"Alexander Jablokov - Market Report" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jablokov Alexander)

This time my father heard the warning in my mother's voice. He squatted down next to me. His knees cracked.

"Sorry, Bert," he said. "I guess I should have told

"Told me what? That you have animals in your sink?"

"It was a fisher."

I caught glimpses of the creature as it snaked its way across the tops of the cabinets, some kind of rodent limp in its mouth. It looked like a big weasel. Its eyes gleamed down at me in the lantern light. Its eyes ...

10 ALEXANDER JABLOKOV

"A fisher?" I didn't look at it. Frogs made a low thrumming noise in the sink. An owl hooted out in the living room. Things examined us from outside the circle of light. When I was little, and wouldn't go get a drink of water myself, this was what I had known it was really like out there.

"Actually, it's an extinct species of mustelid," he said. "This one vanished about the time the ice sheets left North America. It's part of a controlled breeding experiment, the reason we've moved here to Old Oak Orchard. We regress the DNA of animals that went extinct around the Pleistocene and implant it in related ova."

"Oh, God, Dad. Remember that time you raised insulated sea turtles to give rides at that Aleutian beach resort?"

The resort had been run as some government benefit for impoverished Aleuts. All I remembered of the experience was thick clouds, rocks, and giant lumbering shells covered with barnacles, all roughly the same shade of gray. I didn't remember the turtles having any heads. My only entertainment had been working on a seaweed collection. It had all climaxed in a riot by the disillusioned locals, who had invested heavily in beachfront cabanas and glitzy casinos, and blamed my father for the fact that sea turtle rides through choppy ice water failed to draw more tourists. Most of the turtles had been stewed in their own shells on the rocky beach in a drunken feast. Sea lions had barked their approval somewhere out in the mist, which glowed orange with the burning cabanas as we pulled away in our fiberglass bidarka. My mother had made my very favorite chili mac while we were there, and tucked me into bed every night with a sweet lullaby in a foreign language.

"We were undercapitalized, that's all." My dad was irritated at having it brought up. "The failure wasn't biological."

MARKET REPORT 11

"No, they never areЧ"

"You're cranky, Bertram." My mother supported my shoulders, and I sat up. "Not enough sleep."

She had an almost suntan lotion smell, even though it was still dark. Some kind of collagen replacement cream. It was a comfort, to realize that my mother wanted to stay young. It was something to hold on to. The extinct mustelid slunk into shadows and did not come back out.

The lighter and fluffier my mom's scrambled eggs, the worse things wereЧa classic rule. This morning, with the innocent light streaming in through the kitchen windows, they were like clouds. I had looked around the house, but most of its nocturnal dwellers seemed to have hidden themselves in the cupboards and cabinets.

"Is Dad driving you crazy?" I asked. The orange juice was metallic, from concentrate, so maybe there was some hope.

"Since when hasn't he?" She smiled. "But this time I'm driving him crazy too. I came here under protestЧ who wants to move out to one of these bland compounds out in the middle of nowhere, even to raise extinct fauna? Really, that's no different than playing golf until you die, don't you think?"

I didn't tell her how happy I had been to see the place, to feel its stolid normality. Sodden, heavy scrambled eggs would have been a small price to pay to know that I was, at last, safe.

"But I've found things to do. I've found ways to enjoy this little place. And that, as you can guess, drives your dad bananas. I'm using it wrong, you see. I'm not enjoying it the proper way." She produced a day-labeled pillbox, and started filling it with red, yellow, and green pills. Sunday through Saturday. Her week was set up.

12 ALEXANDER JABLOKOV

"And how are you enjoying it, Mother?" She held up a deep-green lozenge. "Do you think my body used to produce this, and then stopped? What gland do you suppose made it?" The pill had a particularly hard gleam, like a liquid-oxygen tank on a Pixar-generated spacecraft in an SF movie.

"I don't know."

"You know how all these Pleisto-kooks got together? They all used to belong to the same Internet newsgroup. They'd trade breeding tips, give each other heads-up on available DNA sequencers and incubators. Then, a bunch of them decided to live together and work on a big project. They bought into Old Oak Orchard en masse. Some of these people were quite wealthy."

"It's the latest thing, you know," I said. "The transformation of virtual communities into real ones. One of those wonderful retrogressive steps that makes my job so much fun."