"David G. Hartwell - Years best sf 11" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hartwell David G)

Shaunasie tossed her short hair in a perfect imitation of a defiant gesture. "These people have a right to
defend themselves."

"Like I said before, it ain't my business to get mixed up in all this."

I pulled myself back to the airlock that would get me outside the cramped living quarters. I toyed briefly
with the idea of telling Jesse what Shaunasie really was. They had spent one hundred fiftytwo days
together so far, and had another twentythree to go before they completed their mission. Assuming they
managed to drop their bomb and get away alive, they would have a hell of a long trip back even using
the fastest transfer orbit.

Jesse was about eighteen Earth years old. Even if the High Fantastic Empire had some kind of sexual
hangup, which I'm pretty sure they didn't, he would have to be crawling the walls trying to figure out a
way to get at that tight little body of hers. Transemotional excellence notwithstanding. If he knew she
was just software running on organic fibrils interspersed throughout her nervous system, he might lose
interest. It would turn the rest of the trip from exquisite torture to something more like the heebiejeebies.

In the end, I decided against it. I was eighteen once. I know what I would have said if some old fart told
me to stop wasting my time with my current love interest. I waved goodbye with a gloved hand, and left
through the airlock.

As I took the sled back to my ship, I was doing a bit of datamining on the info I had teased out of the
little tease on the JAFR. Nothing I had downloaded would be admissible in most courts, seeing as how I
had stolen it. But the Coordinator Group was not a court. They didn't care where their information came
from. They were simply brokers. They found things out, they sold that information, they stayed in

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 Jarpe, Matthew - City of Reason

business, and they helped the vastly complex process of interplanetary trade happen. Nobody got hurt.

They ordinarily wouldn't pay much for the inside scoop on a homestead, but I had a feeling that A Better
Way was up to something the rest of the solar system would find distasteful at best, dangerous at worst.
Human enhancement was a touchy issue. Nobody was ready to come out against any form of
improvement, whether it was genetic manipulation of the unborn or hardware or organic implants in
adults. The practice was just too pervasive. But all the same, everyone wanted to know what everyone
else was up to. How smart, how fast, and how much of the natural type human mind was still intact? I
didn't know whether the interest was selfdefense or keeping up with the competition. Maybe a bit of
both.

The data dump I got from Miss MacTaggart gave me a good idea of what A Better Way was up to. They
had a few thousand members, pretty thriving community for the Kuiper Belt. The elders were
wellaugmented with hardware implants. Younger generations had some bold genetic modifications, all
mental. They had a few dozen brainjacked kids still learning how to directlink with the three artificial
intelligences that ran the physical plant.

They were growing their own sophont silk. In the quantities they were using the stuff, I wasn't surprised.
Millions of Outer System Currency Units couldn't buy the crop of thread that went into each baby. Yeah,
that's right, they were threading the babies. As if drilling them for brainjacks wasn't enough.