"Thomas M. Disch - The Genocides" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

in Anderson the secret sympathy for the powers of destruction had been
metamorphosed by the agency of time into a stern, humorless opposition to
those same powers, a magnificent, raw willfulness as ruthless in its way as
the enemy it opposed. Nothing could more surely elicit that ruthlessness than
seeing this hectic flush in the cheeks of his youngest and (it was commonly
supposed) dearest.
"I'll tell Father," Buddy said. "You go on after Studs. Where's everyone
else?"
"Clay's getting together all the men he can find, and Lady and Blossom
and the women are going out to scare the cows away from the corn if they go
that way." Jimmie shouted the information over his shoulder as he trotted
along the broad trail blazed by the herd.
He was a good boy, Jimmie Lee, and bright as a button. In the old world,
Buddy was sure, he would have become another prodigal. It was always the
bright one who rebelled. Now he'd be lucky to survive. They all would.


The morning's work accomplished, Anderson looked across his field and
saw that it was good. At harvest the ears would not be large and juicy, as in
the old times. They had left the bags of hybridized seed moldering in the
abandoned storerooms of old Tassel. Hybrids gave the best yield, but they were
sterile. Agriculture could no longer afford such fripperies. The variety he
was using now was much closer hereditarily to the ancient Indian maize, the
Aztec zea mays. His whole strategy against the usurping Plants was based on
corn. Corn had become the life of his people: it was the bread they ate and
the meat as well. In the summer Studs and his twelve wives might get along on
the tender green roughage the children scraped from the sides of the Plants or
they might graze among the seedlings along the lake shore, but when winter
came corn sustained the cattle just as it sustained the villagers.
Corn took care of itself almost as well as it took care of the others.
It did not need a plowman to turn over the soil, only a sharp stick to scratch
it and hands to drop in the four seeds and the lump of excrement that would be
their first food. Nothing gave the yield per acre that corn did; nothing but
rice gave as much nourishment per ounce. Land was at a premium now. The Plants
exerted a constant pressure on the cornfields. Every day, the smaller children
had to go out and hunt between the rows of corn for the lime-green shoots,
which could grow in a week's time to the size of saplings, and in a month
would be big as grown maples.
_Damn them!_ he thought. _May God damn them!_ But this curse lost much
of its forcefulness from the conviction that God had sent them in the first
place. Let others talk about Outer Space as much as they liked: Anderson knew
that the same angry and jealous God who had once before visited a flood upon
an earth that was corrupt had created the Plants and sown them. He never
argued about it. When God could be so persuasive, why should Anderson raise
his voice? It had been seven years that spring since the first seedlings of
the Plant had been seen. They had come of a sudden in April of '72, a billion
spores, invisible to all but the most powerful microscopes, sown broadcast
over the entire planet by an equally invisible sower (and where was the
microscope or telescope or radar screen that will make God visible?), and
within days every inch of ground, farmland and desert, jungle and tundra, was