"Greg Egan - The Moral Virologist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

BURN FOREVER! He couldn't have put it more plainly, could he? Nobody
could claim that they hadn't been warned. In 1981, Matthew
Shawcross bought a tiny, run-down cable TV station in the Bible belt,
which until then had split its air time between scratchy
black-and-white film clips of fifties gospel singers, and local novelty
acts such as snake handlers (protected by their faith, not to mention the
removal of their pets' venom glands) and epileptic children (encouraged by
their parents' prayers, and a carefully timed withdrawal of medication, to
let the spirit move them). Matthew Shawcross dragged the station into
the nineteen eighties, spending a fortune on a thirty-second
computer-animated station ID (a fleet of pirouetting, crenellated
spaceships firing crucifix-shaped missiles into a relief map of the
USA, chiselling out the station logo of Liberty, holding up, not a
torch, but a cross), showing the latest, slickest gospel rock video
clips, "Christian" soap operas and "Christian" game shows, and, above
all, identifying issues - communism, depravity, godlessness in schools
- which could serve as the themes for telethons to raise funds to
expand the station, so that future telethons might be even more
successful. Ten years later, he owned one of the country's biggest
cable TV networks. John Shawcross was at college, on the verge of
taking up paleontology, when AIDS first began to make the news in a big
way. As the epidemic snowballed, and the spiritual celebrities he most
admired (his father included) began proclaiming the disease to be God's
will, he found himself increasingly obsessed by it. In an age where the
word miracle belonged to medicine and science, here was a plague,
straight out of the Old Testament, destroying the wicked and sparing
the righteous (give or take some haemophiliacs and transfusion
recipients), proving to Shawcross beyond any doubt that sinners could
be punished in this life, as well as in the next. This was, he decided,
valuable in at least two ways: not only would sinners to whom damnation
had seemed a remote and unproven threat now have a powerful, worldly
reason to reform, but the righteous would be strengthened in their
resolve by this unarguable sign of heavenly support and approval.
In short, the mere existence of AIDS made John Shawcross feel good, and
he gradually became convinced that some kind of personal involvement with
HIV, the AIDS virus, would make him feel even better. He lay awake at
night, pondering God's mysterious ways, and wondering how he could get in
on the act. AIDS research would be aimed at a cure, so how could he
possibly justify involving himself with that? Then, in the early hours
of one cold morning, he was woken by sounds from the room next to his.
Giggling, grunting, and the squeaking of bed springs. He wrapped his
pillow around his ears and tried to go back to sleep, but the sounds
could not be ignored - nor could the effect they wrought on his own
fallible flesh. He masturbated for a while, on the pretext of trying to
manually crush his unwanted erection, but stopped short of orgasm and
lay, shivering, in a state of heightened moral perception. It was a
different woman every week; he'd seen them leaving in the morning. He'd
tried to counsel his fellow student, but had been mocked for his
troubles. Shawcross didn't blame the poor young man; was it any wonder
people laughed at the truth, when every movie, every book, every