"Joanna Russ - Invasion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russ Joanna)

So we leave happy. Crying goodbye, goodbye, I sorry I hurt your artifactual and put water on it. I
was bad. I ate and messed up food room and did other awfuls. But I am only a lit-ul child.
 MARCH! says You Know Who.
So we march.
Down on the surface everybody is now cured of looking like Yoomin Beans, and is back to normal,
viz. green gunk. Life is again horrible. Up in ship only Ff is still there, try to hide out in botanical bay,
imitating frond. Is not successful, is almost devoured by botany cat, must come down to surface in
disgrace, to look forever like Graminidae. Sometimes we look up into sky, remembering beautiful ship
and food and cry, O ship-thing, ship-thing, wherefore art thou up so high/like a carpet in the sky? And
we flow about, savagely chanting:
Rigidity, rigidity,
Wherefore art thou so fond of we?
Which is a sort of spring thing, a festival cry with which we assault the boring semi-liquidity of our
fate.
Meanwhile:
Mam say to steer-person: Did you authorize the entry of these ... ah ... youngsters without checking
out Ulp and said species computer-wise?
All say No no, nobody let them in. Do not do bad things to us, plees. Was not our fault.
Enough. We shall torment you no more. Goodbye, goodbye.


The day shift slept, the Engineer dreaming that she was at home with too few rights and far too many little
brothers and sisters. The Doctor woke every few minutes with a start, having dreamed repeatedly of an
operating room overrun with Ulpian youngsters, until she gave up, rose, put on her robe, and went to
enter results into the hospital computer, from where she could keep an oblique watch on the hall and the
next room. The Navigator slept on her face, over a cache of her most precious discs. The Communicator
alone slept soundly and did not dream. Both reading, both wearing glasses (the Captain for myopia, her
First for a touch of astigmatism) the Captain and the First were in bed together,
the latter in pajamas. After a while the Captain put down her book (Military History of the Late
T'ang) and frowned. "Thinking about those children?" said the other.
"They were not children," she said decisively, and shuddered.
"Well, yes," he said, "they were aliens, true but even as pyramids of green Jell-O, they were , . .
well, baby pyramids."
"Hm!" said she. There was a moment's silence. He went back to his own book, an annotated
Poems of Emily Dickinson. Then she said slowly:
"Love, do you think . . . did it ever occur to you that all children are aliens?"
He said, "Do you mean the bouncing on adults and the cherry pie between their toes? Oh yes. No,
not really. Anyway I rather liked them. The small pyramids, I mean."
"I suppose," she said, a bit sharply, "that it's perfectly normal for human male philoprogenitiveness to
be roused by contact with small pyramids of green goo. NonethelessтАФ"
"No, not by them. By you."
"By me?"
"Absolutely." He added, "Do you want to back out?"
She smiled and shook her head. "No. We'll do it. It'll be human, after all. Not like them."


Indeedy yes. Will be little yoomin bean. Will be playmate. Will be lonely. You Know Who go away
again soon.
We come back.