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

to be fine, but he could still make no sense of the words of the people around
him, and he could only assume that the connections between the parts of his
brain responsible for understanding speech, and the parts which carried out the
lower-level processing of sound, were yet to be refined by whatever ingenious
regime the neurologists had devised. He only wished they'd start soon; he was
sick of this isolation.
One day, he had a visitor - the first person he'd seen since the operation who
was not a health professional clad in white. The visitor was a young man,
dressed in brightly coloured pyjamas, and travelling in a wheelchair.
By now, Gray could turn his head. He watched the young man approaching,
surrounded by a retinue of obsequious doctors. Gray recognised the doctors;
every member of the transplant team was there, and they were all smiling
proudly, and nodding ceaselessly. Gray wondered why they had taken so long to
appear; until now, he'd presumed that they were waiting until he was able to
fully comprehend the explanation of their failure, but he suddenly realised how
absurd that was - how could they have left him to make his own guesses? It was
outrageous! It was true that speech, and no doubt writing too, meant nothing to
him, but surely they could have devised some method of communication! And why
did they look so pleased, when they ought to have been abject?
Then Gray realised that the man in the wheelchair was the Extra, D12. And yet
he spoke. And when he spoke, the doctors shook with sycophantic laughter.
The Extra brought the wheelchair right up to the bed, and spent several seconds
staring into Gray's face. Gray stared back; obviously he was dreaming, or
hallucinating. The Extra's expression hovered between boredom and mild
amusement, just as it had in the dream he'd had all those years ago.


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The Extra turned to go. Gray felt a convulsion pass through his body. Of course
he was dreaming. What other explanation could there be?
Unless the transplant had gone ahead, after all.
Unless the remnants of his brain in this body retained enough of his memory and
personality to make him believe that he, too, was Daniel Gray. Unless the brain
function studies that had localised identity had been correct, but incomplete -
unless the processes that constituted human self-awareness were redundantly
duplicated in the most primitive parts of the brain.
In which case, there were now two Daniel Grays.
One had everything: The power of speech. Money. Influence. Ten thousand
servants. And now, at last, immaculate health.
And the other? He had one thing only.
The knowledge of his helplessness.
It was, he had to admit, a glorious afternoon. The sky was cloudless, the air
was warm, and the clipped grass beneath his feet was soft but dry.
He had given up trying to communicate his plight to the people around him. He
knew he would never master speech, and he couldn't even manage to convey meaning
in his gestures - the necessary modes of thought were simply no longer available
to him, and he could no more plan and execute a simple piece of mime than he
could solve the latest problems in grand unified field theory. For a while he