Кевин Андерсон – Resurrection Inc. (страница 15)
Nathans had gathered up the most brilliant researchers, the mavericks who wanted free reign in the lab and who wanted to be judged by their results and not by tedious paperwork. He brought the researchers together, gave them a combined focus and a challenge—if they could figure out how to do the resurrection process, each one of them could literally have anything he or she wanted.
The team admirably did as they were asked and also came up with a few extra useful items, such as the technique of surface-cloning, which had in itself proven useful on a number of occasions. A few members of the first team were now perfectly wealthy and perfectly happy off on islands someplace, Tierce in Fiji, Bombador and Smythe still living together in Samoa. Swensen now had her own genuine nineteenth-century farm deep in the isolated rural sections of Minnesota, working her fingers to the bone for the sheer joy of it. And poor Ferdinand, the maladjusted one, who had worked a different shift just to avoid the other members of the team—as his reward he had begged to become an Interface, and now spent his entire time catheterized, fed by IVs but linked to The Net and swimming in ecstasy in mankind’s greatest collection of knowledge.
They had served him well, all of them, and Nathans sincerely hoped that each had gotten something to make him or her happy.
Nathans started to walk aimlessly, traveling in whatever direction the crowd’s currents decided to take him. As he looked around, he remembered how horrified the common people had been by the first Servants. But after a year or two, the initial superstitious horror became a more rational fear: for a few months’ salary of one blue-collar Union employee, a corporate owner could purchase a lifetime Servant instead—and Servants worked harder, worked longer hours, did not take breaks, never called in sick, never goofed off, and never dreamed of going on strike. As an even greater economic incentive, Servant laborers required less-strict safety standards, and never complained of poor factory conditions.
But the blues themselves had proven even more stubbornly ignorant than Nathans had expected. Looking at the forlorn, aimless people scattered in the crowd—in greater numbers every day—made him feel depressed and enraged. He wanted to shout at them, force them to see how they were wasting themselves. Why hadn’t they seen what was coming? If they had so much as tried to train themselves, they could have moved into some other job—anything that required the smallest amount of thinking could not be done by a Servant. Rodney Quick had done it; after looking into Rodney’s confidential datafile, Nathans was impressed at how the tech had worked his way up from a blue-collar background, using his own head and nothing more. Not at all like the other apathetic clods.
For the time being, the blue allotment paid for their existence, but the next generation would have to fend for themselves, find a way to survive by using their brains rather than just being assembly-line oxen, or they would perish.
The point of freeing mankind from manual labor was so people could spend their time thinking, philosophizing, educating themselves through the vast databases available through The Net. But the idea had backfired on him, and the people who had been freed from their workhorse lives refused to consider the infinite possibilities before them. With life so full, with so many things to do, with all the information in The Net for the taking if only they made the effort, the blues whined about being bored, with nothing to do.
It should have worked. it all seemed so simple and clear-cut. Because of their additional free time, the blues should have been demanding more art and music and entertainment, thereby creating the need for more artists and more musicians, all of whom could come from their own ranks. But the pornographic or slapstick drivel they demanded as entertainment was a long way from his expectations.
He had insisted on giving the blues the benefit of the doubt, naively believing that they did want the finer things in life but had been denied them because of social inequalities or economic pressures. But their dismal response appalled and offended him. He had spent a lot of time poring over The Net’s databases, but he could find no justification for the voluntary ignorance of the general public—they simply didn’t want to better themselves.
And that had forced him to make an important transition in his own philosophy: perhaps these people
Nathans stopped at a display of groomed rosebushes nearly exploding with roses. An Enforcer guarded the hedge and watched closely as Nathans bent to smell one of the blooms. The plants had been boosted to produce dozens more flowers than they normally would; the roots would burn out, exhausted, in only a few years, yet it would be a spectacular flash of glory. But someone always had to pull out the weeds to let the flowers grow.
Nathans fervently considered this to be the next step in the evolution of mankind, a societal evolution to hone mental capabilities and to selectively breed out those who had no imagination, no personal drive, no powers of reason. Nathans thought it was a grand and subtle plan, for the ultimate benefit of
Subversive groups like the Cremators undermined his power, threw obstacles in the path of this social plan. Involuntarily his fingers clenched, and Nathans almost grasped one of the thorny stems of the boosted rosebush. Carefully he stood up again, smiled at the Enforcer, and made himself walk casually away. Nathans managed to control his frustrated anger, fighting down the urge to stretch out his foot and trip someone.
The Cremators baffled him. He had the greatest resources available in the entire Metroplex, probably in the world, and still there had never been a successful attempt by the Enforcers, or Resurrection, Inc., to locate a single member of the group. Nathans could not understand how anyone could manage to elude his intensive demands for information, but the Cremators had done their cover-up work better than anyone could have conceived.
He could not deny that certain pre-Servants had vanished without a trace, or that the public rumors about the Cremators had not been generated by the rumor division of the Enforcers Guild. But not only did the Cremators steal his potential Servants away—even worse, they increased the public fear and paranoia about Servants in general. Nathans was helpless, and furious that he was helpless.
He strolled along, passive, so in tune with the organism of the crowd that he rarely even bumped elbows with another person. Nathans pushed through a knot of congestion where five street vendors had set up their rickety tables. He stopped to look, perhaps to chat. It always pleased him to see that some of the blues used their spare time to make and create things.
He paused pensively in front of a jeweler’s stall. In several trays were various rings, pendants, earrings, studs, buckles, all made from polished and skillfully modified debris: scrap metal, acrylic-coated paper, wood splinters suspended in colored resins. One of the pendants in the glittering, unarranged chaos caught his eye—a neo-Satanist star-in-pentagram made from twisted copper wire and epoxied onto a wafer-thin disk of porcelain.
Nathans reached forward to pick it up, carefully inspecting the work with a bemused expression on his face. While keeping an eye on everything else that happened at her table, the craftswoman dickered heatedly with another customer about an inexpensive clip-on nose stud. Nathans studied her carefully as he appeared to consider the pendant, still keeping his face in the shadow of his hat brim.
The jewelry vendor had long brown hair braided with a rainbow of different-colored ribbons, like the striking plumage of an extinct bird. She had strung herself with a tangled mass of jewelry, most of which seemed to be her own creations. The woman’s face was wide, not very attractive; she had a few pimples, a few freckles, a few moles. But she had a pretty smile, and she actually wore a tie-dyed T-shirt, harking back to the wave of hippie nostalgia that had swept the Metroplex a few years before.
Giving up on the other sale, she plucked the nose stud from the dissatisfied customer’s fingers and abruptly turned away from him to face Nathans. “Like that one?”
“Yes I do. It’s very interesting,” he said, sounding complimentary but uncertain. It was all a game; they both knew it.
“Are you a neo-Satanist, then?”
“Are you?” Nathans answered quickly, taking her off guard.
“No. I don’t go for that sort of stuff,” she said without vehemence, careful not to scare off a prospective customer. “But it’s okay, I mean. We’re all different, right?”