"Jo Walton - Unreliable Witness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Walton Jo)

woman but I'm not as ignorant as that. I've read science fiction. I know that the
chance of that is like the chance of going to a random island in the Pacific and
finding people who talk with a Bronx accent."
I thought he'd lie and say that the human shape is the evolutionary stable or
something of that nature, I remember how people get round these things in
books. In films they don't bother. At that point I thought he was a kid fooling,
even though I'd seen right through that in the first five minutes. Instead he lifted
up his T-shirt and showed me the other head he had underneath. Horrible thing,
squirmy, not keeping still.


"Are you the one who's stealing my stuff?" I asked, keeping a very tight grip on
the remote.


"No, Mrs. Whippleshaw. But I know who it is. If you'll tell me your secret, I'll tell
you that." He pulled his T-shirt down again, thank God, I'd seen quite enough.


"What secret?"


"Why, the question I asked when I came in." I couldn't remember. That isn't
senility, by the way, when someone can't remember something, or my
daughter-in-law Janice has been senile since Richard first brought her home, and
she was only nineteen then.


"I asked you what it is to be old," the alien prompted.


"Why do you want to know?" I asked.


"Well, our people don't do it. We live to breeding age, we have children, and then
we die. We're much more intelligent than humanity, as a species; we have all
sorts of things you don't have, technologically. We use singularities to travel
between the stars. But we die at the equivalent of your age forty. So do all the
other races we know, somewhere between twenty and fifty. We want to know
the secret of longevity from you. If you don't mind I'd like to take a sample."


I held out my arm and he popped a little needle against it. I hardly felt it. "There
isn't any secret," I said, as he was doing it. "Heart keeps on beating, you keep
on living."


"But we don't." He sighed, and put the needle in his pocket. He didn't look like a
kid at all when he sighed. "We don't have old age. We just die, our minds turn off
our bodies when they've done breeding. That's what our animals do too.