Orson Scott Card - America

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 57.89KB 25 页 5.9玖币

file:///C|/Documents and Settings/hasi•i/Dokumenty/Mar•an/knihy/700 SciFi,...tasy, and Classic eBooks/Card, Orson Scott/Card, Orson Scott - America.txt

AMERICA

By Orson Scott Card

The difference between Latin America and North America's United States has always been vast; the first

being in virtual colonial aspect to the Empire of the Dollar. Now beyond the border between Mexico and

the U.S.A. there lives another race, that of the native Americans miscalled Indians. The majority of the

inhabitants of those countries are among the dispossessed of the world. This may change; indeed, as

history always calls the tune, no matter how long or in what fashion it takes, it will change.

Sam Monson and Anamari Boagente had two encounters in their lives, forty years apart. The first

encounter lasted for several weeks in the high Amazon jungle, the village of Agualinda. The second was

for only an hour near the ruins of the Glen Canyon Dam, on the border between Navaho country and the

State of Deseret.

When they met the first time, Sam was a scrawny teenager from Utah and Anamari was a middle-aged

spinster Indian from Brazil. When they met the second time, he was governor of Deseret, the last

European state in America, and she was, to some people's way of thinking, the mother of God. It never

occurred to anyone that they had ever met before, except me. I saw it plain as day, and pestered Sam

until he told me the whole story. Now Sam is dead and she's long gone, and I'm the only one who knows

the truth. I thought for a long time that I'd take this story untold to my grave, but I see now that I can't do

that. The way I see it, I won't be allowed to die until I write this down. All my real work was done long

since, so why else am I alive? I figure the land has kept me breathing so I can tell the story of its victory,

and it has kept you alive so you can hear it. Gods are like that. It isn't enough for them to run everything.

They want to be famous, too.

Agualinda, Amazonas

Passengers were nothing to her. Anamari only cared about helicopters when they brought medical

supplies. This chopper carried a precious packet of benaxidene; Anamari barely noticed the skinny,

awkward boy who sat by the crates, looking hostile. Another Yanqui who doesn't want to be stuck out in

the jungle. Nothing new about that. Norteamericanos were almost invisible to Anamari by now. They

came and went.

It was the Brazilian government people she had to worry about, the petty bureaucrats suffering through

years of virtual exile in Mannaus, working out their frustration by being petty tyrants over the helpless

Indians. No I'm sorry we don't have any more penicillin, no more syringes, what did you do with the

AIDS vaccine we gave you three years ago? Do you think we're made of money here? Let them come to

town if they want to get well. There's a hospital in Sao Paulo de Olivenca, send them there, we're not

going to turn you into a second hospital out there in the middle of nowhere, not for a village of a

hundred filthy Baniwas, it's not as if you're a doctor, you're just an old withered up Indian woman

yourself, you never graduated from the medical schools, we can't spare medicines for you. It made them

file:///C|/Documents and Settings/hasi•i/Dokumenty/Mar•an/k...ic eBooks/Card, Orson Scott/Card, Orson Scott - America.txt (1 of 25)1.12.2003 23:13:35

file:///C|/Documents and Settings/hasi•i/Dokumenty/Mar•an/knihy/700 SciFi,...tasy, and Classic eBooks/Card, Orson Scott/Card, Orson Scott - America.txt

feel so important, to decide whether or not an Indian child would live or die. As often as not they passed

sentence of death by refusing to send supplies. It made them feel powerful as God.

Anamari knew better than to protest or argue-it would only make that bureaucrat likelier to kill again in

the future. But sometimes, when the need was great and the medicine was common, Anamari would go

to the Yanqui geologists and ask if they had this or that. Sometimes they would share, but if they didn't,

they wouldn't lift a finger to get any. They were not tyrants like the Brazilian bureaucrats. They just

didn't give a damn. They were there to make money.

That was what Anamari saw when she looked at the sullen light-haired boy in the helicopter-another

Norteamericano, just like all the other Norteamericanos, only younger.

