"Ian McDonald - Some Strange Desire" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

consultants: how long do you think it would be before some goi discovered the
truth about Cassiopia?"
"You would let my sister, your daughter die, rather than compromise security?"
"Do not ask me to answer questions like that. Listen up. One of our regulars
here is an ul-goi lawyer. Just to make conversation I asked him once what our
legal position was. This is what he told me: we may think and talk and look like
humans, but we are not human. And, as non-humans, we are therefore the same as
animals --less than animals; most animals enjoy some protection under the law,
but not us. They could do what they liked to us, they could strip us of all our
possessions, jail us indefinitely, use us to experiment on, gas us, hunt us down
one by one for sport, burn us in the street, and in the eyes of the law it would
be no different from killing rats. We are not human, we are not under the
protection of the law. To compromise our secrecy is to threaten us all."
"He is dying and I want to know what to do."
"You know what to do." The voice startled me. It was like the voice of an old,
corroded mechanism returning to life after long inactivity. "You know what to
do," repeated my grandmother, stepping through a moment of lucidity into this
last decade of the millennium. "Can I have taught you so badly, or is it you
were such poor pupils? Pere Teakbois the Balancer demanded jhash of us in return
for our enormously long lives, but Saint Semillia of the Mercies bargained a
ransom price. Blood. The life is in the blood; that life may buy back a life."
Of course I knew the story. I even understood the biological principle behind
the spurious theology. A massive blood transfusion might stimulate the disrupted
immune system into regenerating itself, in a similar sense to the way our bodies
rebuild themselves by using goi sex cells as a template. I had known the answer
to jhash for as long as I had known of jhash itself: why had I refused to accept
it and looked instead for, yes, ludicrous, yes, dangerous alternatives that
could not possibly work?
Because Saint Semillia of the Mercies sells his dispensations dear.
Mother had given me a shoeboxful of equipment, most of it obsolete stuff from
the last century when the last case of jhash had occurred. She did not tell me
the outcome. Either way, I was not certain I wanted to know. In the house on
Shantallow Mews I ran a line into my arm and watched the Six O 'clock News while
I pumped out two plastic bags. Internecine warfare in the Tory party. Some of
the faces I knew, intimately. The blood seemed to revive Cassiopia but I knew it
could only be temporary. I could never supply enough: after only two pints I was
weak and trembling. All I could do was hold the sickness at bay. I took the icon
of Saint Semillia of the Mercies down from the wall, asked it what I should do.
His silence told me nothing I did not already know myself. Out there. They are
few, they are not perfect, but they exist, and you must find them. I tletched,
dressed in black leotard, black tights, black mini, black heels, wrapped it all
under a duster coat and went down to the Cardboard Cities.
What is it your philosophers teach? That we live in the best of all possible
worlds? Tell that to the damned souls of the cardboard cities in the tunnels
under your railway stations and underpasses. Tesh have no such illusions. It has
never been a tenet of our faith that the world should be a good place. Merely
survivable.
Cloaked in a nimbus of hormonal awe, I went down. You would smell the piss and
the beer and the smoke and the dampness and something faint and semi-perceived
you cannot quite recognize. To me that thing you cannot recognize is what is