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

anyhow, for this particular Observer-ship, maybe a Terran was a bad choice. Given that we on Terra are
living the future of a people who denied their past."
She stopped short, appalled at everything she had said.
Tong looked round at her, unappalled. He said, "I don't wonder that you feel that what you've been
trying to do can't be done. But I needed your opinion. So it was worth it to me. But tiresome for you. A
change is in order." There was a gleam in his dark eyes. "What do you say to going up the river?"
"The river?"
"It's how they say 'into the backwoods,' isn't it? But in fact I meant the Ereha."
When he said the name, she remembered that a big river ran through the capital, partly paved over
and so hidden by buildings and embankments that she couldn't remember ever having seen it except on
maps.
"You mean go outside Dovza City?"
"Yes," Tong said. "Outside the city! And not on a guided tour! For the first time in fifty years!" He
beamed like a child revealing a hidden present, a beautiful surprise. "I've been here two years, and I've
put in eighty-one requests for permission to send a staff member to live or stay somewhere outside
Dovza City or Kangnegne or
Ert. Politely evaded, eighty times, with offers of yet another guided tour of the space-program facilities
or the beauty of spring in the Eastern Isles. I put in such requests by habit, by rote. And suddenly one is
granted! Yes! A member of your staff is authorised to spend a month in Okzat-Ozkat.' Or is it
Ozkat-Okzat? It's a small city, in the foothills, up the river. The Ereha rises in the High Headwaters
Range, about fifteen hundred kilos inland. I asked for that area, Rangma, never expecting to get it, and I
got it!" He beamed.
"Why there?"
"I heard about some people there who sound interesting."
"An ethnic fragment population?" she asked, hopeful. Early in her stay, when she first met Tong Ov
and the other two Observers presently in Dovza City, they had all discussed the massive
mono-culturalism of modern Aka in its large cities, the only places the very few offworlders permitted on
the planet were allowed to live. They were all convinced that Akan society must have diversities and
regional variations and frustrated that they had no way to find out.
"Sectarians, I suspect, rather than ethnic. A cult. Possibly remnants in hiding of a banned religion."
"Ah," she said, trying to preserve her expression of interest.
Tong was still searching his files. "I'm looking for the little I've gathered on the subject. Socio-cultural
Bureau reports on surviving criminal antiscientific cult activities. And also a few rumors and tales. Secret
rites, walking on the wind, miraculous cares, predictions of the future. The usual."
To fall heir to a history of three million years was to find little in human behavior or invention that could
be called unusual. Though the Hainish bore it lightly, it was a burden on their various descendants to
know that they would have a hard time finding a new thing, even an imaginary new thing, under any sun.
Sutty said nothing.
"In the material the First Observers here sent to Terra," Tong pursued, "did anything concerning
religions get through?"
"Well, since nothing but the language report came through undamaged, information about anything was
pretty much only what we could infer from vocabulary."
"All that information from the only people ever allowed to study Aka freely—lost in a glitch," said
Tong, sitting back and letting a search complete itself in his files. "What terrible luck! Or was it a glitch?"
Like all Chiffewarians, Tong was quite hairless —a chihuahua, in the slang of Valparaiso. To minimize
his outlandishness here, where baldness was very uncommon, he wore a hat; but since the Akans seldom
wore hats, he looked perhaps more alien with it than without it. He was a gentle-mannered man, informal,
straightforward, putting Sutty as much at her ease as she was capable of being; yet he was so uninvasive
as to be, finally, aloof. Himself uninvadable, he offered no intimacy. She was grateful that he accepted her
distance. Up to now, he had kept his. But she felt his question as disingenuous. He knew, surely, that the