"Elgin,.Suzette.Haden.-.Star.Anchored.Star.Angered" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elgin Suzette Haden)

"The Dean has wide interests," said Coyote carefully, and was rewarded with an enthusiastic nod from his guide.
"I wonder ... " said the Student.
"Yes?"
"Could I ask you a personal question?"
"There still are some?" Coyote's eyebrows went up, and he waited, but he kept on walking.
"Is it true that you own a guitar made of real Old Earth wood, Citizen Jones? That's what they told us, but Student news sources are not always as trustworthy as they might be."
"It's true," said Coyote. "My guitar is rosewood. Real rosewood, not synthowood."
"Ah," sighed the Student. "Now, that's impressive. That is impressive. Perhaps some of us could see it later, when you've finished speaking with the Dean. Or perhaps you don't have time ... "
Coyote shrugged. "If you want to see it," he said, "just go look. It's in my flyer, in a case behind the pilot's seat. Be careful, though."
"Just like that?"
"Well? Are you likely to destroy it as a protest against the eating of pork on Blythe-6 or something of that kind?"
The blossoms and leaves leaped around the young man's eyes, registering his outrage spectacularly. "Certainly not," he snapped.
"Then please help yourself," said Coyote. "And your friends as well. Carefully."
The Student actually bowed. Coyote hadn't seen anyone bow since he had had the good fortune to leave the planet Abba, that bastion of sexism and antiquated etiquette, for the last time. But he managed to bow back, and continued toward #39. The Student did seem to him to be a little odd, but not as odd as the articles in the news would have you believe. And, so far as that went, if you knew that you were one of the elitist of all elite, second in rarity only to the Communipaths themselves, one of one thousand chosen out of countless billions of prospects, surely you had a right to get a little scramble-brained about it. Common motif in Twentieth-Century Ballads was the rose-covered cottage; now we find ourselves with rose-covered Students. Time marches, of course, on.
The door of #39 had no palm-screen, no electronic eye, only a bare surface. He considered it a moment, and then knocked, at which it slid open without a sound. He stepped over the threshold and almost broke his neck.
Nobody, including the be-flowered and be-mannered Student, had bothered to warn him that there were three steps down to be negotiated on the other side of the door. Just like intellectuals to put steps in a place where there was no need for them and then cut a door high enough in the wall to justify their existence.
Still no sign of the fabled luxury. True, the walls were lined with thousands of microfilms and microfiche trays, but that could hardly be considered an extravagance here. The floor was covered with mats in a shabby synthostraw he hadn't seen in fifteen years; apparently the Dean was old-fashioned in her tastes. Or perhaps sensitive to the criticism about wasting tax revenues. And where, for that matter, was the Dean?
She came out of a window at the far end of the room, vaulting handily over its sill and extending a welcoming hand.
"Citizen Jones!" she boomed. He backed off a step. It was difficult to accept the small woman greeting him as the source of that enormous husky voice. And it was clear that Dean Shandalynne O'Halloran was old-fashioned about more than floor coverings, too; she apparently didn't concern herself with cosmetic injections. Since she wore not even a loincloth, it was vividly obvious that she sagged in all the places where women of her age had sagged in the past, before science liberated them from the gravitational effects of time.
"No," she said, "no, you're wrong."
"Mmmm," said Coyote.
"I've just been too busy," she assured him briskly. "Come the end of this term, I'll haul me off to the nearest urban medcenter and have my poor body renovated. I'm not totally indifferent to the shocking effects I have on the eye ... No, that's a lie. I take it back, Citizen Jones, I am totally indifferent. But people remind me. My Students, for instance, remind me. Faces like yours, when I meet a stranger, remind me."
"My dear Citizen DeanЧ"
She ignored him and dropped cross-legged to the mats beside a low table.
"A needle here, a needle there," she went on, oblivious to his discomfort, "and I'll look just like my granddaughters again. Which, I might add, is perfectly ridiculous."
"I didn't know they wore off," he fumbled.
"The cosmetic injections? Oh yes. You have to get them renewed every three years, or nature just takes its course. You don't think the powers that be would allow anything you only had to do once and for all, do you? Although I suppose circumcision does qualify that way ... But you know, if they could figure out a way to make the foreskin grow back so you had to go in twice a year for a trim, they would. Won't you sit down, Citizen?"
