"Ursula K. Leguin - League 03 - City of Illusions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

chance; but then, who lost him? He may be a man whose brain has been damaged by accident, or
tampered with by intent. Or he may be a Shing masking his mind behind a seeming amentia. Or he may
be neither man nor Shing; but then, what is he? There's no proof or disproof for any of these notions.
What shall we do with him?"
"See if he can be taught," said Zove's wife Rossa.
The Master's eldest son Metock spoke: "If he can be taught, then he is to be distrusted. He may have been
sent here to be taught, to learn our ways, insights, secrets. The cat brought up by the kindly mice."
"I am not a kindly mouse, my son," the Master said. "Then you think him a Shing?"
"Or their tool."
"We're all tools of the Shing. What would you do with him?"
"Kill him before he wakes."
The wind blew faintly, a whippoorwill called out in the humid, starlit Clearing.
"I wonder," said the Oldest Woman, "if he might be a victim, not a tool. Perhaps the Shing destroyed his
mind as punishment for something he did or thought. Should we then finish their punishment?"
"It would be truer mercy," Metock said.
"Death is a false mercy," the Oldest Woman said bitterly.
So they discussed the matter back and forth for some while, equably but with a gravity that included both
moral concern and a heavier, more anxious care, never stated but only hinted at whenever one of them
spoke the word Shing. Parth took no part in the discussion, being only fifteen, but she listened intently.
She was bound by sympathy to the stranger and wanted him to live.
Rayna and Kretyan joined the group; Rayna had been running what physiological tests she could on the
stranger, with Kretyan standing by to catch any mental response. They had little to report as yet, other
than that the stranger's nervous system and the sense areas and basic motor capacity of his brain seemed
normal, though his physical responses and motor skill compared with those of a year-old child, perhaps,
and no stimulus of localities in the speech area had got any response at all. "A man's strength, a baby's
coordination, an empty mind," Ranya said.
"If we don't kill him like a wild beast," said Buckeye, "then we shall have to tame him like a wild
beast…"
Kretyan's brother Kai spoke up. "It seems worth trying. Let some of us younger ones have charge of him;
we'll see what we can do. We don't have to teach him the Inner Canons right away, after all. At least
teaching him not to wet the bed comes first… I want to know if he's human. Do you think he is, Master?"
Zove spread out his big hands. "Who knows? Rayna's blood-tests may tell us. I never heard that any
Shing had yellow eyes, or any visible differences from Terran men. But if he is neither Shing nor human,

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 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Ekumen 03 - City of Illusions

what is he? No being from the Other Worlds that once were known has walked on Earth for twelve
hundred years. Like you, Kai, I think I would risk his presence here among us out of pure curiosity…"
So they let their guest live.
At first he was little trouble to the young people who looked after him. He regained strength slowly,
sleeping much, sitting or lying quietly most of the time he was awake. Parth named him Falk, which in
the dialect of the Eastern Forest meant "yellow," for his sallow skin and opal eyes.
One morning several days after his arrival, coming to an unpatterned stretch in the cloth she was weaving,
she left her sunpowered loom to purr away by itself down in the garden and climbed up to the screened
balcony where "Falk" was kept. He did not see her enter. He was sitting on his pallet gazing intently up at
the haze-dimmed summer sky. The glare made his eyes water and he rubbed them vigorously with his
hand, then seeing his hand stared at it, the back and the palm. He clenched and extended the fingers,
frowning. Then he raised his face again to the white glare of the sun and slowly, tentative, reached his
open hand up towards it.