"John C. Wright - Orphans of Chaos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wright John C)

"The adoption records and genealogies only apply to men."
I cocked an eyebrow at him, and gave him an arch look. "And what about women,
then?"
"The word refers to both sexes."
"Does it, really? You'll never talk me into going with you to the Kissing
Well, if you sit there and say I look to you like a man."
"Define your terms. We are certainly human. We are certainly not Homo
sapiens."
And, after a moment, he said, "Actually, I do not recall ask-ing you about
going to the Kissing Well. Your comment seems to be based on a false
assumption."
Victor was, in some ways, the smartest one of the five of us. In omer ways, he
was just so stupid.
I should explain that, during that summer, the chapel attached to the estate
had been undergoing repairs for water damage from the rains. When Mr. Glum,
the groundskeeper, brought Victor, dragged by his ear, back to stand before
the Headmaster, there was a consultation in the library among the Board of
Trustees. The next Sunday we went to Mass in our own chapel, water-streaked
walls behind the saints covered with tarp, scaffolding blocking the
stained-glass windows, and everything. Further expeditions to Abertwyi were
canceled. Victor's argument was brief and solid. A boundary was a fic-tion
defined by law; there were documents reciting the applicable law; and they
named the new highway as the boundary. Q.E.D.
5.
Vanity was of the opinion that if we did not know where the boundary was, it
could not affect us.
Her argument ran along these lines: we had been warned something bad would
happen to us if we went over the boundaries, or tarried too long on the far
side. But boundaries do not exist in the material world. A rock or a tree on
one side or the other of an imaginary line is still a rock or a tree, is it
not?
Therefore the boundaries only exist, as Vanity put it, "in our fancy."
"Think of it this way," she would say, between various ejaculations and
digressions. "If everyone woke up tomorrow and agreed we should spell 'dog'
C-A-T, why, dogs would be cats as far as we could tell. But the dogs would not
care what we called them. If everyone woke up and said, 'Vanity is the Queen
of England!' why, men, I'd be the Queen of England, provided the army and the
tax gatherers were among the people who said it. If only half the army said
it, we'd have a civil war."
The boundary to the South was no different. As one moved Soum there were trees
upon the soum lawn, a few, and then more, and then scattered copses, then
thick copses. At some point, you would find yourself in a place with no grass
under-foot, where no one had stepped before, and see trees which had never
felt the bite of an axe. But where exactly was the dividing line?
The trees were thick around the servants' quarters, the stables, and the pump
house. They were thicker beyond the old brick smithy. They were thicker still
beyond the even older green mound connected with local King Artiiur tales; but
mat mound was bare of trees itself, and one came from the shadows of silent
leaves into a wide round area of surprising sunlight, where four standing
stones held a tilted slab high above wild grass. The stones were gray, and no