"Norman Spinrad - Riding the Torch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

exaggerated sense of their own importance, D'mahl thought. And what
does that make them?
". . . three . . . two . . . one . . ."
Human beings.
D'mahl sat on a bench at the focus of a small amphitheater. Tiered
around him were two thousand and forty people wearing the archaic blue
military tunics dating back to the time when Ship's Pilot was a
paramilitary rank rather than an elective office. D'mahl found the
uniformity of dress stultifying and the overhead holo of the day sky of an
Earthlike planet banal and oppressive, but then he found most Pilots, with
their naive notion of the Trek's existential position, somewhat
simpleminded and more than a little pathetic.
Ryan Nakamura, a white-haired man who had been Chairman of the
Council of Pilots longer than anyone cared to remember, walked slowly
toward him, clapped him on the shoulder with both hands, and sat down
beside him. Nakamura smelled of some noxious perfume designed to sim
wisdom-odors of moldy parchment and decayed sweetness. As an artist,
D'mahl found the effect competent if painfully obvious; as a citizen, he
found it patronizing and offensive.
Nakamura leaned toward him, and as he did, the amphitheater
vanished and they sat cozily alone on an abstract surface entirely
surrounded by a firmament of tightly packed stars.
"Jofe, Scoutship Bela-37 has returned to the Trek and reported that a
solar system containing a potentially habitable planet is located within a
light-year and a half of our present position," Nakamura said solemnly.
D'mahl wanted to yawn in the old bore's face, but of course the
viewpoint player hunched him intently toward Nakamura instead as the
Chairman blatted on. "The Council has voted 1,839 to 201 to alter the
vector of the Trek toward this system, designated 997-Beta, pending the
report of the telltale."
D'mahl sat midway up in the amphitheater as Nakamura continued
formally from a podium on the floor below. "It is our earnest hope that our
long trek is at last nearing its successful completion, that in our own
lifetimes men will once more stand on the verdant hills of a living planet,
with a sky overhead and the smells of living things in our nostrils. We
conclude this bulletin with brief excerpts from the report of Haris
Bandoora, commander of Bela-37."
Behind the podium, Nakamura faded into Haris Bandoora. "Bela-37
was following a course thirty degrees from the forward vector of the Trek,"
Bandoora said tonelessly. "Torching at point nine . . ."
D'mahl stood on the bridge of Bela-37—a small round chamber rimmed
with impressive-looking gadgetry, domed in somewhat bluish plex to
compensate for the doppler shift, but otherwise visually open to the
terrifying glory of the deep void. However, one of the four voidsuckers on
the bridge was a woman who easily upstaged the stellar spectacle as far as
D'mahl was concerned. She wore briefs and slippers and was totally bald,
like the others, and her skull was tinted silver, but her preternaturally
conical breasts and shining, tightly muscled flesh made what ordinarily
would have been an ugly effect into an abstract paradigm of feminine
beauty. Whether the warmth he felt was his alone, or his reaction plus