"EB - Edward L. Ferman - The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction 23rd EditionUC - SS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)

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bag. The greater the variety of genes available to a species, the more secure it is against the vicissitudes of fortune. The existence of congenital disorders and gene deficiencies is the price paid for the advantage of variety and versatility.
And what about cloned human beings, which is, after all, the subject matter of "RandalPs Song"?
These may never be as important as you think. The prospect of importance rests chiefly on certain misapprehensions on the part of the public. Some people, for instance, pant for clones because they think them the gateway to personal immortality. That is quite wrong.
Your clone is not you. Your clone is your twin brother (or sister) and is no more you than your ordinary identical twin would be. Your clone does not have your consciousness, and if you die, you are dead. You do not live on in your clone. Once that is understood, I suspect that much of the interest in clones will disappear.
Some people fear clones, on the other hand, because they imagine that morons will be cloned in order to make it possible to build up a great army of cannon fodder that despots will use for world conquest.
Why bother? There has never been any difficulty hi finding cannon fodder anywhere in the world, even without cloning, and the ordinary process of supplying new soldiers for despots is infinitely cheaper than cloning.
More reasonably, it could be argued that the clone of a great human being would retain his genetic equipment and, therefore, would be another great human being of the same kind. In that case, the chief use of cloning would be to reproduce genius.
That, I think, would be a waste of time. We are not necessarily going to breed thousands of transcendent geniuses out of an Einstein or thousands of diabolical villains out of a Hitler.
After all, a human being is more than his genes. Your clone is the result of your nucleus being placed into a foreign egg cell and the foreign cytoplasm in that egg cell will surely have an effect on the development of the clone. The egg will have to be implanted into a foreign womb and that, too, will have an influence on the development of the organism.
Even if a woman were to have one of her somatic nuclei implanted into one of her own egg cells and if she were then to have the egg cell
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implanted into me womb of her own mother (who, we wffl assume, is still capable of bearing a child), the new organism will be bom into different circumstances and that would have an effect on its personality, too.
For instance, suppose you wanted one hundred Isaac Asimovs so that the supply of F&SF essays would never run out. You would then have to ask what it was that made me the kind of writer I amor a writer at all. Was it only my genes?
I was brought op in a candy store under a father of the old school who, although he was Jewish, was the living embodiment of the Protestant ethic. My nose was kept to the grindstone until I could no longer remove it Furthermore, I was brought up during the Great Depression and had to find a way of making a livingЧor I would inherit the candy store, which I desperately didn't want to do. Furthermore, I lived in a time when science fiction magazines, and pulp magazines generally, were going strong, and when a young man could sell clumsily written stories because the demand was greater than the supply.
Put it all together, they spell M-E.
The Isaac Asimov clones, once they grow op, simply won't live in the same social environment I did, won't be subjected to the same pressures, won't have the same opportunities. What's more, when I wrote, I just wroteЧno one expected anything particular from me. When my clones write, their products will always be compared to the Grand Original and that would discourage and wipe out anyone.
The end result will be that though my clones, or some of them, might turn out to be valuable citizens of one kind or another, it would be very unlikely that any one of them would be another Isaac Asimov, and their production would not be worthwhile. Whatever good they might do would not be worth the reduction they would represent in the total gene variability of humanity.
Yet cloning would not be totally useless, either. There would be the purely theoretical advantage of studying the development of embryos with known variations in their genes which, except for those variations, would have identical genetic equipment (This would raise serious ethical questions, as all human experimentation does, but that is not the issue at the moment)
Then, too, suppose it were possible to learn enough about human
embryonic development to guide embryos into all sorts of specialized bypaths that would produce a kind of monster that had a full-sized heart, with all else vestigial, or a full-sized kidney or lung or liver or leg. With just one organ developing, techniques of forced growth (in the laboratory, of course, and not in a human womb) might make development to full size a matter of months only.
We can therefore imagine that at birth, every human individual will have scrapings taken from his little toe, thus attaining a few hundred living cells that can be at once frozen for possible eventual use. (This is done at birth, because the younger the cell, the more efficiently it is likely to clone.)
These cells could serve as potential organ banks for the future. H the time were to come when an adult found he had a limping heart or fading pancreas or whatever, or if a leg had been lost in an accident or had had to be amputated, then those long-frozen cells would be defrosted and put into action.
An organ replacement would be grown and since it would have precisely the same genetic equipment as the old, the body would not reject it ЧSurely that is the best possible application of cloning.
John Varley's first story for F&Sf was "Picnic on Nearside" in 1974. Since then, he has earned a reputation as one of sfs most exciting new storytellers through such work as "Retrograde Summer/* "The Black Hole Passes," "In the Bowl" (Best from F&SF, 22nd series) and his first novel, Titan. This story was another Nebula award nominee.
