"Nancy Kress - Dancing on Air" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

I said, "You don't have any sensitivity at all, do you, Michael?"
He said quietly, "Your girl's seventeen, Susan. If you couldn't get her
to leave dancing before, you're not going to get her to leave now. Will you do
the story?"
I looked again at the scattered pictures of Michael's children. His
oldest was at Harvard Law. His second son was a happily married househusband,
raising three kids. His third child, a daughter, was doing six-to-ten in Rock
Mountain Maximum Security State Prison for armed robbery. There was no
figuring it out. I said, "I'll do the story."
"Good," he said, not looking at me. "Just hold down the metaphors,
Susan. You're still too given to metaphors."
"_New York Now_ could use a few metaphors. A feature magazine isn't
supposed to be a TV holo bite."
"A feature magazine isn't art, either," Michael retorted. "Let's all
keep that in mind."
"You're in luck," I said. "As it happens, I'm not a great lover of
art."
I couldn't decide whether to tell Deborah I had agreed to write about
ballet. She would hate my writing about her world under threat.
Which was a reason both for and against.
****
September heat and long, cool shadows fought it out over the wide plaza of
Lincoln Center. The fountain splashed, surrounded by tourists and students and
strollers and derelicts. I thought Lincoln Center was ugly, shoe-box
architecture stuck around a charmless expanse of stone unredeemed by a little
splashing water. Michael said I only felt that way because I hated New York.
If Lincoln Center had been built in Kentucky, he said, I would have admired
it.
I had remembered to get the electronic password from Deborah. Since the
first murder, the New York State Theater changed it weekly. Late afternoon was
heavy rehearsal time; the company was using the stage as well as the studios.
I heard the Spanish bolero from the second act of _Coppelia_. Deborah had been
trying to learn it for weeks. The role of Swanilda, the girl who pretends to
be a doll, had first made the brilliant Caroline Olson a superstar.
Privitera's office was a jumble of dance programs, costume swatches,
and computers. He made me wait for him twenty minutes. I sat and thought about
what I knew about bioenhanced dancers, besides the fact that there weren't
supposed to have been any at City Ballet.
There were several kinds of bioenhancement. All of them were
experimental, all of them were illegal in The United States, all of them were
constantly in flux as new discooveries were made and rushed onto the European,
South American, and Japanese markets. It was a new science, chaotic and
contradictory, like physics at the start of the last century, or cancer cures
at the start of this one. No bioenhancements had been developed specifically
for ballet dancers, who were an insignificant portion of the population. But
European dancers submitted to experimental versions, as did American dancers
who could travel to Berlin or Copenhagen or Rio for the very expensive
privilege of injecting their bodies with tiny, unproven biological "machines."
Some nanomachines carried programming that searched out deviations in
the body and repaired them to match surrounding tissue. This speeded the