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

crippled. He worked as blacksmith at the smithy, making wheels of energy, closed upon themselves,
terrible with power, flaming. He who made them was burnt away by them to a shell of cinder, with eyes
like a potter's kiln when it is opened and hair of burning wires, but still he turned the paths of energy and
closed them into wheels, locking power into power. All around this being now was black and hollow
where the wheels turned and ground and milled. There were other beings who came as if flying, like
birds in a storm, flying and crying across the wheels of fire to stop the turning and the work, but they
were caught in the wheels and burst like feathers of flame. The miller was a thin shell of darkness now,
very weak, burnt out, and he too was caught in the wheels' turning and burning and grinding and was
ground to dust, like fine, black meal. The wheels as they turned kept growing and joining until the whole
machine was interlocked cog within cog, and strained and brightened and burst into pieces. Every wheel
as it burst was a flare of faces and eyes and flowers and beasts on fire - burning, exploding, destroyed,
falling into black dust. That happened, and it was one flicker of brightness and dark in the universe of
power, a bubble of foam, a flick of the shuttle, a fleck of mica. The dark dust, or meal, lay in the shape of
open curves or spirals. It began to move and shift, and there was a scintillation in it, like dust in a shaft of
sunlight. It began dancing. Then the dancing drew away and drew away, and closer by, to the left,
something was there, crying like a little animal. That was myself, my mind and being in the world; and I
began to become myself again; but my soul that had seen the vision was not entirely willing. Only my
mind kept drawing it back to me from the Ninth House, calling and crying for it till it came.
I was lying on my right side on earth, in a small, warm room with earthen walls. The only light came
from the red bar of an electric heater. Somewhere nearby people were singing a two-note chant. I was
holding in my left hand a rock of serpentine, greenish with dark markings, quite round as if waterworn,
though serpentine does not often wear round, but splits and crumbles. It was just large enough that I
could close my fingers around it. I held this round stone for a long time and listened to the chanting until
I went to sleep. When I woke up, after a while I felt the rock going immaterial so that my fingers began
sinking into it, and it weighed less and less, until it was gone. I was a little grieved by this, for I had
thought it a remarkable thing to come back from the Right Arm of the World with a piece of it in my
hand; but as I grew clearer headed, I perceived the vanity of that notion. Years later the rock came back
to me. I was walking down by Moon Creek with my sons when they were small boys. The younger one

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 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Visionary

saw the rock in the water and picked it up, saying, "A world!" I told him to keep it in his heya-box, which
he did. When he died, I put that rock back in the water of Moon Creek.
I had been in the vision for the first two days and nights of the Twenty-One Days of the Sun. I was
very weak and tired, and they kept me in the heyimas all the rest of the Twenty-One Days. I could hear
the long-singing, and sometimes I went into other rooms of the heyimas; they made me welcome even in
the inmost room, where they were singing and dancing the Inner Sun and where I had entered the vision.
I would sit and listen and half-watch. But if I tried to follow the dancing with my eyes, or sing, or even
touch the tongue-drum, the weakness would wash into me like a wave on sand, and I would go back into
the little room and lie down on the earth, in the earth.
They waked me to listen to the Morning Carol; that was the first time in twenty-one days that I
climbed the ladder and saw the sun, that day, the day of the Sun Rising.
The people dancing the Inner Sun had been in charge of me. They had told me that I was in danger
and that if I approached another vision, I should try to turn away from it, as I was not strong enough for it
yet. They had told me not to dance; and they kept bringing me food, so good and so kindly given that I
could not refuse it, and ate it with enjoyment. After the Sun Risen days were past, certain scholars of the
heyimas took me in their charge. Tarweed, a man of my House, and the woman Milk of the Obsidian,
were my guides. It was now time that I begin to learn the recounting of the vision.
When I began, I thought there was nothing to learn. All I had to do was say what I had seen.