"Garry Kilworth - Black Drongo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kilworth Garry)

Black Drongo
by Garry Kilworth

SO what you want to do is take Marcia’s personality and put it with the body of a
bird?” said Steve. “What are you trying to create, some monster freak? Some
creature that’ll think, like ... like Marcia?”
We were at dinner, just the three of us, in a small restaurant off Mody Road in
Tsim Sha Tsui. My brother Steve and his girlfriend Marcia were flying out of Hong
Kong the next day. They were going on a business holiday, to some remote place in
the Philippines, which was incidentally Marcia’s homeland.
I explained patiently, “I’m not transferring her psyche, Steve; there are laws
against that. All I want to do is copy Marcia’s persona and superimpose it upon that
of the drongo’s.”
“Okay Einsten, what’s the difference?” he said.
“Her persona is simply her personality. A psyche is someone’s conscious and
unconscious. someone’s mind or self, if you like. I’m not allowed to screw around
with psches, although it is possible to make a transfer under controlled conditions.
Only the GRL, the Government Research Labs, are pemitted to dabble in that. This
won’t hurt her in the least, and she’ll have the satisfaction of knowing she’s
furthering my studies of behavior patterns in wild birds.”
“What if I don’t want you to mess around with my girl’s persona?”
“Steve. . .” said Marcia, in that soft voice she has, but he cut her off with,
“No, wait; I want to hear what Einstein here has to say about it. You just keep quiet
for a minute. No, I’m sorry Marcia; this is for me to decide whether it’s right for you
to do this or not. You don’t understand these things like we do.”
Steve can be a real pain in the ass when he wants to be, which is most of the
time, but he is my brother and I put up with him because I love him. He is
unbelievably insecure, and this manifests itself in hostility and agression. Tonight, he
was being nice; any other time he would have blown his stack and started throwing
things around the room. He always mellowed a little prior to trave;, gradually
becoming as pliant as he would ever be with Marcia, or any woman.
Men could take him better than women: They recognized the apprehensive
hunter-gatherer in him as something they had within themselves though often not to
the same extreme. Steve was one of those people who believed you had to prove
yourself all the time, against the competition. If you didn’t, you would be taken
advantage of, and eaten alive. They would fall on you like jackals while you were
exposed to them. You had to keep your defenses up, show them you were a man to
be reckoned with, never let them see your vulnerability.
 He played squash as if to lose would mean the guillotine. He was merciless
against business rivals. My older brother was still living in a world where you
clubbed a man senseless and took his meat and his woman and made sure you felt
damm good about it. Any weakness in you would be exploited, and you would
become carrion for the vultures.
I did not consider Steve a bad man, and most other men liked his company,
many women too if they were the kind who preferred being told what to do, but
there were others who considered him an aggressive thick-skinned bull.
I hadn’t told Steve that the reason I wanted Marcia’s persona, as opposed to
any other, was because of my observations of their relationship. Steve had always
been the bully, and the person who took the brunt of his obnoxious behavior was
Marcia. She, on the other hand, had soaked up his abuse with not a flicker of