"Carol Emshwiller - The General" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emshwiller Carol)

We've sent out six units. We've commandeered the first huts along several trails as base camps. One unit has
discovered a place where someone spent the night. No one is on the mountain at this time of year so who but the
general could have slept there? We moved all our units to this one mountain trail.

An early snow falls all night and is still going on in the morning. I go out in it. I'll not do as the grandma said. I'll
get rid of that chip at the top of one of the peaks. I'll unwrap it so as to give them a false clue. Useless and foolish, I
know, but I want to do it anyway. Perhaps if it's so hard to get to they'll not bother. They'll think I'm already dead up
there and let me be. They'll say it's just like me to die at the top of something. I wish I'd saved my orange suit to use as
a flag.
I say I may not be back tonight, but I'll be back soon. I'm thinking it'll take all day to climb a mountain even if I'm
more than halfway up right here.
The grandma bundles me in hand-knit scarves. She winds them around me under my stolen jacket. I don't know if
I can climb in all this. She wants to give me dried acorn cakes but I don't let her. I don't believe they have much food
any more than they have much firewood. Soon as I get back I'll chop up more.
The grandma lends me her staffs. She uses two. I'll need two also. "Bring them back," she says.

We've found the chip, brown from his blood. One unit climbed to the top of the mountain thinking what the
General can do, they can do. Thinking he would be there laughing down at them. Or dead, but with a smile at having
forced them to climb there. He was no doubt laughing, but he wasn't there. One member of the unit fell on the rocks
near the top and broke his ankle. One got altitude sickness. They have been flown out. We appointed new squad
leaders.
 There's fish. I caught some myself on the way up when the trail dipped down beside a creek. I ate them raw. Now
I catch more on the way back to the cabin.
When I get there, Loo says she saw a group of men in white suits filing up the trail. They're two days' climb
away. Loo takes me yet farther up into a cave, well off the path. Rattlesnakes sleep there. If I make a fire they'll wake
up.
There's already a bed of old rotten hay. Loo gives me a bundle of food. She insists. I say I'll eat rattlesnake. She
says, "Yes, but this, too." Then she chops off the heads of several big ones to take back to the grandma. They're so
cold they don't come to. "In the morning I'll bring some back fried," she says. She leaves me the ax and goes.
There's a little sort of porch in front of the cave. I watch her till she's out of sight, lumpy little figure, accepting
everything that comes along—though what else can children ever do?
I sit down on a rock and look out at the mountains—for once without falling asleep. A long time ago these peaks
used to be the border—a no-man's-land several miles long between my country and theirs. But no need for any
borders now. It's all theirs. The beauty is still as it was and will be no matter who owns it. Does it matter? Grandma and
Loo? Why do I even wonder what side they're on?
The search parties below have already camped for the night. I see their smoke.
I start to chant to myself as I did when I was a child locked in solitary. I rock back and forth. I remember the cell,
too small for a man, but big enough for me. I remember my classmates called me Rubbish all the time and I called myself
that to myself. If I slipped I'd look at my feet and call them Rubbish. If I dropped something I'd call my hands Rubbish.
Rubbish, I said about myself.
My parents were murdered before my eyes and I, taken to an enemy school to be educated as one of them. I
didn't even know their language. Even when I began to understand, I refused to speak it. I didn't know their food. I
finally got hungry enough to eat it. I profited by that education. I got to know them as I used to know my own. Better
in fact. I almost forgot my own language. I almost forgot our ways. I was told my people were a lower order of
civilization, but I couldn't see much difference.
In the beginning of military school I ran away a lot. Escaping wasn't hard; it was not being found afterward that I
never managed. The enemy was everywhere. After four or five times it seemed useless. The punishment was solitary
confinement. (They don't believe in hitting children. Besides, we were not to be marked in any way.) I burned my
uniform three times, but there were plenty more. After a while I obeyed. It seemed a waste to go to all that trouble of