"Suzette Haden Elgin - Communipaths" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elgin Suzette Haden)

to make me go to sleep. Fortunately the Anais cactus is prickery to sit on, and that
will keep me awake.
I loved that funny baby, I really did. I loved it as much as anyone. But I don’t
suppose that’s the place to start, is it? The place to start would be to tell about us.
There are twenty-one of us now, a good number to be, with seven of us children,
and we all live together at Chrysanthemum Bridge. We are Maklunites, and of course
everyone knows about Maklunites, so I don’t guess I have to explain about that. Or
do I? Patrick said I was to pretend I was writing this for someone very far away,
perhaps as far away as Saturn with its glowing rings (that’s how Patrick put it), and I
suppose it is possible that there might be someone on Saturn who does not know
about Maklunites. On the other hand I don’t want to be boring… Let me see. What I
must do, I guess, is put just enough about things like Maklunites and our names and
what we eat and so on, and then scatter it along through the whole thing so there’s
never an awful lot in a clump. Then no one— this someone I am writing for, I
mean—then this someone will not be tempted to skip around. I think I can manage
to do that well enough.
Maklunites began on Earth, a very long time ago; I don’t know just how long.
And we weren’t very popular there, of course, and so we moved, as far as we could
go. And as more was learned about traveling through space we moved farther and
farther, and now there are a lot of us through the galaxies. My group lives on the
third of the Extreme Moons, the one called 34.922.107 on the star maps. That’s an
awkward name, “thirty-four-point-nine-two-two-point-one-oh-seven,” when you
want to tell somebody where you live, and so the people who came here first
renamed it Iris.
They weren’t Maklunites, those first people, but they were loving people, a Mr.
and Mrs. Alhafi Fez, from New-York-Complex. Mrs. Fez was very fond of flowers
and the flowers of Earth (for one thing ours can move around, and they sing, and I
know the flowers of Earth don’t do either of those things). It’s a good thing the
flower Mrs. Fez liked the most was an Iris, I think. Imagine, if it had been one of
those outlandish things I’ve read about in Patrick’s big Panglish dictionary—just
imagine living on a planet called Sweet Pea, or Bachelor’s Button! Iris is bad
enough, Patrick says, and he thinks this flower bit can be carried too far, particularly
since it’s become a tradition and all of the eleven settlements of Iris have names that
are for flowers in one way or another. Patrick says it’s getting sickening, and he
thinks we ought to rename Chrysanthemum Bridge for a fish, or something, and he’s
probably right. I don’t think it will happen though, because names just sort of grow
on you, and our cluster has always been called Chrysanthemum Bridge.
Our livingdomes are beautiful, I think. Of course I’ve never been any farther than
the next settlement and I haven’t had much chance to compare it with anything, but
I’ve seen a lot of pictures and threedies and I’ve never seen any reason to think the
less of Chrysanthemum Bridge. In the very center is the ashram, with our altar, and I
will tell more about that later. Then around that is our common room, like a ring, with
our made-mantras painted over the doors so that they will be always before our
eyes. (This is the first one: TO BE SELFISH IS TO DO HARM, AND TO DO
HARM IS FORBIDDEN. This is the second one: THE VISIBLE
MANIFESTATION OF LOVE IS RADIANCE. This is the third one: WHAT IS
NOT LOVINGKINDNESS IS NOT PERMITTED HERE. This is the fourth one:
THERE IS NO STERNER DISCIPLINE THAN JOY.)
When Anne-Charlotte had her baby they say she lay beneath the second
made-mantra and never ceased to smile. And now they have taken the baby away,