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

We took the hint and shut up.
"At United Bioengineers," the pitch went on, "we have no doubt that,
given twenty or thirty million years, Mother Nature would have remedied
some of these drawbacks. In fact," and here he gave a smile that managed to
be sly and aw-shucks at the same time, "we wonder if the grand old lady
might have settled on this very System . . . that's how good we think it is.
"And how good is that? I hear you saying. There have been a lot of
improvements since the days of Christine Jorgensen. What makes this one
so special?"
"Christine who?" Cricket whispered, typing rapidly with the fingers of
her right hand on her left forearm.
"Jorgensen. First male-to-female sex change, not counting opera
singers. What are they teaching you in journalism school these days?"
"Get the spin right, and the factoids will follow. Hell, Hildy, I didn't
realize you dated the lady."
"I've done worse since. If she hadn't kept trying to lead on the dance
floor . . . "
This time an armтАФit had to be an arm, it grew out of his shoulder,
though I could have put both my legs into one of his sleevesтАФhooked itself
over the back of the chair in front of me, and I was treated to the whole
elephantine display, from the crew-cut yellow hair to the jaw you could have
used to plow the south forty, to the neck wider than Cricket's hips. I held up
my hands placatingly, pantomimed locking up my lips and throwing away
the key. His brow beetled even moreтАФgod help me if he thought I was
making fun of himтАФthen he turned back around. I was left wondering
where he got the tiny barbells he must have used to get those forehead
muscles properly pumped up.
In a word, I was bored.
I'd seen the Sexual Millennium announced before. As recently as the
previous March, in fact, and quite regularly before that. It was like end-of-
the-world stories, or perpetual motion machines. A journalist figured to
encounter them every few weeks as long as his career lasted. I suspect it
was the same when headlines were chiseled into stone tablets and the
Sunday Edition was tossed from the back of a woolly mammoth. I had lost
track of how many times I'd sat in audiences just like this, listening to a glib
young man/woman with more teeth than God intended proclaim the
Breakthrough of the Age. It was the price a feature reporter had to pay.
It could have been worse. I could have had the political beat.
" . . . tested on over two thousand volunteer subjects . . . random
sampling error of plus or minus one percent . . . "
I was having a bad feeling. That the story would not be one hundredth
as revolutionary as the guy was promising was a given. The only question
was, would there be enough substance to hack out a story I could sell to
Walter?
" . . . registered a sixty-three percent increase in orgasmic sensation, a
two to one rise in the satisfaction index, and a complete lack of post-coital
depression."
And as my old uncle J. Walter Thompson used to say, makes your wash
fifty percent whiter, cleans your teeth, and leaves your breath alone.
I reached down to the floor and recovered the faxpad each of us had