"Vonda N. McIntyre-The Genius Freaks" - читать интересную книгу автора (McIntyre Vonda N)

was damp all over with feverish sweat. Her head ached, and her knees were sore.
"I'm sorry, miz, I was afraid you'd hurt yourself." He must have been rebuffed and denigrated all his
life, to be so afraid of touching another human being.
 "It's all right," she said. She seemed always to be saying that to him. Her mental clock buzzed and
jumped to catch up with reality: twelve hours since the trid woke her up.
The old man sat quietly, perhaps waiting for orders. He did not take his gaze from her, but his
surveillance was of a strange and anxious childlike quality, without recognition. It seemed not to have
occurred to him that his stray might be the Institute fugitive. He seemed to live in two spheres of reality.
When she looked at his eyes, he put his head down and hunched his shoulders. His hands lay limp and
half-curled in his lap. "I didn't know what to do. They yell at me when I ask stupid questions." No
bitterness, just acceptance of the judgment that any question he could ask must be stupid.
She forced back her own useless flare of anger. To awaken hate in him would be cruel. "You did the
right thing," she said. She would have said the same words if he had innocently betrayed her. Two other
lines of possible reality converged in her mind: herself of two months or a year before, somehow
unchanged by exile and disillusionment, and an old man who called Aid for the sick girl in his room. She
would have told him exactly what she thought without regard for his feelings; she would have looked on
him not with compassion but with the kind of impersonal pity that is almost disdain. But they would have
been more similar in one quality: neither of them would have recognized the isolation of their lives.
"Are you hungry?"
"No." That was easier than trying to explain why she was, but could not eat. He accepted it without
question or surprise, and still seemed to wait for her orders. She realized that she could stay and he
would never dare complain-- perhaps not wish to-- nor dare tell anyone she was here. If he had been
one of the plastic people she might have used him, but he was not, and she could not: full circle.
His hands moved in his lap, nervous.
"What's wrong?" She was careful to say it gently.
As an apology, he said, "Miz, I have to work."
"You don't need my permission," she said, trying to keep her tone from sounding like a reprimand.
He got up, stood uncertainly in the center of his room, wanting to speak, not knowing the right words.
"Maybe later you'll be hungry." He fled.
She unwrapped herself from the blanket and massaged her knees. She wandered uneasily around the
room, feeling trapped and alien.
One station on the trid bounced down all news. She came on at the quarter hour. The hope that they
had only traced her to this world evaporated as she listened to the bulletin: the broadcast was
satellite-transmitted; unless they had known, they would not have said she was in Highport and risked
missing her in another city. They kept saying she was crazy, in the politest possible terms. They could
never say that the malignancy was not in her mind but in her body. No one got cancer anymore. People
who related their birth dates to the skies of old Earth did not even call themselves Moon children if they
were born under the Crab. All the normals had been clean-gened, to strip even the potential for cancer
from their chromosomes. Only a few of them, and now Lais, knew that the potential had been put back
into the Institute Fellows, as punishment and control.
They used even this announcement to remind the people how important the Fellows were, how many
advances they had made, how many benefits they had provided.
Before, Lais had never known that that sort of constant persuasion was necessary. Perhaps, in fact, it
wasn't. Perhaps they only thought it was, so they continued it, afraid to stop the constant reinforcement,
probing, breaking old scars.
She turned off the trid. There was a small alcove of a bathroom off the old man's quarters; there was
no pool, only a shower. She stripped and took off the dark wig. If there had been a blower she would
have washed her clothes, but there were only a couple of worn towels. She turned on the shower and
slumped under it with water running through her bright, colorless, startling hair, over her shoulders and
breasts and back. Her bones were etched out at ribs and hips, and her muscles made a clear chart of