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

have children; I am fully functional. Kindness is not really programmable,
unfortunately; it's largely an environmental thing. Don was not kind because he
thought it wouldn't help him get results, but people who are kind are so under
almost all circumstances, save for certain extremes when they may get snappish
and that's always understandable when it happens. But if you have turned out
kind, children would be interesting. Now if that doesn't tempt you you just
aren't the one I'm looking for. There's a fifty percent chance they would have
receptors; I don't know whether that sounds good or bad to you, that germ line
stuff. Who knows what tomorrow may bring. I'm ever so glad I have mine it makes
me more versatile. I am not so lonely as sometimes the fitful satellite gives me
Grand dad, I told you that, and we can talk. Other than that I have delusions of
recreating civilization, only better and in a foolproof way, so now you know
that I am insane and incapable of learning from history. So what? I'm human. If
you are kind, you will like that. Don't come if you don't. I am armed, I tell
you.
I fell in love with Mildred, and if you are Mildred I don't know what you will
think about that, though I did not sleep with her. With You. Oh, I'm getting
confused now. I blush. Well, actually, I barely thought of it, though later I
did, and plenty, after I'd shrugged off her touch and made her cry. I am sorry
about that it is my one regret. All the others are for myself only and therefore
silly as errant neutrinos, as meaningless, yet as powerful in the disruption of
communications. Her feelings were real and she needed me. Maybe just once. Who
else was there, for her? Mildred? You would know why I named my most valuable
ally after you. You would like that. I know you. After a year of life with you,
my dear, I know you. Apparently that was the most important year of my life. And
though I look young, and though I think I could have children, I am old. Old and
very, very amused. How good it would be to have company. Especially yours.
#
Perhaps it was the Ohio sheets which made Mildred and I so close. Without them
it all might have been so foreign to me that I would have run screaming back to
smooth surfaces, information at a touch.
She and Don lived in her mother's house. It was a three- story white frame house
with tilting oak floors. The foundation was surrounded by rose bushes which had
been mature when Mildred was a child; she tended them with great care and they
yielded overblown blossoms which filled the house with color and fra grance from
spring to fall. She gave me thorny bouquets for my own little room on 5th
Street, a room with high ceilings and a steam-heat vent, utterly unlike anything
in the dome.
The three of us visited one another's houses in the evenings and cooked for one
another and had the same vision, I thought, combating the plague. Except that we
had endless arguments about the best way to do it. Don found it hard to trust
inoculation. This was not entirely irrational on his part, but it was the best
stopgap we had and better than nothing. Isolation, what they were trying in
Columbus, was simply impossible. He tolerated me because he knew he had to.
Sometimes I found him staring at me with an unreadable expression after a
particularly fierce ex change. I did not find this pleasant. But I was trying to
forge some connection with him, because he was my link to his patients. Perhaps
he misunderstood my attempts.
We sat in kitchens with wide windows thrown open to the scents of a struggling
herb garden and pedestrian footsteps at my house and to the sweet heavy scents