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

eight months to divide the sustain.”

“Trouble, yes,” As Emsley tilted his chair against the bulkhead of the
BioCore, the seatback cracked under the strain, re-formed and then knitted itself
together to take his weight. His thinking head rested against his talk-ing head.

“You’ve been recast,” said Been, “am I right?”

“Three times.”

“How long did you wait for your first?”

“I was a hundred and forty-one when I had my personality transplant. At two
hundred and thirteen, I became a heterosexual. And I was three hun-dred and four
when I got this.” He tapped the temple of his thinking head.

There were only so many times a human could be recast before going stale
and each had to be more radical than the last. Oak Suellentrop was currently the
oldest living human. At four hundred and sixty-two, he had been recast seven times,
most recently as a floating bladder that cruised the jet streams in the upper
atmosphere of Jupiter.

“Well, the thing is,” said Been, “my grandmother went prematurely stale. We
didn’t realize how far gone she was until it was too late. We tried
ev-erything—transplant, bodymods, transgendering, total reembodiment—to shake
her out of it.” He let his voice go husky out of respect for this ficti-tious
grandmother; Been had never known his real one. “She lived to be two hundred and
eight but for the last sixty years all she wanted to do was watch old-fashioned porn
and look up at Saturn.” Been pounded his fist into his open hand. “So yes, I’m a
little nervous. Ready to embrace para-digm shift and grab a new point of view. Give
me that electric kiss of anxiety and ‘Happy birthday, Been!’”

“You could grow another head,” said Emsley.

“I suppose.” Been looked thoughtful, as he pretended to consider the
pos-sibility. “But that would be at least as much trouble as becoming a woman,
wouldn’t it? Besides, what would I put in it? I don’t think I’m smart enough to have
more than one head. I mean, look at you. How much extra storage do you have up
there, anyway?”

Emsley perked up. Like most people who had opted for radical bodymod in a
late recasting, he was clearly proud of what he’d had done. He unfixed his shirt so
that Been could admire the astonishing breadth of his clavical bridge and the bulge
where his spinal cord split in two. His thinking head was smaller than his talking head
and had only a vestigial mouth and smudge of a nose. It sat low on its own stubby
neck and seemed not to have much range of motion.

“People used to think that symmetry was the key to beauty.” Emsley twisted
his talking head to admire his thinking head. “But in my experience women are just
fascinated by asymmetry.”