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

stupid badly made cars broke down all the time, and the noise all the time, the slogans, the songs, the
hype, a people hyping itself into making every mistake every other population in FF-tech mode had ever
made. —Wrong.
Judgmentalism. Wrong to let frustration cloud her thinking and perceptions. Wrong to admit prejudice.
Look, listen, notice: observe. That was her job. This wasn't her world.
But she was on it, in it, how could she observe it when there was no way to back off from it? Either
the hyperstimulation of the neareals she had to study, or the clamor of the streets: nowhere to get away
from the endless aggression of propaganda, except alone in her apartment, shutting out the world she'd
come to observe.
The fact was, she was not suited to be an Observer here. In other words, she had failed on her first
assignment. She knew that the Envoy had summoned her to tell her so.
She was already nearly late for the appointment. The robocab made another jerk forward, and its
sound system came up loud for one of the Corporation announcements that overrode low settings. There
was no off button. "An announcement from the Bureau of Astronautics!" said a woman's vibrant,
energy-charged, self-confident voice, and Sutty put her hands over her ears and shouted, "Shut up!"
"Doors of vehicle are closed," the robocab said in the flat mechanical voice assigned to mechanisms
responding to verbal orders. Sutty saw that this was funny, but she couldn't laugh. The announcement
went on and on while the shrill voices in the air sang, "Ever higher, ever greater, marching to the stars!"
The Ekumenical Envoy, a doe-eyed Chiffewarian named Tong Ov, was even later than she for their
appointment, having been delayed at the exit of his apartment house by a malfunction of the
ZIL-screening system, which he laughed about. "And the system here has mislaid the microrec I wanted
to give you," he said, going through files in his office. "I coded it, because of course they go through my
files, and my code confused the system. But I know it's in here.... So, meanwhile, tell me how things have
been going."
"Well," Sutty said, and paused. She had been speaking and thinking in Dovzan for months. She had to
go through her own files for a moment: Hindi no, English no, Hainish yes. "You asked me to prepare a
report on contemporary language and literature. But the social changes that took place here while I was
in transit... Well, since it's against the law, now, to speak or study any language but Dovzan and Hainish,
I can't work on the other languages. If they still exist. As for Dovzan, the First Observers did a pretty
thorough linguistic survey. I can only add details and vocabulary."
"What about literature?" Tong asked.
"Everything that was written in the old scripts has been destroyed. Or if it exists, I don't know what it
is, because the Ministry doesn't allow access to it. So all I was able to work on is modern aural literature.
All written to Corporation specifications. It tends to be very—to be standardised."
She looked at Tong Ov to see if her whining bored him, but though still looking for the mislaid file, he
seemed to be listening with lively interest. He said, "All aural, is it?"
"Except for the Corporation manuals hardly anything's printed, except printouts for the deaf, and
primers to accompany sound texts for early learners-- The campaign against the old ideographic forms
seems to have been very intense. Maybe it made people afraid to write —made them distrust writing in
general. Anyway, all I've been able to get hold of by way of literature is sound tapes and neareals. Issued
by the World Ministry of Information and the Central Ministry of Poetry and Art. Most of the works are
actually information or educational material rather than, well, literature or poetry as I understand the
terms. Though a lot of the neareals are dramatisations of practical or ethical problems and solutions...."
She was trying so hard to speak factually, unjudgmentally, without prejudice, that her voice was totally
toneless.
"Sounds dull," said Tong, still flitting through files.
"Well, I'm, I think I'm insensitive to this aesthetic. It is so deeply and, and, and flatly political. Of
course every art is political. But when it's all didactic, all in the service of a belief system, I resent, I
mean, I resist it. But I try not to. Maybe, since they've essentially erased their history— Of course there
was no way of knowing they were on the brink of a cultural revolution, at the time I was sent here— But