"Greg Egan - The Extra (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

no effort to explain anything. Perhaps they thought he was still deaf and blind,
perhaps his sight and hearing at this early stage were freak effects that had
not been envisaged. Before the operation, the schedule for his recovery had been
explained to him in great detail, but his memory of it was hazy now. He told
himself to be patient.
When, at last, one arm came under his control, he raised it, with great effort,
into his field of view.
It was his arm, his old arm - not the Extra's.



file:///G|/rah/Greg%20Egan/Egan,%20Greg%20-%20The%20Extra.txt (7 of 9) [2/2/2004 2:00:28 AM]
 file:///G|/rah/Greg%20Egan/Egan,%20Greg%20-%20The%20Extra.txt

He tried to emit a wail of despair, but nothing came out.
Something must have gone wrong, late in the operation, forcing them to cancel
the transplant after they had cut up his brain. Perhaps the Extra's life-support
machine had failed; it seemed unbelievable, but it wasn't impossible - as his
parents' deaths had proved, there was always a risk. He suddenly felt unbearably
tired. He now faced the prospect of spending months merely to regain the use of
his very own body; for all he knew, the newly forged pathways across the wounds
in his brain might require as much time to become completely functional as they
would have if the transplant had gone ahead.
For several days, he was angry and depressed. He tried to express his rage to
the nurses and physiotherapists, but all he could do was twitch and grimace - he
couldn't speak, he couldn't even gesture - and they paid no attention. How could
his people have been so incompetent? How could they put him through months of
trauma and humiliation, with nothing to look forward to but ending up exactly
where he'd started?
But when he'd calmed down, he told himself that his doctors weren't incompetent
at all; in fact, he knew they were the best in the world. Whatever had gone
wrong must have been completely beyond their control. He decided to adopt a
positive attitude to the situation; after all, he was lucky: the malfunction
might have killed him, instead of the Extra. He was alive, he was in the care of
experts, and what was three months in bed to the immortal he would still,
eventually, become? This failure would make his ultimate success all the more of
a triumph - personally, he could have done without the set-back, but the media
would lap it up.
The physiotherapy continued. His sense of touch, and then his motor control,
was restored to more and more of his body, until, although weak and
uncoordinated, he felt without a doubt that this body was his. To experience
familiar aches and twinges was a relief, more than a disappointment, and several
times he found himself close to tears, overcome with mawkish sentiment at the
joy of regaining what he had lost, imperfect as it was. On these occasions, he
swore he would never try the transplant again; he would be faithful to his own
body, in sickness and in health. Only by methodically reminding himself of all
his reasons for proceeding in the first place, could he put this foolishness
aside.
Once he had control of the muscles of his vocal cords, he began to grow
impatient for the speech therapists to start work. His hearing, as such, seemed