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

kept returning to him, and he found them difficult to banish. The Extra Sarah
had chosen - C7, one of the twenty-four-year-olds - had been muzzled and tightly
bound throughout, but it had made copious noises in its throat, and its eyes had
been remarkably expressive. Gray had learnt, years ago, to keep a mask of mild
amusement and boredom on his face, whatever he was feeling; to see fear,
confusion, distress and ecstasy, nakedly displayed on features that, in spite of
everything, were unmistakably his own, had been rather like a nightmare of
losing control.
Of course, it had also been as inconsequential as a nightmare; he had not lost
control for a moment, however much his animal look-alike had rolled its eyes,
and moaned, and trembled. His appetite for sexual novelty aside, perhaps he had
agreed to Sarah's request for that very reason: to see this primitive aspect of
himself unleashed, without the least risk to his own equilibrium.
He decided to have the creature put down in the morning; he didn't want it
corrupting its clone-brothers, and he couldn't be bothered arranging to have it
kept in isolation. Extras had their sex drives substantially lowered by drugs,
but not completely eliminated - that would have had too many physiological
side-effects - and Gray had heard that it took just one clone who had discovered
the possibilities, to trigger widespread masturbation and homosexual behaviour
throughout the batch. Most owners would not have cared, but Gray wanted his
Extras to be more than merely healthy; he wanted them to be innocent, he wanted
them to be without sin. He was not a religious man, but he could still
appreciate the emotional power of such concepts. When the time came for his
brain to be moved into a younger body, he wanted to begin his new life with a
sense of purification, a sense of rebirth.
However sophisticated his amorality, Gray freely admitted that at a certain
level, inaccessible to reason, his indulgent life sickened him, as surely as it
sickened his body. His family and his peers had always, unequivocally,
encouraged him to seek pleasure, but perhaps he had been influenced -


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

subconsciously and unwillingly - by ideas which still prevailed in other social
strata. Since the late twentieth century, when - in affluent countries -
cardiovascular disease and other "diseases of lifestyle" had become the major
causes of death, the notion that health was a reward for virtue had acquired a
level of acceptance unknown since the medieval plagues. A healthy lifestyle was
not just pragmatic, it was righteous. A heart attack or a stroke, lung cancer or
liver disease - not to mention AIDS - was clearly a punishment for some vice
that the sufferer had chosen to pursue. Twenty-first century medicine had
gradually weakened many of the causal links between lifestyle and life
expectancy - and the advent of Extras would, for the very rich, soon sever them
completely - but the outdated moral overtones persisted nonetheless.
In any case, however fervently Gray approved of his gluttonous, sedentary,
drug-hazed, promiscuous life, a part of him felt guilty and unclean. He could
not wipe out his past, nor did he wish to, but to discard his ravaged body and
begin again in blameless flesh would be the perfect way to neutralise this
irrational self-disgust. He would attend his own cremation, and watch his