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

Administration in order to inspire competitive research.

"Aspirin," the doctor repeated. "The miracle ingredient more doctors recommend." She cat-grinned
again. I think she liked us because we were living in sin. That bottle of black-market aspirin was probably
worth more than the old Navajo bracelet I pawned for her fee.

I went out again to register Simon as temporarily domiciled at my address and to apply for Temporary
Unemployment Compensation ration stamps for him. They only give them to you for two weeks and you
have to come every day; but to register him as Temporarily Disabled meant getting the signatures of two
fed-meds, and I thought I'd rather put that off for a while. It took three hours to go through the lines and
get the forms he would have to fill out, and to answer the 'crats' questions about why he wasn't there in
person. They smelled something fishy. Of course it's hard for them to prove that two people are married
and aren't just adultering if you move now and then and your friends help out by sometimes registering
one of you as living at their address; but they had all the back files on both of us and it was obvious that
we had been around each other for a suspiciously long time. The State really does make things awfully
hard for itself. It must have been simpler to enforce the laws back when marriage was legal and adultery
was what got you into trouble. They only had to catch you once. But I'll bet people broke the law just as
often then as they do now.

***

The lantern-creatures came close enough at last that we could see not only their light, but their
bodies in the illumination of their light. They were not pretty. They were dark colored, most often
a dark red, and they were all mouth. They ate one another whole. Light swallowed light all
swallowed together in the vaster mouth of the darkness. They moved slowly, for nothing, however
small and hungry, could move fast under that weight, in that cold. Their eyes, round with fear,
were never closed. Their bodies were tiny and bony behind the gaping jaws. They wore queer, ugly
decorations on their lips and skulls: fringes, serrated wattles, feather-like fronds, gauds, bangles,
lures. Poor little sheep of the deep pastures! Poor ragged, hunchjawed dwarfs squeezed to the
bone by the weight of the darkness, chilled to the bone by the cold of the darkness, tiny monsters
burning with bright hunger, who brought us back to life!

Occasionally, in the wan, sparse illumination of one of the lantern-creatures, we caught a
momentary glimpse of other, large, unmoving shapes: the barest suggestion, off in the distance,
not of a wall, nothing so solid and certain as a wall, but of a surface, an angleтАж Was it there?

Or something would glitter, faint, far off, far down. There was no use trying to make out what it
might be. Probably it was only a fleck of sediment, mud, or mica, disturbed by a struggle between
the lantern-creatures, flickering like a bit of diamond dust as it rose and settled slowly. In any
case, we could not move to go see what it was. We had not even the cold, narrow freedom of the
lantern-creatures. We were immobilized, borne down, still shadows among the half-guessed
shadow walls. Were we there?

The lantern-creatures showed no awareness of us. They passed before

us, among us, perhaps even through usтАФit was impossible to be sure. They were not afraid, or
curious.

Once something a little larger than a hand came crawling near, and for a moment we saw quite
distinctly the clean angle where the foot of a wall rose from the pavement, in the glow cast by the