"Joanna Russ - Female Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russ Joanna)

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 Joanna Russ - The Female Man



"Oh, all right," said Jeannine hopelessly, "all right."

I'll watch the ailanthus tree.

III

Janet Evason appeared on Broadway at two o'clock in the afternoon in her underwear. She didn't lose her
head. Though the nerves try to keep going in the previous track, she went into evasive position the
second after she arrived (good for her) with her fair, dirty hair flying and her khaki shorts and shirt
stained with sweat. When a policeman tried to take her arm, she threatened him with le savate, but he
vanished. She seemed to regard the crowds around her with a special horror. The policeman reappeared
in the same spot an hour later with no memory of the interval, but Janet Evason had returned to her
sleeping bag in the New Forest only a few moments after her arrival. A few words of Pan-Russian and
she was gone. The last of them waked her bedmate in the New Forest.

"Go to sleep," said the anonymous friend-for-the-night, a nose, a brow, and a coil of dark hair in the
dappled moonlight.

"But who has been mucking about with my head!" said Janet Evason.

IV

When Janet Evason returned to the New Forest and the experimenters at the Pole Station were laughing
their heads off (for it was not a dream) I sat in a cocktail party in mid-Manhattan. I had just changed into
a man, me, Joanna. I mean a female man, of course; my body and soul were exactly the same.

So there's me also.

V

The first man to set foot on Whileaway appeared in a field of turnips on North Continent. He was
wearing a blue suit like a hiker's and a blue cap. The farm people had been notified. One, seeing the blip
on the tractor's infrared scan, came to get him; the man in blue saw a flying machine with no wings but a
skirt of dust and air. The county's repair shed for farm machinery was nearby that week, so the tractor-
driver led him there; he was not saying anything intelligible. He saw a translucent dome, the surface
undulating slightly. There was an exhaust fan set in one side. Within the dome was a wilderness of
machines: dead, on their sides, some turned inside out, their guts spilling on to the grass. From an
extended framework under the roof swung hands as big as three men. One of these picked up a car and
dropped it. The sides of the car fell off. Littler hands sprang up from the grass.

"Hey, hey!" said the tractor-driver, knocking on a solid piece set into the wall. "It fell, it passed out!"

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 Joanna Russ - The Female Man