"Orson Scott Card - Unaccompanied Sonata by Orson Scott Card" - читать интересную книгу автора (Card Orson Scott)

In the city, the blind Watcher furnished Christian with a pad of paper and a pen. Christian immediately gripped the pencil in the crease of his palm and wrote: "What do I do
now?"
The blind Watcher laughed. "Have we got a job for you! Oh, Christian, have we got a job for you! "
APPLAUSE
In all the world there were only two dozen Watchers. They were secretive men who supervised a system that needed little supervision because it actually made nearly everybody happy. It was a good system, but like even the most perfect of machines, here and there it broke down. Here and there someone acted madly and damaged himself, and to protect everyone and the person himself, a Watcher had to notice the madness and go to fix it.
For many years the best of the Watchers was a man with no fingers, a man with no voice. He would come silently, wearing the uniform that named him with the only name he needed-Authority: And he would find the kindest, easiest, yet most thorough way of solving the problem and curing the madness and preserving the system that made the world, for the first time in history, a very good place to live. For practically everyone.
For there were still a few people-one or two each year who were caught in a circle of their own devising, who could neither adjust to the system nor bear to harm it, people who kept breaking the law despite their knowledge that it would destroy them.
Eventually, when the gentle maimings and deprivations did not cure their madness and set them back into the system, they were given uniforms, and they, too, went out. Watching.
The keys of power were placed in the hands of those who had most cause to hate the system they had to preserve. Were they sorrowful?
"I am," Christian answered in the moments when he dared to ask himself that question.
In sorrow he did his duty. In sorrow he grew old. And finally the other Watchers, who reverenced the silent man (for they knew he had once sung magnificent songs), told him he was free. "You've served your time," said the Watcher with no legs, and he smiled.
Christian raised an eyebrow, as if to say, "And?"
"So wander."
Christian wandered. He took off his uniform, but lacking neither money nor time he found few doors closed to him. He wandered where in his former lives he had once lived. A road in the mountains. A city where he had once known the loading entrance of every restaurant and coffee shop and grocery store. And, at last, a place in the woods where a house was falling apart in the weather because it had not been used in forty years.
Christian was old. The thunder roared, and it only made him realize that it was about to rain. All the old songs. All the old songs, he mourned inside himself, more because he couldn't remember them than because he thought his life had been particularly sad.
As he sat in a coffee shop in a nearby town to stay out of the rain, he heard four teenagers who played the guitar very badly singing a song that he knew. It was a song he had invented while the asphalt poured on a hot summer day. The teenagers were not musicians and certainly were not Makers. But they sang the song from their hearts, and even though the words were happy, the song made everyone who heard it cry.
Christian wrote on the pad he always carried, and showed his question to the boys. "Where did that song come from?"
"It's a Sugar song," the leader of the group answered. "It's a song by Sugar."
Christian raised an eyebrow, making a shrugging motion.
"Sugar was a guy who worked on a road crew and made up songs. He's dead now, though," the boy answered.
Christian smiled. Then he wrote (and the boys waited
impatiently for this speechless old man to go away): "Aren't you happy? Why sing sad songs?"
The boys were at a loss for an answer. The leader spoke up, though, and said, "Sure, I'm happy. I've got a good job, a girl I like, and man, I couldn't ask for more. I got my guitar. I got my songs. And my friends."
And another boy said, "These songs aren't sad, mister. Sure, they make people cry, but they aren't sad."
"Yeah," said another. "It's just that they were written by a man who knows."
Christian scribbled on his paper. "Knows what?"
"He just knows. Just knows, that's all:'
And then the teenagers turned back to their clumsy guitars and their young untrained voices, and Christian walked to the door to leave because the rain had stopped and because he knew when to leave the stage. He turned and bowed just a little toward the singers. They didn't notice him, but their voices were all the applause he needed. He left the ovation and went outside where the leaves were just turning color and would soon, with a slight inaudible sound, break free and fall to the earth.
For a moment he thought he heard himself singing. But it was just the last of the wind, coasting madly through the wires over the street. It was a frenzied song, and Christian thought he had recognized his voice.