"When I Was Miss Dow by Sonya Dorman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Award Stories 2)

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Mrs. Dorman raises Akita dogs, looks after her husband and
small daughter, and writes fiction very well andsince all of
the capable female writers of science fiction can be counted
on one truncated hand, hers is a welcome addition to their
ranks. She brings us here a sense of strangeness, more than a
hint of human warmth, as well as a good strong whiff of alien
chillness.

WHEN I WAS MISS DOW

Sonya Dorman
These hungry, mother-haunted people come and find us living
in what they like to call crystal palaces, though really we live
in glass places, some of them highly ornamented and others
plain as paper. They come first as explorers, and perhaps
realize we are a race of one sex only, rather amorphous
beings of proteide; and we, even baby I, are Protean, also,
being able to take various shapes at will. One sex, one brain.
lobe, we live in more or less glass bridges over the humanoid
chasm, eating, recreating, attending races and playing other
games like most living creatures.
Eventually, we're all dumped into the cell banks and
reproduced once more.
After the explorers comes the colony of miners and scien-
tists. The warden and some of the other elders put on faces to
greet them, agreeing to help with the mining of some ores,
even giving them a koota or two as they become interested in
our racing dogs. They set up their places of life, pop up their
machines, bang-bang, chug-chug; we put on our faces, forms,
smiles and costumes; I am old enough to learn to change my
shape, too.
The Warden says to me, "It's about time you made a
change, yourself. Some of your friends are already working
for these people, bringing home credits and sulfas."
My Uncle (by the Warden's fourth conjunction) made
himself over at the start, being one of the first to realize how
it could profit us.
I protest to the Warden, "I'm educated and trained as a
scholar. You always say I must remain deep in my mathemat-
ics and other studies."
My Uncle says, "You have to do it. There's only one way
for us to get along with them," and he runs his fingers
through his long blonde hair. My Uncle's not an educated
person, but highly placed, politically, and while Captain Dow
is around my Uncle retains this particular shape. The Captain
is shipping out soon, then Uncle will find some other features,
because he's already warned that it's unseemly for him to be
chasing around in the face of a girl after the half-bearded