[Casher O'Neill] On the Gem Pla Cordwainer Smith

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.He nodded Casher O'Neill into a chair on the other side of himself.He commanded,'Dim the lights.'The room plunged into semi-darkness.Without being told, the people took their places immediately behind the three main seats and the underpeople perched or sat on benches and tables behind them.Very little was spoken.Casher O'Neill could sense that Pontoppidan was a well-run place.He began to wonder if the Hereditary Dictator had much real work left to do, if he could fuss that much over a single horse.Perhaps all he did was boss his niece and watch the robots load truckloads of gems into sacks while the underpeople weighed them, listed them and wrote out the bills for the customers.IIThere was no screen; this was a good machine.The planet Pontoppidan came into view, its airless brightness giving strong hints of the mineral riches which might be found.Here and there enormous domes, such as the one in which this palace was located, came into view.Genevieve's own voice, girlish, impulsive and yet didactic, rang out with the story of her planet.It was as though sr«! had prepared the picture not only for her own uncle, but foij off-world visitors as well.(By Joan, that's it!thought Cashejj O'Neill.If they don't raise much food here, outside of hydroponics, and don't have any real People Places, they howl to trade: that does mean visitors, and many, many of them.)!The story was interesting but the girl herself was m interesting.Her face shone in the shifting light which the images - a metre, perhaps a little more, from the floor-reflected across the room.Casher O'Neill thought that he had never before seen a woman who so peculiarly combined intelligence and charm.She was girl, girl, girl, all the way through; but she was also very smart and pleased with being smart.It betokened a happy life.He found himself glancing covertly at her.Once he caught her glancing, equally covertly, at him.The darkness of the scene enabled them both to pass it off as an accident without embarrassment.Her viewtape had come to the story of the dipsies, enormous canyons which lay like deep gashes on the surface of the planet.Some of the colour views were spectacular bteyond belief.Casher O'Neill, as the 'appointed one' of Mizzer, had had plenty of time to wander through the nonsalacious parts of his uncle's collections, and he had seen pictures of the most notable worlds.Never had he seen anything like this.One view showed a sunset against a six-kilometre cliff of a material which looked like solid emerald.The peculiar bright sunshine of Pontop-pidan's small, penetrating, lilac-hued sun ran like living water over the precipice of gems.Even the reduced image, one metre by one metre, was enough to make him catch his breath.The bottom of the dipsy had vapour emerging in curious cylindrical columns which seemed to erode as they reached two or three times the height of a man.The recorded voice of Genevieve was explaining that the very thin atmosphere of Pontoppidan would not be breathable for another 2,520 years, since the settlers did not wish to squander their resources on a luxury like breathing when the whole planet only had 60,000 inhabitants; they would rather go on with masks and use their wealth in other ways.After all, it was not as though they did not have their domed cities, some of them many kilometres in radius.Besides the usual hydroponics, they had even imported 7'2 hectares of garden soil, 5'5 centimetres deep, together with enough water to make the gardens rich and fruitful.They had bought worms, too, at the price of eight carats of diamond per living worm, in order to keep the soil of the gardens loose and living.Genevieve's 'transcribed voice rang out with pride as she listed these accomplishments of her people, but a note of sadness came in when she returned to the subject of the dipsies.'.and though we would like to live in them and develop their atmospheres, we dare not.There is too much escape of radioactivity.The geysers themselves may or may not be contaminated from one hour to the next.So we just look at them.Not one of them has ever been settled, except for the Hippy Dipsy, where the horse came from.Watch this next picture.'The camera sheered up, up, up from the surface of the planet.Where it had wandered among mountains of diamonds and valleys of tourmalines, it now took to the blue-black of near, inner space [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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