Have you ever thought about what fiction is? Probably, such a question may seem surprising: and so everything is clear. Every person throughout his life has to repeatedly create the works he needs for specific purposes - statements, autobiographies, dictations - using not gypsum or clay, not musical notes, not paints, but just a word. At the same time, almost every person will be very surprised if he is told that he thereby created a work of fiction, which is very different from visual art, music and sculpture making. However, everyone understands that a student's essay or dictation is fundamentally different from novels, short stories, news that are created by professional writers. In the works of professionals there is the most important difference - excogitation. But, oddly enough, in a school literature course, you don’t realize the full power of fiction. So using our website in your free time discover fiction for yourself. West Of The Sun by Edgar Pangborn (manga ereader txt) 📖
- Author: Edgar Pangborn
Book online «West Of The Sun by Edgar Pangborn (manga ereader txt) 📖». Author Edgar Pangborn
And Paul wondered: Should I tell Kajana what Doc said when it was all over? No, not now—not till I understand it myself. ("I consider myself to blame." "What do you mean?" "Remember when Arek noticed he was gone? I saw him slip away ten minutes before she spoke. He looked at me, too. I think I may have known what he meant to do: I said nothing. Earth is a very distant place, Paul. The Federation is building no more interstellar ships, for a while—for a while." "But you—" "I may therefore be to blame. I look within and am confused, as so often. But all the same, here in our world I have helped to establish a few practical certainties." During that murmured[206] interchange by the temple, Dorothy had been quite silent, as if she needed no question and answer, and Miniaan had ended it, saying, "Let's go back, and tell the others that something has ended.")
Kajana's old mind was roving after other matters, to him more important than Spearman or the beautiful lost ship from Earth. "Teddy," he said, "do you know, Paul, when the two silver boats came slipping down out of the sky Teddy only glanced at them once, and came running to carry me outdoors so that I could see them too. It was her first thought. Her father and mother in her, and what a new self too...!" Kajana was having pain, from the old hip-joint injury that would never heal. "That transcription, Paul—it's quite verbatim, even to a little hemming and hawing."
"Good." Paul studied the wizened red face, regretful that his painter's power could never record what was really Kajana—too much that must escape, even if the portrait were faithful to the small patient hands, the groove in the left fingers caused by years of effort with makeshift writing materials. Sears—and Paul could think it now without too much distress—Sears could have understood Kajana better. "Can I get you anything?"
"No, thank you, Paul. I'm very well tonight." But some other thought stirred in him, and Paul lingered, knowing what it was: a need for a particular reassurance, Kajana's only outward concession to his frailty. "Paul, what do you really think? When the time comes, will it be something like a sleep?"
"I believe so, Kajana. But not soon. We need you."
The mild face showed gratitude, then calm; it glanced beyond him. "Why, Abara—you should be snoring."
Abara followed his comfortable potbelly into the room; his fluty voice was indignant: "I never snore." He sank cross-legged by the bed, rocking lightly with a foot in each hand.
"I've heard you, old man."
"Lizard-fur!" said Abara. "Hear yourself snoring, of course."
Paul stretched. "You gentlemen settle down to a good soothing quarrel. I'll take off." Abara's left eyelid lowered and lifted gravely. "Good night."[207] "Good night," said the little voices. Leaving the room, Paul heard Abara murmur, "Do you remember...."
Paul carried a taper from the permanent fire in the common room to relight the lamp in his and Dorothy's bedroom. It was late indeed, near to the time of the rising of the red moon, seen only the night before from the jungle west of Vestoia—what had been Vestoia. Here in the long room there was still a friendly disorder from the impromptu banquet of the evening. Because of the disturbance when Spearman's flight was discovered and preoccupation with the illness of the newcomers, the common room had received only a few housekeeping flurries. Mats were still scattered in the center of the floor; earthen wine cups stood about. Carrying the taper, Paul saw by his foot a graded series of round faces drawn on the earth with a twig. Helen was apt to do that when most of her mind was elsewhere: the faces were made of neat circles, even nose and mouth. Subject to a pinch on the bottom from her half-sister, Helen called them teddies. Paul smiled sleepily and stepped around.
Kajana took pride in the sharp printlike quality of his writing; under lamplight, the brown ink shifted into gold. Kajana had not recorded the casual beginning of the banquet: the idea had evidently come to him after some remark of Kamon's. Paul could not remember it clearly, but the old giantess had been roused to it by a thing the rather sad-faced, brown-haired girl Sally Marino had mentioned: the prospect of war on the planet Earth. Kajana had taken down what followed as direct dialogue; riffling through the gray pages, Paul noticed that Kajana had inserted no comment of his own at all. The phonetic shorthand, Paul knew, was Kajana's invention—ideal for his own use, but he had not been able to teach it even to Nisana. Too intricate, she said, needing the hyperacute ear which was a gift Kajana could not share.
SLADE: There seems never to be a single cause of war, only a group of causes coming to a particular focus in time. Our world, madam—
WRIGHT: Just Kamon. Somehow we've never formed the habit of courtesy titles, Captain. Names, nicknames, and a few titles of function—as for instance, if Elis were conducting[208] one of our meetings, we'd address him as Governor.
SLADE: Oh. Pleasant, I should think. Our world, Kamon, is still divided in two parts. An ideological division. There is the Asian Empire of Jenga. Let me show you—the map—
DUNIN: Here. I grabbed it. And what a map! If only we could make such things!
DOROTHY: In time, sugar. Takes mighty complex machinery to make such a map.
SLADE: One of the things that must come on the next trip from Earth. Well—here is the Asian Empire. You can see the vastness of it, one land mass, almost all of a continent—
MUKERJI: Except my country.
