"Thomas Easton - Organic Future 03 - Woodsman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

PART 1




CHAPTER 1



Once Martha's home had been as massively solid as her own body. Then she
had been banished to the yard outside and forced to watch, morosely pacing
while that pile of stone and mortar was torn down and replaced by an oblong
concrete rim. Her immense grey sadness lifted only when the construction crew
positioned a Bioblimp, a genetically engineered jellyfish, over the rim, glued
it down, added braces, killed and cleaned and dried it, and coated it with
pungent sprays. The new building was a translucent dome whose thin leather
walls trembled when the wind blew.

Inside once more, Martha eyed the buffet with as much interest as the
Bioblimp had ever provoked. The pressure of three hundred well-dressed bodies
reaching for canapes and plastic cups of punch and coffee and wine was, bit by
bit, nudging the long table closer to the bars of her enclosure. In just
another moment...

"I had my eye on that one!" Freddy the pig sounded outraged as he
struggled to point with a stubby forelimb. "You can't have it!"

Martha seemed to understand. She showed the modified pig a sheepish,
embarrassed eye and extended her trunk toward him. Tom Cross shifted Freddy's
weight to one arm to free a hand and accept the small triangle of bread and
shrimp salad. Then, as he tucked it into Freddy's upright maw, the elephant
dipped her trunk into the punchbowl.

Some of the onlookers gasped in dismay, but Freddy laughed and Tom, his
oldest friend, joined in. They were in the zoo's new elephant hall. It held
eight roomy cells, three of them occupied; the other elephants were outdoors.
Toward the western end of the building was a temporary stage; behind the
stage, the setting sun tinted the translucent wall a glowing orange-red. The
occasion was a benefit concert intended to raise money to pay the last of the
building's costs. The stars of the concert would be Freddy and his wife,
Porculata.

Freddy sneezed and muttered, "The place stinks. Somebody should housebreak
those monsters. Goddam perfumes, too. I'd stand it better if I had hands. Or
even a trunk." The pig wiggled a trotter. Once he had been a garbage disposal;
the gengineers had shaped him so, to fit in the dark, cramped space beneath a
kitchen sink, with no need for more than vestigial limbs. They had also played
on him the cruel trick of intelligence, which Tom had discovered when he was a
child of six. Later, the boy had given the genimal a freedom his body did not
fit.