"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Results" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

trickles between the buildings, cars honking, people yelling, a jackhammer rat-a-tat-tatting two blocks
away.
 Her mother asks, How can you raise a child there? There are no lawns, no quiet places, and Jess
says, There are plays and museums and concerts. And her mother says, How're you going to afford
that, honey?

A little boy on a leash stops in front of Jess, and she nearly topples over him. He's blond and
curly-haired, with enormous blue eyes that twinkle as he investigates a spot of gum on the sidewalk. New
Yorkers form a path around him, like a river diverted by a stone, but she glances over her shoulder as
she passes, sees the young man who is his caretaker, a black-haired, blue-eyed man, who does not have
the look of wealth. A nanny perhaps? Or a lucky man, a man whose genetic code needed no tampering
at all.

She wants to turn around, go to the man, ask, Did you choose the right options or did you wait and
see what nature would provide? Did you trust the process? As if there is still a process to trust.

She lets herself into a side door, an unmarked rusted metal door that has been on Broadway since time
immemorial. She goes through back hallways that lead to the box office of a theater whose name has
changed ten times in the last five years, each name with the claim of authenticity.

At the end of her hallway, the box office. Hot and squalid, air-conditioning fifty years old and inefficient.
She puts on small headphones so that she can hear her phone conversations without interrupting anyone
else. She actually works on an ancient keyboard, the office computer plugged into a dozen services from
the venerable TicketMaster to the brand new E-SEAT. It is her job to take the calls requiring her to deny
someone's pleasure, helping the angry, the frustrated, or the very wealthy find the right ticket to the right
show and then, promptly at 5, go to the box office itself and do the same thing in person, hand out tickets
ordered by mail, soothe the customers who arrive on the wrong night, and press a small button beneath
the shelf to get the manager who will discreetly lead those who get angry onto the street.

The job pays very little and she only has it because human beings still expect to find, beyond e-mail and
the digitized voices, a human face, a real person which, as her parents used to say, is becoming
increasingly rare.

Her fianc├й Bryan's job is marginally better. He is a short-order cook in a restaurant near the George
Washington Bridge. He gets home as she's leaving for work. They only have evenings together.

She puts on her headphones, hands shaking, the day already seeming longer than it should. Results, she
knows, could come today, tomorrow, or next week.

Results.

What are you going to do with them? Her father asked. What if there's nothing catastrophic? What
if you're somewhat compatible? Then what will you decide? Will you base your entire future on a
set of numbers, on percentages that have no meaning?

She had no answer for him when he first asked the question, and she has none now. She goes through
her morning's backlog, checks to see if she must return calls, and finds no personal messages. Then she
deliberately fills her mind with times for this season's remake of Fiddler on the Roof, the latest Oscar
Wilde revival, the newestтАФand probably lastтАФplay by Mamet, the one that deals, unsurprisingly, with
the indignities of manly old age.