"Geoffrey Landis - Ecopoiesis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

But her eyes had suddenly flared with interest, and, for the first time, she
looked at me and actually saw me. "Old LA? Interesting. Have you been there?"
I didn't want to admit that I hadn't, so I temporized. "I know a good guide."
OLA was one of the most dangerous, and certainly the oddest, of the ecosystems
on the Earth. Back at the end of the second Elizabethan age, the doomed city had
been the home of a dozen or more gene-splicing laboratories, corporations that
had made synthetic retroviruses to replace flawed DNA with custom-designed
synthetic, right inside the chromosome of the target organism. Other cities had
such labs, too, of course, and Los Angeles hadn't even been the most prominent
of them. Just the unluckiest.
The virus that had gotten free was a generic gene-splicer. It would copy
snippets of genes at random out of any host organism it happened to infect. As
soon as it vectored to another host, it would make a billion copies of itself,
and of its copied DNA, copy the genes back into a likely spot in the genome of
the new host, and then start over again from the beginning by grabbing a snippet
of DNA from the new host. As a parting gift to the new organism, it would then
trigger the cell's own enzyme promoters to express the DNA.
The fact that retroviruses copy DNA from one organism to another is a natural
process, of course; just a part of the mechanics of evolution. The rogue virus
had the effect of a million years of evolution, set loose in a single day:
chaos.
Most of the additions to the genome were meaningless changes, genes which coded
neither useful nor harmful proteins. Most of the changes that had effect were
dysfunctional, and killed the hosts over the course of a few days or weeks, if
they were lucky, or produced an explosion of cancers that killed the host over
the course of months, if not so lucky. Over the course of the first year a great
die-off occurred.
The things that survived were-- strange. The rogue virus had indiscriminately
cut and pasted genes with no notion of species; what came out of the mingling
were neither humans nor animals nor plants, but weird mixtures: predatory
plants, octopuses with hands, tiger-sized raccoons that knew how to use guns,
social bacteria that drew recondite, hypnotic patterns across deserted beaches.
The thrown-together quarantine barriers held, barely, and the hastily-mobilized
scientific effort to combat the virus devised a specific antiviral protein that
knocked out the rogue virus's ability to reproduce. The plague was stopped
before it spread outside the boundaries of what had been Los Angeles.
Inside the hundred-mile ring, surrounded by scorched sand and silent, instant
death, what had once been Los Angeles was still evolving toward a new ecosystem.
There was no place more deadly, or more strange. The retrovirus itself was gone,
but the creatures it had spawned remained. You could go there, if you signed a
waiver indicating that you knew the danger and were aware that there was no
guarantee that you would come back.
The guide I had been told about was a mysterious survival specialist and weapons
expert named Tally Okumba. Nobody, I was told, knew more about OLA, or about any
of the odd, dangerous corners of the Earth, than Tally did; and nobody knew more
about staying alive, on Earth or elsewhere.
"Old LA," Leah said. Her eyes were veiled, dreaming. "When do we leave?"
#
In the light of the dawn, Tally was dancing, high kicks, spins and backflips in
the low gravity. Over her rebreather, her face was covered with a bone-white