"Daughters Of Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

DAUGHTERS OF EARTH

I

MARTHA BEGAT JOAN, and Joan begat Ariadne. Ariadne lived and died at home on
Pluto, but her daughter, Emma, took the long trip out to a distant planet of an
alien sun.
Emma begat Leah, and Leah begat Carla, who was the first to make her bridal
voyage through sub-space, a long journey faster than the speed of light itself.
Six women in direct descent—some brave, some beautiful, some brilliant: smug or
simple, wilful or compliant, all different, all daughters of Earth, though half
of them never set foot on the Old Planet.
This story could have started anywhere. It began with un­spoken prayer, before
there were words, when an unnamed man and woman looked upward to a point of
distant light, and won­dered. Started again with a pointing pyramid; once more
with the naming of a constellation; and once again with the casting of a
horoscope.
One of its beginnings was in the squalid centuries of churchly darkness, when
Brahe and Bruno, Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo ripped off the veils of godly
ignorance so men could see the stars again. Then in another age of madness, a
scant two centuries ago, it began with the pioneer cranks, Goddard and
Tsiolkovsky, and the compulsive evangelism of Ley and Gernsback and Clarke. It
is beginning again now, here on Uller. But in this narrative, it starts with
Martha:
Martha was born on Earth, in the worst of the black decades of the 20th century,
in the year 1941. She lived out her time, and died of miserable old age at less
than eighty years at home on Earth. Once in her life, she went to the Moon.
She had two children. Her son, Richard, was a good and dutiful young man, a
loving son, and a sober husband when he married. He watched his mother age and
weaken with worry and fear after the Pluto expedition left, and could never
bring himself to hurt her again as his sister had done.
Joan was the one who got away.

II

centure easegone manlookttuthe stahzanprade eeee maythem hizgozzenn izz
gahandenno thawthen izzgole...
'It's—beautiful!'
Martha nodded automatically, but she heard the catch in the boy's voice, the
sudden sharp inhalation of awe and envy, and she shivered and reached for his
hand.
Beautiful, yes: beautiful, brazen, deadly, and triumphant. Martha stared at the
wickedly gleaming flanks of the great rocket resting majestically on its bed of
steel, and hated it with all the stored and unspent venom of her life.
She had not planned to come. She had produced a headache, claimed illness,
ignored the amused understanding in her hus­band's eyes.
Even more, she dreaded having Richard go. But his father voiced one rarely-used
impatient word, and she knew there was no arguing about the boy.
In the end she had to do it too: go and be witness at disaster for herself. The
three of them took their places in the Moon rocket—suddenly safe-seeming and