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

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It was just us and Mother Redd on the bus back to the farm that evening.
“I want to help look,” Meda had said as we climbed aboard.
“Doctor Thomasin is doing everything that needs to be done.”
“Okay.” I was sure she caught our sullenness, mine especially. It weighed heavy on me that we had not gone after Candace. For all her annoying habits, she was still a friend going through a crisis, and no blue ribbon was worth a friend’s pain.
She’s not our friend.
I turned on Manuel and let loose with my anger. He shirked back from me, but held his call for consensus.
Even if she isn’t our friend, she still needs our help! I sent.
I threw my ribbon at him. It missed and sailed to the front of the bus. Mother Redd glanced at it, then at us, but I didn’t care, even when Strom filled the air with embarrassment.
No one else stood up to help in that whole auditorium. No one. We should have.
More embarrassment from Manuel and the others.
She was scared. And she ran, because there was no one to help. And now she’s missing!
Finally they agreed. We sat in silence the rest of the way home.
At the house, there was a taxi bill in the house email account that we saw when we walked in the door.
“She’s here. She took a taxi,” Meda said.
We checked her room, and the rest of the house, but there was nothing. We checked the barn and the labs. Mother Redd called Doctor Thomasin, and we started to check the lake, but stopped when Strom’s duck quacked to be let out. Then the clutch rushed off toward the lake.
“Where are they going?”
“Apparently they aren’t imprinted on Strom anymore.”
Candace wasn’t at the lake either. We stood, looking in six directions for some sign of her, some clue to where she was hiding.
I hope she’s okay.
“Look!”
There coming out of the forest was a flock of ducks—our ducks; all our ducks.
“What are they doing?”
They waddled right up to us and began swarming around our legs.
“Oh, great. More imprinted ducks.”
They began to quack, not individual dissonant sounds, but in unison: Quack, pause, quack, pause, quack, with the tempo slowly increasing.
Then they rushed back toward the forest. We followed.
A flocking pod?
We followed the flock into the brush, struggling to keep up with their orderly and low-to-the-ground progression. They were waddling through the brush more easily than we were walking.
Ahead, the woods broke into a clearing, and there was Candace, lying on the ground.
“Oh no!”
She was pale, every one of her, clammy to the touch. Her breathing was shallow.
Look how thin her face seems.
Her skin looks like paper. We could see the blue veins at her temples.
The ducks clustered around us as we checked her.
Let’s get her back to the house.
We found an easier way back, and carried her to the house, three at a time, leaving the male for last. We hated breaking her up like that, but she was unconscious, and we had to get her to the house.
“Goodness!” Mother Redd said when she saw us. She directed us to the lab. It jolted us to see her behaving as a medical doctor; we thought of the quartet she had been as a doctor. The trio she was was an ecologist. I guess she was still a doctor, even though she had lost a quarter of herself. I wondered how much medical training had been lost when her fourth had expired. “Lay her on the table. Get the rest of her.”
When we got back with the next three, Mother Redd had already begun running tests on her: hormone levels, blood tests, gene maps. When we got back with the last one, Mother Redd was on the vid to Doctor Thomasin.
“Her gene map has deviated from her norm. She appears to have applied transmogrifying sequences to herself, as recently as a week ago. The result is shock, renal failure, and seizures. Possibly shared memory degradation. I’ve called an ambulance.”
His face looked shocked. “Why would she do such a thing?”
He’s misleading us.
I don’t know why I thought it, but as soon as I did, the consensus formed behind it. None of us had had an inkling of his prevarication, but now it seemed obvious. We were built for intuitive leaps.
“I’ll be there in half an hour.”
Meda said, “How would her own doctor not know she’s monkeying with her genome? She’s been sick all summer.” She said it softly, but loud enough for Mother Redd to hear.
One of her turned and looked directly at us. We met the gaze. She nodded slightly.
To Doctor Thomasin, she said, “The ambulance is already here. We’re going to the county hospital.”
“I’ll meet you there.” He signed off.
Mother Redd said, “Wait in the house, please.”
“But—”