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

"Yeah, Jack. You're back in the army now. Only this time, we all enlisted."

"I don't..."

"Come on," I said roughly. "It's up to a vote of the Council. For my part, I don't give a damn what you
do."

"You're lying," he said softly, in that special voice we used between us, and I damned him all over again
because it was true.
****
July again, and we are eighty-seven people now. Word spreads. About half are people who fled nano,
like me. The other half embraced it because it lets them do whatever they'd wanted to do before. Some
of those ones have their own nanomachines, little ones, made of course by other nanomachines. Hal
allows them to use nano to produce things for their jobs, but not to make food or clothing or shelter or
anything else we all need to survive, except for some medicines, and we're working on that.

The two kinds of people here don't always get along very well. We have five actors, Amelia the
geneticist, and two other scientists, one of them studying something about the stars. We have a man
writing fiction, an inventor, and, finally, a real teacher. Also two organic farmers, a sculptor, a man who
carves and puts together furniture all without nails, and, of all things, the United States chess champion,
who can't find anyone good enough to play with and so plays against our old computer.

He also farms and does guard duty and lays pipe and cleans and cans and cooks, of course. Like all the
rest of us. The things that the chess player didn't know how to do, which was everything, we taught him.
Just like Hal, who was a Marine once, taught us all to shoot.

It's pretty bad out there now, although the TV says it's getting better as "society adjusts to this most
cataclysmic of social changes." I don't know if that's true or not. I guess it varies. There was a lot of
rioting and disease and fires. Some places have some government left, some places don't, some are like
us now, mostly our own government, although Hal and two educated women keep our taxes filed and all
that. One of the women told me that we don't have to actually pay taxes because the farm shows a
consistent loss. She was a lawyer, but a religious lawyer. She says nano is Satan's work.

Amelia Parsons says nano is a gift from God.

Me, I think something different. I think nano is a sorter. The old sorting used to put the people with
money and education and nice things in one pile and the rest of us in another. But nano sorts out two
different piles: the ones who like to work because work is what you do, and the ones who don't.
It was kind of like everybody won the lottery all at once. I saw a TV show about lottery winners once, a
show that followed them around for a year or two after they won real big money. By that time, most of
them were worse off than before they won that money: miserable and broke again and with all their
relatives mad at them. But some used the money to make nicer lives. And some just gave nearly all of it
away to charity and went back to taking care of themselves.

Jack lasted two months on the farm. Then he was gone again.

I get email from him every once in a while. Mostly he asks after the kids. He never says where he is or
what he's doing instead of working. He never says who he's with, or if he's happy. I guess he is, or he'd
come back here. People usually end up doing what makes them happiest, if they can.