"Ursula K. Leguin - League 03 - City of Illusions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

Earth free. However, I hope to find out if he's mad or sane or imbecile, and where he came from, and how
he came by those yellow eyes. Have men taken to breeding with cats and falcons in humanity's degenerate
old age? Ask Kretyan to come up to the sleeping-porches, daughter."
Parth followed her blind cousin Kretyan up the stairs to the shady, breezy balcony where the stranger
slept. Zove and his sister Karell, called Buckeye, were waiting there. Both sat cross-legged and straight-
backed, Buckeye playing with her patterning frame, Zove doing nothing at all: a brother and sister getting
on in years, their broad, brown faces alert and very tranquil. The girls sat down near them without
breaking the easy silence. Parth was a reddish-brown color with a flood of long, bright, black hair. She
wore nothing but a pair of loose silvery breeches. Kretyan, a little older, was dark and frail; a red band
covered her empty eyes and held her thick hair back. Like her mother she wore a tunic of delicately
woven figured cloth. It was hot. Midsummer afternoon burned on the gardens below the balcony and out
on the rolling fields of the Clearing. On every side, so close to this wing of the house as to shadow it with
branches full of leaves and wings, so far in other directions as to be blued and hazed by distance, the
forest surrounded them.
The four people sat still for quite a while, together and separate, unspeaking but linked. "The amber bead
keeps slithering off into the Vastness pattern," Buckeye said with a smile, setting down her frame with its
jewel-strung, crossing wires.
"All your beads end up in Vastness," her brother said. "An effect of your suppressed mysticism. You'll
end up like our mother, see if you don't, able to see the patterns on an empty frame."
"Suppressed fiddlediddle," Buckeye remarked. "I never suppressed anything in my life."
"Kretyan," said Zove, "the man's eyelids move. He may be in a dreaming cycle."
The blind girl moved closer to the pallet. She reached out her hand, and Zove guided it gently to the
stranger's forehead. They were all silent again. All listened. But only Kretyan could hear.
She lifted her bowed, blind head at last.
"Nothing," she said, her voice a little strained.
"Nothing?"
"A jumbleтАФa void. He has no mind."
"Kretyan, let me tell you how he looks. His feet have walked, his hands have worked. Sleep and the drug
relax his face, but only a thinking mind could use and wear a face into these lines."
"How did he look when he was awake?"
"Afraid," said Parth. "Afraid, bewildered."
"He may be an alien," Zove said, "not a Terran man, though how that could beтАФBut he may think
differently than we. Try once more, while he still dreams."

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 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Ekumen 03 - City of Illusions

"I'll try, uncle. But I have no sense of any mind, of any true emotion or direction. A baby's mind is
frightening but this тАж is worseтАФdarkness and a kind of empty jumbleтАФ"
"Well, then keep out," Zove said easily. "No-mind is an evil place for mind to stay."
"His darkness is worse than mine," said the girl. "This is a ring, on his handтАж" She had laid her hand a
moment on the man's, in pity or as if asking his unconscious pardon for her eavesdropping on his dreams.
"Yes, a gold ring without marking or design. It was all he wore on his body. And his mind stripped naked
as his flesh. So the poor brute comes to us out of the forestтАФsent by whom?"
All the family of Zove's House except the little children gathered that night in the great hall downstairs,
where high windows stood open to the moist night air. Starlight and the presence of trees and the sound of
the brook all entered into the dimly lit room, so that between each person and the next, and between the
words they said, there was a certain space for shadows, night-wind, and silence.
"Truth, as ever, avoids the Stranger," the Master of the House said to them in his deep voice. "This
stranger brings us a choice of several unlikelihoods. He may be an idiot born, who blundered here by