"LeGuin-Solitude" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

URSULA K. Le GUIN

SOLITUDE

*
An addition to "POVERTY: The Second Report on Eleven-Soro" by Mobile
Entselenne'temharyonoterregwis Leaf, by her daughter, Serenity.

MY MOTHER, A FIELD ETHnologist, took the difficulty of learning anything about
the people of Eleven-Soro as a personal challenge. The fact that she used her
children to meet that challenge might be seen as selfishness or as selflessness.
Now that I have read her report I know that she finally thought she had done
wrong. Knowing what it cost her, I wish she knew my gratitude to her for
allowing me to grow up as a person.

Shortly after a robot probe reported people of the Hainish Descent on the
eleventh planet of the Soro system, she joined the orbital crew as back-up for
the three First Observers down on planet. She had spent four years in the
tree-cities of nearby Huthu. My brother In Joy Born was eight years old and I
was five; she wanted a year or two of ship duty so we could spend some time in a
Hainish-style school. My brother had enjoyed the rainforests of Huthu very much,
but though he could brachiate he could barely read, and we were all bright blue
with skin-fungus. While Borny learned to read and I learned to wear clothes and
we all had antifungus treatments, my mother became as intrigued by Eleven-Sort
as the Observers were frustrated by it.

All this is in her report, but I will say it as I learned it from her, which
helps me remember and understand. The language had been recorded by the probe
and the Observers had spent a year learning it. The many dialectical ;.
variations excused their accents and errors, and they reported that language was
not a problem. Yet there was a communication problem. The two men found
themselves isolated, faced with suspicion or hostility, unable to form any
connection with the native men, all of whom lived in solitary houses as hermits
or in pairs. Finding communities of adolescent males, they tried to make contact
with them, but when they entered the territory of such a group the boys either
fled or rushed desperately at them trying to kill them. The women, who lived in
what they called "dispersed villages," drove them away with volleys of stones as
soon as they came anywhere near the houses. "I believe," one of them reported,
"that the only community activity of the Sorovians is throwing rocks at men."

Neither of them succeeded in having a conversation of more than three exchanges
with a man. One of them mated with a woman who came by his camp; he reported
that though she made unmistakable and insistent advances, she seemed disturbed
by his attempts to converse, refused to answer his questions, and left him, he
said, "as soon as she got what she came for."

The woman Observer was allowed to settle in an unused house in a "village"
(auntring) of seven houses. She made excellent observations of daily life,