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

occupied one end of a deeply cushioned sofa. Calla Laffiter was at the sofa's
other end. Between them sat a tall, slender man, round-faced and blunt-nosed.
He had not yet been introduced.

The front of the stage bore a podium festooned with microphones. The first
few rows of seats held two dozen reporters. From the ceiling hung several
veedo cameras, crimson ready lights glowing, all aimed at the man behind the
podium.

Franklin Peirce was that man. "You know the background," he was saying.
"The Engineers have a lot of sympathizers. Many people yearn for the Good Old
Days. They don't like manure in the streets, or doing without their Roachster
for weeks while it goes through its molt, or cleaning up leaves the size of
bedsheets dropped by their bioform houses. They've heard stories of how neat
and clean the streets were in the Age of Machines, of plug-in parts and
care-free homes. They forget, if they ever knew, how foul the air was growing,
how close we were to exhausting the fossil fuels and ores that made the
machines possible, when the gengineers offered us an alternative. They gave us
a way to raise everyone's standard of living to what the Machine Age made
possible only in a few nations, and then to keep it there.

"It's not really very surprising," he went on. "Not surprising at all,
that we should have the Engineers. Dissatisfaction is a basic human trait.
It's not something we can legislate out of existence. I doubt we could even
gengineer it out of existence." He paused to allow a murmur of laughter. "But
they went too far when they attacked the concert.

"Freddy was a pig. A pig with a human intelligence and human talents. He
was, in fact, a human being stuck in a body designed for immobility. He might
as well have been a quadriplegic. Certainly, he was just as handicapped. And
he dared to wish for a body, a human body, a freedom that the gengineers had
denied him. He dared to say that the technology exists, that a government
program even encourages the use of gene replacement to turn human volunteers
into members of endangered species.

"Calla Laffiter." He gestured toward the woman, and she nodded, giving the
reporters and veedo cameras a toothy smile. "The local ESRP head. She asked
the BRA for permission to give Freddy and his wife human bodies. But religious
groups, the Engineers and their sympathizers, they said Freddy was just an
animal, and a pig at that, a garbage disposal. His mind was irrelevant. So
were his talents. Turning an animal--much less a pig!--into a human being
would be blasphemy." Franklin Peirce shook his head as if human folly could
still amaze him.

"Tell us," said the reporter from the Times . "Animal rights was a big
issue a century ago. People said that we have no right to exploit animals in
research. Some even said that we have no right to eat them. Certainly, we have
no right to manipulate them for our own convenience. Doesn't any vestige of
that feeling remain?"