"Robert F. Young - To Touch a Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

Her name was the ship's name —Mary.
She said, "Have you charted the storms to your satisfaction, Ben?"
"I'm afraid only you can see us safely through the storms," Powers said.
She smiled. "I'll do my best."
He felt the material of her blue blouse touch his cheek as she tidied up the chart table. This was not
wholly illusion. A projection she might be—an electronically brewed personification of the ship —but she
had a substance of sorts. Without it she would not have been able to do his laundry, prepare his meals
and make his bed. And her reality went even deeper, for the ganglions of supership computers were
duplicates of the human brain.
She said suddenly, "Are we following an orthodox course to Morning Mist, Ben?"
Caught off guard, Powers played for time.
"Does it seem unorthodox?"
She laughed. "I pay little attention to such matters. The pilot programs me and I obey." She paused.
Then: "But I am curious to know why you only partially programed me. As matters stand we shall
proceed to Extend and make precisely two orbits around it at a mean altitude of 14,021,636.2 miles.
Then what?"
"Then," said Powers, seeing his way clear, "I will reprogram you, correcting the error I made in my
original programing and putting us on an orthodox course to Morning Mist."
She said, "Oh, I see." And then: "I thought of a different game for us to play tonight, Ben. It's an
awfully old one, but it's lots of fun. It's called checkers."
Powers had never heard of it. But playing it might get the Blue Star off his mind.
"I'll look forward to it," he said.
"Fine. See you at supper."

AFTER she left the room Powers got up and stepped over to the drink dispenser. He dialed a cold
daiquiri and drank it slowly. I wonder what I'd do, he thought, if she were a real woman.
The answer, of course, was—nothing.
When they impotentialized you they burned a little ditty into your brain for you to think of and hum
the music to when doubts assailed you. It went like this:
Impotent I may be
But I will see
Stars lovers know as dust
In the blindness of their lust ...
He hummed the tune now, thinking the words.
And the words danced in his mind—twisted, turned, attenuated, took on flesh and shaped
themselves into naked nymphs and the nymphs cavorted licentiously around a grotesque Pan–and the
Pan was himself, hooves rooted in the ground, straining straining to be free, the while idiotically playing
the impotentialization tune upon a syrinx.
The techs at Salt Peter's Cathedral hadn't known that he had once been an hermaphrodite and he
hadn't told them. He kept that part of his life a deep dark secret. But he should have told them. Maybe
they would have known what Powers had subsequently found out—that ex-hermaphrodites have a
partial immunity to ChiMuZeta—and would have exposed him for a longer period of time. As it was they
had taken away just enough of his manhood to make it impossible for him to have a woman and left just
enough of it for him to want one.

IRONICALLY, Powers had been serving a life sentence for multiple rape when the penal colony
officials had put the proposition to him. However, it was a crime he was not guilty of—could not possibly
have been guilty of for the simple reason that he had not been on the scene when it had been committed.
The proposition the penal colony officials put to him was as follows: if he would submit to
impotentialization and accept a lifetime job as a long-run pilot for Stellar Carriers, Inc., he would be given