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

"You went up," 17 said, staring at him boldly. She had seen him gimping
around the market in his exoframe, but he seemed much taller in his little
shack. He was very thin inside the frame, like a cartoon stick man. No
hair, his scalp seamed with lumpy scars, his face burned brown and
leathery; he looked like one of the turtles that swam in the canal by the
cooler outlets.
It was hot and steamy in his shack. The glossy leaves of plants shone in
vivid greens and oranges under the rack of purplish sunlamps. There was a
shelf of books over his cot, a toilet connected to a tank of spirulina, a
glass-fronted cabinet where he kept his pharmaceuticals.
Doc Roberts said, "I upped and I reupped. More than twenty years, girly.
It made me what I am."
"I want to go."
"That's a hard road. Stay in the dirt. Find a man. Have babies."
"No! Kill myself first!" Suddenly, amazingly, she was crying. She made
fists, knuckled tears. "You tell me. Tell me how. How to get out and up."
Doc Roberts sort of leaned into his frame, the way an ordinary man might
slump in a chair. He looked at her нн really looked. She looked right
back. She knew he hadn't had many customers. Breeders looked after each
other and their kids; free labourers paid to get their lumps and wounds
hacked and sealed at the Factory dispensary.
He said, "What's your name?"
She said defiantly, "17."
She'd chosen it herself. She liked the way it screwed up the system.
Clerks would ask if it was her given name, and she'd say no, it was what
she called herself. Was she her mother's seventeenth kid, the clerk would
want to know, and she'd say no. Her age? She didn't know, fifteen maybe.
What was her real name then? 17, she'd say, stubborn, defiant. That was
what she was. 17. She had started calling herself that a little while
before she'd left the cycling pack, had beaten any kid who called her
different until it stuck. Her mother called her 'Teen, a compromise.
Doc Roberts didn't question it. He put his turtle head to one side and
said, "You pay me, 17, and I'll give you some teaching. How does that
sound?"
That was how it began. She took up cycling again to pay him. Mercury
chases were the best. She knew the tunnels under the Factory as well as
anyone. She knew where the heavy silvery stuff collected, always came back
with twice as much as anyone else. But it was dangerous. Not just because
mercury and other heavy metals could give her the shakes or the falling
sickness, but because sooner or later a gang of jacks or a pack of kids
would find her down there and beat her and maybe kill her for her
gleanings.
She surprised Doc Roberts by being able to read (she had learnt from the
brief captions under the cartoon notices the bulls pasted everywhere), and
he soon discovered her knack of being able to multiply and divide long
numbers without really thinking about it.
"You're an idiot savant," he said.
"You mean like a dummy? I'm no dummy."
"Maybe not. But you have a trick in your head. You can do something that
takes most people a lot of brain hurt as naturally as breathing."