"Ursula K. LeGuin - Coming of Age in Karhide" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

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Coming of Age in Karhide

by Ursula K. Le Guin

SOV THADE TAGE EM EREB, OF RER
IN KARHIDE, ON GETHEN

I live in the oldest city in the world. Long before there were kings in Karhide, Rer was a city, the
marketplace and meeting ground for all the Northeast, the Plains, and Kerm Land. The Fastness of Rer
was a center of learning, a refuge, a judgment seat fifteen thousand years ago. Karhide became a nation
here, under the Geger kings, who ruled for a thousand years. In the thousandth year Sedern Geger, the
Unking, cast the crown into the River Arre from the palace towers, proclaiming an end to dominion. The
time they call the Flowering of Rer, the Summer Century, began then. It ended when the Hearth of Harge
took power and moved their capital across the mountains to Erhenrang. The Old Palace has been empty
for centuries. But it stands. Nothing in Rer falls down. The Arre floods through the street-tunnels every
year in the Thaw, winter blizzards may bring thirty feet of snow, but the city stands. Nobody knows how
old the houses are, because they have been rebuilt forever. Each one sits in its gardens without respect to
the position of any of the others, as vast and random and ancient as hills. The roofed streets and canals
angle about among them. Rer is all corners. We say that the Harges left because they were afraid of what
might be around the corner.

Time is different here. I learned in school how the Orgota, the Ekumen, and most other people count
years. They call the year of some portentous event Year One and number forward from it. Here it's
always Year One. On Getheny Thern, New Year's Day, the Year One becomes one-ago, one-to-come
becomes One, and so on. It's like Rer, everything always changing but the city never changing.

When I was fourteen (in the Year One, or fifty-ago) I came of age. I have been thinking about that a
good deal recently.

It was a different world. Most of us had never seen an Alien, as we called them then. We might have
heard the Mobile talk on the radio, and at school we saw pictures of Aliens—the ones with hair around
their mouths were the most pleasingly savage and repulsive. Most of the pictures were disappointing.
They looked too much like us. You couldn't even tell that they were always in kemmer. The female
Aliens were supposed to have enormous breasts, but my Mothersib Dory had bigger breasts than the
ones in the pictures.

When the Defenders of the Faith kicked them out of Orgoreyn, when King Emran got into the Border
War and lost Erhenrang, even when their Mobiles were outlawed and forced into hiding at Estre in
Kerm, the Ekumen did nothing much but wait. They had waited for two hundred years, as patient as
Handdara. They did one thing: they took our young king off-world to foil a plot, and then brought the
same king back sixty years later to end her wombchild's disastrous reign. Argaven XVII is the only king
who ever ruled four years before her heir and forty years after.

The year I was born (the Year One, or sixty-four-ago) was the year Argaven's second reign began. By
the time I was noticing anything beyond my own toes, the war was over, the West Fall was part of