"John Varley - The Barbie Murders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

races, of course. Orientals had no trouble telling each other apart. So I thought that you... that you people
would ..." She trailed off at the look of blank incomprehension on the barbie's face.

"We don't know what you're talking about."

Bach's shoulders slumped.

"You mean you can't... not even if you saw her again..?"

The woman shrugged. "We all look the same to this one."


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Anna-Louise Bach sprawled out on her flotation bed later that night, surrounded by scraps of paper.
Untidy as it was, her thought processes were helped by actually scribbling facts on paper rather than
filing them in her datalink. And she did her best work late at night, at home, in bed, after taking a bath or
making love. Tonight she had done both and found she needed every bit of the invigorating clarity it gave
her.

Standardists.

They were an off-beat religious sect founded ninety years earlier by someone whose name had not

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 The Barbie Murders

survived. That was not surprising, since Standardists gave up their names when they joined the order,
made every effort consistent with the laws of the land to obliterate the name and person as if he or she
had never existed. The epithet "barbie" had quickly been attached to them by the press. The origin of the
word was a popular children's toy of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a plastic, sexless,
mass-produced "girl" doll with an elaborate wardrobe.

The barbies had done surprisingly well for a group which did not reproduce, which relied entirely on new
members from the outside world to replenish their numbers. They had grown for twenty years, then
reached a population stability where deaths equalled new members-which they called "components."
They had suffered moderately from religious intolerance, moving from country to country until the
majority had come to Luna sixty years ago.

They drew new components from the walking wounded of society, the people who had not done well in a
world which preached conformity, passivity, and tolerance of your billions of neighbors, yet rewarded
only those who were individualistic and aggressive enough to stand apart from the herd. The barbies had
opted out of a system where one had to be at once a face in the crowd and a proud individual with hopes
and dreams and desires. They were the inheritors of a long tra-dition of ascetic withdrawal, surrendering
their names, their bodies, and their temporal aspirations to a life that was ordered and easy to understand.

Bach realized she might be doing some of them a disservice-there could be those among them who were
attracted simply by the religious ideas of the sect, though Bach felt there was little in the teachings that
made sense.