"Ursula K. LeGuin - Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

far away from all of them as he could in the crowded cabin. "None of you constitute, in yourselves, any
reason for my changing my behavior."
Harfex, a reserved and patient man, said, "The reason is that we shall be spending several years
together. Life will be better for all of us ifтАФ"
"Can't you understand that I don't give a damn for all of you?" Osden said, took up his microtapes,
and went out. Eskwana had suddenly gone to sleep. Asnanifoil was drawing slipstreams in the air with his
finger and muttering the Ritual Primes. "You cannot explain his presence on the team except as a plot on
the part of the Terran Authority. I saw this almost at once. This mission is meant to fail," Harfex
whispered to the Coordinator, glancing over his shoulder. Porlock was fumbling with his fly-button; there
were tears in his eyes. I did tell you they were all crazy, but you thought I was exaggerating.
All the same, they were not unjustified. Extreme Surveyors expected to find their fellow team
members intelligent, well-trained, unstable, and personally sympathetic. They had to work together in
close quarters and nasty places, and could expect one another's paranoias, depressions, manias, phobias
and compulsions to be mild enough to admit of good personal relationships, at least most of the time.
Osden might be intelligent, but his training was sketchy and his personality was disastrous. He had been
sent only on account of his singular gift, the power of empathy: properly speaking, of wide-range
bioempathic receptivity. His talent wasn't species-specific; he could pick up emotion or sentience from
anything that felt He could share lust with a white rat, pain with a squashed cockroach, and phototropy
with a moth. On an alien world, the Authority had decided, it would be useful to know if anything nearby
is sentient, and if so, what its feelings towards you are. Osden's title was a new one: he was the team's
Sensor.
"What is emotion, Osden?" Haito Tomiko asked him one day in the main cabin, trying to make some
rapport with him for once. "What is it, exactly, that you pick up with your empathic sensitivity?"
"Muck," the man answered in his high, exasperated voice. "The psychic excreta of the animal
kingdom. I wade through your feces."
"I was trying," she said, "to learn some facts." She thought her tone was admirably calm.
"You weren't after facts. You were trying to get at me. With some fear, some curiosity, and a great
deal of distaste. The way you might poke a dead dog to see the maggots crawl. Will you understand
once and for all that I don't want to be got at, that I want to be left alone?" His skin was mottled with red
and violet, his voice had risen. "Go roll in your own dung you yellow bitch!" he shouted at her silence.
"Calm down," she said, still quietly, but she left him at once and went to her cabin. Of course he had
been right about her motives; her question had been largely a pretext, a mere effort to interest him. But
what harm in that? Did not that effort imply respect for the other? At the moment of asking the question
she had felt at most a slight distrust of him; she had mostly felt sorry for him, the poor arrogant venomous
bastard, Mr. No-Skin as Olleroo called him. What did he expect, the way he acted? Love?
"I guess he can't stand anybody feeling sorry for him," said Olleroo, lying on the lower bunk, gilding
her nipples.
 "Then he can't form any human relationship. All his Dr. Hammergeld did was turn an autism inside
out тАж "
"Poor frot," said Olleroo. "Tomiko, you don't mind if Harfex comes in for a while tonight, do you?"
"Can't you go to his cabin? I'm sick of always having to sit in Main with that damned peeled turnip."
"You do hate him, don't you? I guess he feels that. But I slept with Harfex last night too, and
Asnanifoil might get jealous, since they share the cabin. It would be nicer here."
"Service them both," Tomiko said with the coarseness of offended modesty. Her Terran subculture,
the East Asian, was a puritanical one; she had been brought up chaste.
"I only like one a night," Olleroo replied with innocent serenity. Beldene, the Garden Planet, had never
discovered chastity, or the wheel.
"Try Osden, then," Tomiko said. Her personal instability was seldom so plain as now: a profound
self-distrust manifesting itself as destructivism. She had volunteered for this job because there was, in all
probability, no use in doing it.