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

She hesitated. In a moment it would be too late. She felt the vengeful animals of memories trying to
hold her back. She jabbed with anger at the keyboard, and sent the control data into storage with the
rest as the last bright lines faded from the screen.
The data was there, for them to notice and fear, or ignore and pay the price. She would give them that
much warning. The normals might find a way to clean-gene people after they were grown; they might
even set Fellows to work on the problem, and let them share the benefits. Lais wondered at her own
naivete, that after everything a small part of her still hoped her people might finally be forgiven.
She left it all behind, even the data cubes, and went back out onto the mall.
***


A hovercar whirred a few streets back; sharp beams from its searchlights touched the edges and
corners of buildings. She walked faster, then ran painfully past firmly shut doors to a piece of sculpture
that doubled as a sitting-park. She crawled into the deepest and most enclosed alcove she could reach.
Outside she could hear the security car intruding on the pedestrian mall. The sucks passed without
suspecting her presence, not recognizing the sculpture as a children's toy, a place to hide and climb and
play, a place for transients to sleep in good weather, a place that, tonight, was Lais' alone.
There was a tiny window by her shoulder that cut through a meter of stone to the outside. Moonlight
polished a square of the wall that narrowed, crept upward, and vanished as the moon set;
Lais put her head on her knees and focused all her attention on herself, tracing lines of fatigue through
her muscles to extrapolate her reserves of stamina, probing at the wells of pain in her body and in her
bones. She had become almost accustomed to betrayal by the physical part of herself, but she was still
used to relying on her mind. The slight tilt from a fine edge of alertness was too recent for her to accept.
Now, forcing herself to be aware of everything she was, she was frightened by the changes to the edge of
panic. She closed her eyes and fought it down, wrestling with a feeling like a great gray slug in her
stomach and a small brown millipede in her throat. Both of them retreated, temporarily. Tears tickled her
cheeks, touched her lips with salt; she scrubbed them away on her rough sleeve.
She felt marginally better. It had occurred to her that she felt light-headed and removed and
hallucinatory because of hunger, not because of advancing pathological changes in her brain; that helped.
It was another matter of relying on feedback from a faulty instrument. The thought of food was still
nauseating. It would be harder to eat the longer she put it off, but, then, perhaps it was too late to matter
anymore.
The sitting-park restored her, as it was meant to; for her it was the silence and isolation, the slight
respite from cold and the clean twisting lines of it, whatever reasons others had for responding. She
would have liked to stay.
She walked a long way toward the edge of the bazaar. Her knees still hurt-- it took her a few minutes
to remember when she had fallen, and why; it seemed a very long time before-- and her legs began to
ache. Resting again, she sat on a wall at the edge of the bazaar, at the edge of the mountaintop, looking
down over a city of pinpoint lights (holes in the ground to hell? but the lights were gold and silver, not
crimson). The lights led in lines down the flanks of the mountain, dendrites from the cell of the city and its
nucleus of landing field. She knew she could get out of Highport. She believed she could run so far that
they would not catch her until too late; she hoped they would never find her, and she hoped her body
would fail her before her mind did, or that she would have courage and presence enough to kill herself if
it did not or if the pain grew great enough to break her. All she really had to do was get to the bottom of
the mountain, and past the foothills, until she reached lush jungle and great heat and a climate like an
incubator, where life processes are faster and scavengers prowl, and the destruction of decomposition is
rapid and complete. The jungle would conspire with her to deny the Institute what she considered most
precious, knowledge. She slipped off the wall and started down the hill. Before her the sky was changing
from midnight blue to gray and scarlet with the dawn.
Published by Alexandria Digital Literature. ( http://www.alexlit.com/ )