"Ursula K. LeGuin - The Word for World is Forest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

There was a lot to be done today, since he'd decided, that last minute before getting up, to fly
down to Central and see the new women for himself. They wouldn't last long, 212 among over two
thousand men, and like the first batch probably most of them were Colony Brides, and only twenty
or thirty had come as Recreation Staff, but those babies were real good greedy girls and he
intended to be first in line with at least one of them this time. He grinned on the left, the
right cheek remaining stiff to the whining razor.
The old creechie was moseying round taking an hour to bring his breakfast from the cookhouse.
"Hurry-up-quick!" Davidson yelled, and Ben pushed his boneless saunter into a walk. Ben was about
a meter high and his back fur was more white man green; he was old, and dumb even for a creechie,
but Davidson knew how to handle them; he could tame any of them, if it was worm the effort. It
wasn't, though. Get enough humans here, build machines and robots, make farms and cities, and
nobody would need the creechies any more. And a good thing too. For this world, New Tahiti, was
literally made for men. Cleaned up and cleaned out, the dark forests cut down for open fields of


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grain, the primeval murk and savagery and ignorance wiped out, it would be a paradise, a real
Eden. A better world than worn-out Earth. And it would be his world. For that's
what Don Davidson was, way down deep inside him: a world-tamer. He wasn't a boastful man, but he
knew his own size. It just happened to be the way he was made. He knew what he wanted, and how to
get it. And he always got it.
Breakfast landed warm in his belly. His good mood wasn't spoiled even by the sight of Kees Van
Slen coming towards him, fat, white, and worried, his eyes sticking out like blue golf-balls.
"Don," Kees said without greeting, "the loggers have been hunting red deer in the Strips again.
There are eighteen pair of antlers in the back room of the Lounge."
"Nobody ever stopped poachers from poaching, Kees."
"You can stop them. That's why we live under martial law, that's why the Army runs this colony. To
keep the laws."
A frontal attack from Fatty Bigdome! It was almost funny. "All right, "Davidson said reasonably,
"I could stop 'em. But look, it's the men I'm looking after; that's my job, like you said. And
it's the men mat count. Not the animals. If a little extra-legal hunting helps the men get through
this godforsaken life, men I intend to blink. They've got to have some recreation."
"They have games, sports, hobbies, films, teletapes of every major sporting event of the past
century, liquor, marijuana, bailies, and a fresh batch of women at Central, for those unsatisfied
by the Army's rather unimaginative arrangements
for hygienic homosexuality. They are spoiled rotten, your frontier heroes, and they don't need to
exterminate a rare native species 'for recreation.' If you don't act, I must record a major
infraction of Ecological Protocols in my report to Captain Godde."
"You can do mat if you see fit, Kees," said Davidson, who never lost his temper. It was sort of
pathetic the way a euro like Kees got all red in the face when he lost control of his emotions. '
"That's your job, after all. I won't hold it against you; they can do the arguing at Central and
decide who's right. See, you want to keep mis place just like it is, actually, Kees. Like one big
National Forest. To look at, to study. Great, you're a spesh. But see, we're just ordinary joes
getting the work done. Earth needs wood, needs it bad. We find wood on New Tahiti. So—we're
loggers. See, where we differ is that with you Earth doesn't come first, actually. With me it
does."
Kees looked at him sideways out of those blue golf-ball eyes. "Does it? You want to make this
world into Earth's image, eh? A desert of cement?"