"Joanna Russ - When It Changed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russ Joanna)

"A great tragedy."

I waited, not quite understanding.

"Yes," he said, catching his breath again with that queer smile, that
adult-to-child smile that tells you something is being hidden and will be
presently produced with cries of encouragement and joy, "a great tragedy. But
it's over." And again he looked around at all of us with the strangest
deference. As if we were invalids.

"You've adapted amazingly," he said.

"To what?" I said. He looked embarrassed. He looked insane. Finally he said,
"Where I come from, the women don't dress so plainly."

"Like you?" I said. "Like a bride?" For men were wearing silver from head to
foot. I had never seen anything so gaudy. He made as if to answer and then
apparently thought better of it; he laughed at me again. With an odd
exhilarationтАФas if we were something childish and something wonderful, as if
he were doing us an enormous favorтАФhe took one shaky breath and said, "Well,
we're here."

I looked at Spet, Spet looked at Lydia, Lydia looked at Amalia, who is the
head of the local town meeting, Amalia looked at I don't know who. My throat
was raw. I cannot stand local beer, which the farmers swill as if their
stomachs had iridium linings, but I took it anyway, from Amalia (it was her
bicycle we had seen outside as we parked), and swallowed it all. This was
going to take a long time. I said, "Yes, here you are," and smiled (feeling
like a fool), and wondered seriously if male Earth people's minds worked so
very differently from female Earth people's minds, but that couldn't be so or
the race would have died out long ago. The radio network had got the news
around-planet by now and we had another Russian speaker, flown in from Varna;
I decided to cut out when the man passed around pictures of his wife, who
looked like the priestess of some arcane cult. He proposed to question Yuki,
so I barreled her into a back room in spite of her furious protests, and went
out to the front porch. As I left, Lydia was explaining the difference between
parthenogenesis (which is so easy that anyone can practice it) and what we do,
which is the merging of ova. That is why Katy's baby looks like me. Lydia went
on to the Ansky process and Katy Ansky, our one full-polymath genius and the
great-great-I don't know how many times great-grandmother of my own
Katharina.

A dot-dash transmitter in one of the outbuildings chattered faintly to itself:
operators flirting and passing jokes down the line.

There was a man on the porch. The other tall man. I watched him for a few
minutesтАФI can move very quietly when I want toтАФand when I allowed him to see
me, he stopped talking into the little machine hung around his neck. Then he
said calmly, in excellent Russian, "Did you know that sexual equality had been