"David Weber - Honor Harrington - 02 - The Honor Of The Queen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)
He inhaled deeply and met Courvosier's eyes.
"I won't try to refute anything you've just said, Admiral. I accept it, and I give you my personal word that I'll work to resolve it to the very best of my ability. But I also have to tell you it won't be easy."
"I know it won't."
"Yes, but you may not fully understand why." Yanakov gestured out the window at the darkening mountains. The setting sun dyed the snowy peaks the color of blood, and the blue-green trees were black.
"This world isn't kind to its women," he said quietly. "When we arrived here, there were four women for every adult male, because the Church of Humanity has always practiced polygyny . . . and it was as well we did."
He paused and sipped at his brandy, then sighed.
"We've had almost a thousand years to adapt to our environment, and my tolerance for heavy metals like arsenic and cadmium is far higher than your own, but look at us. We're small and wiry, with bad teeth, fragile bones, and a life expectancy of barely seventy years. We monitor the toxicity of our farmland daily, we distill every drop of water we drink, and still we suffer massive levels of neural damage, mental retardation, and birth defects. Even the air we breathe is our enemy; our third most common cause of death is lung cancer-lung cancer, seventeen centuries after Lao Than perfected his vaccine! And we face all of that, Admiral, all those health hazards and consequences, despite nine hundred years-almost a millennium-of adaptation. Can you truly imagine what it was like for the first generation? Or the second?"
He shook his head sadly, staring down into his brandy.
"Our first generation averaged one live birth in three. Of the babies born living, half were too badly damaged to survive infancy, and our survival was so precarious there was no possible way to divert resources to keep them alive. So we practiced euthanasia, instead, and 'sent them home to God.' "
He looked up, his face wrung with pain.
"That haunts us still, and it hasn't been that many generations since the custom of euthanizing defectives, even those with minor, correctable flaws, stopped. I can show you the cemeteries, the rows and rows of children's names, the plaques with no names at all, only dates, but there are no graves. Even today there are none. The traditions of our founding die too hard for that, and the first generations had too desperate a need for soil which would support terrestrial food crops." He smiled, and some of the pain eased. "Our customs are different from yours, of course, but today our dead give life to gardens of remembrance, not potatoes and beans and corn. Someday I'll show you the Yanakov Garden. It's a very . . . peaceful place.
"But it wasn't that way for our founders, and the emotional cost to women who lost baby after baby, who saw child after child sicken and die, yet had no choice but to bear and bear and bear, even at the cost of their own lives, if the colony was to survive-" He shook his head again.
"It might have been different if we hadn't been such a patriarchal society, but our religion told us men were to care for and guide women, that women were weaker and less able to endure, and we couldn't protect them. We couldn't protect ourselves, but the price they paid was so much more terrible than ours, and it was we who had brought them here."
The Grayson leaned back and waved a hand vaguely before him. No lights had been turned on, and Courvosier heard the pain in his voice through the gathering dimness.
"We were religious zealots, Admiral Courvosier, or we wouldn't have been here. Some of us still are, though I suspect the fire has dimmed-or mellowed, perhaps-in most of us. But we were certainly zealots then, and some of the Founding Fathers blamed their women for what was happening, because, I think, it was so much easier to do that than to bleed for them. And, of course, there was their own pain when their sons and daughters died. It wasn't a pain they could admit, or they would simply have given in and died themselves, so they locked it deep inside, and it turned into anger-anger they couldn't direct at God, which left only one other place it could go."
"At their wives," Courvosier murmured.
"Exactly," Yanakov sighed. "Understand me, Admiral. The Founding Fathers weren't monsters, nor am I trying to excuse my people for being what they are. We're no less the product of our past than your own people are. This is the only culture, the only society, we've ever known, and we seldom question it. I pride myself on my knowledge of history, yet truth to tell, I never thought this deeply about it until I was forced up against the differences between us and you, and I suspect few Graysons ever really delve deep enough to understand how and why we became what we are. Is it different for Manticorans?"
"No. No, it's not."
"I thought not. But those early days were terrible ones for us. Even before Reverend Grayson's death, women were already becoming not wives but chattels. The mortality rate was high among men, too, and there'd been fewer of them to begin with, and biology played another trick on us. Our female births outnumber male by three to one; if we were to sustain a viable population, every potential father had to begin begetting children as soon as possible and spread his genes as widely as he could before Grayson killed him, so our households grew. And as they grew, family became everything and the patriarch's authority became absolute. It was a survival trait which tied in only too well with our religious beliefs. After a century, women weren't even people-not really. They were property. Bearers of children. The promise of a man's physical continuation in a world which offered him a life expectancy of less than forty years of backbreaking toil, and our efforts to create a godly society institutionalized that."
