"James Alan Gardner - League of Peoples 07 - Radiant" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

feasts and games. But the gods refused to let Gotama waste his life in superficialities. Through trickery,
they showed him the ugly truths his father had concealed. When Gotama finally learned that the world
had a dark side, he was devastated—affected so deeply that the experience set him on the road to
enlightenment. Prince Gotama became a Buddha:our Buddha, the most recent in a long line of
Awakened teachers who've pointed the way to wisdom.

But normal Technocracy citizens aren't ready for Buddhahood. They're not emotionally equipped to
leave the pleasure palace. When confronted with anything that suggests their own mortality, they don't get
stronger—they crumple.

They've never learned to live with untimely death. How could they? Old age has been alleviated by
YouthBoost treatments. Disease can almost always be cured. As for fatal accidents, they're virtually
nonexistent thanks to the League of Peoples. The League, headed by aliens billions of years more
advanced thanHomo sapiens, regards willful negligence as equivalent to deliberate homicide; and the
League never hesitates to punish those responsible. If, for example, a corporate executive approves the
design for a vehicle, or a body implant, or a nanopesticide that hasn't been sufficiently tested for
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safety—sufficient to satisfy the League, not just human inspectors—the negligent executive will be
exterminated the next time he or she enters interstellar space. It doesn't matter if the productis safe; failing
to test it thoroughly shows callous indifference toward the lives of others. Therefore, the League
considers the culprit a "dangerous nonsentient creature"... and the League instantly kills any dangerous
nonsentients attempting to leave their home star systems. There's no escape, no appeal, and no sentence
but summary execution.

One has to admit it's an elegant way to keep lesser beings in check. The League doesn't directly govern
humankind or the other alien species at our level of development. The League has no courts, no
bureaucracies; it doesn't tell us what we should or shouldn't do. It simply kills anyone who isn't sufficiently
considerate of sentient life. The onus falls on us to intuit what the League will accept. We receive no hints
or guidelines—we just get killed when we don't do our best.

Which means every commercial product in the Technocracy is as safe as imperfect humans can make it.
Also that human communities are built with the finest possible protections against fires, floods, etc. And
that police forces are provided with all the facilities they need in order to apprehend criminals who might
otherwise jeopardize innocent victims.

So, like Prince Gotama, people of the Technocracy are shielded from life's cruel grind-wheel. The only
exceptions are the few men and women whose duties take them outside the pleasure palace, to places
that haven't been "sanitized."

Men and women who land on unexplored planets.

Men and women called Explorers.

The navy's Explorer Corps takes in freaks from every corner of the Technocracy. People who can die
and not be missed. People whose messy demise won't paralyze ship operations, or make normal-looking
personnel think, "Someday I too will suffer and die."