"LeGuin, Ursula K. - The DispossessedUC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

cle. Beyond that arc was blackness. This blackness re-
versed the whole picture, made it negative. The real, the
stone part of it was no longer concave and full of light but
convex, reflecting, rejecting light. It was not a plain or a
bowl but a sphere, a ball of white stone falling down in
blackness, falling away. It was his world.

"I don't understand," he said aloud.

Someone answered him. For a while he failed to com-
prehend that the person standing by his chair was speaking
to him, answering him, for he no longer understood what
an answer is. He was clearly aware of only one thing, his
own total isolation. The world bad fallen out from under
him, and be was left alone.

He had always feared that this would happen, more
than he had ever feared death. To die is to lose the self
and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest

He was able at last to look up at the man standing be-
side him. It was a stranger, of course. From now on there
would be only strangers. He was speaking in a foreign
language: lotic. The words made sense. All the little
things made sense; only the whole thing did not. The man
was saying something about the straps that held him into
the chair. He fumbled at them. The chair swung upright,
and he nearly fell out of if being giddy and off balance.
The man kept asking if someone had been hurt. Who was
he talking about? "Is he sure he didn't get hurt?" The polite
form of direct address in lotic was in the third person.
The man meant him, himself. He did not know why he
should have been hurt; the man kept saying something
about throwing rocks. But the rock will never hit, he
5

thought. He looked back at the screen for the rock, the
white stone falling down in darkness, but the screen had

gone blank.

**I am well╗" he said at last, at random.
It did not appease the man. "Please come with me. I'm

a doctor."
"I am well.**

Tiease come with me, Dr. Shevek!"
^ou are a doctor," Shevek said after a pause. "I am