"Blish, James - Earth of Hours" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

to predetermine the sex of their children, the predictable
result had been an enormous glut of maleswhich was
directly accountable for the present regime 6n Earth. By the
time the people and the lawmakers, thoroughly frightened
by the crazy years of fashion upheavals, "beefcake," poly-
andry, male prostitution, and all the rest, had come to their
senses, the Matriarchy was in to stay; a weak electric
current had overturned civilized society as drastically as the
steel knife had demoralized the Eskimos.
Though the tide of excess males had since receded some-
what, it had left behind a wrack, of which Robin One was
a bubble. He was a drone, and hence superfluous by defini-
tionfit only to be sent colonizing, on diplomatic missions
or otherwise thrown away.
Superfluity alone, of course, could hardly account for his
presence on 12-Upjohn's staff. Officially, Robin One was an
interpreter; actuallysince nobody could know the language
the Consort of State might be called upon to understand on
this missionhe was a poet, a class of unattached males
with special privileges in the Matriarchy, particularly if
what they wrote was of the middling-difficult or Hillyer So-
ciety sort. Robin One was an eminently typical member of
this class, distractible, sulky, jealous, easily wounded, homo-
sexual, lazy except when writing, and probably (to give him
the benefit of the doubt, for 12-Upjohn had no ear whatever
for poetry) the second-worst poet of his generation.
It had to be admitted that assigning 12-UpJ'ohn a poet
as an interpreter on this mission had not been a wholly
bad idea, and that if Hildegard MuUer of the Interstellar Un-
derstanding Commission had not thought of it, no mere male
would have been likely toleast of all Bar-Rob 4-Agberg,
Director of Assimilation. The nightmare of finding the whole
of the center of the Galaxy organized into one vast federation,
much older than Earth's, had been troubling the State De-
partment for a long time, at first from purely theoretical
considerationsall those heart-stars were much older than
those in the spiral arms, and besides, where star density in
space is so much higher, interstellar travel does not look like
quite so insuperable an obstacle as it long had to Earthmen
and later from certain practical signs, of which the obliter-
ation of the Assam Dragon and her tenders had been only
the most provocative. Getting along with these people on the
first contact would be vital, and yet the language barrier
might well provoke a tragedy wanted by neither side, as the
obliteration of Nagasaki in World War II had been provoked
by the mistranslation of a single word. Under such circum-
stances, a man with a feeling for strange words in odd rela-
tionships might well prove to be useful, or even vital.
Nevertheless, it was with a certain grim enjoyment that
12-Upjohn poured into Robin One a good two-ounce jolt