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

can't remember much about it. It was bad. It hurt. First like knives running
back and forth between my shoulders, and claws digging up and down my spine.
And then all over, my arms, my legs, my fingers, my face.… And I was so weak I
couldn't stand up. I got out of bed and fell down on the floor and I couldn't
get up. I lay there calling my mother, 'Mama! Mama, please come!' She was
asleep. She worked late, waiting in a restaurant, and didn't get home till way
after midnight, and so she slept hard. And I could feel the floor getting hot
underneath me, I was so hot with fever, and I'd try to move my face to a
cooler place on the floor.…

"Well, I don't know if the pain eased off or I just got used to it, but it was
a bit better after a couple of months. It was hard, though. And long, and
dull, and strange. Lying there. But not on my back. You can't lie on your
back, ever, you know. Hard to sleep at night. When it hurt, it always hurt
most at night. Always a little fevery, likely to think strange thoughts, have
funny ideas. And never able to think a thought through, never able quite to
hold on to an idea. I felt as if I myself really couldn't think any more.
Thoughts just came into me and went through me and I watched them. And no
plans for the future any more, because what was my future now? I'd thought of
being a schoolteacher. My mother had been so excited about that, she'd
encouraged me to stay in school the extra year, to qualify for teachers'
college.… Well, I had my nineteenth birthday lying there in my little room in
our three-room flat over the grocery on Lacemakers Lane. My mother brought
some fancy food from the restaurant and a bottle of honey wine, and we tried
to have a celebration, but I couldn't drink the wine, and she couldn't eat
because she was crying. But I could eat, I was always starving hungry, and
that cheered her up.… Poor Mama!

"Well, so, I came out of that, little by little, and the wings grew in, great
ugly dangling naked things, disgusting, to start with, and even worse when
they started to fledge, with the pinfeathers like great pimples—but when the
primaries and secondaries came out, and I began to feel the muscles there, and
to be able to shudder my wings, shake them, raise them a little—and I wasn't
feverish any more, or I'd got used to running a fever all the time, I'm not
really sure which it is—and I was able to get up and walk around, and feel how
light my body was now, as if gravity couldn't affect me, even with the weight
of those huge wings dragging after me … but I could lift them, get them up off
the floor.…

"Not myself, though. I was earthbound. My body felt light, but I wore out even
trying to walk, got weak and shaky. I'd used to be pretty good at the broad
jump, but now I couldn't get both feet off the ground at once.

"I was feeling a lot better, but it bothered me to be so weak, and I felt
closed in. Trapped. Then a flyer came by, a man from uptown, who'd heard about
me. Flyers look after kids going through the change. He'd looked in a couple
of times to reassure my mother and make sure I was doing all right. I was
grateful for that. Now he came and talked to me for a long time, and showed me
the exercises I could do. And I did them, every day, all the time—hours and
hours. What else did I have to do? I used to like reading, but it didn't seem