"Egan, Greg - Demon's Passage, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

employ as they see fit), and those who see it as representing their worst fears:
science springing from the testicles instead of from the brain.
There's a shopping arcade on the ground floor, extending one level above and one
below, with a cinema complex, a health food supermarket, and a twenty-four hour
chemist. Linking the three levels, twisted around the laser-lit spume of an
endlessly-pumping fountain, is the southern hemisphere's only pair of spiral
escalators. Unfortunately, they're usually closed for repairs; the mechanism
that drives them is ingenious, but insufficiently robust, and it takes no more
than a stray bottle top or a discarded chocolate bar wrapper in the wrong place
to start belts slipping, gears crunching, shafts snapping, until the whole
structure begins to behave like a dadaist work of art designed explicitly to
destroy itself.
Floors two to ten hold consulting rooms: neurologists, endocrinologists,
gynaecologists, rheumatologists: in short, as fine a collection of brain-dead,
ex-university rugby players as ever assembled anywhere. These people have only
one facial expression: the patronising, superior, self-satisfied smirk. The very
same smirk that appeared on their lips the day they gained admission to medical
school has come through everything since without the slightest change: gruelling
feats of rote learning and beer sculling at university; initiation by
sleep-deprivation and token poverty as residents; working long and hard on
obscure research projects for their MDs, hoping only that their superiors might
steal the credit for any interesting results, so that by accepting the theft in
silence in a ritual act of self-abasement they might prove themselves worthy to
be the colleagues of the thieves. And then, suddenly, skiing holidays, Pacific
cruises, and an endless line of patients who swoon with awe and say "Yes,
Doctor. No, Doctor. Of course I will, Doctor. Thank you. Thank you, Doctor."
Floors eleven to eighteen house a wide range of pathology labs, where every
substance or structure that might travel the bloodstream, from macrophages and
lymphocytes through to antibodies, protein hormones, carbohydrate molecules,
even individual ions, can be hunted down, tagged and counted.
Nineteen to twenty-five are filled with the offices of pharmaceuticals and
medical instrumentation firms. They pay five times the market rate for renting
space on this sleazy side of town, but it's more than worth it just to share an
address with the world-famous research team that perfected and patented
bioluminescent contact lenses (". . . triggered by minute changes in the
hormonal content of lubricating tears, Honest EyesTM glow with a subtle aura,
changing colour instantly to perfectly reflect every nuance of the wearer's
changing mood . . ."), beat the Americans, the Swiss and the Japanese to develop
the first one hundred per cent effective post-coital contraceptive cigarette,
and then, out-stripping all their past achievements in consumer biotech, went on
to produce a special chewing gum that will stain the teeth red in the presence
of salivary AIDS virus ("Share a stick with someone you love").
Twenty-six to thirty hold libraries, conference rooms, and row after row of
quiet offices, where the scientists can sit and listen to the airconditioning,
their own breathing, the sound of fingers on a keyboard in the next room. This
is the realm of pure abstraction: no test tubes here, no culture flasks or Petri
dishes, and no visible hint of the likes of me.
Thirty-one to forty is administration and marketing, and on top of that is a
simulated Viennese cafe which revolves once every ten minutes. There's a
coin-operated telescope on the rim, with which people can, and frequently do,