"Ursula K. LeGuin - The New Atlantis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

Thus, when we became aware that we were hearing, we were sure that the sounds we heard were
fairly close to us. And yet we may have been quite wrong. For we were in a strange place, a deep
place. Sound travels fast and far in the deep places, and the silence there is perfect, letting the
least noise be heard for hundreds of miles.

And these were not small noises. The lights were tiny, but the sounds were vast: not loud, but very
large. Often they were below the range of hearing, long slow vibrations rather than sounds. The
first we heard seemed to us to rise up through the currents from beneath us: immense

groans, sighs felt along the bone, a rumbling, a deep uneasy whispering.

Later, certain sounds came down to us from above, or borne along the endless levels of the
darkness, and these were stranger yet, for they were music. A huge, calling, yearning music from
far away in the darkness, calling not to us. Where are you? I am here.

Not to us.

They were the voices of the great souls, the great lives, the lonely ones, the voyagers. Calling. Not
often answered. Where are you? Where have you gone?

But the bones, the keels and girders of white bones on icy isles of the South, the shores of bones
did not reply.

Nor could we reply. But we listened, and the tears rose in our eyes, salt, not so salt as the oceans,
the world-girdling deep bereaved currents, the abandoned roadways of the great lives; not so salt,
but warmer.

I am here. Where have you gone?

No answer.

Only the whispering thunder from below.

But we knew now, though we could not answer, we knew because we heard, because we felt,
because we wept, we knew that we were; and we remembered other voices.

***

Max came the next night. I sat on the toilet lid to practice, with the bathroom door shut. The FBI men on
the other end of the bug got a solid half-hour of scales and doublestops, and then a quite good
performance of the Hindemith unaccompanied viola sonata. The bathroom being very small and all hard
surfaces, the noise I made was really tremendous. Not a good sound, far too much echo, but the sheer
volume was contagious, and I played louder as I went on. The man up above knocked on his floor once;
but if I have to listen to the weekly Ail-American Olympic Games at full blast every Sunday morning from
his TV set, then he has to accept Paul Hindemith coming up out of his toilet now and then.

When I got tired, I put a wad of cotton over the bug and came out of the bathroom half-deaf. Simon and
Max were on fire. Burning, un-consumed. Simon was scribbling formulae in traction, and Max was
pumping his elbows up and down the way he does, like a boxer, and saying, "The e-lec-tron