"Charles Stross - Rogue Farm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

"Hear you've got farm trouble," she said non-commitally as she worked the hand pump
on the beer engine.

"Uh-huh." Joe focussed on the glass. "Where'd you hear that?"

"Never you mind." She put the glass down to give the head time to settle; "you want to
talk to Arthur and Wendy-the-Rat about farms. They had one the other year."

"Happens." Joe took his pint. "Thanks, Brenda. The usual?"
"Yeah." She turned back to the washer. Joe headed over to the far corner where a pair of
huge leather sofas, their arms and backs ripped and scarred by generations of Brenda's
semi-feral cats, sat facing each other on either side of a cold hearth. "Art, Rats. What's
up?"

"Fine, thanks." Wendy-the-Rat was well over seventy, one of those older folks who had
taken the p53 chromosome hack and seemed to wither into timelessness: white
dreadlocks, nose and ear studs dangling loosely from leathery holes, skin like a desert
wind. Art had been her boy-toy once, back before middle age set its teeth into him. He
hadn't had the hack, and looked older than she did. Together they ran a smallholding,
mostly pharming vaccine chicks but also doing a brisk trade in high-nitrate fertilizer that
came in on the nod and went out in sacks by moonlight.

"Heard you had a spot of bother?"

"'S true." Joe took a cautious mouthful. "Mm, good. You ever had farm trouble?"

"Maybe." Wendy looked at him askance, slitty-eyed. "What kinda trouble you got in
mind?"

"Got a farm collective. Says it's going to Jupiter or something. Bastard's homesteading
the woods down by old Jack's stream. Listen ...Jupiter?"

"Aye well, that's one of the destinations, sure enough." Art nodded wisely, as if he knew
anything.

"Naah, that's bad." Wendy-the-Rat frowned. "Is it growing trees, do you know?"

"Trees?" Joe shook his head. "Haven't gone and looked, tell the truth. What the fuck
makes people do that to themselves, anyway?"

"Who the fuck cares?" Wendy's face split in a broad grin. "Such as don't think they're
human anymore, meself."

"It tried to sweet-talk us," Joe said.

"Aye, they do that," said Arthur, nodding emphatically. "Read somewhere they're the
ones as think we aren't fully human. Tools an' clothes and farmyard machines, like?
Sustaining a pre-post-industrial lifestyle instead of updating our genome and living off
the land like God intended?"