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

No, it isn’t!
I shushed them with a whiff of baby pheromone, a poke at their childish behavior.
We all knew the history. The first pods had been duos, created almost fifty years ago, the first to use the chemical memory and pheromones to share feelings between two separate humans. Since then, the order of the pods and complexity of the chemical signaling had grown. We were a sextet, the largest order we’d ever seen. All our classmates were sextets. Everyone in the space program was a sextet.
“Because sextets are the largest order. They’re the best,” Strom said.
Not anymore! Candace is a seven, a septet!
It made sense. Genetic engineers were always trying to add to the power of an individual. Why wouldn’t they try to build a seven? Or an eight?
“They succeeded in building one, finally.”
“How old is she?”
“Younger than us. Maybe twelve.”
I hope she’s not staying all summer.
But we knew she was. We wouldn’t have turned out the guest room if she wasn’t.
Maybe we can make her leave.
I said, “We have to be nice. We have to be friends.”
We have to be nice, but we don’t have to be friends.
Why be nice?
I looked at Meda, and she said, “Oh, all right. Let’s go be nice. At least there isn’t eight of her.”
Though how far away would that be?
* * * *
We tried to be nice.
I was the one who’d advised it, and even I chafed at the manners of that arrogant septet.
“Fifteen point seven five three,” Candace said, while we were still scribbling the problem. One of her was looking over Quant’s shoulder as we sat at the great room table.
I knew that, Quant sent.
Still, Meda wrote the problem down and we worked through to the answer, while Candace tapped seven of her feet.
“Fifteen point seven five three three,” Meda said.
“I rounded down,” she said. “One of us—” She nodded at the identical girl to her left—”is specialized in mathematics. When you have seven, you know, you can do that. Specialize.”
We were specialized too, we wanted to say, but I sent, Humble.
She’s specialized at being a git.
“You’re very smart,” Meda said diplomatically. I hadn’t even had to remind her.
“Yes, I am.” She was standing so close that the pungent smell of her chemical thoughts tickled our noses and distracted us. It was almost rude to stand so close that our memories mingled. We couldn’t understand her thoughts, of course, just a bit of self-satisfaction from the pheromones. The chemical memories that we passed from hand to hand, and, to some extent, by air, were pod-specific, most easily passed by physical touch at the wrists, where our pads were. Pheromones were more general, and indicated nuance and emotion. These were often common across all pods, especially those from the same creche. So even though our thoughts didn’t mix together, it felt weird for her to be so close.
She doesn’t know any better, I sent, touching the pad on Manuel’s left wrist. She’s young.
We knew better at that age.
We should try to be friendly, I sent.
“Do you want to go swimming this afternoon?” Meda asked.
Candace shook her head quickly, then she paused for a consensus. We smelled the chemical thoughts, pungent and slick in the air, and wondered why she had to consense on going swimming.
“We don’t swim,” she said finally.
“None of you?”
Another pause. They touched hands, tap, tap, tap, pads sliding together. “None of us.”
“Okay. Well, we’re going swimming in the pond.”
The smell was stronger. The heads turned inward, and they held palms together for ten seconds. What was so complicated about going swimming?
Finally, she said, “We’ll come and watch, but we won’t swim in dirty water.”
Meda said, “Okay,” and we shrugged.
After physics, we studied biology, and, in that, Mother Redd instructed us closely. The farmhouse was not just a farmhouse; attached were a greenhouse and a laboratory with gene-parsers and splicers. The hundred hectares of woods, ponds, and fields were all Mother Redd’s experiment, and part of it she let us work on. We were rebuilding the local habitat, reintroducing flora and fauna in a close facsimile to what had been there before the Exodus and the Gene Wars. Mother Redd was building beaver pods. She was letting us build pods of ducks.
Candace followed us to observe our latest version of duck: a clutch of ducklings that had been gengineered to share chemical duck memories, supposedly. There’d been success in modifying some mammals for chemical memories, but none for other classes of Chordata. We were trying to build a duck pod for the Science Fair at the end of the summer.
We’d released our ducklings—two different modified clutches—by a pond on the farm, and every morning, we went and watched how they worked together.
Bola slid between the reeds while the rest of us hunched down and listened to his thoughts on the wind. The chemical memories were fragile and diffused over distance, but still we could understand what he was seeing and thinking if we concentrated.
“Where are the ducks?” Candace asked.
“Shh!”
“I don’t see them.”
“You’re going to scare them!”
“Fine.” The seven of her folded her arms across her chests.