In the Hall of the Martian Kings
by JOHN VARLEY
It took perseverance, alertness, and a willingness to break the rules to watch the sunrise in Tharsis Canyon. Matthew Crawford shivered in the dark, his suit heater turned to emergency setting, his eyes trained toward the east. He knew he had to be watchful. Yesterday he had missed it entirely, snatched away from him in the middle of a long, unavoidable yawn. His jaw muscles stretched, but he controlled it and kept his eyes firmly open.
And there it was. Like the lights in a theater after the show is over: just a quick brightening, a splash of localized bluish-purple over the canyon rim, and he was surrounded by footlights. Day had come, the truncated Martian day that would never touch the blackness over his head.
This day, like the nine before it, illuminated a Tharsis radically changed from what it had been over the last sleepy ten thousand years. Wind erosion of rocks can create an infinity of shapes, but it
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never gets around to carving out a straight line or a perfect arc. Hie human encampment below him broke up the jagged lines of the rocks with regular angles and curves.
Hie camp was anything but orderly. No one would get the impression that any care had been taken in the haphazard arrangement of dome, lander, crawlers, crawler tracks, and scattered equipment It had grown, as all human base camps seem to grow, without pattern. He was reminded of the footprints around Tranquillity Base, though on a much larger scale.
Tharsis Base sat on a wide ledge about halfway up from the uneven bottom of the Tharsis arm of the Great Rift Valley. The site had been chosen because it was a smooth area, allowing easy access up a gentle slope to the flat plains of the Tharsis Plateau, while at the same time only a kilometer from the valley floor. No one could agree which area was most worthy of study: plains or canyon. So this site had been chosen as a compromise. What it meant was that the exploring parties had to either climb up or go down, because there wasn't a damn thing worth seeing near the camp. Even the exposed layering and its areological records could not be seen without a half-kilometer crawler ride up to the point where Crawford had climbed to watch the sunrise.
He examined the dome as he walked back to camp. There was a figure hazily visible through the plastic. At this distance he would have been unable to tell who it was if it weren't for the black face. He saw her step up to the dome wall and wipe a clear circle to look through. She spotted his bright red suit and pointed at him. She was suited except for her helmet, which contained her radio. He knew he was in trouble. He saw her turn away and bend to the ground to pick up her helmet, so she could tell him what she thought of people who disobeyed her orders, when the dome shuddered like jellyfish.
An alarm started in his helmet, flat and strangely soothing coming from the tiny speaker. He stood there for a moment as a perfect smoke ring of dust billowed up around the rim of the dome. Then he was running.
He watched the disaster unfold before his eyes, silent except for the rhythmic beat of the alarm bell in his ears. The dome was dancing and straining, trying to fly. The floor heaved up in the center, throwing the black woman to her knees. In another second the ulterior was a whirling snowstorm. He skidded on the sand and fell for-
ward, got up tn time to see the fiberglass ropes on the side nearest him snap free from the steel spikes anchoring the dome to the rock. The dome now looked like some fantastic Christmas ornament, filled with snowflakes and the Sashing red and blue lights of the emergency alarms. The top of the dome heaved over away from him, and the floor raised itself high in the air, held down by the unbroken anchors on the side farthest from him. There was a gush of snow and dust; then the floor settled slowly back to the ground. There was no motion now but the leisurely folding of the depressurized dome roof as it settled over the structures inside.
The crawler skidded to a stop, nearly rolling over, beside the deflated dome. Two pressure-suited figures got out. They started for the dome, hesitantly, in fits and starts. One grabbed the other's arm and pointed to the lander. The two of them changed course and scrambled up the rope ladder hanging over the side.
Crawford was the only one to look up when the lock started cycling. The two people almost tumbled over each other coming out of the lock. They wanted to do something, and quickly, but didn't know what. In the end, they just stood there silently twisting their hands and looking at the floor. One of them took off her helmet. She was a large woman, in her thirties, with red hair shorn off close to the scalp.
"Matt, we got here as ..." She stopped, realizing how obvious it was. "How's Lou?"
"Lou's not going to make it." He gestured to the bunk where a heavyset man lay breathing raggedly into a clear plastic mask. He was on pure oxygen. There was blood seeping from his ears and nose.
"Brain damage?"
Crawford nodded. He looked around at the other occupants of the room. There was the Surface Mission Commander, Mary Lang, the black woman he had seen inside the dome just before the blowout She was sitting on the edge of Lou Prager's cot, her head cradled in her hands. In a way, she was a more shocking sight than Lou. No one who knew her would have thought she could be brought to this limp state of apathy. She had not moved for the last hour.