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

everything. Now there's no choice but to get the orcas to give up
meat.
The Residents have the greatest moral potential. At least they
draw the line at fish. The Transients remain relentlessly bull-
headed in their mammalvory, but perhaps the Residents can be
brought to full enlightenment. Back on shore, one of the west
coast's best-known Kirlian nutritionists is working tirelessly on
alternate ways to meet Orcinus' dietary requirements. She's
already had some spectacular successes with her own cats. Not
only is a vegan diet vastly more efficient than conventional pet
foodsтАФthe cats eat only a fraction of what they used toтАФbut the
felines have so much more energy now that they're always out on
the prowl. You hardly ever see them at home any more.
Not everything goes so well, of course. There've been setbacks.
In hindsight, it may have been premature to dump that thousand
heads of Romaine lettuce onto A4-Pod last summer during their
spring migration. Not only did the Residents fail to convert to
Veganism, but apparently they'd actually been considering certain
exceptions to their eat-no-mammals policy. Fortunately, everyone
on the boat had made it back okay.
But that's in the past. Live and learn. Today, it is enough to
stand in solidarity with the Residents against the mammalphagous
Transient foe, to add Human voices in peaceful protest for a just
cause. The moral education can come later. Now it is time to
make friends.
The men and women of the Dipnet have the utmost faith in their
abilities in this regard. They're ready, they're willing, they're the
best of the best.
What else could they be? Every last one of them was hand-
picked by Anna-Marie Hamilton.

***

Shamu sails past Doug in mid-air, his ivory belly a good two
meters above water level. Their eyes meet. For all this talk about
killer whale intelligence, it still looks like a big dumb fish to Doug.
Bulk Food 7

It belly-flops. A small tsunami climbs the splashguards. A few
scattered voices go oooooh.
"Now, Shamu is a Transient, so of course he'd never normally
eat fish," Ramona announces. This is not entirely true. Back
before the Breakthrough, fish was all captive Transients ever got.
A decent meal plan was one of the first things they negotiated
when the language barrier fell. "So to feed him what he really
wants, he knows he has to hide for a bit."
Ramona touches a control on her belt and speaks into the mike.
What's coming out of the speakers now isn't English. It sounds
more like fingernails on a blackboard.
Shamu spits back a series of clicks and sinks below the surface.