"Nancy Kress - Unto the Daughters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

for perhaps the fortieth or fiftieth time, "Knowledge is the only way to change it. Knowledge, and truth.
Eve, listen -- "
She goes with me to the tree. Her baby daughter in her arms, she goes with me. She chooses a
bright red apple, and she chews her mouthful so completely that when she transfers it to Sheitha's lips
there is no chance the baby could choke on it. Together, they eat the whole thing.
I am tired. I don't wait around for the rest: Adam's return, and his outrage that she has acted without
him, his fear that now she knows things he does not. His arrival. I don't wait. I am too tired, and my gut
twists as if I had swallowed something foul, or bitter. That happens sometimes, without my intending it.
Sometimes I eat something with a vitamin I know I need, and it lies hard in my belly like pain.
****
This is not the way you heard the story.
But consider who eventually wrote that story down. Consider, too, who wiped up the ink or
scrubbed the chisel or cleaned the printing office after the writing down was done. For centuries and
centuries.
But not forever.
So this may not be the way you heard the story, but you, centuries about Eve's screams on her
childbed, and Sheitha's murder at the hands of her husband, and Sheitha's daughter's cursing of her
rebellious mother as the girl climbed willingly onto her husband's funeral pyre, and her daughter's harlotry,
and her daughter's forced marriage at age nine to a man who gained control of all her camels and oases.
You know all that, all the things I didn't tell poor Eve would happen anyway. But you know, too -- as
Eve would not have, had it not been for me -- that knowledge can bring change. You sit cross-legged at
your holodecks or in your pilot chairs or on your Councils, humming, and you finally know. Finally -- it
took you so fucking long to digest the fruit of knowledge and shit it out where it could fertilize anything.
But you did. You are not stupid. More -- you know that stupidity is only the soul asleep. The awakened
sleeper may stumble a long time in the dark, but eventually the light comes. Even here.
I woke Eve up.
I, the mother.
So that may not be the way you heard the story, but it is the way it happened. And now -- finally,
finally -- you know.
And can forgive me.

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