"Norman Spinrad - Journals of the Plague Years 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

conceive of, through politics.
I became a prelaw major. I entered law school. I graduated with honors I
found courted, and married a pure Christian virgin, and soon thereafter
impregnated Elaine with Billy, ran for the Virginia State Assembly, and was
elected.
The rest of my life is, as they say, history.

LINDA LEWIN

I was just another horny spoiled little brat until I Got It, just like all
my horny spoiled little friends in Berkeley. Upper-middle-class family with an
upper-middle-class house in the hills. My own car for my sixteenth birthday,
along with the latest model sex interface.
Oh yes, they did! My mom and dad were no Unholy Rollers, they were
educated intellectual liberal Democrats, they read all the literature, they had
been children of the Sexy Seventies, they were realists, they knew the score.
These are terrible times, they told me. We know you'll be tempted to have
meat. You might get away with it for years. Or you might Get It the first time
out. Don't risk it, Linda. We know how you feel, we remember when everyone did
meat. We know this is unnatural. But we know the consequences, and so do you.
And they dragged me out on the porch and made me look out across the Bay
at San Francisco. The Bay Bridge with its blown-out center span. The pig boats
patrolling the shoreline. The gunships buzzing about the periphery like angry
horseflies.
Meat City. That's where you'd end up, Linda. Nothing's worth that, now
is it?
I nodded. But even then, I wondered.
I had grown up with the vision of the shining city across the Bay. Oh
yes, I had also grown up knowing that the lovely hills and graceful buildings
and sparkling night lights masked a charnel house of the Plague, black-carders
all, 100 percent. We were told horror stories about it in sex hygiene classes
starting in kindergarten.
But from about the fifth grade on, we told ourselves our own stories too.
We whispered them in the ladies' room. We uploaded them onto bulletin boards.
We downloaded them, printed them out, wiped them from memory so our parents
wouldn't see them, masturbated over the printouts.
As porn went, it was crude, amateurish stuff. What could you expect from
teenage virgins? And it was all the same. A teenager Gets It. And runs away
to San Francisco. Or disappears into the underground. And, sentenced to death
already, sets out to enjoy all the pleasures of the meat on the way out, in
crude, lurid, sensational detail. And of course, the porn sheets all ended long
before Condition Terminal was reached.
 But I was a good little girl and I was a smart little girl and the sex
interface my parents gave me was the best money could buy, not some cheap one-
way hooker's model. It had everything. The vaginal insert was certified to
five atmospheres, but it was only fifty microns thick, heated to blood
temperature, and totally flexible. It had a neat little clit-hood programmed
for five varieties of electric stimulation and six vibratory patterns. I could
wear the thing under my jeans, finger the controls and never fail to come, even
in the dullest math class.