"Recording Angel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Mr Naryan felt that he should not speak to her unless she spoke first. He was
disturbed by her: he had grown into his routines, and this unsought
responsibility frightened him. No doubt Dreen was watching through one or
another of the little machines that flitted about the sunny, salt-white square
-- but that was not sufficient compulsion, except that now he had found her, he
could not leave her.
At last, the owner of the tea house refilled the woman's bowl and said softly,
"Our Archivist is sitting beside you."
The woman turned jerkily, spilling her tea. "I'm not going back," she said.
"I've told them that I won't serve."
"No one has to do anything here," Mr Naryan said, feeling that he must calm her.
"That is the point. My name is Naryan, and I have the honour, as our good host
has pointed out, of being the Archivist of Sensch."
The woman smiled at this, and said that he could call her Angel; her name also
translated as Monkey, but she preferred the former. "You're not like the others
here," she added, as if she had only just realised. "I saw people like you in
the port city, and one let me ride on his boat down the river until we reached
the edge of a civil war. But after that every one of the cities I passed through
seemed to be inhabited by only one race, and each was different from the next."
"It is true that this is a remote city," Mr Naryan said.
He could hear the faint drums of the procession. It was the middle of the day,
when the sun halted at its zenith before reversing back down the sky.
The woman, Angel, heard the drums too. She looked around with a kind of preening
motion as the procession came through the flame trees on the far side of the
square. It reached this part of the city at the same time every day. It was led
by a bare-chested man who beat a big drum draped in cloth of gold; it was held
before him by a leather strap that went around his neck. The steady beat echoed
across the square. Behind him slouched or capered ten, twenty, thirty naked men
and women. Their hair was long and ropey with dirt; their fingernails were
curved yellow talons.
Angel drew her breath sharply as the rag-taggle procession shuffled past,
following the beat of the drum into the curving street that led out of the
square. She said, "This is a very strange place. Are they mad?"
Mr Naryan explained, "They have not lost their reason, but have had it taken
away. For some it will be returned in a year; it was taken away from them as a
punishment. Others have renounced their own selves for the rest of their lives.
It is a religious avocation. But saint or criminal, they were all once as fully
aware as you or me."
"I'm not like you," she said. "I'm not like any of the crazy kinds of people I
have met."
Mr Naryan beckoned to the owner of the tea house and ordered two more bowls. "I
understand you have come a long way." Although he was terrified of her, he was
certain that he could draw her out.
But Angel only laughed.
Mr Naryan said, "I do not mean to insult you."
"You dress like a ... native. Is that a religious avocation?"
"It is my profession. I am the Archivist here."
"The people here are different -- a different race in every city. When I left,
not a single intelligent alien species was known. It was one reason for my
voyage. Now there seem to be thousands strung along this long, long river. They