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

Dr Cheng frowns. 'I'm sure of one thing: she can't have escaped by herself. Laura couldn't even turn a door handle.
Someone took her. Now, we don't run a prison here, but we do take security very seriously. Only a highly skilled,
highly resourced professional could have removed her - but on whose behalf, and to what end, I can't imagine. It's
getting a bit late for ransom demands, and in any case, her sister isn't well off.'

'Could they have taken the wrong person? Maybe they intended to kidnap another patient - someone whose relatives
could raise a worthwhile ransom - and only realized their mistake when it was too late to do anything about it.'

┬║ suppose that's possible.'

'Any obvious targets? Any patients with particularly wealthy -' ┬║ really can't -'

'No, of course not. Forgive me.' From the look on her face, I'd say she has several candidates in mind - and the last
thing in the world she wants is for me to approach their families. ┬║ take it you've stepped up security?'

7

'I'm afraid I can't discuss that either.' 'No. Tell me about Laura, then. Why was she born brain-damaged? What was the
cause?' 'We can't be sure.'

'No, but you must have some idea. What are the possibilities? Rubella? Syphilis? AIDS? Maternal drug abuse?
Side-effects from a pharmaceutical, or a pesticide, or a food additive. . . ?'

She shakes her head dismissively. 'Almost certainly none of those. Her mother went through standard prenatal health
care; she had no major illness, and she wasn't using drugs. And a chemical teratogen or mutagen doesn't really fit in
with Laura's condition. Laura has no malformation, no biochemical imbalance, no defective proteins, no histological
abnormalities -'

'Then why is she massively retarded?'

'It looks as if certain crucial pathways in the brain, certain systems of neural connections which should have formed at
a very early age, failed to appear in Laura's case - and their absence made subsequent normal development impossible.
The question is why those early pathways didn't form. As I've said, we can't be sure - but I suspect it was a complex
genetic effect, something quite subtle involving the interaction of a number of separate genes, in utero.'

'Couldn't you tell, though, if it was genetic? Couldn't you test her DNA?'
'She has no recognized, catalogued genetic defects, if that's what you mean - which only proves that there are genes
crucial to brain development yet to be located.'

'Any family history of the same thing?'

'No, but if several genes are involved, that's not necessarily surprising - the chance of a relative sharing the condition
could be quite small.' She frowns. 'I'm sorry, but how is any of this going to help you find her?'

'Well, if a pharmaceutical or a consumer product were the cause, the manufacturers might be safeguarding their
interests. It's a long time after the event, I know, but maybe some obscure birth-defects research team is on the

8

verge of publishing the claim that wonder drug X, the miracle antidepressant of the thirties, makes one foetus per