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

go to the Laugh Tree with Arnie, for a good time, I'd like to
learn to play cards with him.
You see what happens: Arnie is, in his way, like my
original self, and I hate that part of him, since I've given it up
to be Martha. Martha makes him happy, she is chocolate to
his appetite, pillow for his weariness.
I turn for company to my koota. She's the color of
morning, her chest juts out like an axe blade, her ribs spring
up and back like wings, her eyes are large and clear as she
returns my gaze. Yet she's beyond hope; in a little time, she'll
be lame; she cannot race any more, she must not mother a
litter. I turn to her and she gazes back into my eyes, dreaming
of speed and wind on the sandy beaches where she has run.
"Why don't you read some tapes?" Arnie suggests to me,
because I'm restless and I disturb him. The koota lies at my
feet. I read tapes. Every evening in his quarters Arnie carves,
I read tapes, the broken racer lies at my feet. I pass through
Terran history this way. When the clown tumbles into the tub,
I laugh. Terran history is full of clowns and tubs; at first it
seeeas that's all there is, but yon learn to see beneath the
comic costumes.
While I float on the taut line, the horizon between light and
dark, where it's so easy, I begin to sense what is under the
costumes: staggering down the street dead drunk on a sunny
afternoon with everyone laughing at you; hiding under the
veranda because you made blood come out of Pa's face;
kicking a man when he's in the gutter because you've been
kicked and have to pass it on. Tragedy is what one of the
Terrans called being a poet in the body of a cockroach.
"Have you heard the rumor?" Arnie asks, putting down the
whittling tool. "Have you heard that some of the personnel in
Punch Center aren't really humans?"
"Not really?" I ask, putting away the tape. We have no
tragedy. In my species, family relationships are based only on
related gene patterns; they are finally dumped into the family
bank and a new relative is created from the old. It's one form
of ancient history multiplying itself, but it isn't tragic. The
koota, her utility destroyed by a recessive gene, lies sleeping at
my feet. Is this tragedy? But she is a single form, she can't
regenerate a lost limb, or exfoliate brain tissue. She can only
return my gaze with her steadfast and affectionate one.
"What are they, then?" I ask Arnie. "If they're not hu-
man?"
"The story is that the local life forms aren't as we really see
them. They've put on faces, like ours, to deal with us. And
some of them have filtered into personnel."
Filtered! As if I were a virus.
"But they must be harmless," I say. "No harm has come to
anyone."
"We don't know that for a fact," Arnie replies.