"George Alec Effinger - Posterity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

"My IV bag's running out," said Courane.

The orderly came over and examined the bag on the pole. "I'll tell the nurse," he said. He
followed the other orderly out.

Courane grimaced; he should have asked the orderly to remind the nurse about the
Demerol shot, too. In the meantime he turned his head and buried his nose in the pillow. It
didn't provide much relief from the nauseating smell. He thought about how often the odor of
gangrene had been described in other people's books as "sickeningly sweet." Those
writers couldn't have had the opportunity to experience it like this. Courane knew now that no
neat phrase could do it justice.
A little while later, Eldr├зs returned and drew the curtains again.

"How are we doing?" she asked.

"You sound like one of the residents," said Courane. "Can you do something about that
awful smell?"

"Let's talk about that," she said. She perched on the very edge of his bed. "I can take
your pain away, and neutralize anything else that's annoying you."

"Superdrugs from the future?"

She combed her white hair back and shook her head. "Just some creative past-altering.
I can doctor details of this quasi-reality."

"Quasi-reality?" asked Courane. "What's quasi about it?"

Eldr├зs shrugged. "I can shift you from one reality to another, nearly identical, one. One in
which, for example, there's no putrid gangrene smell in the air. Or one in which you're
recuperating exactly the same, only you don't hurt. Do you follow me?"

"You have this magical power, but you're going to use it only if I go along with what you
want me to do. That means you're perfectly content to let me go on suffering if I don't
cooperate. You don't have any qualms about withholding comfort from me."
"No qualms at all," said Eldr├зs. "My field is minor twentieth-century genre writers, not
ethics. You can go on suffering as much as you want, although I can't see why you'd make
that choice. What I want isn't so terrible."
"You don't know how hard it is for me to write, even when I'm healthy and sitting at my
desk, fully motivated."
"I'd think that what I'm offering you would be enough to motivate you."

Courane frowned. "I mean inspired. You're asking me to force a book into existence,
something that I'm not at all ready to write. It, won't turn out well; I can guarantee you that. It
won't be writing; It'll be constructing, like putting together a model of a novel from your
outline."
"That's all I want. The people in the future won't know the difference. And who's going to
know? Besides me, I doubt if anyone else m my era has ever even realized your books
exist."