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

her letters. This was mostly due to shyness. To read, you had to stand and speak,
and this she had never been called upon to do. The language of the People was not
pictographic, but it was tonal and each sound-sign had to show shifts in tone. It was
ferociously complicated. Third was inter-ested in the architecture of the signs. Their
shapes kept turning in her mind into proportions that as yet had no meaning. The
teacher would force her to speak, to say something.
"I like that," Third said, pointing to an arch in a sign and following it with her finger.
"But what does the sign sound like?" the teacher would insist.
Third would go quiet and downcast, feeling that she was doing wrong. The question
made no sense, Sign sound like? A sign sounds? Small brown face and black button
eyes were clouded with withdrawal and remorse.
Oh, my People, the teacher would think, looking at her, despairing. There was so
much to do. She could not be angry.
It was at mathematics that Third was noticeably backward. Numbers for her were
always part of some-thing else. They could only exist in relation to other numbers, in
relation to real things. They could not be uprooted and made alone. They were
related, like peo-ple.
"What number is this?" the teacher would ask, holding up a card.
"Number as what?" Third would murmur. She tried to read the digits as she read the
yarrow. Their proportions carried no meaning.
"Number of anything," the teacher would answer. "Just the number. By itself."
Third would stare back mournfully at her, and the teacher would pass on to another
child. The teacher taught the children by day, under a screen of bamboo, so that
they could not be seen from the air.
"One day," she told them, "the Neighbors will be gone. The Neighbors will be gone,
and the foreigners will be gone, and the People will need to work, to build. You will
have to build. You will have to work, to count, to read."
What the People needed to be, what they had to become, were fighters. That was
what the teacher knew. Third was self-contained, beautifully mute, as was expected
of children of the People, and this made the teacher very impatient. The People must
stop being quiet. To stay themselves, to hold back the Neighbors and the Big
People, who wanted to swallow the Unconquered.
The teacher turned Third into a symbol. The sym-bol was this: when this one small
girl learns to count, I will know I have done some good. Third became a target. It
was a kind of love.
She made Third stay after the others. She held up cards. "What number is this?
What number is this, Third? Look. Tell me the number."
Third, seized with a panic that she was doing wrong, would not move, would not
speak. She had never done wrong, and her teacher was trying so hard, paying her
special attention. And Third hated it. That made her feel even more in the wrong.
She went off at night, creeping out of her house, to pound the mud with her feet, and
fling the yarrow stalks in her mind at the sky in anger, going over and over them,
trying to find some link with the marks on the horrible cards. Even then, Third did
not cry.
Then one day, the teacher had an inspiration.
It was after class. The other children were back out in the fields, shaking the muddle
out of their heads. Third was alone with the teacher again.
"Well," the teacher said. "Today we try a different approach." And she brought out
the yarrow stalks.
No, thought Third. Leave those alone.