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

casual and intimate, and all customary movements. Thus he sees a movement out of
the corner of his eye, and thinks he has seen his dead wife moving across the
doorway, and he cannot be content until he has walked to the door and seen that
it was not his wife. Thus he wakes up from a dream in which he heard her voice,
and finds himself speaking his answer aloud as if she could hear him."
"What else?" asked Jiang-qing.
"I'm tired of philosophy," said Han Fei-tzu. "Maybe the Greeks found comfort in
it, but not me."
"The desire of the spirit," said Jiang-qing, insisting.
"Because the spirit is of the earth, it is that part which makes new things out
of old ones. The husband longs for all the unfinished things that he and his
wife were making when she died, and all the unstarted dreams of what they would
have made if she had lived. Thus a man grows angry at his children for being too
much like him and not enough like his dead wife. Thus a man hates the house they
lived in together, because either he does not change it, so that it is as dead
as his wife, or because he does change it, so that it is no longer half of her
making."
"You don't have to be angry at our little Qing-jao," said Jiang-qing.
"Why?" asked Han Fei-tzu. "Will you stay, then, and help me teach her to be a
woman? All I can teach her is to be what I am-- cold and hard, sharp and strong,
like obsidian. If she grows like that, while she looks so much like you, how can
I help but be angry?"
"Because you can teach her everything that I am, too," said Jiang-qing.
"If I had any part of you in me," said Han Fei-tzu, "I would not have needed to
marry you to become a complete person." Now he teased her by using philosophy to
turn the conversation away from pain. "That is the desire of the soul. Because
the soul is made of light and dwells in air, it is that part which conceives and
keeps ideas, especially the idea of the self. The husband longs for his whole
self, which was made of the husband and wife together. Thus he never believes
any of his own thoughts, because there is always a question in his mind to which
his wife's thoughts were the only possible answer. Thus the whole world seems
dead to him because he cannot trust anything to keep its meaning before the
onslaught of this unanswerable question."
"Very deep," said Jiang-qing.
"If I were Japanese I would commit seppuku, spilling my bowel into the jar of
your ashes."
"Very wet and messy," she said.
He smiled. "Then I should be an ancient Hindu, and burn myself on your pyre."
But she was through with joking. "Qing-jao," she whispered. She was reminding
him he could do nothing so flamboyant as to die with her. There was little
Qing-jao to care for.
So Han Fei-tzu answered her seriously. "How can I teach her to be what you are?"

"All that is good in me," said Jiang-qing, "comes from the Path. If you teach
her to obey the gods, honor the ancestors, love the people, and serve the
rulers, I will be in her as much as you are."
"I would teach her the Path as part of myself," said Han Fei-tzu.
"Not so," said Jiang-qing. "The Path is not a natural part of you, my husband.
Even with the gods speaking to you every day, you insist on believing in a world
where everything can be explained by natural causes."