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

know. She talked to me a couple of times after they finished with her. No use for men whatever. She
drove off the P Street bridge.... The man, poor bastard, he was trying to keep that Skian bitch happy
single-handed. Money helps, for a while. I don’t know where he ended.”
He glanced at his wrist again. I saw the pale bare place where a watch had been and told him the
time.
“Is that the message you want to give Earth? Never love an alien?”
“Never love an alien—” He shrugged. “Yeah. No. Ah, Jesus don’t you see? Everything going out,
nothing coming back. Like the poor damned Polynesians. We’re gutting Earth, to begin with. Swapping
raw resources for junk. Alien status symbols. Tape decks, Coca Cola and Mickey Mouse watches.”
“Well, there is concern over the balance of trade. Is that your message?”
“The balance of trade.” He rolled it sardonically. “Did the Polynesians have a word for it, I wonder?
You don’t see, do you? All right, why are you here? I mean you, personally. How many guys did you
climb over—”
He went rigid, hearing footsteps outside. The Procya’s hopeful face appeared around the corner.
The red-haired man snarled at him and he backed out. I started to protest.
“Ah, the silly reamer loves it. It’s the only pleasure we have left.... Can’t you see, man? That’s us.
That’s the way we look to them, to the real ones.”
“But—”
“And now we’re getting the cheap C-drive, well be all over just like the Procya. For the pleasure of
serving as freight monkeys and junction crews. Oh, they appreciate our ingenious little service stations,
the beautiful star folk. They don’t need them, y’know. Just an amusing convenicence. D’you know what
I do here with my two degrees? What I did at First Junction. Tube cleaning. A swab. Sometimes I get to
replace a fitting.”
I muttered something; the self-pity was getting heavy.
“Bitter? Man, it’s a good job. Sometimes I get to talk to one of them.” His face twisted. “My wife
works as a—oh, hell, you wouldn’t know. I’d trade—correction, I have traded—everything Earth
offered me for just that chance. To see them. To speak to them. Once in a while to touch one. Once in a
great while to find one low enough, perverted enough to want to touch me—”
His voice trailed off and suddenly came back strong.
“And so will you!” He glared at me. “Go home! Go home and tell them to quit it. Close the ports.
Burn every god-lost alien thing before it’s too late! That’s what the Polynesians didn’t do.”
“But surely—”
“But surely be damned! Balance of trade—balance of life, man. I don’t know if our birth rate is
going, that’s not the point. Our soul is leaking out. We’re bleeding to death!”
He took a breath and lowered his tone.
“What I’m trying to tell you, this is a trap. We’ve hit the supernormal stimulus. Man is
exogamous—all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by
him, it works for women too. Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it
or die trying. That’s a drive, y’know, it’s built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human.
For millions of years that kept the genes circulating. But now we’ve met aliens we can’t screw, and we’re
about to die trying.... Do you think I can touch my wife?”
“But—”
“Look. Y’know, if you give a bird a fake egg like its own but bigger and brighter-marked, it’ll roll its
own egg out of the nest and sit on the fake? What’s what we’re doing.”
“You’ve only been talking about sex.” I was trying to conceal my impatience. “Which is great, but
the kind of story I’d hoped—”
“Sex? No, it’s deeper.” He rubbed his head, trying to clear the drug. “Sex is only part of it, there’s
more. I’ve seen Earth missionaries, teachers, sexless people. Teachers—they end cycling waste or
pushing floaters, but they’re hooked. They stay. I saw one fine-looking old woman, she was servant to a
Cu’ushbar kid. A defective—his own people would have let him die. That wretch was swabbing up its