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

else; the girls with whom I gambled had taken to smoking a lot of hemp, which I never liked; and though
the friends with whom I rode and looked after the horses were still kind, I did not want to be with
humans much or even with horses. I did not want the world to be as it was. I had begun making up the
world.
I made the world this way: That young man of my House in Chukulmas felt as I felt; and I would go
to Chukulmas after the Grass this year. He and I would go up into the hills together and become forest-
living people. We would take the roan stallion and go to Looks Up Valley, or farther; we would go to the
grass dune country west of the Long Sound, where, he had once told me, the herds of wild horses run. He
said that people went from Chukulmas sometimes to catch a wild horse there, but it was country where
no human people lived. We would live there together alone, taming and riding the wild horses. Telling
myself this world, in the daytime I made us live as brother and sister, but in the nights, lying alone, I
made us make love together. The Grass came and passed; I put off going to Chukulmas, telling myself
that it would be better to go after the Sun was danced. I had never danced the Sun as an adult, and I
wanted to do that; after that, I told myself, I would go to Chukulmas. All along I knew that if I went or if
I did not go it did not matter, and all I wanted to do was to die.
It is hard to say to yourself that what you want to do is die. You keep hiding it behind other things,
which you pretend to want. I was impatient for the Twenty-One Days to begin, as if my life would start
over with them. On the eve of the first day, I went to live at the heyimas.
As soon as I set foot on the ladder, my heart went cold and tight. There was a long-singing that night.
My lips got numb, and my voice would not come out of my throat. I wanted to get out and run away, all
night, but I did not know where to go.
Next morning three groups formed: One would go over the northwest range into wild country in
silence; one would use hemp and mushrooms for trance; and one would drum and long-sing.
I could not choose which group to join, and this distressed me beyond anything. I began shaking, and
went to the ladder but could not lift my foot to climb it.
The old doctor named Gall, who had taught me sometimes at the Doctors Lodge, came down the
ladder. She was coming to sing, but the habit of her art distracted her, and she observed me. She turned
back and said, "Are you not well?"
"I think I am ill."
"Why is that?"
"I want to dance and can't choose the dancing."
"The long-singing?"
"My voice is gone."
"The trances?"
"I'm afraid of them,"
"The journey?"
"I can't leave this house!" I said loudly and began to shake again.

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 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Visionary

Gall put her head back with her chin sunk in her neck and looked at me from the tops of her eyes. She
was a short, dark, wrinkled woman. She said, "You're already stretched. Do you want to break?"
"Maybe it would be better."
"Maybe it would be better to relax?"
"No it would be worse."
"There's a choice made. Come now."
Gall took my hand and brought me to the doorway of the inmost room of the heyimas, where the
people of the Inner Sun were.
I said, "I can't go in there. I'm not old enough to begin the learning."