"James Tiptree Jr. -10000 Light Years From Home" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tiptree James Jr)

bones, and she’s no girl. But if you look twice it can get a little hard to notice other people in the room.
I’d done the double take about three years back.
“Meet me at lunch and I’ll show you something.”
She nodded moodily and lounged off. I watched the white knife-scar ripple elegantly on her tanned
legs and went back through my office, fighting off the urge to push Mrs. Peabody’s smile into her Living
Bra.
Our office is a little hard to explain. Everybody knows C.I.A. is out in that big building at Langley,
but the fact is that even when they built it there it fit about as well as a beagle-house fits a Great Dane.
They go most of the Dane in somehow, but we’re one of the paws and tails that got left out. Strictly a
support facility—James Bond would sneer at us. We operate as a small advertising agency in a refined
section of D.C. which happens to be close to a heavy land cable and the Naval Observatory gadgets.
Our girls actually do some ads for other government agencies—something about Smoky Bear and Larry
Litterbug is all over the first floor. We really aren’t a big secret thing—not a Biretta or a cyanide ampoule
in the place and you can get into our sub-basement anytime you produce front and profile X-rays of both
your grandmothers.
What’s there? Oh, a few linguists and cold war leftovers like me. A computer N.S.A. spilled coffee
into. And George. George is our pocket genius. It is generally believed he got his start making skin flicks
for yaks in Outer Mongolia. He lives on peanut butter and Tillie works for him.
So when the aliens started transmitting at us, George was among the facilities. Langley called on to
help decipher. And also me, in a small, passive way—I look at interesting photography when the big
shop wants a side opinion. Because of my past as a concocter of fake evidence in the bad old days. Hate
that word, fake. Mine is still being used by historians.
Come lunchtime I went looking for Tillie at Rapa’s, our local lifeline. Since Big Brother at Langley
found that our boys and girls were going to Rapa’s instead of eating G.S.A, boiled cardboard, Rapa’s
old cashier has been replaced by a virgin with straight seams and a camera in each, ah, eyeball. But the
chow is still good.
Tillie was leaning back relaxed, a dreamy double-curve smile on her long mouth. She heard me and
wiped it off. The relaxation was a fraud; I saw her hand go over some shredded matches.
She smiled again, like someone had offered her fifty cents for her right arm. But she was okay. I
knew her, this was one of her good days. We ordered veal and pasta, friendly.
“Take a look,” I invited. “We finally synched in with their beam for a few frames.”
The photo showed one side foggy, the rest pretty clear. Tillie goggled.
“It’s—it’s—”
“Yeah, it’s beautiful. She’s beautiful. And the dead spit of you, my girl.”
“But Max! Are you sure?” Her using my name was a good sign.
“Absolute. We saw her move. This, kid, is The Alien. We’ve even had every big cine collection in
the world checking. It’s not any sort of retransmission. See that script on her helmet and that background
panel? T’ain’t nobody’s. No doubt where the send is from, either. That ship up there is full of
people-type people. At least, women... What’s George got?”
“You’ll see the co-copy,” she said absently, grooving on the photo. “He worked out about two
hundred words in clear. It’s weird. They want to land—and something about Mother. Like, Mother is
back, or is home. George says ‘Mother’ is the best he can do.”
“If that’s Mother, oh my. Here’s your pasta.”
They landed a week later, after considerable international wrangling. At Mexico City, as everyone
knows. In a small VTO affair. Thanks to George’s connections—in the literal sense—we had it on
closed circuit right over the crowd of world dignitaries and four million real people.
The airlock opened on a worldwide hush, and Mother came out. One—and then another—and a
third. Last one out fiddled with something on her wrist, and the lock closed. We found out later she was
the navigator.
There they stood on their ramp, three magnificent earth-type young females in space-opera