"Dan Simmons - Metastasis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

Metastasis
by Dan Simmons
Introduction
It's odd to think that within the walls of concentration camps such as Auschwitz and
even in camps such as Treblinka and Sobibor where extermination of human be-ings
was the only official activity, wives of the comman-dants kept gardens, children of
the high-ranking German officers attended classes and competed at sports,
musi-cians played Mozart and Bach and Mahler at dinner par-ties, wives worried
about their figures while their husbands checked for receding hairlines ... all the banal
preoccupations which constitute the human condition that we share today.
While all around them, humans were being starved and beaten and gassed and fed to
the ovens. The ash that had been human flesh an hour before now lightly dusted the
roses in the gardens. Barbed wire separated the boys' soccer fields from the killing
fields. The music of Mozart carried to the barracks where former musicians and
com-posers and conductors lay shivering with the other human skeletons there.
In the commandant's comfortable home, the adminis-trator checked his hairline in the
mirror and the adminis-trator's wife looked in her mirror, pirouetted, pouted, and
decided that she would have one less torte for dessert that night.
Did the mirrors reflect human beings?
Of course they did. People can adapt to almost any-thing.
During the days of the Black Death in the 13th Century, when entire villages were
wiped out, when the death carts rumbled through the streets at night with the cry
"Bring out your dead!" until there was no one left to bury them, there was much
preoccupation with the macabre, many flirtations with deathтАФskull-masked revelers
danced nightly in the burial catacombs of ParisтАФbut overall, the small wheel of daily
life creaked along as usual.
Are we doing the same today?
I always flinch when I hear someone use the word decimate to mean "wipe out," as
in, "The Sioux deci-mated Custer's men."
The word actually comes from the Latin and the action it implies from the Romans.
When someone in an occu-pied province defied the Roman governor or killed a
Ro-man soldier, the Romans would hold a lottery and kill every tenth person. (
Decimate as in Decimat(us), past par-ticiple of decimare.)
The Jews weren't decimated in Poland and Europe; they were almost wiped out.
The people of 13th Century Europe weren't decimat-ed; a fourth to half of the entire
population was wiped out. And the plague returnedтАФagain and again. The people
could not see the plague bacillus so in a sense it did not exist for them. They saw
only the results piled high in the death carts each night, staring eyes and exposed
teeth illu-minated by the light of torches.
We're not being decimated by cancer in the latter part of the 20th CenturyтАФthe odds
are worse than that. The lottery calls one in six. Or perhaps it's already one in five.
(It's been getting worse for a long time.)
Meanwhile, we grow our gardens, play our games, lis-ten to our music, and look in
our mirrors.
We just try not to see too much.
***
On the day Louis Steig received a call from his sister saying that their mother had
collapsed and been admitted to a Denver hospital with a diagnosis of cancer, he
promptly jumped into his Camaro, headed for Denver at high speed, hit a patch of
black ice on the Boulder Turn-pike, flipped his car seven times, and ended up in a