"Greg Egan - Worthless (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

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Worthless
a short story
by Greg Egan




Yes, I'm complacent now, with my well enough paid job, with a wife I can almost
talk to, with a three-year-old son all dark eyes and tousled hair and endearing
clumsiness. We go driving on Sunday afternoons, through suburbs just like our
own, past houses just like our own, an endlessly recurring, mesmerising daydream
under the flawless blue sky. And I whistle an old song of yours, even if I never
dare let the words past my lips:
There's nothing wrong with The Family
That a flame-thrower can't fix
And there's nothing wrong with the salt of the Earth
That couldn't be cured with a well-aimed BRICK
I switch on the radio (when I have a chance), I scan the stations (now and
then), listening for an echo of your voice. Wondering if you've found a new
incarnation. Wondering if I'd recognise it, if you had. Oh, some brain-dead
bitch has stolen one of your best riffs, and chants meaningless drivel over the
top of an endlessly cycling sample -- but my mind shuts her out, and my memory
of you takes over:
Carve my name on your heart, forever
-- with the blunt end of a feather
You said, "I'll stay with you for a lifetime of pain
(just so long as it's over by morning)."
I know what they say, the revisionists, the explainers: you were a glitch, an
aberration; a bug in the software, nothing more. People could never have truly
wanted to hear your "maudlin" voice, your "mealy mouthed whining," your
"smothering self pity."
I did.
I still dream about you, I swear. Do you blame me, if I can't hold on to my
vision of you, lost on these dizzying sunlit plains, numb with contentment, the
way I could when I was desperate, lonely, crippled? When I knew exactly who I
was.
I still want you back. Badly. Sometimes.
But apparently not often, or badly, enough.



When they started making music straight from the Azciak Polls, everybody howled
about the Death of Art -- as if the process was anything new, anything more than
an efficient closure of what had been happening for years. Groups were already
assembled on the basis of elaborate market research. The Azciak Probes were
already revealing people's tastes in breakfast cereals, politicians, and rock
stars. Why not scan the brains of the populace, discover precisely what music
they'd be willing to pay for, and then manufacture it -- all in a single,