King of the Worlds. M. Thomas Gammarino

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ after the better part of two decades on New Taiwan, Dylan still put his foot in his mouth like this on a regular basis.6

      6_____________

      The problem here was that while the natives were more than 99.8 percent identical to humans at the genetic level, and while they reproduced sexually in much the manner that humans did—their genitals being homologous to, and very much resembling, the human penis and vagina—their secondary sex characteristics were almost diametrically flipped, such that the vagina-bearing ones, or females, exhibited traits Terrans typically associated with males. Relative to the penis-bearing ones, i.e. the males, the females had bigger frames, deeper voices, and more body hair. They dressed plainly and practically and kept their hair short. And despite their being the ones to carry the babies (the gestation period of the natives, incidentally, was considerably shorter: just over seven months), the females were traditionally cast in the role of the provider. The males, on the other hand, had smaller frames, higher-pitched voices, and less body hair. They grew the hair on their heads long and invested a great deal of time in washing and styling it. They tended to wear makeup, jewelry, and clothing roughly analogous to those worn by Terran females in first-world temperate zones. Humans had hoped to find on other worlds some radically different gender roles and relations than those that obtained on Earth. Should there turn out to be intelligent life, they had hoped to find they came in a single gender, or three, or twenty. They had hoped for fluid genders, androgynes, sequential hermaphrodites. Alas, all of the newly settled worlds had turned up dimorphous hominids at the tops of their respective food chains. There was nothing, sexually, on New Taiwan that one couldn’t find on a walk through Greenwich Village, with one notable exception: the male, penis and all, was the lactating member of the species. Terran biologists still hadn’t puzzled out exactly how the birth of the baby from the female stimulated the hormonal changes in the male that resulted in milk production, but it was theorized that pheromones played a key role just as it did in the equally mystical-seeming Terran phenomenon of women’s menstrual periods synchronizing themselves with those of other women living in close proximity. The point here being that, beyond perhaps + and - , there was no universal sign for male and female. Dylan’s default mode of thinking was not just politically incorrect; it was flat-out wrong.

      Connor drew:

      “Okay,” Dylan said. “That’s Hermia. Now whom does Hermia love?”

      “Lysander,” said Becky.

      “Correctamundo. Connor, please draw Terran-restroom Lysander next to Terran-restroom Hermia there. And then maybe you could draw an arrow to show that she loves him.”

      “Great. Okay, now whom does Lysander love at this point?”

      “Helena,” said Justin confidently.

      “Precisely. Now draw that for us, would you, please, Mr. da Vinci?”

      Connor squinted.

      “Leonardo da Vinci? Genius of the Italian Renaissance?”

      Only Josh Song nodded, Josh who wore a bow tie and whose face was perpetually half-hidden by a Kurt Cobain teardrop of hair. He was far and away the most learned, and most melancholic, kid in class. Everyone else just looked confused.

      “I guess we’ll have to settle for you doing it as yourself then, Connor. Go on now. Make your immortal strokes.”

      “Very lovely. And whom does Helena love?”

      “Lysander,” said Tate.

      “No. Helena loves Demetrius,” said Sammy.

      “Which is it?”

      “Demetrius,” intoned the class.

      “Sorry, Tate.”

      Tate got some pats on the back for being wrong.

      “And finally, what about Demetrius? Whom does he love?”

      “Hermia,” said Lewis.

      “Correct again. Now let’s give Connor a second to complete his masterpiece.”

      “Bravo, Connor. Okay, so if at the beginning of this play we had a classic love triangle with one outlying point, what geometric figure do we have now?”

      “A square,” sang the chorus.

      “Precisely. Everyone wants someone other than the person who wants him or her.”

      “That’s sad,” Lia said.

      Josh, uncharacteristically, blew a raspberry. “What a waste of energy,” he said.

      “How’s that, Josh?”

      “There must be other single people in Athens, no?”

      “Spoken like a true automaton,” Dylan said. “They’re in love, Josh. Do you really suppose it’s that easy to just give up on love?”

      “They’re not being creative enough, is what I think. There has to be a workable solution here.”

      “And what would you suggest?” Dylan asked.

      “Well, in the first place, what’s to stop that shape from being a circle and not a square? Circles are perfect.”

      “Go on.”

“So like what if instead of having love as this petty little directional force between them, they could place it right at the center and let it radiate out in all directions like the sun?”7

      7_____________

      Technically the star about which New Taiwan made its annual journey was “Lem”—named in honor of Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, author of Solaris and The Cyberiad (among other works) and 1996 winner of the prestigious Order of the White Eagle award—but for all intents and purposes Lem was identical to Earth’s “sun,” so English-speaking exopats, and by inheritance their offspring, sometimes called it that.

      “And how might that translate into practice, I wonder?” Dylan asked.

      “They should get a place together. Maybe build one right there in the forest.”

      “And then?”

      “And then nothing. They live in it and bask in all the love. At the very least they could finally sit down.”

      “I can’t help but inquire about their sleeping arrangements…”

      Dylan could see that not every student in the class was going to be comfortable with the turn this discussion was taking. You could never be sure with ninth-graders: in terms of maturity, some were practically ready СКАЧАТЬ