"Thomas M. Disch - In Xanadu" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

nothing could be done to correct the mistake that Fate, and Disney-Mitsubishi, had made. Maybe he'd
always been a woman. [Cook, Fran] was a sexually ambiguous name. Perhaps his earlier assumption
that he was male was simply a function of thinking in English, where one may be mistaken about his
own identity (but not about hers). I think; therefore I am a guy.
He searched through his expanded memory for some convincing evidence of his gender history.
Correction: her gender history. Her-story, as feminists would have it. Oh, dearтАФwould he be one of
them now, always thinking in italics, a grievance committee of one in perpetual session?
But look on the bright side (she told herself). There might be advantages in such a change of
address. Multiple orgasms. Nicer clothes (though she couldn't remember ever wanting to dress like a
woman
when she was a man). Someone else paying for dinner, assuming that the protocols of hospitality still worked the same
way here in Xanadu as they had back in reality. This was supposed to be heaven and already she was feeling
nostalgic for a life she couldn't remember, an identity she had shed.
Then the loudspeaker above her head emitted a dull Dong!, and she woke up in the Women's Dormitory of State
Pleasure-Dome 2. "All right, girls!" said the amplified voice of the matron. "Time to rise and shine. Le temps s'en va,
mesdames,le temps s'en va."


state pleasure-dome 2
 "La vie,"philosophized Chantal, "est une maladie dont le sommeil nous soulagons toutes les seize heures. C'est un palliative. La morte est un remede."
She flicked the drooping ash from the end of her cigarette and made a moue of chic despair. Fran could understand
what she'd said quite as well as if she'd been speaking English: Life is a disease from which sleep offers relief every
sixteen hours. Sleep is a palliativeтАФdeath a remedy.
They were sitting before big empty cups of cafe au lait in the employee lounge, dressed in their black E-Gal minis,
crisp white aprons, and fishnet hose. Fran felt a positive fever of chagrin to be seen in such a costume, but she felt
nothing otherwise, really, about her entire female body, especially the breasts bulging out of their casings, breasts
that quivered visibly at her least motion. It was like wearing a T-shirt with some dumb innuendo on it, or a blatant
sexual invitation. Did every girl have to go through the same torment of shame at puberty? Was there any way to get
over it except to get into it?
"Mon bonheur," declared Chantal earnestly, "est d'augmenter celle des autres." Her happiness lay in increasing
that of others. A doubtful proposition in most circumstances, but not perhaps for Chantal, who, as an E-Gal was part
geisha, part rock star, and part a working theorem in moral calculus, an embodiment of Francis Hutcheson's notion
that that action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers. There were
timesтАФThursdays, in the early eveningтАФwhen Chantal's bedside/Website was frequented by as many as two
thousand admirers, their orgasms all bissfully synchronized with the reels and ditties she performed on her dulcimer,
sometimes assisted by Fran (an apprentice in the art) but usually all on her own. At such times (she'd confided to
Fran) she felt as she imagined a great conductor must feel conducting some choral extravaganza, the Missa Solemnis
or the Ninth Symphony.
Except that the dulcimer gave the whole thing a tinge and twang of hillbilly, as of Tammy
Wynette singing "I'm just a geisha from the bayou." Of course, the actual Tammy Wynette had died
ages ago and could sing that song only in simulation, but still it was hard to imagine it engineered with
any other voice-print: habit makes the things we love seem inevitable as arithmetic.
"Encore?" Chantal asked, lifting her empty cup, and then, when Fran had nodded, signaling to
the waiter.
Coffee, cigarettes, a song on the jukebox. Simple pleasures, but doubled and quadrupled and raised
to some astronomical power, the stuff that industries and gross national products are made of. Fran
imagined a long reverse zoom away from their table at the cafe, away from the swarming hive of the
city, to where each soul and automobile was a mere pixel on the vast monitor of eternity.
The coffees came, and Chantal began to sing, "Le bonheur de la femme n'est pas dans la liberte, mais
dans l'acceptation d'un devoir."