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

into faces nor too obviously at the streets. Two glances told him they were passing Rei Street, going east, out of the city
realised then he had been hoping they were taking him back to the Embassy. What a fool.
They had the streets to themselves, except for the startled gaze of people on foot as they flashed by. Now they wer
wide boulevard, going very fast, still going east. Although he was in a very bad situation, he still found it absolutely exhila
just to be out of the Embassy, out in the air, in the world, and moving, going fast.
Cautiously he raised his hand and massaged his shoulder. As cautiously, he glanced at the men beside him and facing
All were dark-skinned, two blue-black. Two of the men facing him were young. Fresh, stolid faces. The third was a veo
the third rank, an oga. His face had the quiet inexpressiveness in which his caste was trained. Looking at him, Esdan cau
his eye. Each looked away instantly.
Esdan liked veots. He saw them, soldiers as well as slaveholders, as part of the old Voe Deo, members of a doome
species. Businessmen and bureaucrats would survive and thrive in the Liberation and no doubt find soldiers to fight for t
but the military caste would not. Their code of loyalty, honor, and austerity was too like that of their slaves, with whom t
shared the worship of Kamye, the Swordsman, the Bondsman. How long would that mysticism of suffering survive the
Liberation? Veots were intransigent vestiges of an intolerable order. He trusted them, and had seldom been disappointed
his trust.
The oga was very black, very handsome, like Teyeo, a veot Esdan had particularly liked. He had left Werel long be
the war, off to Terra and Hain with his wife, who would be a Mobile of the Ekumen one of these days. In a few centurie
Long after the war was over, long after Esdan was dead. Unless he chose to follow them, went back, went home.
Idle thoughts. During a revolution you don't choose. You're carried, a bubble in a cataract, a spark in a bonfire, an
unarmed man in a car with seven armed men driving very fast down the broad, blank East Arterial Highway. . . . They w
leaving the city. Heading for the East Provinces. The Legitimate Government of Voe Deo was now reduced to half the c
city and two provinces, in which seven out of eight people were what the eighth person, their owner, called assets.
The two men up in the front compartment were talking, though they couldn't be heard in the owner compartment. N
the bullet-headed man to Esdan's right asked a muttered question to the oga facing him, who nodded.
"Oga," Esdan said.
The veot's expressionless eyes met his.
"I need to piss."
The man said nothing and looked away. None of them said anything for a while. They were on a bad stretch of the
highway, torn up by fighting during the first summer of the Uprising or merely not maintained since. The jolts and shocks
hard on Esdan's bladder.
"Let the fucking white-eyes piss himself," said one of the two young men facing him to the other, who smiled tightly.
Esdan considered possible replies, good-humored, joking, not offensive, not provocative, and kept his mouth shut. T
only wanted an excuse, those two. He closed his eyes and tried to relax, to be aware of the pain in his shoulder, the pain
his bladder, merely aware.
The man to his left, whom he could not see clearly, spoke: "Driver. Pull off up there." He used a speakerphone. The
driver nodded. The car slowed, pulled off the road, jolting horribly. They all got out of the car. Esdan saw that the man
left was also a veot, of the second rank, a zadyo. One of the young men grabbed Esdan's arm as he got out, another sho
a gun against his liver. The others all stood on the dusty roadside and pissed variously on the dust, the gravel, the roots o
row of scruffy trees. Esdan managed to get his fly open but his legs were so cramped and shaky he could barely stand,
the young man with the gun had come around and now stood directly in front of him with the gun aimed at his penis. The
was a knot of pain somewhere between his bladder and his cock. "Back up a little," he said with plaintive irritability. "I d
want to wet your shoes." The young man stepped forward instead, bringing his gun right against Esdan's groin.
The zadyo made a slight gesture. The young man backed off a step. Esdan shuddered and suddenly pissed out a fou
He was pleased, even in the agony of relief, to see he'd driven the young man back two more steps.
"Looks almost human," the young man said.
Esdan tucked his brown alien cock away with discreet promptness and slapped his trousers shut. He was still weari
lenses that hid the whites of his eyes, and was dressed as a rentsman in loose, coarse clothes of dull yellow, the only dye
color that had been permitted to urban slaves. The banner of the Liberation was that same dull yellow. The wrong color
here. The body inside the clothes was the wrong color, too.
Having lived on Werel for thirty-three years, Esdan was used to being feared and hated, but he had never before be