"Greg Egan - Closer (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

passage of time, and of exercise, don't happen by magic; at a deep enough level,
there's always a biochemical signal produced, which can ultimately be faked.
Mature Extras, with sturdy bones and perfect muscle tone, could now be produced
from scratch in a year - four months' gestation and eight months' coma - which
also allowed them to be more thoroughly brain-dead than before, soothing the
ethical qualms of those who'd always wondered just how much was going on inside
the heads of the old, active versions.
In our first experiment, the hardest part for me had always been, not looking
in the mirror and seeing Sian, but looking at Sian and seeing myself. I'd missed
her, far more than I'd missed being myself. Now, I was almost happy for my body
to be absent (in storage, kept alive by a jewel based on the minimal brain of an
Extra). The symmetry of being her twin appealed to me; surely now we were closer
than ever. Before, we'd merely swapped our physical differences. Now, we'd
abolished them.
The symmetry was an illusion. I'd changed gender, and she hadn't. I was with
the woman I loved; she lived with a walking parody of herself.
One morning she woke me, pummelling my breasts so hard that she left bruises.
When I opened my eyes and shielded myself, she peered at me suspiciously. "Are
you in there? Michael? I'm going crazy. I want you back."
For the sake of getting the whole bizarre episode over and done with for good -
and perhaps also to discover for myself what Sian had just been through - I
agreed to the third permutation. There was no need to wait a year; my Extra had
been grown at the same time as hers.
Somehow, it was far more disorienting to be confronted by "myself" without the
camouflage of Sian's body. I found my own face unreadable; when we'd both been
in disguise, that hadn't bothered me, but now it made me feel edgy, and at times
almost paranoid, for no rational reason at all.
Sex took some getting used to. Eventually, I found it pleasurable, in a
confusing and vaguely narcissistic way. The compelling sense of equality I'd
felt, when we'd made love as women, never quite returned to me as we sucked each
other's cocks - but then, when we'd both been women, Sian had never claimed to
feel any such thing. It had all been my own invention.
The day after we returned to the way we'd begun (well, almost - in fact, we put
our decrepit, twenty-six-year-old bodies in storage, and took up residence in
our healthier Extras), I saw a story from Europe on an option we hadn't yet
tried, tipped to become all the rage: hermaphroditic identical twins. Our new
bodies could be our biological children (give or take the genetic tinkering
required to ensure hermaphroditism), with an equal share of characteristics from
both of us. We would both have changed gender, both have lost partners. We'd be
equal in every way.
I took a copy of the file home to Sian. She watched it thoughtfully, then said,
"Slugs are hermaphrodites, aren't they? They hang in mid-air together on a
thread of slime. I'm sure there's even something in Shakespeare, remarking on
the glorious spectacle of copulating slugs. Imagine it: you and me, making slug
love."
I fell on the floor, laughing.
I stopped, suddenly. "Where, in Shakespeare? I didn't think you'd even read
Shakespeare."
Eventually, I came to believe that with each passing year, I knew Sian a little
better - in the traditional sense, the sense that most couples seemed to find