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

“Yes?” Her voice was soft, and male. When had her male component done anything but stay in the background?
Meda pushed open the door.
Candace was sprawled on the beds, her faces flushed, her shirts wet at the pits. The room reeked of heavy thinking.
“Are you okay?”
The male was the only one sitting. “We’ll be okay.”
“It’s dinner time.”
“We’re not feeling too well. I think we’ll pass.”
One of the females opened her eyes.
Didn’t she have green eyes before?
Yes.
“Do you want us to check on your ducklings?”
“What ducklings?” she asked.
“Your Science Fair project!”
She grasped wrists, consensing.
“Oh, right. Thanks.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Really.”
Maybe Doctor Thomasin gave her a vaccination.
She’s old enough to make her own vaccinations.
We ate quickly, then went out to the lab to feed and check Candace’s ducks. Ours were still a few days from hatching.
Her ducks had a fine layer of down and weren’t too noisy nor too active, so the temperature was probably okay. We dipped bits of bread in water and dropped the food in the hutches.
Don’t let them imprint on us.
Why not? That would be funny.
Because they wouldn’t survive in the wild if they did. They need to imprint on each other.
Like we are.
We shared a glance. We were indeed imprinted on each other.
* * * *
Two days later, our own eggs began to hatch. Twelve hatched that day, which wasn’t so bad. Twenty-five hatched the day after. Then fifty-some the day after that. We were too frazzled to notice when the last fifty hatched.
The barn suddenly became a duck maternity ward, with assembly lines for soaked corn meal, temperature and humidity checks, and bedding manufacture.
We quickly found that the chicken brooders we’d planned to use for the ducks were too small, and had to build half a dozen more out of plywood and chicken wire. We kept one as a spare so that we could move a clutch at a time to clean the brooders.
“We should have kept better track of the gene sequences that we used,” Strom said. He was scooping duckling after duckling from one brooder to another. He held up one that had a lizard’s tail attached to its fluffy bottom.
Bola looked into the emptied brooder and held his nose. We all felt his revulsion though we couldn’t actually smell what he smelled.
“How long until they can forage on their own?”
Six weeks.
Not soon enough.
* * * *
We had so many ducklings to take care of that we couldn’t spend a moment watching for pod-like behaviors. Candace, however, loved to stop by the barn and provide details of her latest experiment and success.
“I separate one duckling,” she explained to us, “and feed it a bit of food. The other ducklings start quacking within seconds.”
“They smell the food,” we said.
“Maybe. But it also works for pain stimuli.”
“Pain stimuli?”
“Sure. When I pinch one of the ducklings, the others start making noise.”
“You’re pinching your ducks?”
“Just a gentle pinch. Besides, it’s for science!”
“Right.”
“I’ve got video of the process. It’s very compelling,” she said.
“You’ll have a good presentation at the Science Fair then,” we said.
“You have an awful lot of ducks.”
We turned and stared at her, all six of us.
“We know.”