"Poor Man, Beggar Man by Joanna Russ" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Award Stories 7)

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JOANNA RUSS

Poor Man,
Beggar Man

JOANNA Russ was born February 22, 1937, in the Bronx, New York. Her parents are schoolteachers, and science, literature and books were part of her early environment. She was a Westinghouse STS scholar in 1954. She received her B.A. degree in English from Cornell University in 1957 and her M.F.A. degree in playwriting from the Yale Drama School in 1960. She has acted in community theater (the Brooklyn Heights Players) and semiprofessional groups (the West Broadway Workshop).

She began writing at the age of thirteen, and her more than thirty published stories have appeared in science fiction publications such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the Orbit series, and also in such general publications as Manhattan Review, Epoch, Cimarron Review, The Little Magazine, South, Red Clay Reader and William and Mary Review.

At present she is assistant professor of English at Cornell University, teaching creative writing end even, on occasion, science fiction reading. She also reviews books for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and College English, contributes an occasional article to scholarly publications, belongs to Science Fiction Writers of America and the Modern Language Association, and reports that the only hobby she has time for is eating. She offers as her personal philosophy: "Women ought
to run things, as we are friendlier than men, but alas, that is only because we are not allowed to run things."

Her two novels, Picnic on Paradise and A.-7d Chaos Died, were both Nebula Award finalists, as was her novelette "The Second Inquisition." In the 1971 Nebula Award balloting her novelette "Poor Man, Beggar Man" appeared on the final ballot.

A strange man, with a black cloak wrapped about him and a fold of it drawn over his head to hide his face, with the easy, gliding step of one who no longer cares if his feet go over rough or smooth, a man who smelled the smell of cooking at a turn in the narrow, rocky path, but to whom it meant nothing but a signal about what somebody else was doing, nothing more, this fellow-who was of a fairly ordinary and nonformidable appearance (though perhaps a bit mysterious)-slipped along the winding path outside Alexander's camp near the Indus River as if he knew where he was going. But he had no business being there, certainly not in the heat of the afternoon, though the vegetation around him cast the path into a certain tenebrous gloom. Light and shade spotted him. It was early in the Indian summer and petals and yellow dust dropped on the path and on the leaf mold to either side. He shook himself free. He reached an open place and continued, not looking round.

A quarter of a mile from the general's tent the path ascended, became rockier and more open; a guard lounged on a rock, absorbed in a bluebottle he held between thumb and forefinger. He did not see the stranger as he passed, nor did he return his salute. Muffled to the chin, the stranger passed servants clearing dishes from a board table set up in the open sunlight (for the general's tent commanded a view of the valley from an uninterrupted but therefore somewhat inhospitable height). He stepped inside the tent, bending under the canvas flap, his black cloak trailing. He found his man seated at a low table, calling for a map; he put one hand on his shoulder and then he said quite diffidently-

"Come, I'm still a civilized fellow."

"Apollo guard us!" choked the conqueror, turning pale. The stranger laughed and shook his head, still with the inoffensive and

7 friendly manner that had made him so popular, and that had ` occasioned such grief when Alexander had murdered him at the age of twenty-eight. '

"Your teacher, Aristotle, wouldn't like that," he said, shaking his y head humorously, and he sat down on the edge of the table, closing his hand around a wine cup.

"Take your hands off that!" said Alexander automatically, and '- then he said, his color coming back, "Take it."

"Oh no, thank you," said his dead friend, smiling apologetically, "I couldn't, now. You have no idea what an inconvenience it is, to be dead-"

"Take it!" said the conqueror.

"Ah, but-- and his murdered friend put the wine cup down.

"Well?" said Alexander. The dead man smiled, the mild smile of those who provoke and endure insult; he smiled, backing away. .: "I thought," he said, "that the novelty of my appearance-"

"Doesn't last."

"Ah, but you owe me-"

"What?"

The ghost wandered away a few steps, past the ray of brilliant f sunlight that entered the tent through the front flap, brushing the `

canvas wall with his shoulder and causing not a ripple. "I remem-
ber," he said, "I remember." Alexander watched him intently in