"James Alan Gardner - League of Peoples 07 - Radiant" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

As a girl, I had no patience for Mother's tales of woe. She wearied everyone she knew, demanding
sympathy for the way her peers had ostracized her. At the age of fifteen, I finally had a frothing hysterical
fit, screaming, "People don't hate you because of your face. They hate the way you whine! Whine, whine,
whine, whine, whine. I hate it more than anyone. And I hate you. As if you knowanything about being
ostracized!"
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I was more emotional back then. Subject to outbursts.

Now I've got past the rage. I've changed. But I'll get to that. At the moment, I'm explaining about my
mother.

She thought her lack of thanaka had ruined her life. And before I was born, or even conceived, she
decided to create a corrected version of herself, a daughter who would be beloved and popular, never
suffering social rejection.

My mother found a man reputed to be an expert gene-splicer... even though human-engineering was
illegal on my home planet and every other planet in the Technocracy. For a fistful of rubies (passed down
as a sacred inheritance through ten generations and never touched until my mother spent them all), this
DNA doctor promised to produce a perfect daughter who was smart, fit, and beautiful. Extremely
beautiful. In particular, she would have vividpermanent thanaka-like beauty patches on her cheeks,
forehead, and nose.

You can see where this is going, can't you? But my mother couldn't. For a woman who claimed to know
suffering, she'd never learned much about the universe's love of irony.



It's no challenge to create a baby who's intelligent, robust, and exquisite. The technology is well
established. Building better babies has always been the driving force behind bioengineering, even if
proponents pretend otherwise. Since the earliest days of gene-splicing, scientists have muttered about
"improving agricultural stock" or "facilitating medical research," but those are just side issues. The primary
target was and is the production of superbabies; any other result is a lucky offshoot. Never mind that
manufacturing überchildren has been banned for five hundred years. Laws or no laws, money continues
to change hands to create gifted progeny who'll outshine their peers. DNA technicians have all the
equipment and expertise needed to produce smart, athletic, attractive offspring...

...provided one keeps to conventional notions of brainpower, fitness, and beauty. That's what the black
market does well. If, on the other hand, you make a special order—such as yellow-white streaks in
specific regions of a little girl's face—then the gene-engineers have to improvise.

They have to try untested genes and histones. They have to wing it.

Therefore:

I was born adequately bright. In the ninety-ninth percentile of human intelligence.