H_O_M_O_ R_A_T_I_O_N_A_L_I_S_(SCIENCE FICTION)Chris MYRSKI, Sofia, Bulgaria ?1979 ... 2023— — — — —
— — — — — CONTENTS Foreword The recruit It sounds logical The discovery of professor Kolossov The stimulator of Peter MacGreeves The clover The marriage proposal Right of choice Homo Rationalis The tunnel The cannibals Biological partner The order The sixth day Homo Retarded Nights and days of a young robo-mother What else if not afterlife? Afterword — — — — — P A R T T W O — excerpts!IT SOUNDS LOGICAL — But, father, don't talk like this! You know quite good that will be necessary to leave the home, as also everybody in Prague — said Hèlena Bèlchekova, 42-year-old blonde, to whom nobody gave more than 35 and she hoped to look the same for another 10 years. Dressed in her usual gown with multicoloured irises, big, maybe, like a home cat, because it went well with her blue eyes, she moved around in the kitchen to prepare something for lunch. Today she had a day off and wanted to cook something alone, because was tired by the recipes of the kitchen robot. On the sofa in the corner sat her father in law, Tomash Belchek, who has already approaching 70 and has recently retired, so that the whole day was reading newspapers and watching stereo, if one does not count the evenings, when he went to the local pub to meet with friends, or went to visits. Next to him at the table was finishing her breakfast the 14 year old Monika, daughter of Helena, who should have been at this time at the school, yet still lingered in the kitchen. Tomash mumbled discontentedly: — All, all, but without me! — and later asked: — What date is today? — March the 12th, check in your newspaper if you don't believe me! — remarked Helena a little cool, because in the last month each time when she was at home began the same conversation. — There remain 20 days counting today, if that is what you mean. ... August 1998 — — — — — THE DISCOVERY OF PROFESSOR KOLOSSOV (From personal archive of Michael Fred, who commanded the first scientific expedition on Sigma-5 in 2183, about his meeting with professor Victor Kolossov) Sit down, Mike, feel yourself like in your spaceship. Will you not try my cocktail of blueberries, factor K, and juice of the tree of Hrolov? It was sent to me by a friend from Second Colony. It has wonderful effect on the subconsciousness and forming of ideas, is served cooled. You want, yes? Excellent. What factor, ah? But I beg you, Mike, "K" comes not from Kolossov, but from the good old coffee. Dear friend, do not forget your cradle — the Earth! Please. So-o. ...What's new in relation with Sigma-5? They don't give up, ah? Hmm, ... bad, I'll tell you. I don't bless the colonists. It would have become a paradise, that's what they say? Yeah, but only for the people. And who has asked the pneumothrids? So what of this, that they don't understand the languages of the Earth, we understand them, don't we? Hence they could have taken a reasonable decision, if they only wanted to. Do you know, comes to me before two days one Skvortsov from the department for space news of the Eurovision, or maybe some other stereovision — I have not paid enough attention. Maybe he is a known reporter, but what of it? So, he enters, places his bones in the shown to him chair, turns the television cameras on his helmet to me, as if intends to impale me on his horns, and begins: — Mister professor, you are the hero of the day, what am I saying — of the year — and our milliards of spectators burn with impatience to follow the course of your judgements and to perceive how you have come to the brilliant thought, which opens space for work of tens of thousands of colonists on Sigma-5. How you have established that the pneumothrids are not intelligent beings? — and shoves his hand with the microphone ring under my nose. I moved away his hand, he touched something on the ring, and gave up to keep the hand on the table, at a meter distance, while I looked at him with annoyance and uttered: — Mr. Chizhikov, ... a-ah, sorry, Skvortsov*. I think that you have got wrong information, because I have opened no space for work but on the contrary, I am against whatever form of colonization of Sigma-5, because this will violate the ecological balance on the planet. [ * This is a pun because skvorets in Russian is the bird starling, while chizhik is a siskin. ] Well, and how is the cocktail, Mike? You ponder now, ah? Good, all right. Because you know that I don't like much these pompous reporters - handbooks. They have stuffed in themselves all sorts of knowledge bases and imagine that they are the navel of the Earth. Yet the knowledge is not only collected facts and classifications which everybody, somehow or other, can extract from the computers, but first of all knowledge about the relations between the processes, or, generally speaking, the ability to make conclusions, i.e. to think. And the reporters of today, how they have connected themselves to the sets and talk to you as if they are walking books of Guinness, while their ability to think is on the level of some parrot, who always when hears a bit more of noise around himself begins to cry, either "brravo", or "marrmalade", or some cursing — depending on the taste of his owner. And the more I don't like them when they are under 30 and have barely finished their first tertiary education. And this "starling" turned to be exactly such person. ... 1979 ? — — — — — |
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