"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 3 - Green Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Hiroko was there in the commons, watching him. She rarely spent evenings in the village, and he didnтАЩt
need to look at her to know what she was thinking. They were made to give, she had always said, and
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this would be the ultimate gift. An act of pure viriditas. тАЬOf course,тАЭ he said, happy at the opportunity.



The hospital was next to the bathhouse and the school. It was smaller than the school, and had five beds.
They laid Simon on one, and Nirgal on another.

The old man smiled at him. He didnтАЩt look sick, only old. Just like all the rest of the ancients, in fact. He
had seldom said much, and now he said only, тАЬThanks, Nirgal.тАЭ

Nirgal nodded. Then to his surprise Simon went on: тАЬI appreciate you doing this. The extraction will hurt
afterward for a week or two, right down in the bone. ThatтАЩs quite a thing to do for someone else.тАЭ

тАЬBut not if they really need it,тАЭ Nirgal said.

тАЬWell, itтАЩs a gift that IтАЩll try to repay, of course.тАЭ

Vlad and Ursula anesthetized NirgalтАЩs arm with a shot. тАЬIt isnтАЩt really necessary to do both operations
now, but itтАЩs a good idea to have you two together for it. It will help the healing if you are friends.тАЭ

So they became friends. After school Nirgal would go by the hospital, and Simon would step slowly out
the door, and they would walk the path over the dunes to the beach. There they watched the waves
ripple across the white surface and rise and crumple on the strand. Simon was a lot less talkative than
anyone Nirgal had ever spent time with; it was like being silent with HirokoтАЩs group, only it never ended.
At first it made him uncomfortable. But after a while he found it left time to really look at things: the gulls
wheeling under the dome, the sandcrab bubbles in the sand, the circles in the sand surrounding each tuft
of dune grass. Peter was back in Zygote a lot now, and many days he would come with them.
Occasionally even Ann would interrupt her perpetual traveling, and visit Zygote and join them. Peter and
Nirgal would race around playing tag, or hide and seek, while Ann and Simon strolled the beach arm in
arm.

But Simon was still weak, and he got weaker. It was hard not to see this as some kind of moral failing;
Nirgal had never been sick, and he found the concept disgusting. It could only happen to the old ones.
And even they were supposed to have been saved by their aging treatment, which everyone got when
they were old, and so never died. Only plants and animals died. But people were animals. But they had
invented the treatment. At night, worrying about these discrepancies, Nirgal read his lecternтАЩs whole entry
on leukemia, even though it was as long as a book. Cancer of the blood. White cells proliferated out of
the bone marrow and flooded the system, attacking healthy systems. They were giving Simon chemicals
and irradiation and pseudoviruses to kill the white blood cells, and trying to replace the sick marrow in
him with new marrow from Nirgal. They had also given him the aging treatment three times now. Nirgal
read about this too. It was a matter of genomic mismatch scanning, which found broken chromosomes
and repaired them so that cell division error did not occur. But it was hard to penetrate bone with the
array of introduced auto repair cells, and apparently in SimonтАЩs case little pockets of cancerous marrow