"Greg Egan - The Demon' s Passage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

they call it oncology: the word is missing from many quite hefty dictionaries.
Every garbo and his dog has heard of cancer. "The Division of Cancer Studies"
would not, you might argue, be a label noticeably lacking in dignity, but "The
Division of Oncology" bears the name of the deity logos whom they all claim to
serve; to abandon this small homage could be a dangerous blasphemy. Or, looking
at the question from another angle: what else would you expect from a bunch of
pretentious arseholes who believe that knowledge of Greek and Latin is the
watermark of a civilised man, who tell their wives and husbands, straight-faced,
omnia vincit amor, and offer their lovers postprandial mints?
But back to my life story, back to the very beginning. My parent was a single
rat's neuron. It used to be thought that neurons could not divide, but the Chief


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Oncologist had spent thirty years studying the kinds of infections, poisons and
traumas that manage to send normal cells into frenzies of reproduction, and had
ended up not only understanding and anticipating his mindless enemy's
techniques, but utterly surpassing them. After all, what virus has access to a
few thousand hours on a supercomputer to predict the tertiary structure of the
proteins that it codes for?
Once the electronic divinations seemed auspicious, he moved to the laboratory.
Step by step, month by month, he (or rather his instruments, human and
mechanical) assembled the molecule foretold in phosphor, presaged in printouts.
Like a tornado, the project would sweep in over-curious bystanders, extract
their vital juices by means of vibration and centrifugal force, and then spit
out the remnants. As the Chief Oncologist still boasts, with a chuckle, to those
who are paid to listen, nod, and screw him at out-of-town conferences, "We used
up more PhD students in the first year than rats!" He, of course, travelled at
the eye of the storm, in perfect safety, in perfect stillness.
Finally, inevitably, success. Their painfully contrived seducer burrowed its way
to the heart of a neuron, grasped and prised apart the virginal DNA (I imagine
the Chief Oncologist triumphantly waving a blood-speckled nuptial sheet from a
balcony, to the cheers of his drunken colleagues below), and perverted the
celibate thinker into a helpless, bloated breeding machine.
Thus I was begun.
The neuron donor was my first host. I suppose you could call her my mother. I
killed her in a month, and then they grafted me onto the brain of my next
victim. They call this technique "passaging", rhymes with "massaging".
Oncologists love it, they've been doing it for years. Although I'm certainly the
brightest passaged tumour in the world, I'm far from being the oldest; within
this basement there are twenty-five distinct communities of rats, apart from my
"birthplace", and all have legends of demons past. In fact, one is currently
cursed with an eighteen year-old obscenity which they call Spinecrusher.
The oncologist responsible for Spinecrusher does not call it Spinecrusher. You
think she calls it by a number? A date? A precise phrase of technical jargon?
Oh, no. She calls it "Billy" to her colleagues, and in her mind, "my baby". A
month ago, she addressed a gathering of scientists at the Biotech Playground on
the fascinating discoveries that bits of Billy had provided her, and then,