"James Patrick Kelly - Dividing the Sustain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

DIVIDING THE SUSTAIN
JAMES PATRICK KELLY


J
ames Patrick Kelly made his first sale in 1975, and since has gone on to become one
of the most respected and popular writers to enter the field in the last twenty years.
Although Kelly has had some success with novels, especially with Wildlife, he has
perhaps had more impact to date as a writer of short fiction, with stories such as
“Solstice,” “The Prisoner of Chillon,” “Glass Cloud,” “Mr. Boy,” “Pogrom,”
“Home Front,” and “Undone” (“Un-done” in particular has enough space opera
tropes and wild conceptualization packed into its short length to fuel many another
author’s eight-hundred-page novel), and is often ranked among the best short story
writers in the business. His story “Think Like a Dinosaur” won him a Hugo Award in
1996, as did his story “10 16 to 1,” in 2000. Kelly’s first solo novel, the mostly
ignored Planet of Whispers, came out in 1984. It was followed by Freedom Beach,
a mosaic novel written in collaboration with John Kessel, and then by another solo
novel, Look into the Sun. His short work has been collected in Think Like a
Dinosaur, and, most recently, in a new collection, Strange But Not a Stranger. His
most recent book is the chapbook novella Burn, and coming up is an anthology
coedited with John Kessel, Feeling Very Strange: The Slip-stream Anthology. Born
in Mineola, New York, Kelly now lives with his fam-ily in Nottingham, New
Hampshire. He has a website at www.JimKelly.net, and reviews Internet-related
matters for Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Here he takes us voyaging across the universe with a crew of posthuman
immortals who change their shapes and their very natures as casually as we change
our clothes—but who find that some changes are a little too radical even for them...

****

Been Watanabe decided to become gay two days before his
one-hundred-and-thirty-second birthday. The colony ship had been outbound for
almost a year of subjective time and the captain still could not say when they might
make planetfall. Everyone said that dividing the sustain between the folded
dimensions was more art than science, but what Been wanted now was a schedule,
not a sketch. He couldn’t wait any longer to recast himself as a homosexual because
he worried that he might go stale and lose his mind.

He’d been comfortable—too comfortable—hunkered among the colo-nists
aboard the slipship Nine Ball, two thousand three hundred and forty-seven lumps,
not one of whom had an edge sharp enough to cut butter. The lumps were all well
under a century old and so had never needed to be recast. In moments of
weakness—in line for the sixth lunch seating, say, or toward the yawning climax of
the daily harmony circle—Been worried that he was becoming a lump himself.
Sometimes as the pacifiers nattered on about duty and diligence, he could almost
imagine what it might feel like to pass through Immigration someday and actually be
looking forward to planting beans or selling hats or running a botloader. It was an
alarm-ing daydream for a soon-to-be hundred-and-thirty-two-year-old mindsync
courier carrying a confidential personality transplant to the Consensualist colony on