"Geoff Ryman - The Unconquered Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ryman Geoff)

The Unconquered Country
A Life History

by Geoff Ryman

CONTENTS
Part One: The New Numbers
Part Two: The Ceremony
Part Three: A Bird, Singing
Part Four: The Crow That Warbled
Part Five: No Harm Can Come
Afterword

I watched a family of about eight personsтАФa man and a woman, both about fifty,
with their children about one, eight and ten, and two grown-up daughters of about
twenty to twenty-four. An old woman with snow-white hair was holding the
one-year-old in her arms and singing to it, and tickling it. The child was cooing with
delight. The couple were looking on with tears in their eyes.
The father was holding the hand of a boy about ten years old and speaking to him
softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The fa-ther pointed to the sky, stroked his head
and seemed to explain something to him.
From the transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials as reported in The Quality of Mercy:
Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience by William Shawcross
PART ONE: THE NEW NUMBERS
Third child had nothing to sell but parts of her body. She sold her blood. A young
man with a cruel warriors faceтАФa hooked nose between two plump cheeksтАФcame
to her room every two weeks. He called himself her Agent, and told a string of
hearty jokes, and carried a machine around his neck. It was rather like a pair of
bagpipes, and it clung to him, and whimpered.
Third rented her womb for industrial use. She was cheaper than the glass tanks. She
grew parts of living machinery inside herтАФdifferentials for trucks, small household
appliances. She gave birth to adver-tisements, small caricature figures that sang
songs. There was no other work for her in the city. The city was called Saprang
Song, which meant Divine Lotus, after the Buddha.
When Third was lucky, she got a contract for weapons. The pay was good because
it was dangerous. The weapons would come gushing suddenly out of her with much
loss of blood, usually in the middle of the night: an avalanche of glossy, freckled,
dark brown guppies with black, soft eyes and bright rodent smiles full of teeth. No
matter how ill or exhausted Third felt, she would shovel them, immediately, into
buckets and tie down the lids. If she didn't do that, immediately, if she fell asleep, the
guppies would eat her. Thrashing in their buckets as she carried them down the
steps, the guppies would eat each other. She would have to hurry with them,
shuffling as fast as she could under the weight, to the Neighbors. The Neighbors
only paid her for the ones that were left alive. It was piecework.
The Neighbors had coveted the lands of Third's people for generations. Then the
people of the Big Country, for reasons of their own, had given weapons to the
Neighbors.
Third's nation had called itself the Unconquered Country. It had never been
colonized. Then the Neighbors came and conquered the Country. They conquered
the South at first, with its cities and City People. The North still fought. Its mobile