NORA STERN: Well, naturally, Jimmy—
MUKERJI: I tend to be sensitive on the point since we joined the Federation somewhat belatedly.
SLADE: That's the Asian Empire. And there they believe, and have long believed, that individual man is nothing—an ant in a colony—the state is everything, a sole reason for existence. The state—
WRIGHT: Which exists only in the minds of individual men.
SLADE: Ye-es.... For them the state takes the place of God, of reason, of ethics, of—Oh, it's be-all and end-all, so far as an individualist like myself can understand their doctrine. A hundred years ago this empire was two great states; they had the same doctrine then but called it by a less honest name, communism, derived from certain naïve social theories of about a hundred years earlier—
SPEARMAN: NaĂŻve?
SLADE: Before I went in for engineering, sir, I majored in history at McGill. With the help of a great deal of coffee, I even read Das Kapital. It is not logical even from its own dogmatic premises. Incidentally I think it can still be found in secondhand bookstores.
SPEARMAN: As a matter of fact, when I left Earth, it was quite readily available in up-to-date editions from the Collectivist Press.
SLADE: Oh. Yes, I dare say it was.... Well, Kamon,[209] about a hundred years ago those two Asian states, still paying lip service to the—debatable doctrine of communism (satisfactory, Mr. Spearman?)—attacked each other in a long war, making use of recently discovered atomic weapons as well as man-made pestilence and other devices. It was not actually a doctrinal war, but simply a power struggle between two tyrannies. It was hideous, incredibly destructive, and the only saving thing about it was that it prevented them from visiting the same disaster on the rest of the world. Neither side won, of course; a few decades later a new dictator—a little one-eyed zealot from Mongolia—inherited the desolation and built on the ruins a new monolithic state, which still exists.
AREK: But what actually was this theory—this communism?
SLADE: Oh, the theory. Originally an appeal to the dispossessed. In the nineteenth century and earlier there were masses of poor, widespread suffering and injustice, too much economic and political power in the hands of a few, who abused their power with stupidity and cruelty. Marx and other theorists imagined, or said they imagined, that the situation could be remedied by reversal—give power to the dispossessed (the proletariat, as they called them) and injustice would right itself. Why they imagined that the proletariat was any more fitted to rule than its oppressors—why they supposed it would not abuse power quite as viciously—they never bothered to explain. Naturally the realists among them weren't concerned with any Utopian outcome: they simply saw the doctrine as a means to personal power for themselves and used it accordingly. The first important one of these was a furious little man named Lenin. He may have believed his own theories for a while—there seems to have been some short-lived experimentation with the contradictions of actual communism when he first won power in Russia—but absolute power corrupts absolutely, as somebody said. The foundations of an old-new despotism were well established before he died—and was unofficially deified and kept in a glass case for the consolation of the atheist faithful. Matter of fact, Arek, a good many things in Earth history would make a cat laugh.... The actual cure for the ugly situation that existed turned out to be[210] a gradual economic leveling combined with the (very slow and difficult) growth of representative government—so that there would be no swollen fortunes, no severe poverty, and no heavy concentrations of unchecked political power. But that was most undramatic procedure: it needed the work of centuries. No bloody revolution could ever achieve such an end, nor could any other evil means ever bring it any nearer. In the Federation we begin to have—an approximation of it. The Asian Empire is merely despotism, old and stale, old as the Pharaohs, committed to the policy of violence and carrying the burden of slavery under modern names: the natural product of fanatic doctrine after the power-hungry have taken it over and made use of it.
SPEARMAN: Jenga's empire is not collectivism. It is a perversion of it.
ANN: If you'll excuse me—
DOROTHY: Honey, of course! I think you got up too soon. The boys are in bed. Come on—let me tuck you in and fuss at you....
STERN: She's been ill?
WRIGHT: Yes. For a long time. But now I think she—
SPEARMAN: What—
AREK: Captain, tell us about the other part of Earth, the part you come from.
SLADE: Canada? Oh, you mean the Federation itself. It's very great, miss—I mean, Arek. Let's have the map again, my dear. All of North America—here—parts of South America, the United States of Europe, Union of Islam, Japan, India, parts of Africa outside of Islam—then over here there's Australia and New Zealand, and here's the Republic of Oceania. Almost all the rest of the world, you see. Here's Federal City. Find it? Follow my finger east of Winnipeg—lake country, and very lovely: I was born near there. The city was planned and built new in 1985; seems long ago, isn't really. And then, Arek, there are some small countries which have preferred to keep their national unity outside of the Federation instead of inside it, although they're affiliated with us and there aren't any barriers to travel and other intercourse. A somewhat technical distinction, since local sovereignties are well enough preserved within the Federation.[211]
WRIGHT: Not entirely a technicality. At the time we left Earth, there were some tendencies in the Federation that could lead to overcentralization, even with the recognition of limited powers. And too much emphasis on the admitted glories of machine civilization. I think it's an excellent thing that some parts of the world should be a little insulated from the enthusiasms of material progress. The Federation itself will be the better for it.
SLADE: Perhaps. I think I know what you mean, Doctor. I was always a small-government man, myself. Still, under the threat of Jenga—
STERN: I can't see it as much of a threat.
SALLY MARINO: I don't know....
STERN: The empire will break down sooner or later, of its own rigidity.
SLADE: But while we wait for that, the Federation has to be strong, in the military as well as other senses.
MUKERJI: If we do just wait for it.
STERN: Preventive war is an absurdity, Jimmy.
MUKERJI: Yes, but—
STERN: Gradualist methods. The Federation can afford to wait. The same gradualist methods
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