Yanakov fell silent again, and Courvosier studied his profile against the fading, bloody sunset. This was a side of Grayson he'd never even imagined, and he was ashamed. He'd condemned their parochialism and congratulated himself on his cosmopolitan tolerance, yet his view of them had been as two-dimensional as their view of him. He didn't need anyone to tell him Bernard Yanakov was an extraordinary representative of his society, that all too many Grayson men would never dream of questioning their God-given ascendancy over the mere females about them. But Yanakov was just as real as those others, and Courvosier suspected it was Yanakov who spoke for Grayson's soul.
God knew there were enough Manticorans not worth the pressure to blow them out the lock, but they weren't the real Manticore. People like Honor Harrington were the real Manticore. People who made the Kingdom better than it dreamed it could be, made it live up to its ideals whether it wanted to or not, because they believed in those ideals and made others believe with them. And perhaps, he thought, people like Bernard Yanakov were the real Grayson.
Yanakov straightened finally, then waved a hand over a rheostat. Lights came up, driving back the darkness, and he turned to face his guest.
"After the first three centuries, things had changed. We'd lost an enormous amount of our technology, of course. Reverend Grayson and his First Elders had planned for that to happen-that was the entire point of making the journey-and they'd deliberately left behind the teachers and text books, the essential machinery that might have supported the physical sciences. We were fortunate the Church hadn't regarded the life sciences with the same distrust, but even there we were desperately short of the specialists we needed. Unlike Manticore, no one even knew where we were, or cared, and because they didn't, no Warshawski sail ship called here until barely two hundred years ago. Our colony ship left Old Earth five hundred years before Manticore's founders, so our starting point was five centuries cruder than yours, and no one came to teach us the new technologies that might have saved us. The fact that we survived at all is the clearest possible evidence that there truly is a God, Admiral Courvosier, but we'd been smashed down to bedrock. We had only bits and pieces, and when we began to build upon them we found ourselves face to face with the worst danger of all: schism."
"The Faithful and the Moderates," Courvosier said quietly.
"But they did-at first, at least. The Moderates, on the other hand, believed our situation here had been our own Faith's Deluge, a disaster to make God's true Will clear at last. What He wanted from us was the development of a way of life in which technology was used as He had intended-not as Man's master, but as his servant.
"Even the Faithful accepted that at last, but the hostilities already existed, and the factions grew even further apart. Not over technology, now, but over what constituted godliness, and the Faithful went beyond conservatism. They became reactionary radicals, chopping and pruning at Church doctrine to suit their own prejudices. You think the way we treat our women is backward . . . have you ever heard of the Doctrine of the Second Fall?"
Courvosier shook his head, and Yanakov sighed.
"It came out of the Faithful's search for God's Will, Admiral. You know they regard the entire New Testament as heretical because the rise of technology on Old Earth 'proves' Christ couldn't have been the true Messiah?"
This time Courvosier nodded, and Yanakov's face was grim.
"Well, they went even further than that. According to their theology, the first Fall, that from Eden on Old Earth, had been the fault of Eve's sin, and we'd created a society here that made women property. The Moderates might interpret what had happened to us as our Deluge, might have believed-as we of Grayson believe today-that it was part of God's Test, but the Faithful believe God never intended us to face Grayson's environment. That He would have transformed it into a New Eden, had we not sinned after our arrival. And as the first sin was Eve's, so this sin, the cause of our Second Fall, was committed by Eve's daughters. It justified the way they treated their own wives and daughters, and they demanded that all of us accept that, just as they demanded we accept their dietary laws and stonings.
"The Moderates refused, of course, and the hatred between the factions grew worse and worse until, as you know, it ended in open civil war.
"That war was terrible, Admiral Courvosier. The Faithful were the minority, and their hardcore zealots were only a small percentage of their total number, but those zealots were completely ruthless. They knew God was on their side. Anything they did was done in His name, and anyone who opposed them must therefore be vile and evil, with no right to live. We were still far from having rebuilt an advanced tech base, but we could produce guns and tanks and napalm-and, of course, the Faithful built their doomsday weapon as a last resort. We didn't even know of its existence until Barbara Bancroft, the wife of their most fanatical leader, decided the Moderates had to know. She escaped to us-turned against all the Faithful believed-to warn us, but her courage had its cost in fresh tragedy as well."
Yanakov stared down into his brandy glass.
