"Bisson, Terry - Macs (txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bisson Terry)

You wouldn't have believed the publicity at the time. It was a big triumph for
Victims' Rights, which is now in the Constitution, isn't it? Maybe I'm wrong.
Anyway, it wasn't a particularly what you might call pleasant job, even though I
was all for the families and Closure and stuff and still am.

Looked like anybody. Looked like you except for the beard. None of them were
different. They were all the same. One of them was supposedly the real McCoy,
but so what? Isn't the whole point of cloning supposed to be that each one is
the same as the first one? Nobody's ever brought this up before. You're not from
one of those talk shows, are you?

They couldn't have talked to us if they had wanted to, and we weren't about to
talk to them. They were all taped up except for the eyes, and you should have
seen those eyes. You tried to avoid it. I had one that threw up all over my
truck even though theoretically you can't throw up through that tape. I told the
dispatcher my truck needed a theoretical cleaning.

They all seemed the same to me. Sort of panicked and gloomy. I had a hard time
hating them, in spite of what they done, or their daddy done, or however you
want to put it. They say they could only live five years anyway before their
insides turned to mush. That was no problem of course. Under the Victims' Rights
settlement it had to be done in thirty days, that was from date of delivery.

I delivered thirty-four macs, of 168 altogether. I met thirty-four fine
families, and they were a fine cross-section of American life, black and white,
Catholic and Protestant. Not so many Jews.

I've heard that rumor. You're going to have rumors like that when one of them is
supposedly the real McCoy. There were other rumors too, like that one of the
macs was pardoned by its family and sent away to school somewhere. That would
have been hard. I mean, if you got a mac you had to return a body within thirty
days. One story I heard was that they switched bodies after a car wreck. Another
was that they burned another body at the stake and turned it in. But that one's
hard to believe too. Only one of the macs was burned at the stake, and they had
to get a special clearance to do that. Hell, you can't even burn leaves in
Oklahoma anymore.

SaniMed collected, they're a medical waste outfit, since we're not allowed to
handle remains. They're not going to be able to tell you much. What did they
pick up? Bones and ashes. Meat.

Some of it was pretty gruesome but in this business you get used to that. We
weren't supposed to have to bag them, but you know how it is. The only one that
really got to me was the crucifixion. That sent the wrong message, if you ask
me.

There was no way we could tell which one of them was the real McCoy, not from
what we picked up. You should talk to the loved ones. Nice people, maybe a
little impatient sometimes. The third week was the hardest in terms of