"James Alan Gardner - The Children of Creche" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

THE CHILDREN OF
CRECHE
by James Alan Gardner
Copyright ┬й 1989, James Alan Gardner.

"And so it's good-bye to New Earth and hello to Creche."

Inter-World Vac/Lines is such a mind-slogging Mom-And-Pop outfit that
they think their good-bye/hello trick is cute. Halfway through the
welcoming spiel from the burstingly mammalian
Coffee-Tea-or-Kama-Sutra Flight Hostess...and speaking of sexual
pandering, Inter-World, must we be so heavy-handed with the airborne
pheromones in the cabin? I for one am more comfortable buckling up the
seat belt when I don't have a pointlessly throbbing erection...halfway
through the opening monologue with all its openly oozing female
fecundity, they hit the cabin stasis field, and it's six weeks later,
we're dirtside on some colony where every particle of air has been
through one lung too many, and Miss
Wouldn't-You-Like-To-Know-If-I've-Been-Surgically-Enhanced is
finishing off a sentence that started a couple of dozen light years ago. I
mean, really, Inter-World, can't you see how smarmy the whole thing is?

No, you probably can't, you pitiful geckos.

It was with this lapse of taste in my mouth that your intrepid

Art-Critic-cum-Role-Model-cum-Provider-of-Vicarious-Savoir-Faire
donned the traditional leather jacket of his profession and sallied forth
into the Vac/Port for a first recce of the fabled planet of Creche. I was
not entirely surprised to find that a Vac/Port is a Vac/Port is a Vac/Port,
all of modern semiotics notwithstanding. You have your usual gaggle of
tourists from the colony one star system over, the ones with no particular
idea why they're here, except that they just had to get off-planet or go
mad, and this place was cheaper than Morganna's Semen-Sea
Whack-Me World; and you have your traditional traders from your
favorite alien culture that doesn't see in the visible spectrum, blundering
around with incomprehensible accents, asking humans to read the signs to
them; and alas, you have your mass of parochial flibberties who shouldn't
be allowed to read our dear old Mind Spurs Weekly but do anyway,
who have pilgrimaged to the V/P to maketh the Big Embarrassing Frenzy
of Gratitude that J*O*N*N*Y! T*H*E! S*C*A*L*P*E*L!, Knower
of Taste and Taster of Knowing, has deigned to descend upon their
terraformed little Nowhere to partake of their pathetic drippy lives and
report same to the Cosmos at Large (i.e. You, Devoted Reader,
currently feeling superior to such hicks, for reasons that are more obvious
to you than to Yrs Trly).

Still and all, the Creche mob of droolies were a touch outside the normal
run: old as dry beavers, the lot of them. Of course This Reporter was
aware of Creche's famed shortfall in the production of mewlies and
pukies; but you don't snugly plug into the reality of a child-poor world

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