"Resnick, Mike - Hothouse Flowers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

The Major looks at me through unfocused eyes. There is a little drool running out the side of his mouth, and I wipe it off.
"It's a lovely morning," I say. "It's a pity you can't be outside to enjoy it." I pause, waiting for the reaction that never comes. "Still," I continue, "you've seen more than your share of them, so missing a few won't hurt." I check the screen at his life station, find his birthdate, and dope it out. "Well, I'll be damned! You've actually seen 60,573 mornings!"
Of course, he's been here for almost half of them: 29,882 to be exact. If he ever did count them, he stopped a long time ago.
I clean and sterilize his feeding tubes and his medication tubes and his breathing tubes, examine him for bedsores, wash him, take his temperature and blood pressure, and check to make sure his cholesterol hasn't gone above the 350 level. (They want it lower, of course, but he can't exercise and they've been feeding him intravenously for more than half a century, so they won't do anything about changing his diet. After all, it hasn't killed him so far, and altering it just might do so.)
I elevate his withered body just long enough to change the bedding, then gently lower him back down. (That used to take ten minutes, and at least one helper, before they developed the anti- grav beam. Now it's just a matter of a few seconds, and I like to think it causes less discomfort, though of course the Major is in no condition to tell me.)
Then it's on to Rex. Felicia has problems with her Rex, and I have problems with mine.
"Good morning, Rex," I say.
He mumbles something incomprehensible at me.
I look down at him. His right eye is bloodshot and tearing heavily.
"Rex, what am I going to do with you?" I say. "You know you're not supposed to stare at the sun."
He doesn't really know it. I doubt that he even knows his name is Rex. But cleansing his eye and medicating it is going to put me behind schedule, and I have to blame someone. Rex doesn't mind being blamed. He doesn't mind burning out his retina. He doesn't even mind lying motionless for decades. If there is anything he does mind, nobody's found it yet.
I spill some medication on him while fixing his eye, so I decide that rather than just change his diaper I might as well go all the way and give him a DryChem bath. I marvel, as always, at the sheer number of surgical scars that criss-cross his torso: the first new heart, the second, the new kidneys, the new spleen, the new left lung. There's a tiny, ancient scar on his lower belly which I think was from the removal of a burst appendix, but I can't find any record of it on the computer and he's been past talking about it for almost a century.
Then I move on to Mr. Spinoza. He's laying there, mouth agape, eyes open, head at an awkward angle. I can tell even before I reach him that he's not breathing. My first inclination is to call Emergency, but I realize that his life station will have reported his condition already, and sure enough, just seconds later the Resurrection Team arrives and sets up a curtain around him (as if any of his roommates could see or care), and within ten minutes they've got the old gentleman going again.
This is the fifth time Mr. Spinoza has died this year. All this dying has to be hard on his system, and I worry that one of these days it's going to be permanent.
* * * *
"So how was your Major today?" asks Felicia at dinner.
"Same as usual," I say. "How's yours?"
Her Major is the Browallia speciosa majorus. "Ditto," she says. "Old, but hanging on." She frowns. "We may not get any blossoms this year, though. The roots are a little ropey."
"I'm sorry to hear it."
"It happens." She pauses. "How was the rest of your day?"
"We had some excitement," I reply.
"Oh?"
"Mr. Spinoza died again."
"That's the fourth time, isn't it?" she asks.
"The fifth," I correct her. "The Resurrection Team revived him."
"The Resuscitation Team," she corrects me.
"You have your word for them, I have mine," I say. "Mine's better. Resurrection is what they do."
"So you've only lost one this week," says Felicia, if not changing the subject at least moving on a tangent away from it.
"Right. Mr. Lazlo. He was 193 years old."
"193," she muses, and then shrugs. "I guess he was entitled."
"You mentioned that you lost one too," I note.
"My cymbidium."
"That's an orchid, right?" I say. "The one they nicknamed Peter Pan?"
She nods.
"Silly name for an orchid," I remark.
"It stayed young forever, or so it seemed," she replies. "It had the most exquisite blooms. I'm really going to miss it. I'd had it for almost 20 years." She smiles sadly, and a single tear begins to roll down her cheek. "I worked so hard over it, sometimes I felt like its mother." She looks at me. "That sounds ludicrous, doesn't it?"
"Not at all," I say, sincerely touched by her grief.
"It's all right," she says. Then she stares at my face. "Don't be so concerned. It was just a flower."
"It's called empathy," I answer, and she lets it drop...but I am troubled, and by the oddest thought: Shouldn't I feel worse about losing a person than she feels about losing an orchid?
But I don't.
* * * *
I don't know when it began. Probably with the first caveman who made a sling for a broken arm, or forced water out of a drowned companion's lungs. But somewhere back in the dim and distant past man invented medicine. It had its good centuries and its bad centuries, but by the end of the last millennium it was curing so many diseases and extending so many lives that things got out of hand.
More than half the people who were alive in 2050 were still alive in 2150. And almost 90% of the people who were alive in 2100 will be alive in 2200. Medical science had doubled and then trebled man's life span. Immortality was within our grasp. Life everlasting beckoned.
We were so busy increasing the length of life that no one gave much thought to the quality of those extended lives.
And then we woke up one day to find that there were a lot more of them than there were of us.
* * * *
His name is Bernard Goldmeier. They carry him in on an airsled, then transfer him to Mr. Lazlo's old life station.
After I clean the Major's tubes and change his bedding and medicate Rex's eye, I call up Mr. Goldmeier's medical history on the holoscreen at his life station.
"This place stinks!" rasps a dry voice.
I jump, startled, then turn to see who spoke. There is no one in the room except me and my charges.