"The Summer Of The Seven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Melko Paul)

“Wait in the house.”
We did, and, to pass the time, we ran searches on the legal and medical ramifications of postpartum genetic manipulation. Our children were built; it is a fact of our society. But the individual—the pod—is sacred, once it has pod-bonded. For his own reasons, Doctor Thomasin, who had built Candace, saw the need to change her still, to modify his creation.
It’s wrong.
There was no doubt in our mind.
When the ambulance arrived, Mother Redd directed it to the Institute hospital instead of the county hospital.
* * * *
Mother Redd relented and allowed us to come with her as she followed the ambulance in the aircar. She wouldn’t let us drive, though we were checked out on the car, and had about ten times better reflexes than she did.
We sat in the waiting room while she consulted with the physicians at the Institute. We’d been in the Institute hospital only rarely; we’d had a single anatomy class the year before in one of the auxiliary buildings. Most of our classes were in engineering science, and we were rarely sick enough that we couldn’t fix ourselves.
It was late, but we couldn’t sleep. We kept checking with the floor AI to see if Candace’s condition had changed. It hadn’t.
Manuel gazed out the window at the dark buildings. The Institute looked desolate, and I doubted that anyone was on campus, certainly not students, and probably not teachers. Fall classes didn’t start for another three weeks.
A door banged. We looked up, and there was Doctor Thomasin, pushing out of the stairwell. He’d run up the six flights of stairs instead of waiting for the elevator.
Without thinking, we formed up behind Strom, our defensive position.
He did a double take.
“I thought you took her to the county hospital,” he said.
“We know what you did. Mother Redd knows,” Meda said.
“What are you talking about?” Now that we knew how he lied, his bluffs were transparent.
“You have been modifying her DNA all summer. You almost killed her.”
“It’s some problem with the DNA, sure. But I didn’t modify it. Where is she?”
He tried to step around us, but we repositioned ourselves in front of him.
“Get out of my way, student!”
“We’re not your student. We’re human beings with full rights, just like Candace. But then you don’t care about that, do you?”
For a second, I thought that he was going to strike at us, and I felt Strom determine the best defense, the best offense. For a moment, we were a matrix of possibility, a phalanx of potential.
“Gorgi, you better go.”
It was Mother Redd, standing in the doorway of Candace’s room.
“I just need to see her.”
“No.”
“I was just trying to make her perfect, don’t you see?”
“I see.”
“I have a responsibility to the future,” he said. “We need to become a viable species. We’re on the cusp. We’re as near extinction as we’ve ever been, and I have got to save us!”
“Saving the human race through Candace is not your responsibility,” Mother Redd said.
“You were responsible for Candace,” we said. “But you failed.” We were suddenly aware of all our responsibilities, to our friends, to ourselves, to our ducks: duties and relationships interwoven.
Doctor Thomasin looked at me. “I wanted to build something as good as you,” he said.
“You did.”
He held our look and we smelled his thoughts. After a moment, he nodded, then turned away.
* * * *
We saw Candace once after she left the hospital. She came to the farm, and we showed her the duck pod: one hundred and fifty-seven ducks forming a single entity. We told her that we were going to publish a paper, and we wanted her to be coauthor.
“No thanks. I don’t have anything to contribute.”
We nodded, embarrassed. We’d forgotten that she’d lost a huge amount of pod memory with the last genetic modification.
“What are your plans then?”
“I’m thinking about medical school. I’ll have to start a lot of studies from scratch, but I think I’d like to do that.”
“That sounds good. You’ll do well.”
Her interface and Meda hugged, and then she finished packing her stuff. On the air pad, we said another awkward good-bye. We made sure she had our ID so she could write, but I had a feeling that she wasn’t going to. I doubted that she wanted to remember this summer at all.
We watched the air car rise and depart.
Time to check the ducks.
It’s always time to check the ducks!
So we did.

Copyright © 2005 by Paul Melko.