"Mcauley, Paul J -17" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

17
a short story by Paul J McAuley

It seemed to 17 that her family had been labourers in the Factory forever.
Her mother claimed that her great-great-great grandparents had worked in
the original Factory, and that they had helped in the reconstruction after
the One Big One; her most treasured possession was a photo of men and
women in rags standing in knee-deep mud in front of a hillside of trees
all knocked down in the same direction.
17 had worked since she could walk, when her mother had taught her how to
grade waste paper. Then she had cycled with the kids from her rack,
chasing heavy metal residues in the flues of the refineries, harvesting
mussels in the sewers for their metal-rich shells, sorting through the
spill heaps. She had run with the same pack for ten years, had been boss
for the last three, but at last she had realised that she wasn't
interested in them any more. They were just kids. So she had picked a
fight with the next oldest, a lanky boy called Wulf, had beaten him bloody
and had told him that he was boss now, and had walked away.
That was last winter. Since then she'd been a free labourer, turning up
each day at the canal junction by the cooler stacks and waiting with the
others until the shift foremen arrived and made their pick. It was hard,
dangerous work. The men went to the refineries or foundries. 17 mostly
cleaned the spinners, clever machines which built up hundreds of different
things using frames and cellulose spray. The spinners never stopped, their
spray heads chattering away right above her while she dug out mounds of
stinking cellulose that had accumulated beneath the frames. Blood worms
lived in the stuff, thin red whips a metre long that stung bad if they
lashed your skin. Rat-crabs too, and roaches and black crickets.
Her mother disapproved. It was time she settled down, her mother said,
time she got herself a man and made babies.
They had terrible rows about it. 17 argued that she could do what she
wanted, but she knew that if she stayed a free labourer sooner or later
she'd get hurt. And if she got hurt bad she'd be sent to work the tanks
where wood pulp was dissolved in acid. Most people didn't last long there;
fumes ate their lungs, blinded them, ulcerated their skin until gangrene
set in. But it was that or ending up as a breeder like her mother, blown
up by having kids one after the other, or becoming some jack's troll.
She'd already had a taste of that, thanks to Dim, the prime jack of her
rack. She'd messed around with the other kids of her pack, but Dim had
shown her what real sex was like. She swore she'd kill him or kill herself
if he or any other man tried it again.
Then Doc Roberts came, and everything changed forever.

Doc Roberts was ex-Service, come to the Factory to stretch his pension by
leechcraft. He rented a shack on the roof of one of the racks at the edge
of the quadrant. He filled it with sunlamps and plants and hung out a
shingle announcing his rates.
17 went to see him the second decad after he arrived.
"You're not sick and you're not pregnant," Doc Roberts said, after a
rough, cursory examination. "Why are you here?"