"James Alan Gardner - League of Peoples 03 - Vigilant" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

unflinchingly enforced by races so far advanced beyond human intelligence that the directive might as well
be a fundamental law of the universe: NO DANGEROUS NON-SENTIENT CREATURE WILL
EVER BE ALLOWED TO MOVE FROM ITS HOME STAR SYSTEM TO ANOTHER SYSTEM.

"Dangerous non-sentient" means any creature ready to kill a sentient creature, or to let sentients die
through willful negligence. The law makes interstellar war an impossibility; the only conceivable wars are
civil ones, restricted to a single planet. Starships cannot carry lethal weapons—no laser-cannons on the
hull, no guns for personnel—because those are automatic statements of non-sentient disposition.
(Weapons for self-defense? Whom would you be defending against? The only beings allowed into
interstellar space are sentients. By definition, they aren't going to try to kill you.)

Intention counts: even if you are completely unarmed, if you travel through space with the objective of
killing someone when you reach your destination, you are inherently a dangerous non-sentient creature.
Therefore, you don'treach your destination—you simply die en route. No one knows how the League
can tell that you have murder in your heart—whether they read minds or see the future or have simply
achieved omniscience. (The League's senior races have had a billion-year evolutionary headstart on
Homo sapiens; to describe them as godlike is belittling.)

The inescapable truth is that no human has ever beaten the League; not in the twenty-fifth century, nor in
all the years of recorded history. Dangerous non-sentient creatures—murderers—have to consider
themselves grounded the moment they cease to respect sentient life... the moment they become
non-sentient.

Sometimes people wonder if non-sentient beings can ever become sentient again. By rehabilitation. By
repentance. By redemption. And if a killer has a true change of heart, will the League accept it? Or are
you simply condemned forever by the person you once were?

Always an interesting question...




THE SLACK DEATH
I want to tell you everything, everything all at once.

I don't want to be plod-patient, setting it down in sequence: first the plague, then the cave-in, then the
years of Other Business, when everything seemed like a burden to get out of the way before real life
could start. Everyone knows thisis real life, it's all real life, sixty seconds of real life every minute, no one
gets less.

But you cantake less. All the time you're swimming in the ocean of real life, it's so precious easy to keep
your eyes closed and just tread water. Even so, if you're lucky, you might be caught in a current, a
current that's carrying you toward something...

No, too simplistic. We'reall caught in currents, dozens of the buggers dragging us in different directions
sixty seconds every minute, and it's never as obvious as people want you to believe. You live through a
day, and at the end you grumble, "I didn'tdo anything"... but second by second youdid do things, you
occupied every second, just as you occupy every second of every day.