"Dean Ing - Firefight Y2K" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

Predation brings unending lustтАФ
An old causality.

The hypothalamus, behind armoring bone, was crucial. Maels took it all. Adrenal medulla, a strip of
mucous membrane, smear of marrow. Chewing reflectively, Maels thought:Eye of newt, toe of frog. A
long way from the real guts of immortality.

He had known a feeder, an academic like himself, who read so much Huxley he tried to substitute carp
viscera for the only true prescription. Silly bastard had nearly died before Maels, soft-hearted Karl
Maels, brought him the bloody requisites in a baggie. At some personal sacrifice, too: the girl had been
Maels' best graduate student in a century.

Sacrifice, he reflected, was one criterion largely ignored by the Darwinists. They prattled so easily of a
species as though the single individual mattered little. But if you are one of a rare subspecies, feeders
whose members were few and camouflaged? A back-burner question, he decided. He could let it
simmer. With admirable economy of motion Maels further vandalized the kill to disguise his motive.
Minutes later he was in his rented sedan, en route back to his small college town. Maels felt virile,
coruscating, efficient. The seasonal special feeding, in its way, had been a thing of beauty.

Ninety-three days later, Maels drove his own coupe to another city and left it, before dusk, in a parking
lot. He was overdue to feed but thought it prudent to avoid patterns. The city, the time of day, even the
moon phase should be different. If the feeding itself no longer gave joy, at least he might savor its
planning.

He adjusted his turtleneck and inspected the result in a storefront reflection. Maybe he would shave the
beard soon. It was a damned nuisance anyhow when he fed.

Maels recalled a student's sly criticism the day before: when was a beard a symbiote, and when
parasitic? Maels had turned the question to good classroom use, sparking a lively debate on the
definitions of parasite and predator. Maels cited the German Brown trout, predator on its own kind yet
not a parasite. The flea was judged parasitic; for the hundredth time Maels was forced to smile through
his irritation at misquotation of elegant Dean Swift:
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey.
And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em,
And so proceed,ad infinitum .



Which only prompted the class to define parasites in terms of size. Maels accepted their judgment; trout
and feeder preyed on smaller fry, predators by spurious definition.

Comfortably chewing on the trout analogy, Maels cruised the singles bars through their happy hour. He
nurtured his image carefully, a massive gentle bear of a man with graceful hands and self-deprecating wit.
At the third spa he maneuvered, on his right, a pliable file clerk with adenoids and lovely skin. She
pronounced herself simply thrilled to meet a real, self-admitted traveling salesman. Maels found her rather
too plump for ideal quarry, but no matter: she would do. He felt pale stirrings of excitement and honed
them, titillated them. Perhaps he would grant her a sexual encounter before he fed. Perhaps.

Then Karl Maels glanced into the mirror behind the bar, and the pliant clerk was instantly and brutally