"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Chimera" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

you gotta know that the reason you're walking, hell, the reason you're even
breathing is because of the work we do. You got to dance until the age of
forty, and you could have gone longer because of our research. But you quit to
have a baby, by yourself, and it was easy, not like it was fifty years ago for
a first-timer your age, so before you go into the ethics of creating chimera,
you got to remember how much benefit you've taken from them."

Gen took a deep breath. "I didn't come here to yell at you. I came to find out
what happened to Cedric."

"What happened to him? He was in our lab until the experiment expired. Then I
gave him to Anna for the Mission."

"He's violent," Gen said. "And he has night terrors, or so it seems to me.
Anna said he was part of an experiment for Parkinson's—"

"Alzheimer's." Moya looked down. "A lot of the old folk had such poor medical
care and nutrition when they were kids. They're still developing Alzheimer's.
We can hold it off until they're a hundred or so, but with the lifestyle
changes, they might live another twenty years. That's a burden on the
families. We can slow the progression of the disease, but we haven't been able
to stop it. Not yet."

"Cedric has Alzheimer's?"

"No." Moya sighed. "Cedric was a control. We used stem cells to give him the
closest thing we could to a human brain, and then we tested our latest drugs
on him. I can't tell you more than that."

"What did the drugs do?"

"Enhanced memory. Increased certain types of chemicals. Helped fortify
connections between different parts of the brain. Some of the drugs failed. A
few didn't. But drugs are iffy things. They can alter personality in humans.
Cedric isn't human and he's not exactly feline. He became too erratic to work
with, so we were supposed to put him down." Moya shrugged. "I don't believe in
doing that."

She said that last very softly, and Gen understood where many of Anna's
animals came from.

"Why do you think he became erratic?" Gen asked.

"I didn't have a chance to study him," Moya said. "He began to hate his cage,
and he would attack anyone he didn't know. He hid on us a lot, and wouldn't
let us find him until after testing times. He became difficult. I wanted to
keep him on the study, but the team decided he was a hazard."

"How old is he?" Gen asked.
"About two."