"Mike Resnick - The Lotus and the Spear" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

came down from the north only a century before the Europeans. They are nomads,
wanderers, who follow their herds from one grazing area to another. The Kikuyu are
farmers, who have always lived beside the holy mountain. We lived side by side with
the Maasai for only a handful of years."
"Then bring us the Wakamba, or the Luo, or the Europeans!" he said, trying to
control his frustration. "You still don't understand what I am saying. It is not the
Maasai I want, it is the challenge!"
"And this is what Keino and Njupu and Nboka wanted?"
"Yes."
"And will you kill yourself, as they did, should a challenge not materialize?"
"I do not know. But I do not want to live a life filled with boredom."
"How many others in the colony of young men feel as you do?"
"Right now?" asked Murumbi. "Only myself." He paused and stared unblinking
at me. "But there have been others before; there will be again."
"I do not doubt it," I replied with a heavy sigh. "Now that I understand the
nature of the problem, I will return to my boma and think about how best to solve
it."
"This problem is beyond your ability to solve, mundumugu," said Murumbi,
"for it is part of the society that you have fought so hard to preserve."
"No problem is incapable of solution," I said.
"This one is," answered Murumbi with absolute conviction.
I left him standing there by the ashes, not totally convinced that he was wrong.
###


For three days I sat alone on my hill. I neither went into the village nor conferred
with the Elders. When old Siboki needed more ointment for his pain, I sent Ndemi
down the path with it, and when it was time to place new charms on the scarecrows,
I instructed Ndemi to tend to the matter, for I was wrestling with a far more serious
problem.
In some cultures, I knew, suicide was an honorable way of dealing with certain
problems, but the Kikuyu did not belong to such a culture.
Furthermore, we had built a Utopia here, and to admit that suicides would occur
from time to time meant that it was not a Utopia for all our people, which in turn
meant that it was not a Utopia at all.
But we had built our Utopia along the lines of a traditional Kikuyu society, that
which existed in Kenya before the advent of the Europeans. It was the Europeans
who forcefully introduced change into that society, not the Kikuyu, and therefore I
could not allow Murumbi to change the way we lived, either.
The most obvious answer was to encourage him — and others like him — to
emigrate to Kenya, but this seemed out of the question. I myself had received higher
degrees in both England and America, but the majority of Kikuyu on Kirinyaga had
been those (considered fanatics by a Kenyan government that was glad to be rid of
them) who had insisted in living in the traditional way prior to coming to Kirinyaga.
This meant that not only could they not cope with the technology that permeated
every layer of Kenyan society, but also that they did not even possess the tools to
learn, for they could neither read nor write.
So Murumbi, and those who would surely follow him, could not leave Kirinyaga
for Kenya or any other destination. That meant they must remain.
If they remained, there were only three alternatives that I could see, all of them