"ss - Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Monteleone Thomas F)
THOMAS F. MONTELEONE
Breath's a Ware That
Will Not Keep
Thomas F. Monteleone is a newer writer of the hard
working school to which Charles Grant t also belongs. He
is also an extremely sensitive writer, as he has been proving since 1972, when he sold his first story to AMAZING
SCIENCE FICTION, and with his first novel in 1974. In
person, he is a deceptively quiet man with an amazingly
quick perception that tends to be obscured by the gentle
ness of his speech. The story that follows, "Breath's a
Ware That Will Not Keep," takes its title from a poem
called "Rebellion" by A. E. Houseman, and it has a
poetry of its own. The story is part of Tom Monteleone's
"Chicago" series, which will be published later this year
as a novel, THE TIME SWEPT CITY, by Popular Library.
Benjamin Cipriano sat down at his console, casting a quick glance outward to the Breeder Tank below him. He switched his attention to the-controls and opened up a communications channel to the Tank. He pulled the psi-helmet over his head and pressed the throat mike close to his larynx. "Good morning, Feraxya. Feeling okay today?"
His scalp tingled as invisible fingers slipped into his skull to massage his brain. The helmet fed her psiwords into him: "Good morning to you, too, Benjamin." The "voice" sounded just vaguely feminine to him, and his imagination reinforced the conceptualization. "I'm feeling fine. Everything is normal. You know I always feel comfortable when you are on the console."
"Thank you," said Cipriano, pausing for a moment. "Now, I have some tests to run this morning, so we'd better get started." He flipped several toggles as he continued speaking to her. "It's all routine stuff . . . blood sugar, enzyme scans, placental balance quotients . . . things like that. Nothing to worry about." There was a short silence before she touched his mind again: "I never worry when you're on. Perhaps we'll have time to talk, later on?"
Technically speaking, Feraxya was human. Visually, however, she was an amorphous, slithering, amoeba-like thing. She was tons of genetically cultured flesh, a human body inflated and stretched and distended until it was many times its normal size. Lost beneath her abundant flesh was a vestigial skeleton which floated disconnected and unmoving in a gelatinous sea. Her bioneered organs were swollen to immense proportions and hundreds of liters of blood pumped through her extensive circulatory system.
Yet he knew, even as he activated the probes that plunged into her soft flesh, that she was still a woman to him. A very special kind of woman. From her earliest moments of consciousness, she had spent her life contained within the glassteel walls of the Breeder Tank. It was an immense cube, ten meters on each side, the back wall covered with connecting cables and tubes which carried her life support systems, monitoring devices, and biomedical elements that were necessary for her continued maintenance.
To Cipriano, she was the glassteel tube. Feraxya had no face, no arms, no legs; all those things were buried beneath the folds of swollen flesh that rippled with life fiuids. And yet she was a person, a Citizen of Chicago, who had received the standard education by means of special input programs piped through her sensory nerves and into her brain, bypassing her useless eyes and ears. She also represented several basic changes from previous Host Mothers. Feraxya was a third-generation
mutant; careful genetic selection and programming had given her primary-level psi-powers, which were used in communication and eventually for education. Chicago's Central Computers postulated that the quiet, undisturbed environ of the Breeder Tank would be an ideal atmosphere for the development of psi.
Ben looked away from the giant Tank, leaned back in his chair, and watched the monitoring data come clicking into the tapes at his console. As he waited for the data to accumulate, his gaze wandered down the long row of other consoles like his own, where many other Breeder Monitors sat reading their indicators and print-outs. Each Monitor was charged with his own Host-Mother; each Host Mother held within her an enlarged uterus that was filled with thirty human fetuses.
It was in this way that the Host-Mothers provided the City with every desired type of Citizen. There were no outcasts, no misfits, now that society, was shaped by the benevolent but highly efficient Central Computers of Chicago. An entire hierarchy was cybernetically conceived and programmed, then handed down through the bureaucratic chain until it reached the Bioneers and Eugenicists. In Chicago's massive Eugenic Complex, hundreds of Host-Mothers like Feraxya carried the fetuses of the next generation of Citizens. Laborers, artists, scientists, bureaucrats, and technicians-all pre-coded and expected.
A message suddenly flashed on Cipriano's console which reminded him to check the night-shift Monitor's report. He did so and found it satisfactory. Feraxya had only recently received her first uterine implant and there was little for him to do at this point except routine systems-checks. Later when her brood of fetuses grew and began to crowd her great womb, Cipriano's tasks would also grow. A Host-Mother nearing the end of gestation required much attention.
He replaced the psi-helmet on his head and signaled to her. A tingling sensation touched his mind as she was raised from her inner thoughts: "Yes, Ben?"
"The databanks are still filling," he said "I've some
free time. Thought you might want to talk for a little while."
"Yes, I would., Thank you. I wanted to tell you about the dream I had.'. . ."
"A dream?" he asked. "About what?"
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