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

"sinful" corpse consigned to "hellfire"! Atheists, he decided, are not immune to
religious metaphors; he had no doubt that the experience would be powerfully
moving, liberating beyond belief.
Three months later, Sarah Brash's lawyers informed him that she had conceived a
child (which, naturally, she'd had transferred to an Extra surrogate), and that
she cordially requested that Gray provide her with fifteen billion dollars to
assist with the child's upbringing.
His first reaction was a mixture of irritation and amusement at his own
naivety. He should have suspected that there'd been more to Sarah's request than
sheer perversity. Her wealth was comparable to his own, but the prospect of
living for centuries seemed to have made the rich greedier than ever; a fortune
that sufficed for seven or eight decades was no longer enough.
On principle, Gray instructed his lawyers to take the matter to court - and
then he began trying to ascertain what his chances were of winning. He'd had a
vasectomy years ago, and could produce records proving his infertility, at least
on every occasion he'd had a sperm count measured. He couldn't prove that he
hadn't had the operation temporarily reversed, since that could now be done with
hardly a trace, but he knew perfectly well that the Extra was the father of the
child, and he could prove that. Although the Extras' brain damage resulted
solely from foetal microsurgery, rather than genetic alteration, all Extras were
genetically tagged with a coded serial number, written into portions of DNA
which had no active function, at over a thousand different sites. What's more,
these tags were always on both chromosomes of each pair, so any child fathered
by an Extra would necessarily inherit all of them. Gray's biotechnology advisers
assured him that stripping these tags from the zygote was, in practice,
virtually impossible.
Perhaps Sarah planned to freely admit that the Extra was the father, and hoped
to set a precedent making its owner responsible for the upkeep of its human
offspring. Gray's legal experts were substantially less reassuring than his
geneticists. Gray could prove that the Extra hadn't raped her - as she no doubt
knew, he'd taped everything that had happened that night - but that wasn't the
point; after all, consenting to intercourse would not have deprived her of the
right to an ordinary paternity suit. As the tapes also showed, Gray had known
full well what was happening, and had clearly approved. That the late Extra had
been unwilling was, unfortunately, irrelevant.
After wasting an entire week brooding over the matter, Gray finally gave up
worrying. The case would not reach court for five or six years, and was unlikely
to be resolved in less than a decade. He promptly had his remaining Extras
vasectomised - to prove to the courts, when the time came, that he was not
irresponsible - and then he pushed the whole business out of his mind.
Almost.
A few weeks later, he had a dream. Conscious all the while that he was
dreaming, he saw the night's events re-enacted, except that this time it was he
who was bound and muzzled, slave to Sarah's hands and tongue, while the Extra



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