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

drapes revealed three bee-sized holes in the screen, and beyond them a sky
gray with both clouds and twilight. It was the end of the day, a time for
themselves alone, free of the hordes of kids they faced at work. "Are you
coming back?" he called.

"As soon as this casserole is in the oven," she answered him. "But I'll
have to get dressed soon. Finca's putting out a mailing this week." Sheila was
a volunteer campaign manager for a city councilwoman, directing the stuffing
of envelopes and the collection of signatures and the delivery of voters to
the polls as the seasons of the woman's terms demanded. Others wrote the press
releases and newsletters and coached the councilwoman on the issues.

Sam shifted on his lounge. He volunteered his services to the community in
another way. He taught history, but he had trained as well as an emergency
medical technician. At least two evenings a week he assisted the ambulance
crew at the local fire station. There was never any danger of boredom.

On the table by his side sat a small mail terminal, its screen glowing
with a letter from his father. Mike Nickers had recently retired from his
position as a recruiter for the Daisy Hill Truck Farm, and he was bored. He
was thinking of traveling, of moving, of finding a replacement for his dead
wife, Sam's mother, of...

The doorbell sounded. The birds fell silent. Sam swore. Sheila appeared in
the doorway, grinning, her green skin glowing in the bright light. He stared
at her, struck as always by her beauty, and by what the genetic changes had
done to enhance it. Her nipples and lips were so dark a green that they seemed
almost black. The dark-brown and orange of her feathers, the black and yellow
of the small butterfly-wing inserts over her cheekbones, the pink and gold of
the snakeskin along her jawline caught the eye like the organic jewelry they
were. He swore again. She laughed and held out his robe. "Here. I'll get
mine."

Sheila was behind him when he opened the door to face a clean cut young
couple. The man was dark-haired, slim, with the lines of his muscles cleanly
limned beneath the cloth that covered them. The woman was blonde, red-lipped,
wide-hipped, her nipples little spires on the broad domes beneath the fabric
of her coverall. Together, they seemed designed to rivet the attention of
whoever might answer their knock.

Yet as soon as they saw the Nickers, their eyes went suddenly wide, their
mouths opened, their torsos leaned back, away, their hands full of pamphlets
jerked upward as if to erect a paper barrier before them. They were so fully
human, with no slightest trace of genetic modification, that Sam hardly needed
their shocked recoil, nor their blue coveralls and golden cogwheel patches, to
tell that they were Engineers. Nor did he wonder that they seemed surprised to
find that the Nickers were not quite the traditional model of human being.
Most of the apartment building's tenants had no genetic modifications, or at
least, none that showed.