"Joanna Russ - Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russ Joanna)

Russ, Joanna - Souls.htm




Souls
by Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ has been in the forefront of modern American science
fiction since the late 1960s, when she established a firm following
with the vigorously feminist sword-and-sorcery novel Picnic on
Paradise and the haunting and astonishingly vivid novel of
extrasensory powers And Chaos Died. Her short story, "When It
Changed," was a Nebula winner for 1972.
The brilliant novella reprinted here, which may at first seem to be
historical fiction but which gradually reveals its emphatic science
fiction content, first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction.



Deprived of other Banquet I entertained myself—
—EMILY DICKINSON



This is the tale of the Abbess Radegunde and what happened when
the Norsemen came. I tell it not as it was told to me but as I saw it,
for I was a child then and the Abbess had made a pet and errand boy


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of me, although the stern old Wardress, Cunigunt, who had outlived
the previous Abbess, said I was more in the Abbey than out of it and
a scandal. But the Abbess would only say mildly, "Dear Cunigunt, a
scandal at the age of seven?" which was turning it off with a joke,
for she knew how harsh and disliking my new stepmother was to
me and my father did not care and I with no sisters or brothers. You
must understand that joking and calling people "dear" and "my
dear" was only her manner; she was in every way an unusual
woman. The previous Abbess, Herrade, had found that Radegunde,
who had been given to her to be fostered, had great gifts and so sent
the child south to be taught, and that has never happened here
before. The story has it that the Abbess Herrade found Radegunde
seeming to read the great illuminated book in the Abbess's study;
the child had somehow pulled it off its stand and was sitting on the
floor with the volume in her lap, sucking her thumb, and turning the