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

loss of the transmission had been no accident. Why should she have to explain it? She had made it clear
that she was traveling without luggage, just as Observers and Mobiles who'd been in space for centuries
did. She was not answerable for the place she had left sixty light-years behind her. She was not
responsible for Terra and its holy terrorism.
But the silence went on, and she said at last, "The Beijing ansible was sabotaged."
"Sabotaged?"
She nodded.
"By the Unists?"
"Toward the end of the regime there were attacks on most of the Ekumenical installations and the
treaty areas. The Pales."
"Were many of them destroyed?"
He was trying to draw her out. To get her to talk about it. Anger flooded into her, rage. Her throat felt
tight. She said nothing, because she was unable to say anything.
A considerable pause. "Nothing but the language got through, then," Tong said.
"Almost nothing."
"Terrible luck!" he repeated energetically. "That the First Observers were Terran, so they sent their
report to Terra instead of Hain —not unnaturally, but still, bad luck. And even worse, maybe, that ansible
transmissions sent from Terra all got through. All the technical information the Akans asked for and Terra
sent, without any question or restriction... .Why, why would the First Observers have agreed to such a
massive cultural intervention?"
"Maybe they didn't. Maybe the Unists sent it."
"Why would the Unists start Aka marching to the stars?"
She shrugged. "Proselytising."
"You mean, persuading others to believe what they believed? Was industrial technological progress
incorporated as an element of the Unist religion?"
She kept herself from shrugging.
"So during that period when the Unists refused ansible contact with the Stabiles on Hain, they were ...
converting the Akans? Sutty, do you think they may have sent, what do you call them, missionaries,
here?"
"I don't know."
He was not probing her, not trapping her. Eagerly pursuing his own thoughts, he was only trying to get
her, a Terran, to explain to him what the Terrans had done and why. But she would not and could not
explain or speak for the Unists.
Picking up her refusal to speculate, he said, "Yes, yes, I'm sorry. Of course you were scarcely in the
confidence of the Unist leaders! But I've just had an idea, you see— If they did send missionaries, and if
they transgressed Akan codes in some way, you see? — that might explain the Limit Law." He meant the
abrupt announcement, made fifty years ago and enforced ever since, that only four offworlders would be
allowed on Aka at a time, and only in the cities. "And it could explain the banning of religion a few years
later!" He was carried away by his theory. He beamed, and then asked her almost pleadingly, "You
never heard of a second group sent here from Terra?"
"No."
He sighed, sat back. After a minute he dismissed his speculations with a little flip of his hand. "We've
been here seventy years," he said, "and all we know is the vocabulary."
She relaxed. They were off Terra, back on Aka. She was safe. She spoke carefully, but with the
fluency of relief. "In my last year in training, some facsimile artifacts were reconstituted from the damaged
records. Pictures, a few fragments of books. But not enough to extrapolate any major cultural elements
from. And since the Corporation State was in place when I arrived, I don't know anything about what it
replaced. I don't even know when religion was outlawed here. About forty years ago?" She heard her
voice: placating, false, forced. Wrong.
Tong nodded. "Thirty years after the first contact with the Ekumen. The Corporation put out the first