"Robert Reed - A Place With Shade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

"It sounds like Beringa," I muttered.

"My home world, yes." Beringa was a giant snowball terraformed by commercial
souls, carpeted with plastics and rock and rich artificial soils, its interior
still frozen while billions lived above in a kind of perpetual summer,
twenty-hour days but limited heat. The natives were built like Provo, tailored
genes keeping them comfortably fat and perpetually warm. In essence, Beringa
was
an inspired apartment complex, lovely in every superficial way.

The kind of work I hated most, I was thinking.

"This environment," I heard, "is very much makeshift."

I gestured at the tundra. "What happened?"

"Ula thought I would enjoy a grove of hot-sap trees."
Grimacing, I said, "They wouldn't work at all." Ecologically speaking. Not to
mention aesthetically.

"Regardless," said Provo, "I purchased vats of totipotent cells, at no small
cost, and she insisted on genetically tailoring them. Making them into a new
species."

"Easy enough," I whispered.

"And yet." He paused and sighed. "Yet some rather gruesome metabolites were
produced. Released. Persistent and slow toxins that moved through the food
web.
My mammoths sickened and died, and since I rather enjoy mammoth meat, having
been raised on little else --"

"You were poisoned," I gasped.

"Somewhat, yes. But I have recovered nicely." The nonsmile showed again, eyes
pained. Bemused. "Of course she was scared for me and sorry. And of course I
had
to pay for an extensive cleanup, which brought on a total environmental
failure.
This tundra package was an easy replacement, and besides, it carries a
warranty
against similar troubles."

Popular on toxic worlds, I recalled. Heavy metals and other terrors were
shunted
away from the human foods.

"You see? I'm not a simple miser."

"It shouldn't have happened," I offered.