"James Tiptree Jr. - The Only Neat Thing to Do" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tiptree James Jr)

THE ONLY
NEAT THING
TO DO
James Tiptree, Jr.
We journey now to the far future and the far
reaches of space, past the boundaries of
exploration to the Great North Rift that lies
between arms of the galaxy. The protagonist is
sixteen-year-old Coati Cass, who wants to become
an explorer and who ventures into that unknown
space. She finds more than her share of adventure.
James Tiptree, Jr.'s most recent novel is
Brightness Falls From the Air.


Heroes of space! Explorers of the starfields!
Reader, here is your problem:
Given one kid, yellow-head, snub-nose-freckles,
green-eyes-that-stare-at-you-level, rich-brat,
girl-type, fifteen-year-old. And all she's dreamed of,
since she was old enough to push a hologram
button, are heroes of the First Contacts, explorers of
far stars, the great names of Humanity's budding
Star Age. She can name you the crew of every
Discovery Mission; she can sketch you a pretty
accurate map of Federation Space and number the
Frontier Bases; she can tell you who first contacted
every one of the fifty-odd races known; and she
knows by heart the last words of Han Lu Han when,
himself no more than sixteen, he ran through alien
flame-weapons to drag his captain and pilot to
safety on Lyrae 91-Beta. She does a little math, too;
it's easy for her. And she haunts the spaceport and
makes friends with everybody who'll talk to her, and
begs rides, and knows the controls of fourteen
models of craft. She's a late bloomer, which means
the nubbins on her little chest could almost pass for
a boy's; and love, great Love, to her is just
something pointless that adults do, despite her
physical instruction. But she can get into her junior
space suit in seventy seconds flat, including safety
hooks.
So you take this girl, this Coati Cass—her full
name is Coatillia Canada Cass, but everyone calls
her Coati—
And you give her a sturdy little space-coupe for
her sixteenth birthday.
Now, here is your problem:
Does she use it to jaunt around the star-crowded
home sector, visiting her classmates and her