"Joanna Russ - Poor Man, Beggar Man (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russ Joanna)

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JOANNA RUSS

Poor Man,
Beggar Man

JOANNA Russ was born February 22, 1937, in the Bronx, New York. Her parents are schoolteachers,
and science, literature and books were part of her early environment. She was a Westinghouse STS
scholar in 1954. She received her B.A. degree in English from Cornell University in 1957 and her
M.F.A. degree in playwriting from the Yale Drama School in 1960. She has acted in community
theater (the Brooklyn Heights Players) and semiprofessional groups (the West Broadway Workshop).

She began writing at the age of thirteen, and her more than thirty published stories have appeared
in science fiction publications such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the Orbit
series, and also in such general publications as Manhattan Review, Epoch, Cimarron Review, The
Little Magazine, South, Red Clay Reader and William and Mary Review.

At present she is assistant professor of English at Cornell University, teaching creative writing
end even, on occasion, science fiction reading. She also reviews books for The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction and College English, contributes an occasional article to scholarly
publications, belongs to Science Fiction Writers of America and the Modern Language Association,
and reports that the only hobby she has time for is eating. She offers as her personal philosophy:
"Women ought
to run things, as we are friendlier than men, but alas, that is only because we are not allowed to
run things."

Her two novels, Picnic on Paradise and A.-7d Chaos Died, were both Nebula Award finalists, as was
her novelette "The Second Inquisition." In the 1971 Nebula Award balloting her novelette "Poor
Man, Beggar Man" appeared on the final ballot.

A strange man, with a black cloak wrapped about him and a fold of it drawn over his head to hide
his face, with the easy, gliding step of one who no longer cares if his feet go over rough or
smooth, a man who smelled the smell of cooking at a turn in the narrow, rocky path, but to whom it
meant nothing but a signal about what somebody else was doing, nothing more, this fellow-who was
of a fairly ordinary and nonformidable appearance (though perhaps a bit mysterious)-slipped along
the winding path outside Alexander's camp near the Indus River as if he knew where he was going.
But he had no business being there, certainly not in the heat of the afternoon, though the
vegetation around him cast the path into a certain tenebrous gloom. Light and shade spotted him.
It was early in the Indian summer and petals and yellow dust dropped on the path and on the leaf
mold to either side. He shook himself free. He reached an open place and continued, not looking
round.

A quarter of a mile from the general's tent the path ascended, became rockier and more open; a
guard lounged on a rock, absorbed in a bluebottle he held between thumb and forefinger. He did not
see the stranger as he passed, nor did he return his salute. Muffled to the chin, the stranger