Терри Гудкайнд — Закон девяток

Law of Nines

  “Первым, что привлекло его внимание был пиратский флаг, развевающийся на крыше грузовика, перевозившего водопроводные трубы. ...

&  — Мне кажется, зеркала наблюдают за мной.
    — Зеркала имеют свойство так делать.

&  — Что за экстракт ты готовишь? Ты должен знать, что пытаешься сделать.
    — Пытаться и делать — это две разные вещи.

&  — человек должен быть готов к худшему, но брать от жизни все, что может.

&  — Это твой день рождения, Алекс. Ты можешь купить себе достойный подарок. Да такой, какой никто из нас не смог бы тебе предложить.
    — Я никогда ничего особо и не хотел. У меня всегда было все необходимое, именно то, в чем я нуждался больше всего.
    — Что-то вроде моего кофейника, — пробормотал Бен. — Никогда не хотел чего-то большего.

&  — Не благодари за совет, который услышал. Пока не воспользуешься им, это всего лишь слова.

&  — Неприятности найдут тебя.

&  Power. In the end it’s nothing more complicated than that.

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&  “There are always people like Radell Cain who are ready to take advantage of public resentment. He played on people’s emotions by blaming everything on those who were still productive and prosperous, saying that they were uncaring and insensitive. People swooned at Cain’s simplistic, populist notions. He made what was really nothing more than simple greed sound somehow morally righteous. He made taking what others had worked to earn sound like justice. People ate it up.
    “In the middle of unrest and difficult times, Cain won people over with promises of change–a new vision, a new direction. He made change sound like a miracle solution to all our problems. People mindlessly embraced the notion of change.”
    “I guess people love hearing that nothing is their fault,” Alex said, “that other people are to blame for their troubles.”
    Jax nodded. “For a lot of people it beats hard work and personal responsibility.”

&  “Well, imagine life here without technology. Imagine life without the technology that heats your buildings, helps grow food in abundance, makes your lights glow. What would your lives be like without phones, trucks, medicines and cures, without the means to supply the people in your cities with goods and services?
    “Imagine all the people in cities deprived of every kind of technology, technology that they use every day to survive. Imagine everyone suddenly having to find a way to grow their own food, to preserve it, to store it safely.”
    “People are pretty ingenious,” Alex said with a shrug. “I’m sure it would be hard but I think they would cope.”
    “Cope? Think of the reality of your world, tomorrow, suddenly stripped of your technology–no phones, no computer devices, no way to find out anything. Think it through, Alex.
    “Without your technology the fabric of civilization itself would come apart within days–if not hours. Everyone would be on their own. One city wouldn’t know what the next was doing, or if they were even alive. There’d be no planes or cars or anything else. You couldn’t travel to other places unless you walked. Do you have any idea how long it takes to walk just a few dozen miles? A distance that in your cars takes a brief time would be days of hard travel on foot.
    “There would be no way for people to know what had happened to their far flung loved ones. No one would know what had happened to their government. No word would come about anything. Everyone–everyone–would be in the dark, literally and figuratively. You would all be sitting there with no phones, no electrical devices, no heat, no way to get anything or summon help. Your world would fall silent.
    “It wouldn’t be long until supplies of food started to rot and run out. How long would it be until roving gangs started to loot what they wanted? Who would stop them? How would the police know when and where crimes were being committed? How would they hear anyone cry for help? How would they get there? Law and order would quickly become a thing of the past.
    “When it turns cold, then what? Millions of people will rush to cut wood to try to keep warm, that’s what. Makeshift fires used to keep warm will inevitably get out of hand. Your technology to fight the fires would be gone. Once fires catch hold, they will rampage unchecked, growing to firestorms that will gut cities and leave tens of thousands homeless.
    “Disease will spread like a plague with no means to stop it. Life will be not merely cheap but short.
    “When all the food is gone you will begin dying by the millions. Those still alive will not have the strength or the will to bury all the dead. In the end, in the grip of starvation, the living will eat the dead.
    “The only law will be survival.
    “Those who once held idyllic notions of how simple and clean life would be without the demon of technology ... will die filthy, terrified, and confused. Their idealistic notions will crumble in the cold face of reality. They will be unprepared for the consequences of their pompous beliefs.
    “What before had been simple will become tremendously difficult or impossible. The ignorant, the frightened, the weak, the criminal, will defecate in runoff areas, in streams, and in rivers, wanting their waste to be washed away. They won’t care about anyone downstream. Finding water will be a monumental chore. Finding clean, disease free water will be impossible.
    “Sewage and garbage will lie in the open. Vermin will multiply into a nightmare of filth. The stench of human habitation will be unbearable, but you will live in it, sleep in it, have sex in it, bear children you cannot care for in it. Without technology, the product of your minds, mankind will be marked by the stench of sickness and death.
    “Schools, of course, will be a thing of the past. Learning will be stopped in its tracks; knowledge will wither daily. Survival itself will be an all consuming struggle. As people die in droves the aptitude for technology, the skills, the expertise that was so common and taken for granted, will be lost. Without it your world will plunge headlong into the depths of a bottomless dark age of filth and misery. Millions upon millions of lives will be cut short as they are born into profound ignorance, abject poverty, backward superstition, and the rule of the most brutal.
    “That is the reality of a world without technology–brief lives of unimaginable misery, filth, and savagery.”

&  “What did you tell her?”
    “I told her that I killed people for a living.”
    Alex lost a step. “You told her what?”
    “That I kill people. I’m not familiar enough with your world to come up with a credible lie, so I told her the truth.” Jax flicked her hand, dismissing the alarm on his face. “People usually don’t believe the truth. They’d rather hear a good lie.”

&  As Ben had always said, it was his mind that was the real weapon.

&  You couldn’t always choose the fight. The best thing to do was to avoid a fight, if you could. But the way that it all too often happened was that you would find yourself in a fight you didn’t want, outnumbered, and outmatched in weapons. That was because people would generally only attack if they felt confident enough in their superiority to feel sure of the outcome.

&  “I win any way I can, even if I have to break the rules.”

&  Dictators always seek to take weapons away from people so that there can be no effective opposition to their rule.

&  Ben always told him that you could never have enough guns or ammo.

&  You can’t bargain with evil. You can’t appease it. You can’t compromise with it.

  ... Разве не с этого все обычно начинается?”

__ Как хорошо, что ни одно издательство не выпустило перевод _этого_.