"Gordon R. Dickson & Harry Harrision - Lifeship" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

They all turned away immediately, without hesitationтАФ except, perhaps, the
girl Mara. It seemed to Giles that she paused for fust a second before moving
to obey, and this puzzled him. It was possible she was one of those
unfortunate arbites who had been unnaturally pampered, petted, and brought up
by some Adelman family to feel almost as if she was one of the upper classes.
Arbites hand-raisedтАФso to speakтАФin such a manner were always maladjusted in
latter life. They had not acquired proper habits in their early, formative
years and as adults were never able to adapt to social discipline in normal
fashion. If that was the case, it was a pity. She had so much else to
recommend her.

He turned away from the arbites, dismissing them from his mind, and began a
closer examination of the lifeship. It bore little or no similarity to the
luxuriously comfortable and highly automated private spacecraft he, like most
of the Adelbom, had often piloted among the inner worlds of the Solar System.

"Sir..." It was a whisper behind him. "Do you knowтАФare they females?"

Giles turned and saw that the whisperer was Groce. The man's face was white
and sweating. Giles glanced back for a moment at the two aliens. The
Albenareth were almost indistinguishable as far as sex went, and both served
indiscriminately at duties aboard spacecraftтАФand everywhere else on the alien
worlds, for that matter. But the extra length of the Captain's torso was a
clue and the particular erectness of that officer's stance. She was a female.
The Engineer was a male.

Giles looked back at the sick paleness of fear on Grace's face. Among the
arbites there were a thousand horror stories about the behavior of Albenareth
females under certain glandular conditions, not merely toward their own
"males" butтАФarbite superstitions had itтАФtoward any other intelligent male
creature. The basis of all the tales was the fact that the Albenareth "female"
тАФthe two sexes of the aliens did not really correspond equivalently to human
male and femaleтАФwhen in estrus, required from the "male" not merely the
specific and minute fertilizing organism he had produced for the egg she
carried, but the total genital area of "his" body. This she took complete
into her egg sac, where it became connected to her own bloodstream, part of
her own body, and a source of nourishment for the embryo during its period of
intrauterine growth.

The acquisition of the "male's" genital area, entirely normal by Albenareth
standards, in human terms represented a rather massive mutilation of the
"male" by the "female." It effectively desexed the male until his genital
area should grow back, which took about two years, roughly, by Earth timeтАФlong
enough for the single Albenareth offspring to be bom and learn to travel with
comfort upright on its two legs. Human xenobiologists had theorized that in
prehistoric times the evolutionary principle behind the desexing of the
Albenareth "male" had been to ensure his protection and assistance to the
particular "female" carrying his progeny, during the vulnerable period before
she and it were fully able to take care of themselves.