He joined her on the other side of the table, and was making a determined effort to look at the far corner of the room, when she reached across the bowl of fruit and took both his hands tightly in hers. He hadn't realized that breasts drooped like that, normally.
"Tell me, Citizen Jones," she said, holding his hands firmly so that he could scarcely follow his instincts to invent a pressing errand elsewhere, "don't your testicles droop? I mean, dear Citizen, would you expect them to charge on ahead of you, fully erect, making lumps in your clothing?"
Coyote closed his eyes and surrendered to his fate, and the silence grew all around them. It was a fair question, after all, and when he got back home againЧassuming he ever didЧhe would take it up with his daughter. She had an excellent mind for this sort of thing. And then he felt his hands laid down for the useless objects that they were, and neatly arranged for him on the table, and he opened his eyes. She was looking right into them.
"Dear Citizen Jones," she said again, gently. "I've upset you. It comes of spending all my time with Students, who cannot, by definition, be upset. Perhaps we could begin all over again? We must just pretend that I did not greet you by flinging myself through a window at you stark naked, babbling all the while about my breasts and your testicles."
"It won't help," said Coyote sadly. "I could pretend. But you did do all that, you know."
"You couldn't just put it out of your mind?"
"No," said Coyote. "I don't think I could. I think we should just go on from here. Wherever here is."
The Dean sighed, and folded her hands in front of her. "I'll have to take a course or something," she said, frowning. 'Non-Students, Behavior With'. I don't run into one of you people more than twice a year, you see, and generally when I do it's at some stupid state occasion where I have to wear what is offensively known as my Academic Regalia. And at which I speak in Academic Regalian. Inter alia. Ad hoc. Cogito ergo sum. Hoc arbiter testes infinitum."
Coyote blinked. "I don't know the last one," he said.
"Of course not, I made it up. I am trying to put you at ease, in my own clumsy wayЧI do realize, you know, that whatever brings you here is a serious matter."
Still frowning, she produced a small file sheath, opened it and scanned it quickly, slapped it closed, and returned it to the niche under the table from which it had apparently come.
"Well, Citizen Jones," she said, and all banter was gone from her voice now, "I am advised that you have been authorized to go to the planet Freeway to investigate the current religious conflict there, and that you will be masquerading as a Student in Religious Science. I have also been authorized to give you all the help I can."
Coyote was reasonably certain that wasn't all she had to say, and he was right.
"Just exactly how did you manage all that?" she snapped, leaning toward him with both hands gripping the table between them. "It will be hundreds of years before Freeway is off Novice Planet status and required to give up its anti-tourist regulationsЧthat's Point One. Point Two: nobody, but nobody, is allowed to 'masquerade' as a Student. Doesn't happen. And Point Three: just where do they come off, asking a Multiversity Dean to participate in this extravaganza?"
She was fairly spitting sparks at him, but Coyote was used to irritated officials. He felt considerably more comfortable now.
"The question of real interest, Citizen," he said, "is not how I managed all thatЧbut how you were induced to agree to it."
"Standoff," said the Dean, and Coyote grinned at her.
"You must know someone very, very powerful," she said.
"As do you, Citizen Dean."
As she surely did, and no question about it. The eleven Multiversity Deans had more power than any other group in the Three Galaxies. Not formally. Not in the sense that a government had power. But out of the Multiversities came the great judges, the scientists, the artists, the writers, all the intellectual and the political aristocracy; and every member of that aristocracy had a fanatical devotion to one or more of the Multiversity Deans. It was not a power to be lightly dismissed, and Coyote had the utmost respect for this chunk of a woman with the outsized voice.
"Very well, Citizen Jones," she said. "I won't torment you further. It's unbecoming of me, anyway, since you undoubtedly have orders you aren't allowed to ignore. Would you give me some sort of indication as to how we are supposed to proceed, then?"
Coyote relaxed, not that he gave a wafer-thin damn for his "orders." "I need to know how to pass as a Student of Religious Science. Or as a Student of anything, for that matter. I might add that I don't think much of this ideaЧI'm no intellectual, and no scholar, not by anyone's definition."
The Dean looked indifferent, both to his opinions and his protests.