"Ursula K. Leguin - The Flyers Of Gy - An Interplanetary Tale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

as they have always done, not stodgily, exactly, but with a kind of dullness,
a polite indifference and impenetrability, behind which may lie supreme
self-satisfaction, or something quite different.

The crasser kind of tourists from other planes refer to the Gyr, of course, as
birdies, birdbrains, featherheads, and so on. Many visitors from livelier
planes visit the small, placid cities, take rides out into the country in
ugnunu-chaises, attend sedate but charming balls (for the Gyr like to dance),
and enjoy an old-fashioned evening at the theater without losing one degree of
their contempt for the natives. "Feathers but no wings," is the conventional
judgment that sums it up.

Such patronizing visitors may spend a week in Gy without ever seeing a winged
native or learning that what they took for a bird or a jet was a woman on her
way across the sky.

The Gyr don't talk about their winged people unless asked. They don't conceal
them, or lie about them, but they don't volunteer information. I had to ask
questions fairly persistently to be able to write the following description.

Wings never develop before late adolescence. There is no sign at all of the
propensity until suddenly a girl of eighteen, a boy of nineteen, wakes up with
a slight fever and a terrible aching in the shoulder blades.

After that comes a year or more of extreme physical stress and pain, during
which the subject must be kept quiet, warm, and well fed. Nothing gives
comfort but food—the nascent flyers are terribly hungry most of the time—and
being wrapped or swaddled in blankets, while the body restructures, remakes,
rebuilds itself. The bones lighten and become porous, the whole upper body
musculature changes, and bony protuberances, developing rapidly from the
shoulder blades, grow out into immense alar processes. The final stage is the
growth of the wingfeathers, which is not painful. The primaries are, as
feathers go, massive, and may be a meter long. The wingspread of an adult male
Gyr is about four meters, that of a woman usually about a half meter less.
Stiff feathers sprout from the calves and ankles, to be spread wide in
flight.

Any attempt to interfere, to prevent or halt the growth of wings, is useless
and harmful or fatal. If the wings are not allowed to develop, the bones and
muscles begin to twist and shrivel, causing unendurable, unceasing pain.
Amputation of the wings or the flightfeathers, at any stage, results in a
slow, agonizing death.

Among some of the most conservative, archaic peoples of the Gyr, the tribal
societies living along the icy coasts of the north polar regions and the
herdsfolk of the cold, barren steppes of the far south, this vulnerability of
the winged people is incorporated into religion and ritual. In the north, as
soon as a youth shows the fatal signs, he or she is captured and handed over
to the tribal elders. With rituals similar to their funeral rites, they fasten
heavy stones to the victim's hands and feet, then go in procession to a cliff