"John Varley - Truth, Justice and the Politically Correct Socialist Path" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

Truth, Justice and the Politically Correct Socialist Path
John Varley
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Ethnocentricity is a basic feet of the human condition, We tend to make judgements of right and wrong
based on our cultural upbringing rather than any universal concept of goodness.

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Of all the scientists on the planet Xenon, only Mar-Lon was convinced that the world was headed for
destruction. They laughed when Mar-Lon made his prediction before the Council of Eminent Scientists,
Xenon’s governing body.

“It’s just a series of Xenonquakes,” they said

Stung, Mar-Lon retired to his mountaintop laboratory with his wife and their infant son, Kla-Lon.

“Our doom is sealed,” said Mar-Lon. “But our son shall survive the destruction of Xenon. I have
constructed a spaceship with just enough room to carry him away. Quickly, there is no time to lose.”

They sealed the tiny payload into the rocket, stood back, and launched Kla-Lon into space. No sooner
had the rocket cleared the atmosphere than Xenon was blown to bits, just as Mar-Lon had predicted.
So much for eminent scientists.

The rocket sped through the galaxies at pretty close to the speed of light for a time impossible to
measure, due to relativistic effects. Finally it sizzled through the atmosphere of a green, watery, fertile
planet, third from the sun, known to its inhabitants as Zemlya.

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The rocket plowed into the ground just west of the Urals, about two hundred kilometers south of
Sverdlovsk, in the Rossijskaja Sovetskaja Federativnaja Socialisticeskaja Respublika, or the
Russian Federated S.S.R. of the glorious Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It came to rest, smoking, in
a wheat field of the Long Live The Heroes Of The October Revolution Collective Farm #56, not far from
where Marina and Pavel Kentarovsky were munching on raw beets as they lugubriously surveyed the flat
left rear tire of a twelve-year-old Spirit of Lenin tractor.

The Spirit of Lenin was an exact copy of a 1934 International Harvester except for cast-iron axles and,
as Pavel often remarked, “the soul of a pig.”

The Kentarovskys hurried over to the space capsule. A hatch popped open. Pavel leaned forward to
take a look.

“Phew,” said Pavel, straightening quickly. “This looks like a job for you.”

Dutifully, Marina reached in and removed the infant. She stripped off his diaper, which had gone a
thousand light-years without a change.

“A malchik,” she said, which meant it was a boy. “We’ll raise him as if he were our own child.”