"Day Million by Frederik Pohl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Award Stories 2)

nine, charming and cute. I admit she doesn't sound that way.
She was, as you might put it, a dancer. Her art involved
qualities of intellection and expertise of a very high order,
requiring both tremendous natural capacities and endless
, practice; it was performed in null-gravity and I can best
describe it by saying that it was something like the perform-
ance of a contortionist and something like classical baflel;'
maybe resembling Danilova's dying swan. It was also prett~
damned sexy. In a symbolic way, to be sure; but face it, most
of the things we call "sexy" are symbolic, you know, except
perhaps an exhibitionist's open clothing. On Day Million
when Dora danced, the people who saw her panted, and you
would too.
About this business of her being a boy. It didn't matter to
her audiences that genetically she was male. It wouldn't
matter to you, if you were among them, because you wouldn't
know itnot unless you took a biopsy cutting of her flesh and
put it under an electron-microscope to find the XY chromo-
.someand it didn't matter to them because they didn't care.
Through techniques which are not only complex but haven't
yet been discovered, these people were able to determine a
great deal about the aptitudes and easements of babies quite a
long time before they were bornat about the second horizon
of cell-division, to be exact, when the segmenting egg is
becoming a free blastocystand then they naturally helped
those aptitudes along. Wouldn't we? If we find a child with an
aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Juilliard. If
they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman,
they made him one. As sex had long been dissociated from
reproduction this was relatively easy to do and caused no
trouble and no, or at least very little, comment.
How much is "very little"? Oh, about as much as would be
caused by our own tampering with Divine Will by filling a
tooth. Less than would be caused by wearing a hearing aid.
Does it still sound awful? Then look closely at the next busty
babe you meet and reflect that she may be a Dora, for adults
who are genetically male but somatically female are far from
unknown even in our own time. An accident of environment
in the womb overwhelms the blueprints of heredity. The
difference is that with us it happens only by accident and we
don't know about it except rarely, after close study; whereas
the people of Day Million did it often, on purpose, because
they wanted to.
Well, that's enough to tell you about Dora. It would only
confuse you to add that she was seven feet tall and smelled of
peanut butter. Let us begin our story.
On Day Million, Dora swam out of her house, entered a
transportation tube, was sucked briskly to the surface in its
flow of water and ejected in its plume of spray to an elastic
platform in front of herahcall it her rehearsal hall.