"Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen - Old Music and the Slave Women" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

Old Music and the Slave Women
by
Ursula K. Le Guin

The Chief Intelligence Officer of the Ekumenical Embassy toWerrel, a man who on his home world had the name
Sohikelwenyanmurkeres Esdan, and who in Voe Deo was known by a nickname, Esdardon Aya or Old Music, was bo
It had taken a civil war and three years to bore him, but he had got to the point where he referred to himself in ansible re
to the Stabiles on Hain as the Embassy's chief stupidity officer.
He had been able, however, to retain a few clandestine links with friends in the Free City even after the Legitimate
Government sealed the Embassy, allowing no one and no information to enter or leave it. In the third summer of the war
came to the Ambassador with a request. Cut off from reliable communication with the Embassy, Liberation Command h
asked him (how? asked the Ambassador; through one of the men who delivered groceries, he explained) if the Embassy
would let one or two of its people slip across the lines and talk with them, be seen with them, offer proof that despite
propaganda and disinformation, and though the Embassy was stuck in Jit City, its staff had not been co-opted into supp
the Legitimates, but remained neutral and ready to deal with rightful authority on either side.
"Jit City?" said the Ambassador. "Never mind. But how do you get there?"
"Always the problem with Utopia," Esdan said. "Well, I can pass with contact lenses, if nobody's looking closely.
Crossing the Divide is the tricky bit."
Most of the great city was still physically there, the government buildings, factories and warehouses, the university, t
tourist attractions: the Great Shrine of Tual, Theater Street, the Old Market with its interesting display rooms and lofty H
Auction, disused since the sale and rental of assets had been shifted to the electronic marketplace; the numberless street
avenues, and boulevards, the dusty parks shaded by purple-flowered beya trees, the miles and miles of shops, sheds, m
tracks, stations, apartment buildings, houses, compounds, the neighborhoods, the suburbs, and exurbs. Most of it still st
most of its fifteen million people were still there, but its deep complexity was gone. Connections were broken. Interactio
did not take place. A brain after a stroke.
The greatest break was a brutal one, an ax-blow right through the pons, a kilo-wide no-man's-land of blown-up buil
and blocked streets, wreckage and rubble. East of the Divide was Legitimate territory: downtown, government offices,
embassies, banks, communications towers, the university, the great parks and wealthy neighborhoods, the roads out to
armory, barracks, airports, and spaceport. West of the Divide was Free City, Dustyville, Liberation territory: factories, u
compounds, the rentspeople's quarters, the old gareot residential neighborhoods, endless miles of little streets petering o
into the plains at last. Through both ran the great East-West highways, empty.
The Liberation people smuggled him out of the Embassy and almost across the Divide successfully. He and they had
a lot of practice in the old days getting runaway assets out to Yeowe and freedom. He found it interesting to be the one
smuggled instead of one of the smugglers, finding it far more frightening yet less stressful, since he was not responsible, t
package not the postman. But somewhere in the connection there had been a bad link.
They made it on foot into the Divide and partway through it and stopped at a little derelict truck sitting on its wheel r
under a gutted apartment house. A driver sat at the wheel behind the cracked, crazed windshield, and grinned at him. H
guide gestured him into the back. The truck took off like a hunting cat, following a crazy route, zigzagging through the ru
They were nearly across the Divide, jolting across a rubbled stretch which might have been a street or a marketplace, w
the truck veered, stopped, there were shouts, shots, the van back was flung open and men plunged in at him. "Easy," he
"go easy," for they were manhandling him, hauling him, twisting his arm behind his back. They yanked him out of the truc
pulled off his coat and slapped him down searching for weapons, frog-marched him to a car waiting beside the truck. H
tried to see if his driver was dead but could not look around before they shoved him into the car.
It was an old government state-coach, dark red, wide, and long, made for parades, for carrying great estate owners
the Council and ambassadors from the spaceport. Its main section could be curtained to separate men from women
passengers, and the driver's compartment was sealed off so the passengers wouldn't be breathing in what a slave breath
out.
One of the men had kept his arm twisted up his back until he shoved him headfirst into the car, and all he thought as
found himself sitting between two men and facing three others and the car starting up was, I'm getting too old for this.
He held still, letting his fear and pain subside, not ready yet to move even to rub his sharply hurting shoulder, not loo