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

someone's ovary? I'd like to get it through your head that this is a very good
subject to shut up about." "Aren't you up too tight, Ian? These people are
very enlightened types." "One of my friends had both feet cut off by some
supposedly enlightened types." Pax grunted. Maybe I had been out too long. Why
did this place give me the feeling of a stage set? It was so insistently
human-norm. Well, I'd know more when I saw the women. Three weeks later I was
still wondering. Not that I hadn't seen Esthaan ladies-at dinners, at lunches,
at merry family picnics, even on a field trip with two lady marine biologists.
Or rather, with what passed for biologists on Esthaa? it had soon appeared
that with all the shiny instruments, science on Esthaa was more an upper-class
hobby than a discipline. People collected oddities and studied what amused
them, without system. It was an occasion for wearing a lab coat, just as their
army seemed to be merely a game of wearing uniforms. My Esthaan ladies were
like everything else here, charming, large, and wholesome. And decorously
mammalian to outward view. But had I seen women? Well, why not? As Ovancha
would say-I needed a closer look. The usual approach on an advanced planet is
through the schools of medicine. But Ovancha had been right in claiming Esthaa
was healthy. Aside from injuries and a couple of imported infections now
controlled by antibiotics, sickness did not seem to exist here. Medicine, I
found, referred to the pathology of aging; arthritis, atherosclerosis and the
like. When I asked about internal medicine, gynecology, obstetrics, I was
stopped cold. One chubby little orthopedist allowed me to take a few measures
and blood samples from his child patients. When I persisted in asking to see
adult females he began to dither. Finally he sent me to a colleague who
reluctantly produced the cadaver of an aged female worker, a cardiac-arrest
case. She had evidently been operated on for hernia in middle life. "Who did
this operation, Reshvid Korsada?" I asked. He blinked. "This is not the work
of a doctor," he replied slowly. "Well, I would like to meet the person who
did this work," I persisted. "Also I would like to meet one of your doctors
who assist in delivering new life." He laughed embarrassedly and licked his
lips. "But-there is no need for doctors! There are certain women-" He ran down
there, and I saw the sweat on his forehead and talked of other matters. I have
not lived twenty years in this job by poking sticks into sore places, and I
wanted to make that Long Leave back to Molly and the kids. "These people are
touchy as a pregnant warthog," I told Pax that night. "Apparently birth is so
taboo they can't mention it, and so easy they don't need doctors. I doubt "
these medicos ever see a woman naked. Like Medieval Europe where they
diagnosed with dolls. This is going to be very ticklish indeed." "Can't you
count chromosomes or something?" "To determine fertility? The interior of the
cell is not called the last fortress of neg entropy for nothing. It's the
pattern, that counts; quantitative DNA analyses and the few gene loci we know
are nothing. The only reliable index we have is the oldest one of all-you
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bring a male and female gamete together and see if the zygote grows. But how
in Mordor am I going to get an ovum?" Pax guffawed. "I hope you don't expect
me to-" "No, I don't. I'll put in time cataloguing and figure something out.
How are your rocks, by the way?" "That reminds me, lan, I think I've hit a