"Greg Egan - Reasons To Be Cheerful" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

second mortgage to raise the fee, saddling themselves with a further fifteen or twenty yearsтАЩ debt. The
two survival rates were not that different, and I heard Dr Maitland warn them that the figures couldn't
really be compared, because the viral treatment was so new. They would have been perfectly justified in
taking her advice and sticking to the traditional regime.

Maybe my enkephalin sainthood spurred them on somehow. Maybe they wouldn't have made such a
great sacrifice if I'd been my usual sullen and difficult self, or even if I'd been nakedly terrified rather than
preternaturally brave. I'll never know for sureтАФand either way, it wouldn't make me think any less of
them. But just because the molecule wasn't saturating their skulls, that's no reason to expect them to have
been immune to its influence.

On the flight north, I held my father's hand all the way. We'd always been a little distant, a little mutually
disappointed in each other. I knew he would have preferred a tougher, more athletic, more extroverted
son, while to me he'd always seemed lazily conformist, with a world view built on unexamined platitudes
and slogans. But on that trip, with barely a word exchanged, I could feel his disappointment being
transmuted into a kind of fierce, protective, defiant love, and I grew ashamed of my own lack of respect
for him. I let the Leu-enkephalin convince me that, once this was over, everything between us would
change for the better.

****

From the street, the Gold Coast Health Palace could have passed for one more high-rise beach front
hotelтАФand even from the inside, it wasn't much different from the hotels I'd seen in video fiction. I had a
room to myself, with a television wider than the bed, complete with network computer and cable modem.
If the aim was to distract me, it worked. After a week of tests, they hooked a drip into my ventricular
shunt and infused first the virus, and then three days later, the drug.

The tumor began shrinking almost immediately; they showed me the scans. My parents seemed happy
but dazed, as if they'd never quite trusted a place where millionaire property developers came for scrotal
tucks to do much more than relieve them of their money and offer first-class double-talk while I
continued to decline. But the tumor kept on shrinking, and when it hesitated for two days in a row the
oncologist swiftly repeated the whole procedure, and then the tendrils and blobs on the MRI screen grew
skinnier and fainter even more rapidly than before.

I had every reason to feel unconditional joy now, but when I suffered a growing sense of unease instead I
assumed it was just Leu-enkephalin withdrawal. It was even possible that the tumor had been releasing
such a high dose of the stuff that literally nothing could have made me feel betterтАФif I'd been lofted to
the pinnacle of happiness, there'd be nowhere left to go but down. But in that case, any chink of darkness
in my sunny disposition could only confirm the good news of the scans.

One morning I woke from a nightmareтАФmy first in monthsтАФwith visions of the tumor as a clawed
parasite thrashing around inside my skull. I could still hear the click of carapace on bone, like the rattle of
a scorpion trapped in a jam jar. I was terrified, drenched in sweat ... liberated. My fear soon gave way
to a white-hot rage: the thing had drugged me into compliance, but now I was free to stand up to it, to
bellow obscenities inside my head, to exorcize the demon with self-righteous anger.

I did feel slightly cheated by the sense of anticlimax that came from chasing my already-fleeing nemesis
downhill, and I couldn't entirely ignore the fact that imagining my anger to be driving out the cancer was a
complete reversal of true cause and effectтАФa bit like watching a forklift shift a boulder from my chest,
then pretending to have moved it myself by a mighty act of inhalation. But I made what sense I could of