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

worse. If he died there it wouldn't be good publicity abroad, since there have been some nasty rumors
about deaths from illness in the Rehabilitation Camps and the Federal Medical Association Hospitals; and
there are scientists abroad who have heard of Simon, since somebody published his proof of Goldbach's
Hypothesis in Peking. So they let him out early, with eight dollars in his pocket, which is what he had in
his pocket when they arrested him, which made it, of course, fair. He had walked and hitched home from
Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, with a couple of days in jail in Walla Walla for being caught hitchhiking. He
almost fell asleep telling me this, and when he had told me, he did fall asleep. He needed a change of
clothes and a bath but I didn't want to wake him. Besides, I was tired, too. We lay side by side and his
head was on my arm. I don't suppose that I have ever been so happy. No; was it happiness? Something
wider and darker, more like knowledge, more like the night: joy.

***

It was dark for so long, so very long. We were all blind. And there was the cold, a vast, unmoving,
heavy cold. We could not move at all. We did not move. We did not speak. Our mouths were
closed, pressed shut by the cold and by the weight. Our eyes were pressed shut. Our limbs were
held still. Our minds were held still. For how long? There was no length of time; how long is
death? And is one dead only after living, or before life as well? Certainly we thought, if we
thought anything, that we were dead; but if we had ever been alive, we had forgotten it.

There was a change. It must have been the pressure that changed first, although we did not know
it. The eyelids are sensitive to touch. They must have been weary of being shut. When the pressure
upon them weakened a little, they opened. But there was no way for us to know that. It was too
cold for us to feel anything. There was nothing to be seen. There was black.

But thenтАФ"then," for the event created time, created before and after, near and far, now and
thenтАФ"then" there was the light. One light. One small, strange light that passed slowly, at what
distance we could not tell. A small greenish white, slightly blurred point of radiance, passing.

Our eyes were certainly open, "then," for we saw it. We saw the moment. The moment is a point
of light. Whether in darkness or in the field of all light, the moment is small, and moves, but not
quickly. And "then" it is gone.

It did not occur to us that there might be another moment. There was no reason to assume that
there might be more than one. One was marvel enough: that in all the field of the dark, in the
cold, heavy, dense, moveless, timeless, placeless, boundless black, there would have occurred,
once, a small, slightly blurred, moving light! Time need be created only once, we thought.

But we were mistaken. The difference between one and more than one is all the difference in the
world. Indeed, that difference is the world.

The light returned.

The same light, or another one? There was no telling.

But, "this time," we wondered about the light: Was it small and near to us, or large and far away?
Again there was no telling; but there was something about the way it moved, a trace of hesitation,
a tentative quality, that did not seem proper to anything large and remote. The stars, for instance.
We began to remember the stars.