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

“This one has Dalmatian spots.”
“We know!”
Her eyes are green again.
She looks pale.
“Are you still sick?”
She swapped faces, something she did all the time now. “A little still. Allergies, maybe.”
“What are allergies?”
“Reactions to air-borne particles and pollen. It used to be very common. Doctor Thomasin thinks I have it, and it just manifested when I came to the farm.”
“Hopefully he’ll fix that in the next batch of septets he cooks up,” Meda said.
“Yeah, I guess.”
As she walked away, Quant showed us memories of her when she first arrived. She’s grown fifteen centimeters in a month.
Growth spurt.
Bigger boobs. This was followed by a pheromone leer from Manuel.
“Stop it.”
There’s something wrong with her. Changing interfaces, allergies, forgetting things.
The rest of my pod shrugged at me.
What can we do?
Talk to Mother Redd.
We didn’t have time to ponder Candace’s allergies and growth chart, and we never talked with Mother Redd. The ducklings needed their food.
* * * *
Two weeks later, we started letting the ducklings roam the farmyard for food.
Look! They re-form into the same subgroups if we separate them!
I didn’t understand until Bola shared his memory of what he saw. Bola’s specialty was spatial, and, in an instant, I saw how the nearly identical ducklings coalesced into groups when we removed them from the brooder.
It could be the group they imprinted to.
Perhaps imprinting is a crude form of pod-building.
Strom scattered the ducklings and we watched them re-form into their subgroups. We marked a few of them with paint on their backs and did it again and again, showing how a single group of six re-formed every time.
It seemed that we were on to something.
Unfortunately, so were the six ducklings with the paint on their backs. They followed Strom wherever he went. When he broke them apart, they re-formed and headed straight back to his ankles.
They’ve imprinted on you.
“Didn’t they imprint on themselves already?” Strom asked as the ducklings clustered on his feet.
Apparently not. Dad.
Strom answered that with a sardonic smile.
* * * *
Once we moved the ducklings to the lake, we actually had time to do our chores and study. One hundred and fifty ducks, less the six that would not leave Strom’s feet, made for a crowded, messy lake, and we still had to drag out bags of bread so the birds wouldn’t starve.
Candace continued to have luck with her clutch of ducks, while we showed mannerisms that could easily be attributed to other ducklike behavior patterns.
“This fair project is gonna suck,” Quant said. “We’ve got nothing.”
Negative results are still results.
“Negative results don’t get the blue ribbon.”
Before we knew it, the Science Fair arrived and we drove over to the county fairgrounds with Mother Redd and Candace in the farm bus. We left the ducks, though Strom’s six quacked pitifully.
“Can’t we take the aircar?” Meda asked. “And can’t we drive?”
“No.”
The county seat was a good 100 kilometers away, a mere hop in an aircar, but two hours in the old bus. It was a tight fit with three of us in it. We opened the windows, and that helped.
In the three decades since the Exodus, there’d been little need for the roadway infrastructure. With the smaller global population, farms that had been critical to feed the masses had gone fallow. We passed orchards where the clear lines of trees were now the start of a chaotic forest, carefully tended hybrids gone wild. It was a bumpy ride, over a decaying road.
“It’s hard to imagine what was here twenty years ago,” we said to Candace.
She looked at us blank-eyed. “Yeah,” she said, though we didn’t think she knew what we’d said.
“Are you nervous?”
She shrugged.
“Do you want to borrow a brush?” we asked. Her hair was straggly.
“I’m okay!” she shrilled. “Leave me alone.”
Just nervous. We had butterflies too.