"Peter Watts - Bulk Food" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

all the edge he needs. ThatтАЩs where heтАЩs headed now, at top speed.
Herschel and his ten grand. Tetsuo and his lousy aim. Doug
could kiss them both. When a guest makes a kill, they get to keep
the carcass.
But when they fuck up, it's whale steaks in the gift shop.

***

Well, no one expected the whales to be such assholes.
Certainly not Anna Marie Hamilton and her army of whale-
huggers. The Gospel according to Anna Marie said that orcas (you
never called them тАЬkiller whalesтАЭ) were gentle, intelligent creatures
who lived in harmonious matriarchal societies. Humans were
ethically bound to respect their cultural autonomy. Kidnapping
these creatures from the wild, tearing them from their nurturing
female-centered family units and selling them into bondage for
barbaric human entertainmentтАФthis went beyond mere animal
abuse. This was slavery, pure and simple.
Bulk Food 13

That was all before the Breakthrough, of course. These days,
itтАЩs kind of hard to rail against the enslavement of orcas when
every schoolkid knows that all orca society, Resident or Transient,
is based on slavery. Always has been. The matriarchs arenтАЩt
kindly nurturing feminist grandmas, theyтАЩre eight-ton black-and-
white Mommie Dearests with really big teeth. And their children
arenтАЩt treasured guardians of the next generation, either. TheyтАЩre
genetic commodities, a common currency for trade between pods,
and who knew what uses they got put to? It's a scientific fact that
almost half of all killer whales die before reaching their first
birthday.
That infant-mortality stat has been a godsend to the aquarium
industry ever since it was derived in the nineteen-seventiesтАФWell
of course itтАЩs tragic that another calf died here in our habitat but
you know, even in the wild killer whales just aren't very good
parentsтАФ but even the whalejailers were taken aback to be proven
so utterly right. It didnтАЩt take them long to recover from the
shock, though. To embrace the irrefutable evidence of this kindred
intelligence. To see the error of their ways. To reach out across
that immense interspecies gulf with a business proposition.
And what do you know. The Matriarchs were more than happy
to cut a deal.

***

SLAVERS OF THE SEVEN SEAS, a wall-sized viewscreen
shouts in capital letters. Beside it, smaller screens run looped
footage already seen a million times in every living room on the
continent: priests and politicians and longliners and whale-
huggers, riding the Friendship Flotilla out into history to sign the