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

only on fish. We didn't know why until after The Breakthrough,
though. It turns out that Residents are the killer whale version of
animal-rights activists!" This is obviously supposed to be a joke.
Nobody's laughed at that line since Doug started casing this place
over a year ago, but the song remains the same.
Unfazed, Ramona continues: "Yes, the Residents consider it
unethical to eat other mammals. Transients, on the other hand,
believe that their gods have given them the right to eat anything in
the ocean. Each group regards the other as immoral, and Residents
Bulk Food 5

and Transients have not been on speaking terms for hundreds of
years. Of course, we at the Aquarium haven't taken sides. Most
humans know better than to interfere in the religious affairs of
others."
Ramona pauses. A faint chant of assembled voices drifts into
the silence from beyond the outer wall:
"Hey hoтАФhey hoтАФthe Matriarchs have got to goтАФ"
Ramona smiles. "And despite what some people might think,"
she continues, "there's no such thing as a vegetarian orca."

***
Not yet, anyway.
Dipnet chugs steadily west. Her cargo of ambassadors scans the
waves for any sign of the natives, their faith too strong to falter
before anything so inconsequential as zero visibility. Not everyone
gets to commune with an alien intelligence. A superior
intelligence, in many ways.
Not in every way, of course. Many on the Dipnet long for the
good old days of moral absolutes, the days when Meat Was
Murder only when Humans ate it. Everything was so clear back
then, to anyone who wasn't a puppet of the Industrial-Protein
Complex. There was a ready answer to anything the Ignorantsia
might ask:
How come it's okay for sharks to kill baby seals? Because
sharks aren't moral agents. They can't see the ethical implications
of their actions.
How come it's not okay for people to kill baby seals? Because
we can.
Now orcas are moral agents too. They talk. They think. They
reason. Not that that's any surprise to Dipnet's passengers, of
courseтАФthey knew the truth way back when all those bozo
scientists were insisting that orcas were basically chimps with fins.
But sometimes, too much insight can lead to the wrong kind of
questions, questions that distract one from the truth. Questions
like:
How come it's okay for orcas to kill baby seals, but we can't?
6 Peter Watts

If only those idiot scientists hadn't barged in and proved