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

never finished his sentences. She could wait for him to finish them himself, so
that he never felt rushed, never felt that he was boring her.
Perhaps even more important, he didn't have to form his words as fully for her
as he did for human listeners. Andrew had given him a personal terminal-- a
computer transceiver encased in a jewel like the one Andrew wore in his own ear.
From that vantage point, using the jewel's sensors, Jane could detect every
sound he made, every motion of the muscles in his head. He didn't have to
complete each sound, he had only to begin it and she would understand. So he
could be lazy. He could speak more quickly and be understood.
And he could also speak silently. He could subvocalize-- he didn't have to use
that awkward, barking, yowling voice that was all his throat could produce now.
So that when he was talking to Jane, he could speak quickly, naturally, without
any reminder that he was crippled. With Jane he could feel like himself.
Now he sat on the bridge of the cargo ship that had brought the Speaker for the
Dead to Lusitania only a few months ago. He dreaded the rendezvous with
Valentine's ship. If he could have thought of somewhere else to go, he might
have gone there-- he had no desire to meet Andrew's sister Valentine or anybody
else. If he could have stayed alone in the starship forever, speaking only to
Jane, he would have been content.
No he wouldn't. He would never be content again.
At least this Valentine and her family would be somebody new. On Lusitania he
knew everybody, or at least everybody that he valued-- all the scientific
community there, the people of education and understanding. He knew them all so
well that he could not help but see their pity, their grief, their frustration
at what had become of him. When they looked at him all they could see was the
difference between what he was before and what he was now. All they could see
was loss.
There was a chance that new people-- Valentine and her family-- would be able to
look at him and see something else.
Even that was unlikely, though. Strangers would look at him and see less, not
more, than those who had known him before he was crippled. At least Mother and
Andrew and Ela and Ouanda and all the others knew that he had a mind, knew that
he was capable of understanding ideas. What will new people think when they see
me? They'll see a body that's already atrophying, hunched over; they'll see me
walk with a shuffling gait; they'll watch me use my hands like paws, clutching a
spoon like a three-year-old; they'll hear my thick, half-intelligible speech;
and they'll assume, they'll know, that such a person cannot possibly understand
anything complicated or difficult.
Why did I come?
I didn't come. I went. I wasn't coming here, to meet these people. I was leaving
there. Getting away. Only I tricked myself. I thought of leaving on a
thirty-year voyage, which is only how it will seem to them. To me I've been gone
only a week and a half. No time at all. And already my time of solitude is over.
My time of being alone with Jane, who listens to me as if I were still a human
being, is done.
Almost. Almost he said the words that would have aborted the rendezvous. He
could have stolen Andrew's starship and taken off on a voyage that would last
forever without having to face another living soul.
But such a nihilistic act was not in him, not yet. He had not yet despaired, he
decided. There might yet be something he could do that might justify his