"Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

'Cuidado con una pulmonia.' El nuevo tipo de pulmonia es peor que eI
SIDA, ban muerto ya centenares de personas.
"Okay, okay," Alex said. "Sure, no problem. I'm doing lots better
lately, though. I don't even need the chair."
Concepci├│n nodded and helped him out of bed, shoving her solid
shoulder under his armpit. The two of them made it out the door of
the suite and a good ten meters down the carpeted hall before Alex's
knees buckled. The wheelchair, a machine of limited but highly
specialized intelligence, was right behind Alex as he stumbled. He
gave up the struggle gracefully and sat within the chrome-and-leather
machine.
Concepci├┤n left Alex in the treatment room to wait for Dr. Mirabi.
Alex was quite sure that Dr. Mirabi was doing nothing of consequence.
Having Alex wait alone in a closed room was simply medical etiquette,
a way to establish whose time was more important. Though Dr. Mirabi's
employees were kept on the hustle-especially the hardworking retail
pharmacists-Dr. Mirabi himself hardly seemed oppressed by his duties.
As far as Alex could deduce from the staff schedules, there were only
four long-
patients in the whole clinica. Alex was pretty sure
most of the clinica's income came from yanquis on
тАв down from Laredo. Before he himself had ~ckecfin last April,
he'd seen a line of Americans halfway wn the block, eagerly picking
up Mexican megadosage ~strums for the new ultraresistant strains of
Th.
Dr. Mirabi's treatment room was long and rectangular and full of tall
canvas-shrouded machinery. Like every place else in the clinica, it
was air-conditioned to a deathly chill, and smelled of sharp and
potent disinfectant. Alex wished that he had thought to snag a
fotonovela on the way out of his room. Alex pretended distaste for
the nave-las' clumsy and violence-soaked porn, but their comically
distorted gutter-level Spanish was of a lot of philological interest.
Concepci├│n opened the door and stepped in. Behind her, Dr. Mirabi
arrived, his ever-present notepad in hand. Despite his vaguely
Islamic surname, Alex suspected strongly that Dr. Mirabi was, in
fact, Hungarian.
Dr. Mirabi tapped the glass face of his notepad with a neat black
stylus and examined the result. "Well, Alex," he said briskly in
accented English, "we seem to have defeated that dirty streptococcus
once and for all."
"That's right," Alex said. "Haven't had a night sweat in ages."
"That's quite a good step, quite good," Dr. Mirabi encouraged. "Of
course, that infection was only the crisis symptom of your syndrome.
The next stage of your cure"
-he examined the notepad-"is the chronic mucus congestion! We must
deal with that chronic mucus, Alex. It might have been protective
mucus at first, but now is your metabolic burden. Once the chronic
mucus is gone, and the tubercles are entirely cleansed-cleaned . .
." He paused. "Is it 'cleaned,' or 'cleansed'?"
"Either one works," Alex said.