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

anatomy. Her knees were black and purple; she bruised very easily now.
She left before the old man returned. Trying to thank him would embarrass him and force him to
search for words he did not possess. If she waited she might lose her courage and stay; if she waited she
might convince herself that she did not need to run again to defy the Institute. If she waited they might
trace her to him. It would not matter to them nor help their search if they questioned him, but it would
confuse and hurt him. She felt strangely protective toward him, perhaps as he had felt toward her, as if
people responded to helplessness in ways that had nothing to do with their capacity to think.
Outside it was dark again-- could be still dark, for all the sun Lais had seen. But the sleet had stopped
and it was a midnight-blue morning, cold and clear, and even the city's sky-glow could not dim the stars.
People strolled alone or in groups on the softly lit mall, or sat on the bronze or stone flanks of the
sculptures of prehistoric beasts. Lais stayed in shadows and at edges. No frozen-young faces blanched
on seeing her; no one sidled toward the nearest cmu booth to call the security agents. Many of the
people, by their clothes and languages, were transients who had no reason to be interested in local news.
The haranguers were back after the rain: preachers for bizarre religions, recruiters for little outwoods
colonies, proponents of strange social ideals. Lais could ignore them all, except the ones who preached
against her. She could feel the age about them: they remembered. Only a few kept that much hate,
enough to stand on walls and cry that the freaks were a danger and a curse. Lais crept by them on the
opposite side of the path, as if they could know what she was just by looking. Their voices followed her.
Drained, she stopped and entered one of the frequent cmu booths. The door closed over the sounds.
She needed to rest. The money she had scrounged and smoothed could buy no ticket now past the
watchers in the port. She used it instead to open lines to the city's computers, and they returned to her
the power of machines. Their lure was too great, measured against the delay. The problem lay so clear in
her mind that the programs needing to be run sprang Out full-grown. She did a minute's worth of
exploration and put a block on the lines so she could not be cut off as soon as her money ran out. It
should hold long enough. Into the wells she inserted the data cubes she had carried around for two
months. Working submerged her; reality dissolved.
Later, while waiting for more important output, Lais almost idly probed for vulnerability in the city
programs, seeking to construct for herself a self-erasing escape route. The safeguards were intricate, but
hidden flaws leaped out at Lais and the defenses fell, laying the manager programs open to her abilities. It
was hardly more difficult than blocking the lines. At that moment she could have put glitches in the city's
services and untraceable bugs in its programs. She could see a thousand ways to cause disruption for
mere annoyance; she could detour garbage service and destroy commercial records and mismatch mail
codes and reroute the traffic, and there were a thousand times a thousand ways to disrupt things
destructively, to turn a community of a million people into the ruined inhabitants of a chaotic war zone.
Entropy was all on her side. Yet when the city was stretched out vulnerable before her, the momentary
eagerness to destroy left her. The fact that she could have done it seemed to be enough. Taking
vengeance on the plastic people would have been senseless, and very much like experimenting with mice
or rabbits or lower primates, small furry stupid beasts that accept the pain and degradation with
frightened resignation in their wide deep eyes, not knowing why. The emotional isolation that might have
allowed her to tamper with the city was shattered in her own experience and existence as a laboratory
animal, knowing, but not really understanding why.
She slammed at the terminal to close down the holes she had made in the city's defenses, and touched
it more gently to complete her work. She used an hour of computer time in less than an hour of real time.
The results came chuckling out: first one, then a second world ecosystem map in fluorescent colors,
shading through the spectrum from violet for concrete through blue and green and yellow for high to low
certainty to orange and red for theoretical projections. The control map was mostly blue, very little red: it
looked good. Its data had been nothing but a sample of ordinary dirt, analyzed down to its isotopes, from
the grounds of the outpost, where Lais had been working when she got sick. The map showed the
smooth flow of natural evolution, spotted here and there with the quick jumps and twists and bare spots
and rootless branches of alien human occupation. Its accuracy was extraordinary. Lais had not thought