"Egan, Greg - Extra, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

On principle, Gray instructed his lawyers to take the matter to court - and
then he began trying to ascertain what his chances were of winning. He'd had a
vasectomy years ago, and could produce records proving his infertility, at least
on every occasion he'd had a sperm count measured. He couldn't prove that he
hadn't had the operation temporarily reversed, since that could now be done with
hardly a trace, but he knew perfectly well that the Extra was the father of the
child, and he could prove that. Although the Extras' brain damage resulted
solely from foetal microsurgery, rather than genetic alteration, all Extras were
genetically tagged with a coded serial number, written into portions of DNA
which had no active function, at over a thousand different sites. What's more,
these tags were always on both chromosomes of each pair, so any child fathered
by an Extra would necessarily inherit all of them. Gray's biotechnology advisers
assured him that stripping these tags from the zygote was, in practice,
virtually impossible.
Perhaps Sarah planned to freely admit that the Extra was the father, and hoped
to set a precedent making its owner responsible for the upkeep of its human
offspring. Gray's legal experts were substantially less reassuring than his
geneticists. Gray could prove that the Extra hadn't raped her - as she no doubt
knew, he'd taped everything that had happened that night - but that wasn't the
point; after all, consenting to intercourse would not have deprived her of the
right to an ordinary paternity suit. As the tapes also showed, Gray had known
full well what was happening, and had clearly approved. That the late Extra had
been unwilling was, unfortunately, irrelevant.
After wasting an entire week brooding over the matter, Gray finally gave up
worrying. The case would not reach court for five or six years, and was unlikely
to be resolved in less than a decade. He promptly had his remaining Extras
vasectomised - to prove to the courts, when the time came, that he was not
irresponsible - and then he pushed the whole business out of his mind.
Almost.
A few weeks later, he had a dream. Conscious all the while that he was
dreaming, he saw the night's events re-enacted, except that this time it was he
who was bound and muzzled, slave to Sarah's hands and tongue, while the Extra
stood back and watched.
But . . . had they merely swapped places, he wondered, or had they swapped
bodies? His dreamer's point of view told him nothing - he saw all three bodies
from the outside - but the lean young man who watched bore Gray's own
characteristic jaded expression, and the middle-aged man in Sarah's embrace
moaned and twitched and shuddered, exactly as the Extra had done.
Gray was elated. He still knew that he was only dreaming, but he couldn't
suppress his delight at the inspired idea of keeping his old body alive with the
Extra's brain, rather than consigning it to flames. What could be more
controversial, more outrageous, than having not just his Extras, but his own
discarded corpse, walking the grounds of his estate? He resolved at once to do
this, to abandon his long-held desire for a symbolic cremation. His friends
would be shocked into the purest admiration - as would the fanatics, in their
own way. True infamy had proved elusive; people had talked about his last stunt
for a week or two, and then forgotten it - but the midsummer party at which the
guest of honour was Daniel Gray's old body would be remembered for the rest of
his vastly prolonged life.
Over the next few years, the medical research division of Gray's vast corporate