"Nancy Kress - Nano Comes to Clifford Falls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

"Suspicious little thing, aren't you? Come with me."

We went out to the barn. The cows were in the pasture, and the hayloft half empty. In an old tack room
that the Bellinghams had turned into an apartment for a long-ago cattle manager, a pretty young woman
sat in front of a metal table. I blinked.

The whole room was full of strange equipment, along with freezers and other stuff I recognized. The
woman wore a white lab coat, like doctors on TV. She stood and smiled at us.

"This is Amelia Parsons," Bellingham said. "She used to work for Camry Biotech, which just went out of
business. She's a crop geneticist."

"Hello," she said, holding out her hand. Women like her make me nervous. Too polished, too educated.
They all had it too easy. But I shook her hand; I'm not rude.

"Amelia's working on creating an apomictic corn plant. That's corn that doesn't need pollination, that can
produce its own seeds asexually, like non-hybrid varieties once did, and like blackberries and mangos
and some roses do now. Apomictic corn would keep all the good traits of hybrid corn, maybe even with
added benefits, but farmers wouldn't have to buy seed every year."

"I couldn't work on this very much at Camry," Amelia said to me. Her pretty face glowed. Her red hair
was cut in one of those complicated city cuts. "Even though apomixis was my doctoral thesis. The
biotech company wanted us to work on things that were more immediately profitable. But now that I
don't need to earn a salary, that oversight agencies are pretty much dismantling, and that I can get the
equipment I need from nano ... well, nano makes it possible for me to do some real work!"

I smiled at her again, because I didn't have anything to say. There was a baby-food stain on my jeans and
I moved my hand to cover it.

"Thanks, Amelia," Hal Bellingham said. "See you later."
On the way back to the house, he said quietly, "I just wanted you to see the other side, Carol."

I didn't answer.
****
My little school started on Monday. Caddie Alghren, whose mother had been killed by a drunk driver
last spring, clung to me at first, but Will and she were friends and as long as she could sit next to him, she
was all right. The three Bellingham kids were well-behaved and smart. Kitty watched Kimee and Jackie
in the kitchen and helped Mattie Bellingham. At night Kitty went home with me, because her stepfather
had started to come into her room at night. Nothing real bad had happened yet, but she hated him and
was glad to babysit for her keep.

After the kids finally got to sleep each night, Kitty and I watched the TV, like Hal said, and saw what
was happening in the cities. A lot of people won't work if they don't have to. But a lot of people not
working means a lot of broken things don't get fixed. Nano can make water pipes and schoolbooks and
buses and toilets. It can't install them or tech them or drive them. The cities were getting to be pretty
scary places.

Clifford Falls wasn't that bad. But it wasn't all that far out from the city, either. Kitty and I were watching
TV one night, the kids in bed, when the door burst open and two men rushed in.