"Barbara Bancroft is-well, I suppose you could call her our 'token heroine.' Our planet owes her its very life. She's our Joan of Arc, our Lady of the Lake, with all the virtues we treasure in our women: love, caring, the willingness to risk her life to save her children's. But she's also an ideal, a figure out of myth whose courage and toughness are too much to expect from 'ordinary' women. We've forced her into the frame of our own prejudices, yet to the Faithful, the woman we call The Mother of Grayson is the very symbol of the Second Fall, the proof of all women's inherent corruption. They may have rejected the New Testament, but they retain their version of the Antichrist, and they call her The Harlot of Satan.
"But because of Barbara Bancroft, we were prepared when the Faithful threatened to destroy us all. We knew the only possible answer was to cast out the madmen, and that, Admiral-that was when the universe played its cruelest trick of all on Grayson, for there was a way we could do that."
He sighed and sank back in his chair.
"My own ancestor, Hugh Yanakov, commanded our colony ship, and he tried to hang onto at least a limited space capability, but the First Elders had smashed the cryo installations immediately after we planeted. It was their equivalent of burning their boats behind them, committing themselves and their descendants to their new home. I doubt they would have done it if they'd been more scientifically educated, but they weren't. And since the ship couldn't take us away, our desperate straits left us no choice but to cannibalize it.
"So we were here to live or die, and somehow, we'd lived. Yet by the time of the Civil War, we'd reached the point where we could once more build crude, chem-fueled sublight ships. They were far less advanced than the one which had brought us here, with no cryo capability, but they could make the round trip to Endicott in twelve or fifteen years. We'd even sent an expedition there and discovered what today is Masada.
"Masada has an axial inclination of over forty degrees, and its weather is incredibly severe compared to Grayson, but humans can eat its plants and animals. They can live without worrying about lead and mercury poisoning from simply breathing its dust. Most of our people would have given all they owned to move there, and they couldn't. We didn't have the capability to move that many people. But when the Civil War ended with a handful of fanatics threatening to blow up the entire planet, we could move them to Masada."
He laughed again, harshly and more mirthlessly even than before.
"Think about it, Admiral. We had to cast them out, and the only place to which we could banish them was infinitely better than where all the rest of us had to remain! There were barely fifty thousand of them, and under the peace settlement's terms, we equipped them as lavishly as we could and sent them off, and then the rest of us turned to making the best we could of Grayson."
"I think you've done quite well, all things considered," Courvosier said quietly.
"Oh, we have. In fact, I love my world. It does its best to kill me every single day, and someday it will succeed, but I love it. It's my home. Yet it also makes us what we are, because we did survive, and we did it without losing our faith. We still believe in God, still believe this is all part of a testing, purifying process. I suppose you think that's irrational?"
The question could have been caustic, but it was almost gentle.
"No," Courvosier said after a moment. "Not irrational. I'm not certain I could share your faith after all your people have been through, but, then, I suppose a Grayson might find my faith incomprehensible. We are what our lives-and God-have made us, Admiral Yanakov, and that's as true of Manticorans as Graysons."
"That's a very tolerant view," Yanakov said quietly. "One I'm quite confident a great many, perhaps most, of my people would find difficult to accept. For myself, I believe you're correct, yet it's still our Faith which dictates how we regard our own women. Oh, we've changed over the centuries-our ancestors didn't call themselves 'Moderates' for nothing!-but we remain what we are. Women are no longer property, and we've evolved elaborate codes of behavior to protect and cherish them, partly, I suspect, in reaction against the Faithful. I know many men abuse their privileges-and their wives and daughters-but the man who publicly insults a Grayson woman will probably be lynched on the spot, if he's lucky, and they're infinitely better treated than Masadan women. Yet they're still legally and religiously inferior. Despite The Mother of Grayson, we tell ourselves it's because they're weaker, because they bear too many other burdens to be forced to vote, to own property . . . to serve in the military." He met Courvosier's eyes with a slight, strained smile. "And that's why your Captain Harrington frightens us so. She terrifies us, because she's a woman and, deep down inside, most of us know Haven's lied about what happened in Basilisk. Can you imagine what a threat that is to us?"
"Not completely, no. I can see some of the implications, of course, but my culture is too different to see them all."
"Then understand this much, Admiral, please. If Captain Harrington is as outstanding an officer as you believe-as I believe-she invalidates all our concepts of womanhood. She means we're wrong, that our religion is wrong. She means we've spent nine centuries being wrong. The idea that we may have been in error isn't quite as devastating to us as you may think-after all, we've spent those same nine centuries accepting that our Founding Fathers were wrong, or at least not completely correct. I think we can admit our error, in time. Not easily, not without dealing with our current equivalent of the Faithful, but I have to believe we can do it.
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