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

they said. Only because it grieved me terribly, their talking. Because they couldn't rejoice aloud over a
job done and a discovery made, but had to hide there and whisper about it. Because they couldn't go out
into the sun.

I went into the bathroom with my viola and sat on the toilet lid and did a long set of sautille exercises.
Then I tried to work at the Forrest trio, but it was too assertive. I played the solo part from Harold in
Italy, which is beautiful, but it wasn't quite the right mood either. They were still going strong in the other
room. I began to improvise.

After a few minutes in E-minor the light over the shaving mirror began to flicker and dim; then it died.
Another outage. The table lamp in the other room did not go out, being connected with the sun, not with
the twenty-three atomic fission plants that power the Greater Portland Area. Within two seconds
somebody had switched it off too, so that we shouldn't be the only window in the West Hills left alight;
and I could hear them rooting for candles and rattling matches. I went on improvising in the dark. Without
light, when you couldn't see all the hard shiny surfaces of things, the sound seemed softer and less
muddled. I went on, and it began to shape up. All the laws of harmonics sang together when the bow
came down. The strings of the viola were the cords of my own voice, tightened by sorrow, tuned to the
pitch of joy. The melody created itself out of air and energy, it raised up the valleys, and the mountains
and hills were made low, and the crooked straight, and the rough places plain. And the music went out to
the dark sea and sang in the darkness, over the abyss.

When I came out they were all sitting there and none of them was talking. Max had been crying. I could
see little candle flames in the tears around his eyes. Simon lay flat on the bed in the shadows, his eyes
closed. Phil Drum sat hunched over, holding the solar cell in his hands.

I loosened the pegs, put the bow and the viola in the case, and cleared my throat. It was embarrassing. I
finally said, "I'm sorry."

One of the women spoke: Rose Abramski, a private student of Simon's, a big shy woman who could
hardly speak at all unless it was in mathematical symbols. "I saw it," she said. "I saw it. I saw the white
towers, and the water streaming down their sides, and running back down to the sea. And the sunlight
shining in the streets, after ten thousand years of darkness."

"I heard them," Simon said, very low, from the shadow. "I heard their voices."
"Oh, Christ! Stop it" Max cried out, and got up and went blundering out into the unlit hall, without his
coat. We heard him running down the stairs.

"Phil," said Simon, lying there, "could we raise up the white towers, with our lever and our fulcrum?"

After a long silence Phil Drum answered, "We have the power to doit."

"What else do we need?" Simon said. "What else do we need, besides power?"

Nobody answered him.

***

The blue changed. It became brighter, lighter, and at the same time thicker: impure. The ethereal
luminosity of blue-violet turned to turquoise, intense and opaque. Still we could not have said that
everything was now turquoise colored, for there were still no things. There was nothing, except