"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Results" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

-----------------------------------
Results
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
-----------------------------------

Science Fiction


A DF Books NERDs Release
Copyright ┬й2000 Kristine Kathryn Rusch

First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, March 2000

Do it now, do it later. Do it when you're twenty-five, do it when you're forty-five. Each choice involves
risk. Each choice involves an element of chance. That's what her parents fail to understand. They don't
realize that the world she faces is different from the one they knew.

Jess stands, feet apart, in the subway car. It's half full, but all the seats are taken, and she holds the metal
bar. She loves this antique method of travel in a city that hasn't updated itself in any real way for nearly a
hundred years. New York, she heard a colleague say, is becoming America's first European city, a lot of
people in a small space, history crammed against the future, land buried so deep no one remembers what
grass looks like.

She loves it here. The past mingling with the future. Making the present bright.

Her parents, stuck in Des Moines, surrounded by grass, just don't understand.

She leans her head against the metal bar. It's cool against her scalp. The clickity-clack of the cars along
the old track is somehow comforting.

She should have called her folks last night. They paged her three separate times after the test. But she
wanted to wait until she had results, until she had something new to say instead of going over the same
old arguments. She's twenty-five, old enough to make her own choices. Old enough to make her own
mistakes.

Her parents thought the testing was mistake number one. It certainly was expensive enough, but the
doctor said he advised it for any couple about to get married. If they're genetically incompatible, he'd
said, they have the choice of terminating the relationship, planning for an expensive future, or tying
tubesтАФpracticing irreversible infertility, as one of her friends called it.

Options. That's what her parents don't get. It's all about options.

And results.

Her stomach flutters. She wonders why tests are always a production, why now, in the days of instant
communication, results must wait a day, a week, sometimes a month. The doctor said that while
communication might be instantaneous, science is not. She wonders if that's true, but doesn't really know.

The train stops at Times Square. She gets off, walks away from the smell of exhaust, a smell that will
remain on her clothing all day. As she emerges from the tunnel, the city assaults her: sunlight thin as it