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

wood carvings. Sometimes I go to bed with the sun and
sometimes I'm up working all night. And then children. No.
I'm lucky to be an old bachelor," he says.
Arnie carves kaku wood, which has a brilliant grain and is
soft enough to permit easy carving. He's working on a figure
of a murger bird, whittling lengthwise down the wood so the
grain, wavy, full of flowing, wedge-shaped lines, will represent
the feathers. The lamp light shines on his hair and the crinkle
of his eyelids as he looks down and carves, whittles, turns.
He's absorbed in what he doesn't see there but he's projecting
what he wants to see. It's the reverse of what he must do in
the viewing room. I began to suffer a peculiar pain, located in
the nerve cluster between my lungs. He's not talking to me.
He's not caressing me. He's forgotten I'm here, and like a
false projection, I'm beginning to fade. In another hour
perhaps the film will become blank. If he doesn't see me, then
am I here?
He's doing just what I do when absorbed in one of my own
projects, and I admire the intensity with which he works: it's
magnificent. Yes, I'm jealous of it. I burn with rage and
jealousy. He has abandoned me to be Martha and I wish I
were myself again, free in shape and single in mind. Not this
sack of mud clinging to another. Yet he's teaching me that it's
good to cling to another. I'm exhausted from strange disci-
plines. Perhaps he's tired, too; I see that sometimes he kneads
the muscles of his stomach with his hands, and closes his eyes.
The Warden sits me down on one of my rare evenings
home, and talks angrily. "You're making a mistake," he says.
"If the Doctor finds out what you are, you'll lose your job
with the colony. Besides, we never supposed you'd have a
liaison with only one man. You were supposed to start with
the Doctor, and go on from there. We need every credit you
can bring in. And by the way, you haven't done well on that
score lately. Is he stingy?"
"Of course he isn't."
"But aH you bring home in credits is your pay."
I can think of no reply. It's true the Warden has a right to
use me in whatever capacity would serve us all best, as I will
use others when I'm a Warden, but he and my Uncle spend
half the credits from my job on sulfadiazole, to which they've
become addicted.
"You've no sense of responsibility," the Warden says.
Perhaps he's coming close to time for conjunction again, and
this makes him more concerned about my stability.
My Uncle says, "Oh, he's young, leave him alone. As long
as he turns over most of those pay credits to us. Though what
he uses the remainder for, I'll never know."
I use it for clothes at the Colony Exchange. Sometimes
Arnie takes me out for an evening, usually to the Laugh Tree
Bar, where the space crews, too, like to relax. "The bar is the