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

Thus it is probable what Whileaway—a name for the Earth ten centuries from now, but not our Earth, if
you follow me—will find itself not at all affected by this sortie into somebody else's past. And vice
versa, of course. The two might as well be independent worlds.

Whileaway, you may gather, is in the future.

But not our future.

VII

I saw Jeannine shortly afterward, in a cocktail lounge where I had gone to watch Janet Evason on
television (I don't have a set). Jeannine looked very much out of place; I sat next to her and she confided
in me: "I don't belong here." I can't imagine how she got there, except by accident. She looked as if she
were dressed up for a costume film, sitting in the shadow with her snood and her wedgies, a long-
limbed, coltish girl in clothes a little too small for her. Fashion (it seems) is recovering very leisurely
from the Great Depression. Not here and now, of course. "I don't belong here!" whispered Jeannine
Dadier again, rather anxiously. She was fidgeting. She said, "I don't like places like this." She poked the
red, turfed leather on the seat

"What?" I said.

"I went hiking last vacation," she said big-eyed. "That's what I like. It's healthy."

I know it's supposed to be virtuous to run healthily through fields of flowers, but I like bars, hotels, air-
conditioning, good restaurants, and jet transport, and I told her so.

"Jet?" she said.

Janet Evason came on the television. It was only a still picture. Then we had the news from Cambodia,
Laos, Michigan State, Lake Canandaigua (pollution), and the spinning globe of the world in full color
with its seventeen man-made satellites going around it. The color was awful. I've been inside a television
studio before: the gallery running around the sides of the barn, every inch of the roof covered with
lights, so that the little woman-child with the wee voice can pout over an oven or a sink. Then Janet
Evason came on with that blobby look people have on the tube. She moved carefully and looked at
everything with interest. She was well dressed (in a suit). The host or M.C. or whatever-you-call-him
shook hands with her and then everybody shook hands with everybody else, like a French wedding or an
early silent movie. He was dressed in a suit. Someone guided her to a seat and she smiled and nodded in
the exaggerated way you do when you're not sure of doing the right thing. She looked around and shaded
her eyes against the lights. Then she spoke.

(The first thing said by the second man ever to visit Whileaway was, "Where are all the men?" Janet

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 Joanna Russ - The Female Man

Evason, appearing in the Pentagon, hands in her pockets, feet planted far apart, said, "Where the dickens
are all the women?")

The sound in the television set conked out for a moment and then Jeannine Dadier was gone; she didn't
disappear, she just wasn't there any more. Janet Evason got up, shook hands again, looked around her,