"David Zindell - Shanidar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

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beneath the dermis, excising most of his sweat glands to keep him from soaking his furs and
freezing to death at the first hint of false winter. Because his dark skin would synthesize too
little vitamin D to keep his bones calcified during the long twilight of deep winter, I inhibited
his melanocytes -- it is little known that all men, light or dark, have nearly the same number of
melanocytes -- I lightened his skin until he was as fair as a man from Thorskalle. The last thing
I did for him, or so I thought at the time, was to grow out his fine, almost invisible body hair
so that it covered him like brown fur from toe to eyebrow.

"I was very pleased with my handiwork and a little frightened because Goshevan had grown so strong
-- stronger, I think, than any Alaloi -- that he could have torn my clavicle from my chest, had he
so desired. But he was not pleased and he said, 'The most important thing there is, this thing you
didn't do.' And I told him, 'I've made you so that no one among the Alaloi could tell you from his
brother.' But he looked at me with his dark fanatic's eyes and asked me, 'And my s-sons, should my
s-seed by some chance be compatible with the Alaloi women, who will there be to call my weak-jawed
half-breed sons brother?' I had no answer for him other than a dispirited repeating of the law: 'A
man may do with his flesh as he pleases,' I said, 'but his DNA belongs to his species.' And then
he grabbed my forearm so tightly that I thought my muscles would split away from the bone and
said, 'Strong men make their own laws.'

"Then, because I felt a moment of pity for this strange man who only wanted what all men want --
which is a son after his own image and a few moments of peace -- I broke the law of the civilized
worlds. It was a challenge, do you understand? I irradiated his testes and bathed them with
sonics, killing off the sperm. I couldn't, of course, engage the services of a master splicer
because all my colleagues shunned such criminal activity. But I was a master cutter -- some will
tell you the best in the city -- and what is gene-splicing but surgery on a molecular scale? So I
went into his tubules and painstakingly sectioned out and mutated segments of his stem cells' DNA
so that the newly produced germ cells would make for him sons after his new image.

"When I finished this most delicate of delicate surgeries, which took the better part of two
years, Goshevan regarded himself in the mirror of my changing room and announced, 'Behold Homo
neandertalis. Now I am less than a man but also more.'

"'You look as savage as any savage,' I said. And then, thinking to scare him, I told him what was
commonly believed about the Alaloi. 'They live in caves and have no language,' I said. 'They are
bestially cruel to their children; they eat strangers, and perhaps each other.'

"Goshevan laughed as I said this and then he told me, 'On Old Earth during the holocaust century,
a neandertal burial site was discovered in a place called Shanidar near the Zagros mountains of
Irak. The archeologists found the skeleton of a forty-year-old m-man who was missing his lower
right arm. Shanidar I, they named him, and they determined he had lost his arm long before he
died. In the burial site of another neandertal, Shanidar IV, was the pollen of several kinds of
flowers, mixed in with all the bone fragments, pebbles and dust. The question I have for you,
Cutter, is: how savage could these people have been if they supported a cripple and honored their
dead with bright colored wildflowers?' So I answered, 'The Alaloi are not the same.' And he said,
'We will see, we will see.'