"Cordwainer Smith - A Planet Named Shayol" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Cordwainer)

With this he felt his lips thicken and his mind go slack. He was wide awake, but he did not feel like doing anything. In that beautiful place, among all these companionable and attractive people, he sat and smiled.
B’dikkat was sterilising his knives.

Mercer wondered how long the super-condamine had lasted him. He endured the ministrations of the dromozoa without screams or movement. The agonies of nerves and itching of skin were phenomena which happened somewhere near him, but meant nothing. He watched his own body with remote, casual interest. The Lady Da and the hand-covered woman stayed near him. After a long time the half-man dragged himself over to the group with his powerful arms. Having arrived he blinked sleepily and friendlily at them, and lapsed back into the restful stupor from which he had emerged. Mercer saw the sun rise on occasion, closed his eyes briefly, and opened them to see stars shining. Time had no meaning. The dromozoa fed him in their mysterious way; the drug cancelled out his needs for cycles of the body.
At last he noticed a return of the inwardness of pain.
The pains themselves had not changed; he had.
He knew all the events which could take place on Shayol. He remembered them well from his happy period. Formerly he had noticed them – now he felt them.
He tried to ask the Lady Da how long they had had the drug, and how much longer they would have to wait before they had it again. She smiled at him with benign, remote happiness; apparently her many torsos, stretched out along the ground, had a greater capacity for retaining the drug than did his body. She meant him well, but was in no condition for articulate speech.
The half-man lay on the ground, arteries pulsating prettily behind the half-transparent film which protected his abdominal cavity.
Mercer squeezed the man’s shoulder.
The half-man woke, recognised Mercer and gave him a healthily sleepy grin.
“‘A good morrow to you, my boy.’ That’s out of a play. Did you ever see a play?”
“You mean a game with cards?”
“No,” said the half-man, “a sort of eye-machine with real people doing the figures.”
“I never saw that,” said Mercer, “but I –”
“But you want to ask me when B’dikkat is going to come back with the needle.”
“Yes,” said Mercer, a little ashamed of his obviousness.
“Soon,” said the half-man. “That’s why I think of plays. We all know what is going to happen. We all know when it is going to happen. We all know what the dummies will do” – he gestured at the hummocks in which the decorticated men were cradled – “and we all know what the new people will ask. But we never know how long a scene is going to take.”
“What’s a ‘scene’?” asked Mercer. “Is that the name for the needle?”
The half-man laughed with something close to real humour. “No, no, no. You’ve got the lovelies on the brain. A scene is just a part of a play. I mean we know the order in which things happen, but we have no clocks and nobody cares enough to count days or to make calendars and there’s not much climate here, so none of us know how long anything takes. The pain seems short and the pleasure seems long. I’m inclined to think that they are about two Earth-weeks each.”
Mercer did not know what an ‘Earth-week’ was, since he had not been a well-read man before his conviction, but he got nothing more from the half-man at that time. The half-man received a dromozootic implant, turned red in the face, shouted senselessly at Mercer, “Take it out, you fool! Take it out of me!”
When Mercer looked on helplessly, the half-man twisted over on his side, his pink dusty back turned to Mercer, and wept hoarsely and quietly to himself.
Mercer himself could not tell how long it was before B’dikkat came back. It might have been several days. It might have been several months.
Once again B’dikkat moved among them like a father; once again they clustered like children. This time B’dikkat smiled pleasantly at the little head which had grown out of Mercer’s thigh – a sleeping child’s head, covered with light hair on top and with dainty eyebrows over the resting eyes. Mercer got the blissful needle.
When B’dikkat but the head from Mercer’s thigh, he felt the knife grinding against the cartilage which held the head to his own body. He saw the child-face grimace as the head was cut; he felt the far, cool flash of unimportant pain, as B’dikkat dabbed the wound with a corrosive antiseptic which stopped all bleeding immediately.
The next time it was two legs growing from his chest.
Then there had been another head beside his own.
Or was that after the torso and legs, waist to toe-tips, of the little girl which had grown from his side?
He forgot the order.
He did not count time.
Lady Da smiled at him often, but there was no love in this place. She had lost the extra torsos. In between teratologies, she was a pretty and shapely woman; but the nicest thing about their relationship was her whisper to him, repeated some thousands of times, repeated with smiles and hope, “People never live forever.”
She found this immensely comforting, even though Mercer did not make much sense out of it.
Thus events occurred, and victims changed in appearance, and new ones arrived. Sometimes B’dikkat took the new ones, resting in the everlasting sleep of their burned-out brains, in a ground-truck to be added to other herds. The bodies in the truck threshed and bawled without human speech when the dromozoa struck them.
Finally, Mercer did manage to follow B’dikkat to the door of the cabin. He had to fight the bliss of super-condamine to do it. Only the memory of previous hurt, bewilderment and perplexity made him sure that if he did not ask B’dikkat when he, Mercer, was happy, the answer would no longer be available when he needed it. Fighting pleasure itself, he begged B’dikkat to check the records and to tell him how long he had been there.
B’dikkat grudgingly agreed, but he did not come out of the doorway. He spoke through the public address box built into the cabin, and his gigantic voice roared out over the empty plain, so that the pink herd of talking people stirred gently in their happiness and wondered what their friend B’dikkat might be wanting to tell them. When he said it, they thought it exceedingly profound, though none of them understood it, since it was simply the amount of time that Mercer had been on Shayol:
“Standard years – eighty-four years, seven months, three days, two hours, eleven and one half minutes. Good luck, fellow.”
Mercer turned away.
The secret little corner of his mind, which stayed sane through happiness and pain, made him wonder about B’dikkat. What persuaded the cow-man to remain on Shayol? What kept him happy without super-condamine? Was B’dikkat a crazy slave to his own duty or was he a man who had hopes of going back to his own planet some day, surrounded by a family of little cow-people resembling himself? Mercer, despite his happiness, wept a little at the strange fate of B’dikkat. His own fate he accepted.
He remembered the last time he had eaten – actual eggs from an actual pan. The dromozoa kept him alive, but he did not know how they did it.
He staggered back to the group. The Lady Da, naked in the dusty plain, waved a hospitable hand and showed that there was a place for him to sit beside her. There were unclaimed square miles of seating space around them, but he appreciated the kindliness of her gesture none the less.








IV