"Orson Scott Card - Ender's Saga 03 - Xenocide" - читать интересную книгу автора (Card Orson Scott)

beam with his head on the first day of the voyage, but ever since then his
collisions had been deliberate, for comic effect. No one ever laughed out loud,
of course-- that was a family tradition, not to laugh when Jakt pulled one of
his physical gags-- but then Jakt was not the sort of man who needed overt
encouragement from others. He was his own best audience; a man couldn't be a
sailor and a leader of men all his life without being quite self-contained. As
far as Valentine knew, she and the children were the only people he had ever
allowed himself to need.
Even then, he had not needed them so much that he couldn't go on with his life
as a sailor and fisherman, away from home for days, often weeks, sometimes
months at a time. Valentine went with him sometimes at first, when they were
still so hungry for each other that they could never be satisfied. But within a
few years their hunger had given way to patience and trust; when he was away,
she did her research and wrote her books, and then gave her entire attention to
him and the children when he returned.
The children used to complain, "I wish Father would get home, so Mother would
come out of her room and talk to us again." I was not a very good mother,
Valentine thought. It's pure luck that the children turned out so well.
The essay remained in the air over the terminal. Only a final touch remained to
be given. At the bottom, she centered the cursor and typed the name under which
all her writings were published:
DEMOSTHENES
It was a name given to her by her older brother, Peter, when they were children
together fifty-- no, three thousand years ago.
The mere thought of Peter still had the power to upset her, to make her go hot
and cold inside. Peter, the cruel one, the violent one, the one whose mind was
so subtle and dangerous that he was manipulating her by the age of two and the
world by the age of twenty. When they were still children on Earth in the
twenty-second century, he studied the political writings of great men and women,
living and dead, not to learn their ideas-- those he grasped instantly-- but to
learn how they said them. To learn, in practical terms, how to sound like an
adult. When he had mastered it, he taught Valentine, and forced her to write low
political demagoguery under the name Demosthenes while he wrote elevated
statesmanlike essays under the name Locke. Then they submitted them to the
computer networks and within a few years were at the heart of the greatest
political issues of the day.
What galled Valentine then-- and still stung a bit today, since it had never
been resolved before Peter died-- was that he, consumed by the lust for power,
had forced her to write the sort of thing that expressed his character, while he
got to write the peace-loving, elevated sentiments that were hers by nature. In
those days the name "Demosthenes" had felt like a terrible burden to her.
Everything she wrote under that name was a lie; and not even her lie-- Peter's
lie. A lie within a lie.
Not now. Not for three thousand years. I've made the name my own. I've written
histories and biographies that have shaped the thinking of millions of scholars
on the Hundred Worlds and helped to shape the identities of dozens of nations.
So much for you, Peter. So much for what you tried to make of me.
Except that now, looking at the essay she had just written, she realized that
even though she had freed herself from Peter's suzerainty, she was still his
pupil. All she knew of rhetoric, polemic-- yes, of demagoguery-- she had learned