"Burroughs, William S. - Immortality" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burroughs William S)

~ IMMORTALITY ~ by William S. Burroughs

"To me the only success, the only greatness, is immortality." - James
Dean, quoted in James Dean: The Mutant King, by David Dalton

The colonel beams at the crowd . . . pomaded, manicured, he wears the
satified expression of one who has just sold the widow a fraudulent
peach orchard. "Folks, we're here to sell the only thing worth selling
or worth buying and that's immortality. Now here is the simplest
solution and well on the way. Just replace the worn-out parts and keep
the old heap on the road indefinitely.

"As transplant techniques are perfected and refined, the age-old dream
of immortality is now within the grasp of mankind. But who is to decide
out of a million applicants for the same heart? There simply aren't
enough parts to go around. You need the job lot once a year to save 20
percent, folks. Big executives use a heart a month just as regular as
clockwork. Warlords, paying off their soldiers in livers and kidneys and
genitals, depopulate whole areas. Vast hospital cities cover the land;
the air-conditioned hospital palaces of the rich radiate out to field
hospitals and open-air operating booths.

The poor are rising in mobs. They are attacking government warehouses
where the precious parts are stored. Everyone who can afford it has dogs
and guards to protect himself from roving bands of parts hunters, like
the dreaded Wild Doctors, who operate on each other after the battle,
cutting the warm quivering parts from the dead and dying. Cut-and-grab
men dart out of doorways and hack out a kidney with a few expert strokes
of their four-inch scalpels. People have lost all shame. Here's a man
who sold his daughter's last kidney to buy himself a new groin- appears
on TV to appeal for funds to buy little Sally an artificial kidney and
give her this last Christmas. On his arm is a curvaceous blond known
apparently as Bubbles. She calls him Long John; now isn't that cute?

A flourishing black market in parts grows up in the gutted cities
devastated by parts riots. In terrible slums, scenes from Brueghel and
Bosch are reenacted; misshapen masses of rotten scar tissue crawling
with maggots supported on crutches and cans, in wheel-chairs and carts.
Brutal-as-butchers practitioners operate without anesthetic in open-air
booths surrounded by their bloody knives and saws.

The poor wait in parts lines for diseased genitals, a cancerous lung, a
cirrhotic liver. They crawl towards the operating booths holding forth
nameless things in bottles that they think are usable parts. Shameless
swindlers who buy up operating garbage in job lots prey on the unwary.

And here is Mr. Rich Parts. He is three hundred years old. He is still
subject to accidental death, and the mere thought of it throws him into
paroxysms of idiot terror. For days he cowers in his bunker, two hundred
feet down in solid rock, food for fifty years. A trip from one city to