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

Among the urbanized Gyr, that dread is mitigated to some degree, since the
winged ones are treated not as sacrificial scapegoats but with tolerance and
even sympathy, as people with a most unfortunate handicap.

This might seem odd. To soar over the heads of the earthbound, to race with
eagles and soar with condors, to dance on air, to ride the wind, not in a
noisy metal box or on a contraption of plastic and fabric and straps but on
one's own vast, strong, splendid, outstretched wings—how could that be
anything but a joy, a freedom? How stodgy, sullen-hearted, leaden-souled the
Gyr must be, to think that people who can fly are cripples!

But they do have their reasons. The fact is that the winged Gyr can't trust
their wings.

No fault can be found in the actual design of the wings. They serve admirably,
with a little practice, for short flights, for effortless gliding and soaring
on updrafts and, with more practice, for stunts and tumbling, aerial
acrobatics. When winged people are fully mature, if they fly regularly they
may achieve great stamina. They can stay aloft almost indefinitely. Many learn
to sleep on the wing. Flights of over two thousand miles have been recorded,
with only brief hover-stops to eat. Most of these very long flights were made
by women, whose lighter bodies and bone structure give them the advantage over
distance. Men, with their more powerful musculature, would take the
speed-flying awards, if there were any. But the Gyr, at least the wingless
majority, are not interested in records or awards, certainly not in
competitions that involve a high risk of death.

The problem is that flyers' wings are liable to sudden, total, disastrous
failure. Flight engineers and medical investigators on Gyr and elsewhere have
not been able to account for it. The design of the wings has no detectable
fault; their failure must be caused by an as yet unidentified physical or
psychological factor, an incompatibility of the alar processes with the rest
of the body. Unfortunately no weakness shows up beforehand; there is no way to
predict wing failure. It occurs without warning. A flyer who has flown his
entire adult life without a shadow of trouble takes off one morning and,
having attained altitude, suddenly, appallingly, finds his wings will not obey
him—shuddering, closing, clapping down along his sides, paralyzed. And he
falls from the sky like a stone.

The medical literature states that as many as one flight in twenty ends in
failure. Flyers I talked to believed that wing failure was not nearly as
frequent as that, citing cases of people who had flown daily for decades. But
it was not a matter they wanted to talk about with me, or perhaps even with
one another. They seemed to have no preventive precautions or rituals,
accepting it as truly random. Failure may come on the first flight or the
thousandth. No cause has been found for it—heredity, age, inexperience,
fatigue, diet, emotion, physical condition. Every time a flyer goes up, the
chance of wing failure is the same.