"Ursula K. LeGuin - The Telling" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

All that was on the net, though Sutty could watch it without having to partiss in it, Father having
disconnected the vr-proprios. Godsword was full of it, too. And full of the new Envoy, again. Dalzul was
a Terran. Born right here on God's Earth, they said. A man who understood the men of Earth as no alien
ever could, they said. A man from the stars who came to kneel at the feet of the Fathers and to discuss
the implementation of the peaceful intentions of both the Holy Office and the Ekumen.
"Handsome fellow," Mother said, peering. "What is he? A white man?"
"Inordinately so," Father said.
"Wherever is he from?"
But no one knew. Iceland, Ireland, Siberia, everybody had a different story. Dalzul had left Terra to
study on Hain, they all agreed on that. He had qualified very quickly as an Observer, then as a Mobile,
and then had been sent back home: the first Terran Envoy to Terra.
"He left well over a century ago," Mother said. "Before the Unists took over East Asia and Europe.
Before they even amounted to much in Western Asia. He must find his world quite changed."
Lucky man, Sutty was thinking. Oh lucky, lucky man! He got away, he went to Hain, he studied at the
School on Ve, he's been where everything isn't God and hatred, where they've lived a million years of
history, where they understand it all!
That same night she told Mother and Father that she wanted to study at the Training School, to try to
qualify for the Ekumenical College. Told them very timidly, and found them undismayed, not even
surprised. "This seems a rather good world to get off of, at present," Mother said.
They were so calm and favorable that she thought, Don't they realise, if I qualify and get sent to one of
the other worlds, they'll never see me again? Fifty years, a hundred, hundreds, round trips in space were
seldom less, often more. Didn't they care? It was only later that evening, when she was watching her
father's profile at table, full lips, hook nose, hair beginning to go grey, a severe and fragile face, that it
occurred to her that if she was sent to another world, she would never see them again either. They had
thought about it before she did. Brief presence and long absence, that was all she and they had ever had.
And made the best of it.
"Eat, Aunty," Mother said, but Aunty only patted her piece of naan with her little ant-antenna fingers
and did not pick it up.
"Nobody could make good bread with such flour," she said, exonerating the baker.
"You were spoiled, living in the village," Mother teased her. "This is the best quality anybody can get
in Canada. Best quality chopped straw and plaster dust."
 "Yes, I was spoiled," Aunty said, smiling from a far country.
The older slogans were carved into facades of buildings: FORWARD TO THE FUTURE.
PRODUCER-CONSUMERS OF AKA MARCH TO THE STARS. Newer ones ran across the
buildings in bands of dazzling electronic display: REACTIONARY THOUGHT IS THE DEFEATED
ENEMY. When the displays malfunctioned, the messages became cryptic: OD IS ON. The newest ones
hovered in holopro above the streets: PURE SCIENCE DESTROYS CORRUPTION. UPWARD
ONWARD FORWARD. Music hovered with them, highly rhythmic, multivoiced, crowding the air.
"Onward, onward to the stars!" an invisible choir shrilled to the stalled traffic at the intersection where
Sutty's robocab sat. She turned up the cab sound to drown the tune out. "Superstition is a rotting
corpse," the sound system said in a rich, attractive male voice. "Superstitious practices defile youthful
minds. It is the responsibility of every citizen, whether adult or student, to report reactionary teachings
and to bring teachers who permit sedition or introduce irrationality and superstition in their classroom to
the attention of the authorities. In the light of Pure Science we know that the ardent cooperation of all the
people is the first requisite of— " Sutty turned the sound down as far as it would go. The choir burst
forth, "To the stars! To the stars!" and the robocab jerked forward about half its length. Two more jerks
and it might get through the intersection at the next flowchange.
Sutty felt in her jacket pockets for an akagest, but she'd eaten them all. Her stomach hurt. Bad food,
she'd eaten too much bad food for too long, processed stuff jacked up with proteins, condiments,
stimulants, so you had to buy the stupid akagests. And the stupid unnecessary traffic jams because the