"Nancy Kress - The Flowers of Aulit Prison" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

"He can teach this special method to me."
"So far, no World person has been able to learn it. Their brains are different from ours."
She glares at me. But no one, even those lost to reality, can deny that alien brains are
weird. And my injuries are certainly real: bloody head cloth, left eye closed from swelling, skin
scraped raw the length of my left cheek, bruised arm. She strokes the Terran gun, a boringly
straight-lined cylinder of dull metal. "All right. You may keep the Terran near you -- if he
agrees. Why should he?"
I smile at her slowly. Pek Fakar never shows a response to flattery; to do so would be to
show weakness. But she understands. Or thinks she does. I have threatened the Terran with
her power, and the whole prison now knows that her power extends among the aliens as well
as her own people. She goes on glaring, but she is not displeased. In her hand the gun
gleams.
And so begin my conversations with a Terran.


Talking with Carryl Pek Walters is embarrassing and frustrating. He sits beside me in the
eating hall or the courtyard and publicly scratches his head. When he is cheerful, he makes
shrill horrible whistling noises between his teeth. He mentions topics that belong only among
kin: the state of his skin (which has odd brown lumps on it) and his lungs (clogged with fluid,
apparently). He does not know enough to begin conversations with ritual comments on
flowers. It is like talking to a child, but a child who suddenly begins discussing bicycle
engineering or university law.
"You think individual means very little, group means everything," he says.
We are sitting in the courtyard, against a stone wall, a little apart from the other prisoners.
Some watch us furtively, some openly. I am angry. I am often angry with Pek Walters. This is
not going as I'd planned.
"How can you say that? The individual is very important on World! We care for each other
so that no individual is left out of our common reality, except by his own acts!"
"Exactly," Pek Walters says. He has just learned this word from me. "You care for others so
no one left alone. Alone is bad. Act alone is bad. Only together is real."
"Of course," I say. Could he be stupid after all? "Reality is always shared. Is a star really
there if only one eye can perceive its light?"
He smiles and says something in his own language, which makes no sense to me. He
repeats it in real words. "When tree falls in forest, is sound if no person hears?"
"But -- do you mean to say that on your star, people believe they ... " What? I can't find
the words.
He says, "People believe they always real, alone or together. Real even when other people
say they dead. Real even when they do something very bad. Even when they murder."
"But they're not real! How could they be? They've violated shared reality! If I don't
acknowledge you, the reality of your soul, if I send you to your ancestors without your
consent, that is proof that I don't understand reality and so am not seeing it! Only the unreal
could do that!"
"Baby not see shared reality. Is baby unreal?"
"Of course. Until the age when children attain reason, they are unreal."
"Then when I kill baby, is all right, because I not kill real person?"
"Of course it's not all right! When one kills a baby, one kills its chance to become real,
before it could even join its ancestors! And also all the chances of the babies to which it
might become ancestor. No one would kill a baby on World, not even these dead souls in Aulit!
Are you saying that on Terra, people would kill babies?"
He looks at something I cannot see. "Yes."