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

herself still capable of elation, but she was smiling involuntarily, and for a few moments she forgot about
pain and exhaustion.
The second map had less blue and more red, but it seemed unified and logical. Its data had been a bit
of a drone sample from an unexplored world, and it showed that the programs were very likely doing
what they were supposed to do: deduce the structure and relationships of a world's living things.
 Lais' past research had produced results that could hardly be understood, much less used, by normals.
It would be extended and built on by her own kind, eventually, not in her lifetime, or perhaps not even in
the lifetime that should have belonged to her. This time she had set out to discover the limits of theory
applied to minimal data, and the applications were not only obvious but of great potential benefit. When
the hounds tracked her, they would find her last programs, and they would be used. Lais shrugged. If she
had wanted to be vindictive, she would have tried not to finish, but her mind and her curiosity and her
need for knowledge were not things she could flick on and off at will, to produce results like handsful of
cookies.
The screen blinked. Her time had run out long since, and the computer was beginning to cut Out the
obstructions she had put in its billing mechanism. But they held for the moment, and the computer began
obediently to print out the data blocks after the map and the programs. She reached to turn it off, then
drew her hand back.
Among crystal structures and mass spectrum plots a DNA sequence zipped by, almost unnoticed,
almost unnoticeable, but it caught her attention. She thought it was from the drone sample. She brought it
back and put it on the screen. The city computers had all the wrong library programs, and who bothered
to translate DNA anymore anyway? She picked a place that looked right and did it by memory; for Lais
it was like typing. AUG, adenine, uracil, guanine. Start: methionine. Life is the same all over. The
computer built a chain of amino acids like a string of popbeads. 2D valiantly masqueraded as 3D. Lais
threw in entropy and let the chain fold up. When it was done she doubled and redoubled it and added a
copy of its DNA. The screen flickered again; the openings she had made in the computer's safeguards
were beginning to close, and alarms would be sounding.
The pieces on the screen began the process of self-aggregation, and when they were done she had a
luminous green reproduction, a couple of million times real size, of something that existed on the borders
of life. It was a virus, that was obvious. She could not stay and translate the whole genome and look for
equivalents for the enzymes it would need. She did not have to. It felt, to all her experience, and memory,
and intuition, like a tumor virus. She glanced at the printout again, and realized with slow shock, free-fall
sensation, that this was from the control data.
There were any number of explanations. Someone could have been using the virus as a carrier in
genetic surgery, replacing its dangerous parts with genes that it could insert into a chromosome. They did
not grow freaks at that outpost, but they might have made the virus stocks that the freaks were infected
with when they were no more than one-cell zygotes. Someone could have been careless with their sterile
technique, especially if they had not been told what the virus was used for and how dangerous it was.
The looming green virus particle, as absurd and obscene that size as the magnified head of a fly,
dimmed. The computer was almost through the block. Lais had been in the company of machines so long
that they seemed to have as much personality as people; this one muttered and grumbled at her for
stealing its time. It lumbered to stop her, a hippopotamus playing crocodile.
Lais had dug the virus up outside in the dirt, free, by chance, and there was a lot of it. If it were
infectious-- and it seemed complete-- it could be infecting people at and around the outpost, not very
many, but some, integrating itself into their chromosomes, eradicating the effects of clean-gening. It might
wait ten or fifteen or fifty years, or forever, but when injury or radiation or carcinogen induced it out, it
would begin to kill. It would be too late to cure people of it then, just as it was for Lais; the old, crippling
methods, surgery, radiation, might work for a few, but if the disease were similar to hers, fast-growing,
metastasizing, nothing would be much use.
The light on the screen began to go out. She moved quickly and stored the map programs, the maps,
the drone data.