"Elizabeth Hand - Cleopatra Brimstone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hand Elizabeth)

manifestation, one that no one but herself seemed to have noticed. She had started menstru
several months earlier: nothing unusual in that. Everything she had read about it mentioned
usual thingsтАФmood swings, growth spurts, acne, pubic hair.
But nothing was said about eyebrows. Janie first noticed something strange about hers w
she got her period for the second time. She had retreated to the bathtub, where she spent a g
half hour reading an article in Nature about oriental ladybug swarms. When she finished
article, she got out of the tub, dressed, and brushed her teeth, and then spent a minute frow
at the mirror.
Something was different about her face. She turned sideways, squinting. Had her
broken out? No; but something had changed. Her hair color? Her teeth? She leaned
the sink until she was almost nose-to-nose with her reflection.
That was when she saw that her eyebrows had undergone a growth spurt of their own. A
inner edge of each eyebrow, above the bridge of her nose, three hairs had grown remark
long. They furled back toward her temple, entwined in a sort of loose braid. She had
noticed them sooner because she seldom looked in a mirror, and also because the hairs did
arch above the eyebrows, but instead blended in with them, the way a bittersweet vine tw
around a branch.
Still, they seemed bizarre enough that she wanted no one, not even her parents, to no
She found her mother's tweezers, neatly plucked the six hairs, and flushed them down the to
They did not grow back.
At the optometrist's, Jane opted for heavy tortoiseshell frames rather than contacts.
optometrist, and her mother, thought she was crazy, but it was a very deliberate choice. J
was not one of those homely B-movie adolescent girls, driven to science as a last resort.
had always been a tomboy, skinny as a rail, with long slanted violet-blue eyes; a small
mouth; long, straight black hair that ran like oil between her fingers; skin so pale it had
periwinkle shimmer of skim milk.
When she hit puberty, all of these conspired to beauty. And Jane hated it. Hated
attention, hated being looked at, hated that the other girls hated her. She was quiet, not shy
impatient to focus on her schoolwork, and this was mistaken for arrogance by her peers.
through high school she had few friends. She learned early the perils of befriending boys,
earnest boys who professed an interest in genetic mutations and intricate computer simula
of hive activity. Janie could trust them not to touch her, but she couldn't trust them not to fa
love. As a result of having none of the usual distractions of high schoolтАФsex, social
mindless employmentтАФshe received an Intel/ Westinghouse Science Scholarship fo
computer-generated schematic of possible mutations in a small population of vic
butterflies exposed to genetically engineered crops. She graduated in her junior year, took
scholarship money, and ran.
She had been accepted at Stanford and MIT, but chose to attend a small, highly prestig
women's college in a big city several hundred miles away. Her parents were apprehen
about her being on her own at the tender age of seventeen, but the college, with its eleg
cloister-like buildings and lustily wooded grounds, put them at ease. That and the de
assurances that the neighborhood was completely safe, as long as students were sensible a
not walking alone at night. Thus mollified, and at Janie's urgingтАФshe was desperate to m
away from homeтАФher father signed a very large check for the first semester's tuition.
September she started school.
She studied entomology, spending her first year examining the geni-talia of male and fe
scarce wormwood shark moths, a species found on the Siberian steppes. Her hours in
zoology lab were rapturous, hunched over a microscope with a pair of tweezers so minute
were themselves like some delicate portion of her specimen's physiognomy. She would rem
the butterflies' genitalia, tiny and geometrically precise as diatoms, and dip them first