"Goonan, Kathleen Ann - The Day The Dam Broke" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goonan Kathleen Ann)

Copyright й 1995
Kathleen Ann Goonan
All Rights Reserved
Originally published as an OMNI ONLINE NOVELLA
THE DAY THE DAM BROKE
by
Kathleen Ann Goonan

Of course James Thurber was from Columbus but I don't think he was Italian. The
information meant to tempt someone to Colum bus for post-doc study-intervention
in the plague zone emphasized an Italian neighborhood. I imagined being able to
buy fresh buffalo mozzarella every morning, bundles of fragrant green basil,
fresh bread, and Reggiano cheese cut from a jealous wheel, crumbling deliciously
at the edges into shards I could gobble from stiff paper or nibble between sips
of cappuccino or pale wine.
Dream on, Julia. Maybe before the millennium, but not now. The information I
latched onto in the L.A. dome was, shall we say, a bit out of date.
One of my grandfathers was actually born in Columbus, which was a point in its
favor. Now when he leaps from my cabin wall for a chat--nobody else to chat with
up here in the Canadian Rockies, though I do wait for You--brief auras, fleeting
pic tures, of old Ohio eddy from him, corridors of time which shimmer back to
the great forests, cool, slow-moving Indian rivers, and then pre-history when
the great land swelled and moved without regard to how we felt about it, fleas
upon its shuddering thin skin.
Well, that's what I wanted. Good food. Additional personal depth. The
opportunity to make my mark as one of the hot-shot nanplague meds of the time.
And a chance to get out of the dome.
Those pure enclaves dotted the world like the plastic bub bles they put over
smallpox vaccinations in the nineteen fifties so the kids wouldn't pick the
scabs off too soon. I hypered into that odd little tidbit while researching
plagues. I felt like part of a vaccine against the nanotech disasters of the
recent past, the disasters which still had not ended. As we were to learn. I
ached to be able to help make everything safe enough so that we could remove the
goddamned domes, those sad ellipsoidal barriers to the sky and stars and to what
I saw as Life.
Fine they said go. You think medicine is all G.E. That's genetic engineering and
I did. Inhalants in which DNA rode to the rescue on viral steeds. Wait till you
get out in the sticks. Far from us. Far from the Links--communication was touch
and go at that point but better than now! I must tell you that I am an old
woman. That depends on your definition of old of course but I was born pre-mil,
1999, and it is now . . . can it be? Oh, I'm just teasing you it is, it is
truly, twenty. Ninety-three. 2093. And this took place when I was a young
whippersnapper, as Thurber's grandfather might say, caught up in the RWF, Radio
Wave Fibrillation, and the Great Panic, and there I was, alone without medical
backup (or willing patients either so it didn't really matter) and no fresh
mozzarella either, if there ever had been any. At least I have the latter now.
Maybe that's what I wanted most all along.
I don't digress; press your ears to what must now pass for my heart--the radio.
If the technology is the same as now, and fibrillation has briefly ceased, use
the purple infrabar. That will give you the correct screen; then program in the