"Kathleen Ann Goonan - The Bones of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

about one hundred and two. Her eyes were black, intense in her
sunken, weathered face. No enhancement for her!
“You’ve got to get proper rest, young lady,” she scolded. “It’s not
good for you to stay up half the night after being in the hospital.”
Nana hadn’t used the word miscarriage—much too bald.
Lynn felt something in her chest ease at her grandmother’s voice.
The old woman had been so gentle, never once reprimanding
her—so far. Now things were getting back to normal. This was
home, not the rarefied estate high on Tantalus Drive from which her
father, a top Interspace executive, had ejected her years ago. She had
insisted as a teenager on taking a job playing her own synthesizer
compositions in the Waikiki San Bar, a roofless Tourist Zone
nightclub atop the Princess Kaiulani Hotel. A disgrace to the family
and a waste, he’d proclaimed.
Lynn still performed occasionally, but genetics, and the
theoretical designing of humans to adapt them to long space
journeys, had seized her imagination years ago. It was like an
entirely new form of music, composing possible humans from the
infinite combinations of the notes of potential physiology.
“You’re right,” she said, but pushed a few pads on her handheld.
Her small desk holo projector beeped, and she gazed at a
representation in light of a rat brain section from an obscure Czech
study that had just arrived via the web. She touched another pad
several times and watched as different parts of the section were
revealed.
Nana clucked with disapproval before turning to continue down
the hall. The curtain blew in the slight, fragrant breeze, bisecting
the holo without disturbing it.
Lynn had always reveled in the freedom she had won and thought
that her half brothers, twins a few years younger than she and
firmly ensconced in Interspace, secretly envied her.
On her black enameled desk was the note from one of them,
James. Arriving last week via snailmail, unsigned, and coded in a
childhood code, it suggested that she go to Hong Kong and procure
the genetic material of—it was claimed, at least—Mao. One of their
typical black-market schemes. She couldn’t deny she got a kick out
of such transactions. At least she used to.
Just a week ago, it had been irritatingly tempting. With her
retrieval of the material would come replication and study rights
carte blanche, something to add to her genetic library, which
already contained the DNA of the visionary president of China,
Zhong Chau. She’d been assassinated in 2025. Lynn also had a
collection of once-powerful ayatollahs, which had come in a bundle,
various queens and kings both ancient and recent, Lenin, Indira
Gandhi, Teddy Roosevelt, and a host of other politicians. She also
had libraries of writers, artists, athletes, scientists; and also at her
disposal was the vast computer-held information of the World
Health Organization, in which a drop of blood from every person
born since 2004 was analyzed and cataloged. Whenever anyone had
any interface with the medical community more information was