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

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Visionary


THE VISIONARY
by URSULA K. LE GUIN

from Omni October 1984



My mother and aunt said that when I was learning to talk, I talked to people they could not see or
hear, sometimes speaking in our language and sometimes saying words or names they did not know. I
can't remember doing that, but I remember that I could not understand why people said that a room was
empty or that there was nobody in the gardens, because there were always people of different kinds,
everywhere. Mosty they stayed quietly or were going about their doings, or passing through. I had
already learned that nobody talked to them and that they did not often pay heed or answer when I tried to
talk to them, but it had not occurred to me that other people did not see them.
I had a big argument with my cousin once when she said there was nobody in the wash house, and I
had seen a whole group of people there, passing things from hand to hand and laughing silently, as if
they were playing some gambling game. My cousin, who was older than I, said I was lying, and I began
to scream and tried to knock her down. I can feel that same anger now. I was telling what I had seen and
could not believe she had not seen the people in the wash house; I thought she was lying in order to call
me a liar. That anger and shame stayed a long time and made me unwilling to look at the people that
other people didn't see or wouldn't talk about. When I saw them, I looked away until they were gone. I
had thought they were all my kinfolk, people of my household, and seeing them had been companionship
and pleasure to me; but now I felt I could not trust them, since they had got me into trouble. Of course I
had it all backward, but there was nobody to help me get it straight. My family was not much given to
thinking about things, and except for going to school, I went to our heyimas only in the Summer before
the games.
When I turned away from all those people that I had used to see, they went on and did not come back.
Only a few were left, and I was lonely.
I liked to be with my father, Olive of the Yellow Adobe, a man who talked little and was cautious and
gentle in mind and hand. He repaired and reinstalled solar panels and collectors and batteries and lines
and fixtures in houses and outbuildings; all his work was with the Miller's Art. He did not mind if I eame
along if I was quiet, and so I went with him to be away from our noisy, busy household. When he saw
that I liked his art, he began to teach it to me. My mothers were not enthusiastic about that. My
Serpentine grandmother did not like having a Miller for son-in-law, and my mother wanted me to learn
medicine. "If she has the third eye, she ought to put it to good use," they said, and they sent me to the
Doctors Lodge on White Sulfur Creek to learn. Although I learned a good deal there and liked the
teachers, I did not like the work and was impatient with the illnesses and accidents of mortality,
preferring the dangerous, dancing energies my father worked with. I could often see the electrical
current, and there were excitements of feeling, tones of a kind of sweet music barely to be heard, and
tones also of voices speaking and singing, distant and hard to understand, that came when I worked with
the batteries and wires. I did not speak of this to my father. If he felt and heard any of these things, he
preferred to leave them unspoken, outside the house of words.


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