Joan D. Vinge - To Bell the Cat

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2024-11-24 0 0 43.65KB 19 页 5.9玖币

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To Bell the Cat by Joan D. Vinge

Another squeal of animal pain reached them from the bubble tent twenty meters

away. Juah-u Corouda jerked involuntarily as he tossed the carved gaming

pieces from the cup, spoiling his throw. "Hell, a triad.... Damn that noise;

it's like fingernails on metal."

"Orr doesn't know the meaning of 'surrender.'" Albe Hyacin-Soong caught up the

cup. "It must be driving him crazy that he can't figure out how those scaly

little rats survive all that radioactivity. How they ever evolved in the

first place - "

"He doesn't know the meaning of the word 'mercy.' " Xena Soong - Hyacin

frowned at her husband, her hands clasping her elbows. "Why doesn't he

anesthetize them?"

"Come on, Xena," Corouda said. "They're just animals. They don't feel pain

like we do."

"And what are any of us, Juah-u, but animals trying to play God?"

"I just want to play squamish," Albe muttered.

Corouda smiled faintly, looking away from Xena toward the edge of the camp. A

few complaints, hers among them, had forced Orr to move his lab tent away from

the rest. Corouda was just as glad. The noises annoyed him, but he didn't

take them personally. Research was necessary; Xena - any scientist - should

be able to accept that. But the bleeding hearts are always with us. No

matter how comfortable a society became, no matter how fair, no matter how

nearly perfect, there was always someone who wanted flas to pick at. Some

people were never satisfied; he was glad he wasn't one of them. And glad he

wasn't married to one of them. But then, Albe always liked a good argument.

"Next you'll be telling me that he doesn't feel anything either!" Xena

pointed.

"Keep your voice down, Xena. He'll hear you. He's right over there. And

don't pull down straw men; he's got nothing to do with this. He's Piper

Alvarian Jary; he's supposed to suffer."

"He's been brainwiped. That's like punishing an amnesiac; he's not the same

man - "

"I don't want to get into that again," Albe said, unconvincingly.

Corouda shook his head, pushed the blond curls back under his peaked cap and

moved further into the shade. They sat cross - legged on the soft, gray -

brown earth with the studied primitivism all wardens affected. He turned his

head slightly to look at Piper Alvarian Jary, sitting on a rock in the sun;

alone as usual, and as usual within summoning range of Hoban Orr, his master.

Piper Alvarian Jary, who for six years - six years! Was it only six? - had

been serving a sentence at Simeu Biomedical Research Institute, being punished

in kind for the greatness of his sin.

Not that he looked like a monster now, as he sat toying endlessly with a pile

of stones. He wore a plain, pale coverall sealed shut to the neck in spite of

the heat; dark hair fell forward into his eyes above a nondescript sunburned

face. He could have been anyone's menial assistant, ill at ease in this group

of ecological experts on an unexplored world. He could have been anyone -

Corouda looked away, remembering the scars that the sealed suit probably

covered. But he was Piper Alvarian Jary, who had supported the dictator Naron

- who had bloodied his hands in one of the most brutal regimes in mankind's

long history of inhumanity to man. It had surprised Corouda that Jary was

still young. But a lifetime spent as a Catspaw for Simeu Institute would age

a man fast. Maybe that's why he's sitting in the sun; maybe he wants to fry

his brains out.

" - that's why I wanted to become a warden, Albe!" Xena's insistent voice

pulled his attention back. "So that we wouldn't have to be a part of things

like this ... so that I wouldn't have to sit here beating my head against a

stone wall about the injustice and the indifference of this society - "

Albe reached out distractingly and tucked a strand of her bound - up hair

behind her ear. "But you've got to admit this is a remarkable discovery we've

made here. After all, a natural reactor - a concentration of uranium ore so

rich that it's fissioning. The only comparable thing we know of happened on

Terra a billion years before anybody was around to care." He waved his hand at

the cave mouth 200 meters away. "And right in that soggy cave over there is a

live one, and animals survive in it! To find out how they could have adapted

to that much radiation - isn't it important for us to find that out?"

"Of course it is." Xena looked pained. "Don't patronize me, Albe. I know

that as well as you do. And you know that's not what I'm talking about."

"Yes, I know it isn't...." He sighed in surrender. "This whole expedition

will be clearing out soon; they've got most of the data they want already.

And then the six of us can get down to work and forget we ever saw any of

them; we'll have a whole new world all to ourselves."

"Until they start shipping in the damned tourists - "

"Hey, come on," Corouda said, too loudly. "Come on. What're we sitting here

for? Roll them bones."

Albe laughed, and shook the cup. He scattered the carved shapes and let them

group in the dirt. "Hah, Two-square."

Corouda grunted. "I know you cheat; if I could just figure out how. Xena - "

She turned back from gazing at Piper Alvarian Jary, her face tight.

"Xena, if it makes you feel any better, Jary doesn't feel anything. Only in

his hands, maybe his face a little."

She looked at him blankly. "What?"

"Jary told me himself; Orr killed his sense of feeling when he first got him,

so that he wouldn't have to suffer needlessly from the experiments."

Her mouth came open.

"Is that right?" Albe pushed the sweatband back on his tanned, balding

forehead. "Remember last week, he backed into the campfire.... I didn't know

you'd talked to him, Juah-u. What's he like?"

"I don't know. Who knows what somebody like that is really like? A while back

he came and offered to check a collection of potentially edible flora for

me...." And Jary had returned the next day with the samples, looking tired and

a little shaky, to tell him exactly what was and wasn't edible, and to what

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