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

were pleasant and civil, he was most obliging, but he could not quite hide his
sense of being apart from, different from the wingless, having nothing really
to do with them. How could he help but look down on us?

I pressed him a little about this feeling of superiority, and he tried to
explain. "When I said it was as if I was my wings, you know?—that's it. Being
able to fly makes other things seem uninteresting. What people do seems so
trivial. Flying is complete. It's enough. I don't know if you can understand.
It's one's whole body, one's whole self, up in the whole sky. On a clear day,
in the sunlight, with everything lying down there below, far away …. Or in a
high wind, in a storm—out over the sea, that's where I like best to fly. Over
the sea in stormy weather. When the fishing boats run for land, and you have
it all to yourself, the sky full of rain and lightning, and the clouds under
your wings. Once off Emer Cape I danced with the waterspouts.… It takes
everything to fly. Everything you are, everything you have. And so if you go
down, you go down whole. And over the sea, if you go down, that's it, who's to
know, who cares? I don't want to be buried underground." The idea made him
shiver a little. I could see the shudder in his long, heavy, bronze-and-black
wingfeathers.
I asked if the affairs on the wing sometimes resulted in children, and he said
with indifference that of course they sometimes did. I pressed him a little
about it and he said that a baby was a great bother to a flying mother, so
that as soon as a baby was weaned it was usually left "on the ground," as he
put it, to be brought up by relatives. Sometimes the winged mother got so
attached to the child that she grounded herself to look after it. He told me
this with some disdain.

The children of flyers are no more likely to grow wings than other children.
The phenomenon has no genetic factor, but is a developmental pathology shared
by all Gyr, which appears in less than one out of a thousand.

I think Ardiadia would not accept the word "pathology."

I talked also with a non-flying flyer, who let me record our conversation but
asked that I not use his name. He is a member of a respectable law firm in a
small city in Central Gy. He said, "I never flew, no. I was twenty when I got
sick. I'd thought I was past the age, safe. It was a terrible blow. My parents
had already spent a good deal of money, made sacrifices to get me into
college. I was doing well in college. I liked learning. I had an intellect. To
lose a year was bad enough. I wasn't going to let this business eat up my
whole life. To me they are simply excrescences. Growths. Impediments to
walking, dancing, sitting in a civilized manner on a normal chair, wearing
decent clothing. I refused to let something like that get in the way of my
education, my whole life. Flyers are stupid, their brains go all to feathers.
I wasn't going to trade in my mind for a chance to flitter about over the
rooftops. I'm more interested in what goes on under the roofs. I don't care
for scenery. I prefer people. And I wanted a normal life. I wanted to marry,
to have children. My father was a kind man; he died when I was sixteen, and
I'd always thought that if I could be as good to my children as he was to us,
it would be a way of thanking him, of honoring his memory.… I was fortunate