"James Tiptree Jr - your faces, my sisters, your faces are filled with light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tiptree James Jr)

behind.
—Dry under the overpass, but it's really dark in here between the light-ning flashes. She pushes back her
parka, walks on, carefully avoiding wrecks and debris. With all that flashing, her night-vision won't develop.
Too bad, she has keen night-vision. Takes forty-five minutes to come up fully; she knows a lot of stuff like that.
BYTE BEAUTIFUL

She's under a long elevated roadway down the center of an old street; it seems to go on for miles straight ahead.
Almost straight West, good. Out-side on both sides the open street is jumping with rain, splashing up white like
plaster grass as the lightning cracks. Boom! Barooomm-m-m! The Mid-west has great storms. She loves the wild
uproar; she loves footing through a storm. All for her! How she'd like to strip and run out into it. Get a good bath,
clean off all the dust and sweat. Her stuff would keep dry in here. Hey, shall I? . . . Almost she does, but she isn't really
that dirty yet and she should get on; she lost so much time at that hostel. Couriers have to act responsible. She makes
herself pad soberly along dodging junk in the dark, thinking, Now here's the kind of place a horse would be no good.
She has always this perennial debate with herself about getting a horse. Some of the couriers like to ride. It probably
is faster, she thinks. But not much, not much. Most people have no idea how fast walking goes; I'm up and moving
while they're still fussing with the horse. And so much trouble, feeding them, worrying about their feet. You can carry
more, of course. But the real point is how isolated it makes you. No more hitching, no more fun of getting to know all
kinds of sisters. Like that wise motherly sister back there who picked her up coming into the city. Sort of a strange
dialect, but I could understand her, and the love showed through. A mother. . . . Maybe I'll be a mother someday, she
thinks. But not yet. Or I'll be the good old Nokomis. The wrinkled old Nokomis, many things Nokomis taught her. . . .
And those horses she had, I never saw horses go like that. Must be some tremendous farms around here. Tomorrow
when she's out of the city, she'll get up on a high place where she can really look over the country. If I see a good
horse-farm, I'll remember. A horse would be useful if I take the next route, the route going all the way West, across the
Rockies. But Des Moines is far enough now. Des Moines is just right, on my own good legs.

"She was one of them, one of those bra-burners," Mrs. Olmsted says pursily, sliding gingerly out of her plastic
raincoat. She undoes her plastic Rainflower bonnet. "Oh god, my set."
"You don't usually pick up hitchers, Mom." Bee is sitting in the dinette, doing her nails with Plum Love.
"It was starting to storm," the mother says defensively, hustling into the genuine Birdseye kitchen area. "She had a
big knapsack on her back. Oh, to tell you the truth, I thought it was a Boy Scout. That's why I stopped."
"Ha ha ha."
jqq BYTE BEAUTIFUL
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"I dropped her right at Stony Island. That's as far as we go, I said. She kept talking crazy about my face."
"Probably stoned. She'll get murdered out there."
"Bee, I told you, I wish you wouldn't use that word. I don't want to know about it, I have no sympathy at all.
She's made her bed, I say. Now, where's the Fricolator lid?"
"In the bathroom. What about your face?"
"What's it doing in the bathroom?"
"I used it to soak my fluffbrush, it's the only thing the right shape. What'd she say about your face?"
"Oh, Bee, your father would murder you. That's no way to do, we eat out of that." Her voice fades and rises, still
protesting, as she comes back
with the lid.
"My hair isn't poison, Mom. Besides, the heat will fix it. You know my hair is pure hell when it rains, I have to look
good at the office." "I wish you wouldn't swear, either." "What did she say about your face, Mom?"
"Oh, my face. Well! 'Your face has wisdom,' she says in this crazy way. 'Mother-lines full of wisdom and light.'
Lines. Talk about rude! She called me the wrinkled old somebody. I told her what I thought about girls hitchhiking,
believe me I told her. Here, help me clear this off, your father will be home any minute. You know what she said?"
"What did she say? Here, hand me that."