She had the benaxidene, and so she immediately began spreading word that all the Baniwas should come

for injections. It was a disease that had been introduced during the war between Guyana and Venezuela

two years ago; as usual, most of the victims were not citizens of either country, just the Indios of the

jungle, waking up one morning with their joints stiffening, hardening until no movement was possible.

Benaxidene was the antidote, but you had to have it every few months or your joints would stiffen up

again. As usual, the bureaucrats had diverted a shipment and there were a dozen Baniwas bedridden in

the village. As usual, one or two of the Indians would be too far gone for the cure; one or two of their

joints would be stiff for the rest of their lives. As usual, Anamari said little as she gave the injections,

and the Baniwas said less to her.

It was not until the next day that Anamari had time to notice the young Yanqui boy wandering around

the village. He was wearing rumpled white clothing, already somewhat soiled with the greens and

browns of life along the rivers of the Amazon jungle. He showed no sign of being interested in anything,

but an hour into her rounds, checking on the results of yesterday's benaxidene treatments, she became

aware that he was following her.

She turned around in the doorway of the government-built hovel and faced him. "O que e'?" she

demanded. What do you want?

To her surprise, he answered in halting Portuguese. Most of these Yanquis never bothered to learn the

language at all, expecting her and everybody else to speak English. "Posso ajudar?" he asked. Can I help?

"Nao," she said. "Mas pode olhar." You can watch.

He looked at her in bafflement.

She repeated her sentence slowly, enunciating clearly. "Pode olhar."

"Eu?" Me?

"Voce, sim. And I can speak English."

file:///C|/Documents and Settings/hasi•i/Dokumenty/Mar•an/k...ic eBooks/Card, Orson Scott/Card, Orson Scott - America.txt (2 of 25)1.12.2003 23:13:35

file:///C|/Documents and Settings/hasi•i/Dokumenty/Mar•an/knihy/700 SciFi,...tasy, and Classic eBooks/Card, Orson Scott/Card, Orson Scott - America.txt

"I don't want to speak English."

"Tanto faz," she said. Makes no difference.

He followed her into the hut. It was a little girl, lying naked in her own feces. She had palsy from a bout

with meningitis years ago, when she was an infant, and Anamari figured that the girl would probably be

one of the ones for whom the benaxidene came too late. That's how things usually worked-the weak

suffer most. But no, her joints were flexing again, and the girl smiled at them, that heartbreakingly

happy smile that made palsy victims so beautiful at times.

So. Some luck after all, the benaxidene had been in time for her.

Anamari took the lid off the clay waterjar that stood on the one table in the room, and dipped one of her

clean rags in it. She used it to wipe the girl, then lifted her frail, atrophied body and pulled the soiled

sheet out from under her. On impulse, she handed the sheet to the boy.

"Leva fora," she said. And, when he didn't understand, "Take it outside."

He did not hesitate to take it, which surprised her. "Do you want me to wash it?"

"You could shake off the worst of it," she said. "Out over the garden in back. I'll wash it later."

He came back in, carrying the wadded-up sheet, just as she was leaving. "All done here," she said.

"We'll stop by my house to start that soaking. I'll carry it now."

He didn't hand it to her. "I've got it," he said. "Aren't you going to give her a clean sheet?"

"There are only four sheets in the village," she said. "Two of them are on my bed. She won't mind lying

on the mat. I'm the only one in the village who cares about linens. I'm also the only one who cares about

this girl."

"She likes you," he said.

"She smiles like that at everybody.

"So maybe she likes everybody."

Anamari grunted and led the way to her house. It was two government hovels pushed together. The one

served as her clinic, the other as her home. Out back she had two metal washtubs. She handed one of

them to the Yanqui boy, pointed at the rainwater tank, and told him to fill it. He did. It made her furious.

"What do you want!" she demanded.

file:///C|/Documents and Settings/hasi•i/Dokumenty/Mar•an/k...ic eBooks/Card, Orson Scott/Card, Orson Scott - America.txt (3 of 25)1.12.2003 23:13:35

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Orson Scott Card - America.pdf

共25页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Orson Scott Card - America

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: