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

“But what?”
“You’re just a new breed. You’re still human.”
She stared at us with her fourteen green eyes. “I’m more than human, Apollo.”
“So you can only have babies with a pod just like you, another of Dr. Thomasin’s septets. You can’t have babies with just anyone.”
“Oh, I see what you’re getting at. Don’t be silly! Procreation doesn’t have to follow love. I’ll have children for the sake of the species regardless of who I bond with,” Candace said.
“Did Doctor Thomasin pick your mate yet?”
“No. I guess not. Maybe.”
She paused to think. This time we saw the interface cycle into the pack and another of the identical females take her place.
Why is she doing that? Manuel asked.
Identity crisis, Bola replied.
“Even if he has,” the new face said, “that’s fine. Besides, any mate will have to be one that he made. No one else has succeeded in building a septet.”
“So you don’t know other septets?” we asked.
“No. Not really. But there are others like me, I guess. And I’d mate with whomever was necessary, to propagate the species.”
“Pods aren’t a separate species. We’re all human beings,” we said.
“Of course we’re a separate species!” she replied. “Pods are much better than singletons. It’s obvious. And I’m much better than a sextet or a quintet or a quartet.”
“We’re all human,” we said again.
“Well, you may be human, but I’m another species,” she said, walking off.
I’ll say.
* * * *
We rotated the eggs every day. We measured the humidity with a wet bulb. We determined temperature with sensors that logged to our desktop. The damn alarms kept failing and waking us in the middle of the night. We couldn’t just roll over and go back to sleep, since the ducklings might really be freezing to death. After fifteen days of incubation, we opened the vents on the incubators and lowered the temperature a half a degree.
Mother Redd’s words had stung us, and we started keeping better records. We marked the eggs with their genome tag, at least the ones we could remember. We tracked temperature and humidity hourly and graphed the data.
We watched the brood by the lake meticulously, though the pheromone sensors never picked up a whiff of chemical thought and our lab books were line after line of “No sign of consensus.”
We avoided Candace when we could, which was tougher than it would seem on a farm of over a hundred hectares. Mother Redd had given her chores that seemed to overlap ours.
Candace’s arguments, however, were something we couldn’t avoid. I found myself researching her ideas. She was wrong about a lot of things and right about a lot of things too.
The classical definition of “species” still stated that pods were human. If Meda, Quant, or I had a child with an unmodified human, the child would be human. We weren’t a new species. However, we weren’t entirely standard human either. We had been modified by our predecessors to have pads on our palms that could transfer chemical memories among our podmates. We had glands at our necks to send pheromonal emotions and crude thoughts. We had enhanced olfactory capability to decode the scents. Unless closely inspected, we would not look any different than a human from a century ago.
But the fact that we were a pod, that we functioned as a single being in the fabric of our society, indicated that we were a radically different type of social organization, created by our biological technology and artificially sustained. If there were no creche-system and no genetic modification of embryos to add pod traits, pod society would disappear in a few generations, replaced by normal humans. Candace was right; if the Overgovernment fell and society crumbled, then pods would fall apart. There would be no pods without constant social manipulation. We were the most advanced animal on the planet, but behind that faзade was a framework of scaffolding and wires.
There were three million pods in the world, which amounted to just over ten million people. Three decades ago, there had been over ten billion humans on the planet. The cataclysm was far from over. We pods had inherited the Earth, not because we were superior, but because we had failed to leave or die or advance with the rest of the Community. It was a fragile ecosystem we had inherited. Our own biology was fragile, and perhaps more desperate than we knew.
We spoke to Mother Redd.
“How stable is our society?” Meda asked one evening as we cleaned up after dinner. Candace was out turning her duck eggs.
“We have a representative democracy implemented by consensus-formed legislation. It is more stable than most,” she said.
“No. I mean biologically and societally. If we lost our scientific knowledge, what would happen?”
One of Mother Redd stopped her drying to look at us, while the other two continued with the pots.
“A sage question. I don’t know, but I expect that the next generation of humans would be normal. Perhaps we could form pods; perhaps the genetic changes we have implemented would breed true.”
“Do we know if they will?”
She smiled. “Perhaps you should do a literature search.”
“I did! I couldn’t understand the results.” Biology wasn’t our strongest subject. Physics and math suited us.
“Technology gives us our individuality. That is the problem. And, given that, we will not willingly give up our individuality, we can’t see the path back,” Mother Redd said. “We have passed our own singularity, just as the Community did. And you have hit upon the greatest problem of our world. How do we propagate?”
There were some who said the Exodus—the near instantaneous vanishing of all the billions of Community members—was a technological singularity, the transmogrification of normal humans to post-humans. Mother Redd was saying that the pod society had created its own parallel singularity, one we could not reverse without losing our identity.
“Candace is the future, isn’t she?”
“Maybe. Doctor Thomasin’s ideas are radical. Perhaps reproducing septets are the answer. There are others researching it, including ethicists.”
“Why?”
“If our society and our biology are unsound, we cannot allow them to advance.”
“But—”
Candace bounded in then, shouting, “One of my ducklings is hatching!”
We all went out to watch the wet and lizard-like bird peck its way through the shell. Our mind was on Mother Redd’s words, and we kept touching hands, swapping thoughts, as we considered them. I realized then, as we watched the ducklings hatch, that there were those who were considering the elimination of pod society and biology as a desirable path into the future.
* * * *
Doctor Thomasin visited again the next day. He was visiting every week now, examining Candace for hours. That evening, after he left, Candace hadn’t shown for dinner, so Mother Redd sent us up to fetch her.
“Candace?” Meda called, as she knocked on the door.
“She needs to check the temperature on the ducklings, too,” said Bola. We pretended we didn’t care about Candace’s project, but clearly we did.
We just don’t want the ducklings to die!