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

weapons instead of food, would my father have succumbed?

As I record this, IтАЩve been remembering how when my father put mein charge of El Instituto
Paleobiol├│gico, hesaid, тАЬOnce you show peoplethat we paleogeneticists can recreate life from the
Mesozoic, they will seethat there are no limits to what we can do. The concept of extinction
willfall away, and we will be free to rebuild this world, turn it into a Gardenof Eden.тАЭ

Such was my fatherтАЩs hope. But six years ago I recreated theEuparkeriaand the world has regarded
my work with meager curiosity and somefear. It was then that I first realized that my fatherтАЩs
assessment of theworld was wrong. He wanted to recreate rain forests, restore oceans totheir
pristine conditions; but once people saw my dinosaurs, they did notunite with our cause. In
government hearings, bureaucrats decried thecost of such an effort. They said it would take
generations to rebuild thisworld, that such an effort was impractical and would bankrupt nations .
My father told them that an effort that took five generations would repayitself for a hundred
thousand generations to come. Yet his talk was all fornothing. People eyed my father with the
same curiosity and fear that theyshowed my dinosaurs .

Curiosity and fear. Here in Cartagena, we have a great zoo where theyhave begun to exhibit
some dinosaurs, especially the fierce flesh-eaters ofthe Jurassic. Many peasants fear I will create
such monsters, and thatthey will stalk the ghettos and eat their children. Ah well, it is shortlypast
noon. My father has been dead for more than two hours. I feel tired,and my tongue and mouth are
going numb, so I must hurry and recordthese words:

After the newscast, I pressed the small yellow capsules of mem-set between my fingers, wondering how
much pressure it would take to release the liquid inside. I worried that the poisons might escape if the
capsules came in contact with my saliva, so I spat on them, then watched to make sure that the capsules
not disintegrate. I remembered a story of an old Socialista general who was captured in Argentina, and
heтАЩd poisoned himself with mem-set. I jacked into the computer network and called up thestory, learned
how he had taken the mem-set and lain paralyzed in his cell. Despite all his captors could do, he died
within hours. The article noted that mem-set, because it is catalyzed by uric acid which is a natural
byproduct of dying cells, is perhaps the only drug that is more effective in a deceased person than in a
living being. Yet it is also deadlyтАФfor uric acid is present in small amounts in every human.

In the early morning, I walked the beach and looked out to sea, and among the ghost crabs that scuttied
across the beach like something from a dream I saw a dozen gulls flapping above a heap that looked like
a corpse. I ran to it and found a child, a Siren of palest blue, wrapped in red kelp, drowning in the open
air. She was gasping, and her eyes were rolled back. I dragged her back to the water and held her under
the waves. I watched up and down the beach, afraid someone would see what I was doing, and a
moment later a female Siren swam at my ankles in the foam and thrust her head out.

тАЬThank you,тАЭ the Siren sang, and I looked into her deep green eyes and saw gratitude burning there. For
days IтАЩd been depressed and frightened, but I looked in her eyes and felt only warmth and peace. The
gentleness in that creatureтАЩs eyes was so convincing, so alien, that I could not imagine the Sirens killing
humans. I wondered, when the Sirens blew the dam on the Rio Negro, could they have been aware that
so many humans would die? Could creatures of the sea conceive how vulnerable we humans would be in
their element? Later that day I saw the Allied Marines in the bay with their black gunships, dropping
torpedoes into the water, hunting for the mother and her child.

After less than two months, the authorities declared the War of the Sirens to be over. The Marines
imprisoned six hundred of them in secure holding tanks in Jamaica. I suppose the rest of them died. The