"Greg Egan - Oracle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

Oracle
by Greg Egan
тАв тАЬOracleтАЭ

тАв Miscellaneous Fiction contents

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1
On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

He'd woken a dozen times throughout the night with an overwhelming need to stretch his back and limbs,
and none of the useful compromise positions he'd discovered in his first few days тАФ the least-worst
solutions to the geometrical problem of his confinement тАФ had been able to dull his sense of panic. He'd
been in far more pain in the second week, suffering cramps that felt as if the muscles of his legs were
dying on the bone, but these new spasms had come from somewhere deeper, powered by a sense of
urgency that revolved entirely around his own awareness of his situation.

That was what frightened him. Sometimes he could find ways to minimise his discomfort, sometimes he
couldn't, but he'd been clinging to the thought that, in the end, all these fuckers could ever do was hurt
him. That wasn't true, though. They could make him ache for freedom in the middle of the night, the way
he might have ached with grief, or love. He'd always cherished the understanding that his self was a
whole, his mind and body indivisible. But he'd failed to appreciate the corollary: through his body, they
could touch every part of him. Change every part of him.

Morning brought a fresh torment: hay fever. The house was somewhere deep in the countryside, with
nothing to be heard in the middle of the day but bird song. June had always been his worst month for hay
fever, but in Manchester it had been tolerable. As he ate breakfast, mucus dripped from his face into the
bowl of lukewarm oats they'd given him. He staunched the flow with the back of his hand, but suffered a
moment of shuddering revulsion when he couldn't find a way to reposition himself to wipe his hand clean
on his trousers. Soon he'd need to empty his bowels. They supplied him with a chamber pot whenever he
asked, but they always waited two or three hours before removing it. The smell was bad enough, but the
fact that it took up space in the cage was worse.

Towards the middle of the morning, Peter Quint came to see him. тАЬHow are we today, Prof?тАЭ Robert
didn't reply. Since the day Quint had responded with a puzzled frown to the suggestion that he had an
appropriate name for a spook, Robert had tried to make at least one fresh joke at the man's expense
every time they met, a petty but satisfying indulgence. But now his mind was blank, and in retrospect the
whole exercise seemed like an insane distraction, as bizarre and futile as scoring philosophical points
against some predatory animal while it gnawed on his leg.

тАЬMany happy returns,тАЭ Quint said cheerfully.

Robert took care to betray no surprise. He'd never lost track of the days, but he'd stopped thinking in
terms of the calendar date; it simply wasn't relevant. Back in the real world, to have forgotten his own
birthday would have been considered a benign eccentricity. Here it would be taken as proof of his
deterioration, and imminent surrender.

If he was cracking, he could at least choose the point of fissure. He spoke as calmly as he could, without
looking up. тАЬYou know I almost qualified for the Olympic marathon, back in forty-eight? If I hadn't done