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

crawling creature, which was covered with a foliage of plumes, each plume dotted with many tiny,
bluish points of light. We saw the pavement beneath the creature and the wall beside it,
heartbreaking in its exact, clear linearity, its opposition to all that was fluid, random, vast, and
void. We saw the creature's claws, slowly reaching out and retracting like small stiff fingers, touch
the wall. Its plumage of light quivering, it dragged itself along and vanished behind the corner of
the wall.

So we knew that the wall was there; and that it was an outer wall, a housefront, perhaps, or the
side of one of the towers of the city.

We remembered the towers. We remembered the city. We had forgotten it. We had forgotten who
we were; but we remembered the city, now.

***

When I got home, the FBI had already been there. The computer at the police precinct where I
registered Simon's address must have flashed it right over to the computer at the FBI building. They had
questioned Simon for about an hour, mostly about what he had been doing during the twelve days it took
him to get from the Camp to Portland. I suppose they thought he had flown to Peking or something.
Having a police record in Walla Walla for hitchhiking helped him establish his story. He told me that one
of them had gone to the bathroom. Sure enough I found a bug stuck on the top of the bathroom door
frame. I left it, as we figured it's really better to leave it when you know you have one, than to take it off
and then never be sure they haven't planted another one you don't know about. As Simon said, if we felt
we had to say something unpatriotic we could always flush the toilet at the same time.

I have a battery radioтАФthere are so many work stoppages because of power failures, and days the
water has to be boiled, and so on, that you really have to have a radio to save wasting time and dying of
typhoidтАФand he turned it on while I was making supper on the Primus. The six o'clock Ail-American
Broadcasting Company news announcer announced that peace was at hand in Uruguay, the president's
confidential aide having been seen to smile at a passing blonde as he left the 613th day of the secret
negotiations in a villa outside Katmandu. The war in Liberia was going well; the enemy said they had shot
down seventeen American planes but the Pentagon said we had shot down twenty-two enemy planes,
and the capital cityтАФI forget its name, but it hasn't been inhabitable for seven years anywayтАФwas on the
verge of being recaptured by the forces of freedom. The police action in Arizona was also successful.
The Neo-Birch insurgents in Phoenix could not hold out much longer against the massed might of the
American army and air force, since their underground supply of small tactical nukes from the
Weathermen in Los Angeles had been cut off. Then there was an advertisement for Fed-Cred cards and
a commercial for the Supreme Court: "Take your legal troubles to the Nine Wise Men!" Then there was
something about why tariffs had gone up, and a report from the stock market, which had just closed at
over two thousand, and a commercial for U.S. Government canned water, with a catchy little tune: "Don't
be sorry when you drink/It's not as healthy as you think/Don't you think you really ought to/Drink
coo-ool, puu-uure USG water?"тАФ with three sopranos in close harmony on the last line. Then, just as
the battery began to give out and his voice was dying away into a faraway tiny whisper, the announcer
seemed to be saving something about a new continent emerging.

"What was that?"

"I didn't hear," Simon said, lying with his eyes shut and his face pale and sweaty. I gave him two aspirins
before we ate. He ate little, and fell asleep while I was washing the dishes in the bathroom. I had been
going to practice, but a viola is fairly wakeful in a one-room apartment. I read for a while instead. It was