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

boys from the space ships. I don't want to do this myself,
wasting so much time, when the fourteen decimals even now
are clicking on my mirrors.
The Warden says, "We have a pattern from a female
botanist, she ought to do for you. But before we put you into
the pattern tank, you'll have to approximate another brain
lobe. They have two."
"I know," I say, sulkily. A botanist. A she!
"Into the tank," the Warden says to me without mercy, and
I am his to use as he believes proper.
I spend four days in the tank absorbing the female Terran
pattern. When I'm released, the Warden tells me, "Your job is
waiting for you. We went to a lot of trouble to arrange it." He
sounds brusque, but perhaps this is because he hasn't con-
joined for a long time. The responsibilities of being Warden
of Mines and Seeds come first, long before any social engage-
ment.
I run my fingers through my brunette curls, and notice my
Uncle is looking critically at me. "Haven't you made yourself
rather old?" he asks.
"Oh, he's all right," the Warden says. "Thirty-three isn't
badly matched to the Doctor, as I understand it."
Dr. Arnold Proctor, the colony's head biologist, is busy
making radiograph pictures (with his primitive X-rays) of
skeletal structures: murger birds, rodents, and our pets and
racers, the kootasdogs to the Terrans, who are fascinated
by them. We breed them primarily for speed and stamina, but
some of them carry a gene for an inherited structural defect
which cripples them and they have to be destroyed before
they are full grown. The Doctor is making a special study of
kootas.
He gets up from his chair when I enter his office. "I'm Miss
Dow, your new assistant," I say, hoping my long fingernails
will stand up to the pressure of punch keys on the computer,
since I haven't had much practise in retaining foreign shapes.
I'm still in uncertain balance between myself and Martha
Dow, who is also myself. But one does not have two lobes for
nothing, I discover.
"Good morning. I'm glad you're here," the Doctor says.
He is a nice, pink man, with silver hair, soft-spoken,
intelligent. I'm pleased, as we work along, to find he doesn't
joke and wisecrack like so many of the Terrans, though I am
sometimes whimsical. I like music and banquets as well as my
studies.
Though absorbed in his work. Dr. Proctor isn't rude to
interrupters. A man of unusual balance, coming as he does
from a culture which sends out scientific parties that are
ninety per cent of one sex, when their species provides them
with two. At first meetings he is dedicated but agreeable, and
I'm charmed.