"James Tiptree Jr. - Your Haploid Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tiptree James Jr)

bet my tour pay that MacDorra's return would find me with a negative report to
file. Wait till we see the women, I told myself. Pax was pointing his profile
like Scouts of the Galaxy as we trundled up endless avenues bright with
suburban shrubbery. Possibly he had much the same idea ... It has always
struck the younger ISB agents as grossly unfair that middle-aged, monogamous
and non-charismatic types should be charged with investigating the
question of alien sex. Bureau Personnel learned that the hard way. The first
ISB agent sent to Esthaa, over a century back, had been a lad called Harkness.
Among other idiosyncrasies, Harkness had had a weakness for
laboratory-fermented brew. The sensitive, reserved Esthaans had been very
unfavorably impressed when a wing of their new university went up with him.
After the investigation and reparations Esthaa had been dropped to the bottom
of the sector list to cool off. A hundred years later Auriga Sector had only
Esthaa left to check, and the Esthaans had been persuaded to accept another
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Interplanetary Survey team, guaranteed non-explosive. Which was now arriving
as one Pax Patton, mineralogist-stratigrapher, and one Ian Suitlov,
middle-aged ecologist in public and Certified Officer in fact-as Harkness had
tried to be before me. "What's this 'mystery man' bit they give you C.O.s?"
Pax had asked me while we were getting acquainted on the ship. I had looked at
his eager face and cursed Bureau security. "Well, there is the Mystery, you
know. Silly name, to your generation. But when I started work people were
still ready to fight about it. The One-World Crusade was active -in fact, two
of my graduating class got kidnapped and were given the conversion treatment.
One forgets how much energy and money -and blood-got spent over the fact that
human races have been found scattered through the galaxy. It was a highly
emotional thing. Powerful religions were upset. Some people wouldn't believe
it. Nowadays we've just settled down to the job of counting and describing. We
don't call it a Problem. But it is a mystery. Where do we come from? Are we a
statistical peak, a most probable bridge-hand of evolution? Or are we one crop
out of one seed pod that somehow got spilled through the stars? People got
pretty excited over it. I know one or two who still are." "But why the
Security hang-up, Ian?" "Use your head. Look at the human position in the
galaxy. A new race can get all wrought up over whether or not they're
certified human. We know it doesn't really matter-there are Hrattli in top Gal
Fed jobs, and they look like poached eggs. But can you explain this to a
newly-contacted, proud, scared humanoid race? No! They take noncertification
as inferiority. That's why C.O.s are not called C.O.s out loud. We try to get
in and get the data quietly before any uproar can start. Ninety percent of the
time there's no problem anyway, and C.O. work is the dullest kind of routine.
But when you hit one of the emotional ten percent- well, that's why the Bureau
pays our insurance. I'm telling you this so you'll remember to keep your mouth
very carefully shut about my work. Didn't anybody brief you? You do your
rocks, I do my biology-but nothing about humans, humanity,
mystery-right?" "Aye aye, sir!" Pax grinned. "But lan, I don't get it. What's
the problem? I mean, isn't being human basically a matter of culture, like
sharing the same values?" "Curdled Chaos, what do they teach you rock hounds