"John Kessel - The Juniper Tree" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

Forty milligrams of serentol, a whiff or two of THC, and an ounce of grain alcohol: Jack Baldwin
wobbled through the crowd of revelers in Sobieski Park. Beneath the somatic night, feeling just an edge
of anxiety, he looked for Eva among the faces.

The park was full of young men and women, their perfect bodies in one another's arms. Sex was their
favorite pastime, and who could blame them? They went about it as if their lives depended on the next
coupling. That was biology at work, he supposed—but if it was just genes having their way with the
human body, then why all the emotional turmoil—does she love me who's he sleeping with I can't stand it
when she looks at him like that how unfair to treat me like a toy who does he think he is I can't stand it I'll
die if I can't have her tonight ...

Where was Eva? He smiled. Apparently genes did not let go of your mind just because you were pushing
forty. Sex had been a problem back on earth—always some screw up with women co-workers, hassles
with his live-ins, distractions. Here, sex was the common coin of interpersonal contact, unjudged as taste
in ice cream (but some people made a religion of taste), easy as speech (but speech was not always
easy) frequent as eating (but some people starved themselves in the midst of plenty). Where did that
leave him? Was he simply a victim of the culture that had raised him? Or was his frustration purely
personal?

Where was Eva?

Men and women, naked, oiled, and smiling, wove their way through the celebrants, offering themselves
to whoever might wish to take them. It was the one day of the year that the Society of Cousins fit the
cliched image of polymorphous orgy that outsiders had of it. One of them, a dark young woman—dark
as Eva—brushed her fingers across Jack's cheek, then swirled away on one luscious hip.

But Eva was taller, more slender. Eva's breasts were small, her waist narrow despite the softness of the
belly that had borne Carey, and when they made love her hipbones pressed against him. She was forty,
and there was gray in her black hair. This girl dancing by could satisfy his lust, and perhaps if he knew her
would become a person as complex as Eva. But she would not be Eva: the combination of idealism and
practicality, the temper that got her into trouble because she could not keep her mouth shut. Fierce when
she fought for what mattered to her, but open-hearted to those who opposed her, with an inability to be
successfully Machiavellian that was her saving grace.

He had met Eva a month after he and Roz had arrived at the colony. Jack was working on a new
nematode that, combined with a gene-engineered composting process, would produce living soil from
regolith more efficiently than the tedious chemical methods that had been used to create Fowler's initial
environment. His specialty in nematodes had been the passport for him and Roz into the guarded Cousins
society, the last bridge after a succession of burned bridges he had left behind them. He certainly had not
planned to end up on the moon. The breakup with Helen. The fight over Roz, ending with him taking her
against the court order. The succession of jobs. The forged vita.

Eva, newly elected head of the board, was head of the environmental subcommittee. She had come by
the biotech lab in the outlying bunker. Jack did not know who the tall, striking woman in the webbed
pressure suit was. She asked questions of Amravati, the head of the project, then came over to observe
Jack, up to his ankles in muck, examining bacteria through an electron microscope visor.

Flirting led to a social meeting, more flirting led to sex. Sex—that vortex women hid behind their navels,
that place he sometimes had to be so badly that every other thought fell away and he lost himself again.
Or was it finding himself? Eva's specialty was physics, some type of quantum imaging that he did not