"John Varley - Persistence Of Vision2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

was one group who seemed to feel that getting back to nature consisted of sleeping in pigshit and
eating food a buzzard wouldn't touch. Many were obviously doomed. They would leave behind a group
of empty hovels and the memory of cholera.
So the place wasn't paradise, not by a long way. But there were successes. Cane or two had
been there since '63 or '64 and were raising their third generation. I was disappointed to see
that most of these were the ones that departed least from established norms of behavior, though
some of the differences could be startling. I suppose the most radical experiments are the least
likely to bear fruit.
I stayed through the winter. No one was surprised to see me a second time. It seems that
many people came to Taos and shopped around. I seldom stayed more than three weeks at any one
place, and always pulled my weight. I made many friends and picked up skills that would serve me
if I stayed off the roads. I toyed with the idea of staying at one of them forever. When I
couldn't make up my mind, I was advised that there was no hurry. I could go to California and
return. They seemed sure 1 would.
So when spring came I headed west over the hills. I stayed off the roads and slept in the
open. Many nights I would stay at another commune, until they finally began to get farther apart,
then tapered off entirely. The country was not as pretty as before.
Then, three days' leisurely walking from the last commune, I came to a wall.

In 1964, in the United States, there was an epidemic of German measles, or rubella.
Rubella is one of the mildest of

infectious diseases. The only time it's a problem is when a woman contracts it in the first four
months of her pregnancy. It is passed to the fetus, which usually develops complications. These
complications include deafness, blindness, and damage to the brain.
In 1964, in the old days before abortion became readily available, there was nothing to be
done about it. Many pregnant women caught rubella and went to term. Five thousand deaf-blind
children were born in one year. The normal yearly incidence of deaf-blind children in the United
States is one hundred and forty.
In 1970 these five thousand potential Helen Kellers were all six years old. It was quickly


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seen that there was a shortage of Anne Sullivans. Previously, deaf-blind children could be sent to
a small number of special institutions.
It was a problem. Not just anyone can cope with a deafblind child. You can't tell them to
shut up when they moan; you can't reason with them, tell them that the moaning is driving you
crazy. Some parents were driven to nervous breakdowns when they tried to keep their children at
home.
Many of the five thousand were badly retarded and virtually impossible to reach, even if
anyone had been trying. These ended up, for the most part, warehoused in the hundreds of anonymous
nursing homes and institutes for "special" children. They were put into beds, cleaned up once a
day by a few overworked nurses, and generally allowed the full blessings of liberty: they were
allowed to rot freely in their own dark, quiet, private universes. Who can say if it was bad for
them? None of them were heard to complain.
Many children with undamaged brains were shuffled in among the retarded because they were
unable to tell anyone that they were in there behind the sightless eyes. They failed the batteries
of tactile tests, unaware that their fetes hung in the balance .when they were asked to fit round