"Daniel Pearlman - The Heart Of The Overchild" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pearlman Daniel)

The Heart of the Overchild
a short story by Daniel Pearlman

Foreword
In this story, two sacred culture-cows unhappily collide with each other.

The Heart of the Overchild
The sound from her videowatch buzzed into her head through stereoceptors
implanted behind her ears, but she could not raise the noise-level high
enough to drown out the yatter of those parents of hers who were trying so
desperately to prevent her heart operation even now, on the day for which
it was scheduled. The audio peak was factory-set for safety's sake--so
that you couldn't block out the sounds of the outer world whether you
wanted to hear them or not. So here she sat awash in sonic waves from two
worlds, a kind of stereo all the kids called interfereo. The sad-eyed man
in her videowatch described the criminal destruction of some Southeast
Asian rain-forest acreage while her parents proceeded to argue with the
Board-members for the rights of their overchild to exemption from the
pending operation.
Cheri was pretty sure that her parents would win the appeal. They'd never
stopped assuring her of that during these past two weeks of appearances
before some lesser committees. So she no longer let herself get terribly
upset at all the embarrassment they were putting her through. Her mother
could melt titanium off a nosecone with her tears, and her father could
use logic to make day look like night. They had coached her to shut up, to
answer nothing even if questioned (legally, a seven-year-old did not have
to say a thing), so she furtively rubbed her shoulder where it still hurt
after last night's beating and tried to focus on the disaster in Southeast
Asia.
"Probably a work of sheer spite committed by the anticonservationists,"
said the video voice as an aerial view panned acres of defoliated
greenery. "Biologists estimate that at least a hundred species of living
creatures, some of which have never even been catalogued, have been
forever destroyed by this outrageous act." Cheri could imagine herself as
one of those tiny creatures whose kind had existed nowhere else in the
world. She could see herself hopping from leaf to trembling leaf, her
scalded wings beating in pain as poisonous fumes darkened the air all
about her. There were Cheris all over the world, she thought, billions of
kids like her--but of those little beings whose weakening wings she felt
flapping on her own (sore) back there'd been hardly a handful, and now not
even one was still alive. "Our irreplaceable biological heritage." She
shuddered as, voicelessly, her lips mouthed a phrase which had inspired
her with awe long before she'd grown old enough to understand it.
"... our only overchild!" her father was saying to the two thin-lipped men
and three unfriendly-looking women who sat around the sides and end of the
long table opposite the three of them. The room was the usual pukey
government green, but it had a computer station in one corner and a wall
full of black-covered books, and it was even pukily carpeted, unlike the
stone-cold meeting-rooms she'd been shlepped to up to now. Otherwise you'd
never know you were in the presence of the highest appeals committee in