"Nancy Kress - The Mountain to Mohammed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

piers and dead fish and garbage. Even here, in the Morningside Security Enclave,
where that part of the apartment maintenance fees left over from security went to
keep the streets clean. Yellow lights gleamed through the gloom, stacked twelve
stories high but crammed close together; even insurables couldn't afford to heat
much space.
Where they were going there wouldn't be any heat at all.
Jesse followed the slight man down the subway steps. The guy paid for both of
them, a piece of quixotic dignity that made Jesse smile. Under the lights he got a
better look: The man was older than he'd thought, with webbed lines around the eyes
and long, thin lips over very bad teeth. Probably hadn't ever had dental coverage in
his life. What had been in his genescan? God, what a system.
"What do I call you?" he said as they waited on the platform. He kept his voice
low, just in case.
"Kenny."
"All right, Kenny," Jesse said, and smiled. Kenny didn't smile back. Jesse told
himself it was ridiculous to feel hurt; this wasn't a social visit. He stared at the tracks
until the subway came.
At this hour the only other riders were three hard-looking men, two black and
one white, and an even harder-looking Hispanic girl in a low-cut red dress. After a
minute Jesse realized she was under the control of one of the black men sitting at the
other end of the car. Jesse was careful not to look at her again. He couldn't help
being curious, though. She looked healthy. All four of them looked healthy, as did
Kenny, except for his teeth. Maybe none of them were uninsurable; maybe they just
couldn't find a job. Or didn't want one. It wasn't his place to judge.
That was the whole point of doing this, wasn't it?


###


The other two times had gone as easy as Mike said they would. A deltoid suture
on a young girl wounded in a knife fight, and burn treatment for a baby scalded by a
pot of boiling water knocked off a stove. Both times the families had been so
grateful, so respectful. They knew the risk Jesse was taking. After he'd treated the
baby and left antibiotics and analgesics on the pathetic excuse for a kitchen counter,
a board laid across the non-functional radiator, the young Hispanic mother had
grabbed his hand and covered it with kisses. Embarrassed, he'd turned to smile at
her husband, wanting to say something, wanting to make clear he wasn't just another
sporadic do-gooder who happened to have a medical degree.
"I think the system stinks. The insurance companies should never have been
allowed to deny health coverage on the basis of genescans for potential disease, and
employers should never have been allowed to keep costs down by health-based
hiring. If this were a civilized country, we'd have national health care by now!"
The Hispanic had stared back at him, blank-faced.
"Some of us are trying to do better," Jesse said.
It was the same thing MikeтАФDr. Michael CassidyтАФhad said to Jesse and Anne
at the end of a long drunken evening celebrating the half-way point in all their
residencies. Although, in retrospect, it seemed to Jesse that Mike hadn't drunk very
much. Nor had he actually said very much outright. It was all implication, probing
masked as casual philosophy. But Anne had understood, and refused instantly.