"Thomas F. Monteleone - Breath's a ware that will not keep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Monteleone Thomas F)

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THOMAS F. MONTELEONE

Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep

Thomas F. Monteleone is a newer writer of the hard working school to which Charles Grant also
belongs. He is also an extremely sensitive writer, as he has been proving since 1972, when he sold his
first story to AMAZING SCIENCE FICTION, and with his first novel in 1974. In person, he is a
deceptively quiet man with an amazingly quick perception that tends to be obscured by the gentle ness of
his speech. The story that follows, "Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep," takes its title from a poem
called "Rebellion" by A. E. Houseman, and it has a poetry of its own. The story is part of Tom
Monteleone's "Chicago" series, which will be published later this year as a novel, THE TIME SWEPT
CITY, by Popular Library.



Benjamin Cipriano sat down at his console, casting a quick glance outward to the Breeder Tank
below him. He switched his attention to the-controls and opened up a communications channel to the
Tank. He pulled the psi-helmet over his head and pressed the throat mike close to his larynx. "Good
morning, Feraxya. Feeling okay today?"

His scalp tingled as invisible fingers slipped into his skull to massage his brain. The helmet fed her
psiwords into him: "Good morning to you, too, Benjamin." The "voice" sounded just vaguely feminine to
him, and his imagination reinforced the conceptualization. "I'm feeling fine. Everything is normal. You
know I always feel comfortable when you are on the console."

"Thank you," said Cipriano, pausing for a moment. "Now, I have some tests to run this morning, so
we'd better get started." He flipped several toggles as he continued speaking to her. "It's all routine stuff .
. . blood sugar, enzyme scans, placental balance quotients . . . things like that. Nothing to worry about."
There was a short silence before she touched his mind again: "I never worry when you're on. Perhaps
we'll have time to talk, later on?"

"If you want to. I'll have some time in a few minutes. Bye now." He switched off the communications
channel and stared at the protoplasmic nightmare on the other side of his console-booth window.
Stretched out before him were all the Breeder Tanks for his Sector of the City. They were Chicago's
symbols of deliverance from misery and deprivation for all the City's members. Except, perhaps, the
Host-Mothers themselves. Cipriano wondered about them in general, Feraxya in particular, and what
their lives must be like.

Technically speaking, Feraxya was human. Visually, however, she was an amorphous, slithering,
amoeba-like thing. She was tons of genetically cultured flesh, a human body inflated and stretched and
distended until it was many times its normal size. Lost beneath her abundant flesh was a vestigial skeleton
which floated disconnected and unmoving in a gelatinous sea. Her bioneered organs were swollen to
immense proportions and hundreds of liters of blood pumped through her extensive circulatory system.

Yet he knew, even as he activated the probes that plunged into her soft flesh, that she was still a