"John Varley - Steel Beach" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

Copyright ┬й 1991 by John Varley. All rights reserved. Published under
arrangement with the author. For the personal use of those who have purchased
the ESF 1993 Award anthology only.



STEEL BEACH

by John Varley



CHAPTER ONE




"In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman.
He paused to let this planet-shattering information sink into our amazed
brains. Personally, I didn't know how many more wonders I could absorb
before lunch.
"With the right promotional campaign," he went on, breathlessly, "it
might take as little as two years.
He might even have been right. Stranger things have happened in my
lifetime. But I decided to hold off on calling my broker with frantic orders
to sell all my jock-strap stock.
The press conference was being held in a large auditorium belonging to
United Bioengineers. It could seat about a thousand; it presently held about
a fifth that number, most of us huddled together in the front rows.
The UniBio salesman was non-nondescript as a game-show host. He
had one of those voices, too. A Generic person. One of these days they'll
standardize every profession by face and body type. Like uniforms.
He went on:
 "Sex as we know it is awkward, inflexible, unimaginative. By the time
you're forty, you've done everything you possibly could with our present,
'natural' sexual system. In fact, if you're even moderately active, you've
done everything a dozen times. It's become boring. And if it's boring at
forty, what will it be like at eighty, or a hundred and forty? Have you ever
thought about that? About what you'll be doing for a sex life when you're
eighty? Do you really want to be repeating the same old acts?"
"Whatever I'm doing, it won't be with him," Cricket whispered in my
ear.
"How about with me?" I whispered back. "Right after the show."
"How about after I'm eighty?" She gave me a sharp little jab in the ribs,
but she was smiling. Which is more than I could say for the hulk sitting in
front of us. He worked for Perfect Body, weighed about two hundred
kilosтАФnone of it fatтАФand was glaring over the slope of one massive
trapezius, flexing the muscles in his eyebrows. I wouldn't have believed he
could even turn his head, much less look over his shoulder. You could hear
the gristle popping.