister Eileen 's—that we visit the Final Encyclopedia that
day, using my new travel pass as a worker in Communications. Ordinarily,