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

afraid he wouldn't be able to get them back on. When he had to move or sit up so I could wash him, he
shut his eyes.

"Am I really here?" he asked. "Am I here?"

"Yes," I said. "You are here. What I don't understand is how you got here."

"Oh, it wasn't bad so long as I kept moving. All you need is to know where you're goingтАФto have
someplace to go. You know, some of the people in Camp, if they'd let them go, they wouldn't have had
that. They couldn't have gone anywhere. Keeping moving was the main thing. See, my back's all seized
up, now."

When he had to get up to go to the bathroom he moved like a ninety-year-old. He couldn't stand straight,
but was all bent out of shape, and shuffled. I helped him put on clean clothes. When he lay down on the
bed again, a sound of pain came out of him, like tearing thick paper. I went around the room putting
things away. He asked me to come sit by him and said I was going to drown him if I went on crying.
"You'll submerge the entire North American continent," he said. I can't remember what he said, but he
made me laugh finally. It is hard to remember things Simon says, and hard not to laugh when he says
them. This is not merely the partiality of affection: He makes everybody laugh. I doubt that he intends to.
It is just that a mathematician's mind works differently from other people's. Then when they laugh, that
pleases him.

It was strange, and it is strange, to be thinking about "him," the man I have known for ten years, the same
man, while "he" lay there changed out of recognition, a different man. It is enough to make you
understand why most languages have a word like "soul." There are various degrees of death, and time
spares us none of them. Yet something endures, for which a word is needed.

I said what I had not been able to say for a year and a half: "I was afraid they'd brainwash you."

He said, "Behavior mod is expensive. Even just the drugs. They save it mostly for the VIPs. But I'm
afraid they got a notion I might be important after all. I got questioned a lot the last couple of months.
About my 'foreign contacts.'" He snorted. "The stuff that got published abroad, I suppose. So I want to
be careful and make sure it's just a Camp again next time, and not a Federal Hospital."

"Simon, were theyтАж are they cruel, or just righteous?"

He did not answer for a while. He did not want to answer. He knew what I was asking. He knew by
what thread hangs hope, the sword, above our heads.

"Some of themтАж" he said at last, mumbling.

Some of them had been cruel. Some of them had enjoyed their work. You cannot blame everything on
society.

"Prisoners, as well as guards," he said.

You cannot blame everything on the enemy.

"Some of them, Belle," he said with energy, touching my handтАФ "some of them, there were men like gold
thereтАФ"