"Dave Wolverton - Siren Song at Midnight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolverton Dave)

SIREN SONG AT MIDNIGHT
DaveWolverton




When I was a girl of ten, my father, Stef├бn Elegante, worked as a paleogeneticist for the Pacific Fisheries
Commission, trying to restore extinct tuna and marlin, dolphins and blue squid. He took me to his lab and
showed me how he pulled bits of bone from fossils and dyed the DNA so his computers could read it
and begin building living replicas of the cells: тАЬSee, Josephina!тАЭ he said, pointing to remnants of a cell
under his microscope, rainbow-hued ropes of DNA. тАЬYou see, the fishes are still there! Waiting for us to
bring them back to life, and the DNA is a manual to tell us how.тАЭ His eyes glowed as he spoke, and I
didnтАЩt understand half of what he said. тАЬThis is old DNA. I like the old stuff best. DNA that is a hundred
years old is better than that cloned from a living cell, for when a creature is living, so many chemical
processes happen from moment to moment that sections of DNA get torn loose and often return into
place reversed. But a cell that is a million years old is sometimes in better shape. The cells heal
themselves. In old dead cells, the chemical bonds between amino acids are so strong that reversed DNA
corrects itself, you see!тАЭ

He gazed at me a moment with his solemn brown eyes, saw my confusion. тАЬDonтАЩt worry. Someday, you
will understand all of this, and more,тАЭ he said, kissing my forehead. тАЬYou know, I sometimes wonder, if
we destroy our world, do you think God could take this old DNA and rebuild us?тАЭ he asked, sincerely
awed by this marvel. I saw his fossils and understood only that, like God, he brought creatures to life
from the dust of the Earth. On that day, I decided to become a paleogeneticist.

But somehow his hope died. Just as a wasp will lay its eggs in pear blossoms, corrupting their fruit, so
despair corrupted him. Once he dared to dream of a restored world with vast rain forests, alive with the
cries of macaws.

Wait. I am confused, exhausted to the bone. IтАЩm not sure what to say.I must turn off the recorder
for a moment .

[Two seconds of silence.]

I think I began too early. I know IтАЩll live for only another few minutes,and 1 must record this while
1 can. Let me begin with the arrest of myfather:

Last September, five plankton-harvesting ships exploded in a single evening. From childhood IтАЩve seen
these Chinese ships off the Chilean coast-floating ceramic cities whose brilliant halogen lights sputter like
fallen stars in the evening out on the horizon. During the attack, I was working at El Instituto
Paleobiol├│gico in Cartagena, extracting DNA from fossilized dimetrodons. I heard a distant explosion,
almost a popping noise, and ran out into the evening. One plankton-harvesting ship had exploded on the
horizon, and where it had floated, a great violet curtain of spray was rising into the night, higher and
higher, looking almost like a thunderhead. Beside me, a small boy cried, тАЬWhat is that!тАЭ and his mother,
who perhaps wanted to protect him, said, тАЬIt is only angels, washing the curtains of heaven in the ocean.тАЭ

I thought India must have attacked China, that the Plankton Wars had started again, that they might blow
all the ships. But if the Plankton Wars had begun again, they did so with a twist, for that night the Rio
Negro dam blew in Brazil, and two million died as black torrents flooded down the Amazon.
A few hours later, the media revealed that the bombers werechimeras, genetically-engineered men that