"Sean Williams - The Perfect Gun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Sean)

yourself involved in something, Court. I mean, what if someone's dragged out
the old weapons, or invented new ones . . ?"
She didn't finish the thought, and she didn't need to. My mind had raced ahead
on its own. Over five hundred years had passed since the days of the Trouble
and the genetic plagues that had swept the Earth, but the race-memory still
hurt. Every child born today carries within it the legacy of war stamped
 indelibly on its genes.
No one really knows who started it, or what purpose it was suppose to achieve,
but the family of morpholytic viruses had had terrible consequences. Genetic
terrorism on a massive scale, it had spread like wildfire. The techniques used
to control it included viral reagents and genocide; its social effects
included chaos, warfare and starvation: the end of civilisation for almost a
century.
With dozens of competing viral strains vying for human cells with natural
forms of diptheria, HIV and ebola, plus radiation and chemical poisons leaking
into the biosphere, death from cancer reached plague proportions in the summer
of 2052. Literally no one was unaffected. In twenty years, the population of
the Earth shrank to less than fifty percent of its former, bloated high--and
the plagues hadn't even finished their work. A more subtle form of cancer was
spreading, twisting genes and warping the face of humanity itself. The human
genome, the original and so-called Ideal, had been twisted from true.
Of the children born during the time of the Trouble, only twenty-five percent
survived, and many of these were gross mutations, unable to reproduce. The
remainder were sports, twisted by the plagues until they barely resembled
their parents. When the sports bred, they bred a second generation of sports.
And then their grandparents died.
The Human Ideal died with them. Not even a record of the whole genome
survived, it having been destroyed along with most of the other electronic
records of the old world. In its place came new strains of humanity: the
castes, differing from the Ideal in a vast number of ways. Interbreeding led
to further sports, until finally the genepool settled down, or the viruses
died, leaving the face of humanity irrevocably altered.
The Trouble lasted almost fifty years, from 2052 to 2099. And I guess that
explains why there has never been a C21. C20's official envelope is 1932 -
2125, covering the best of the Twentieth Century's culture and as much of the
Twenty-First's as can be tolerated. Beyond that point--well, who wants to
visit a world characterized by plague, famine and war?
The fact that humanity survived says a lot for the resilience of the race. The
sports inherited the ruins their ancestors left behind and fashioned from them
a new, truly multicultural society over the following century. It must have
been tempting to lay the blame for the carnage on previous generations, but
instead the new human breeds retained a measure of reverence for the Ideal,
especially while the global civilisation was returning from savagery. The
ruins contained old footage--films, documentaries, educational programs and so
on. Elder humanity came to resemble angels, in literature, song and legend.
From their skins inward, the sports knew what they were--near-aliens--and
idealized the old accordingly.
This reverence, in part, resulted in the habitats--like C20 and its
sisters--where the sports play-acted at being Ideal. The most recent energy-
and resource-rich human society--my society, the one I had left behind to live