"Michael Swanwick - Mother Grasshopper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

leftovers were stored away for later.

After we'd eaten, Rivera caught my eye and gestured with his chin. We went
outside, and he led me to a shed out back. He unpadlocked the door and we
stepped within. A line of ten people lay unmoving on plainbuilt beds. They were
each catheterized to a drip-bag of processed ichor. Light from the door caught
their hair, ten white haloes in the gloom.

"We brought them with us," Rivera said. "Thought we'd be doing well enough to
make a go of it. Lately, though, I don't know, maybe it's the drought, but the
blood's been running thin, and it's not like we have the money to have a new
well drilled."

"I understand." Then, because it seemed a good time to ask, "There was a man
came by this way probably less'n a week ago. Tall, riding a --"

"He wouldn't help," Harry said. "Said it wasn't his responsibility. Then, before
he drove off, the sonofabitch tried to buy some of our food." He turned and
spat. "He told us you and the woman would be coming along. We been waiting."

"Wait. He told you I'd have a woman with me?"

"It's not just us we have to think of!" he said with sudden vehemence. "There's
the young fellers, too. They come along and all a man's stiffnecked talk about
obligations and morality goes right out the window. Sometimes I think how I
could come out here with a length of iron pipe and-- well." He shook his head
and then, almost pleadingly, said, "Can't you do something?"

"I think so." A faint creaking noise made me turn then. Victoria stood frozen in
the doorway. The light through her hair made of it a white flare. I closed my
eyes, wishing she hadn't stumbled across this thing. In a neutral voice I said,
"Get my bag."

Then Rivera and I set to haggling out a price.

We left the settlement with a goodly store of food and driving their third-best
pickup truck. It was a pathetic old thing and the shocks were scarce more than a
memory. We bumped and jolted toward the south.

For a long time Victoria did not speak. Then she turned to me and angrily
blurted, "You killed them!"

"It was what they wanted."

"How can you say that?" She twisted in the seat and punched me in the shoulder.
Hard. "How can you sit there and...say that?"

"Look," I said testily. "It's simple mathematics. You could make an equation out
of it. They can only drill so much ichor. That ichor makes only so much food.
Divide that by the number of mouths there are to feed and hold up the result