"Walter Jon Williams - Videostar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

West, Ric thought. He'd buy into an American condecology somewhere in
California and enjoy retirement.
He was twenty-two years old.
He began to feel sick in the Tangier to Houston suborbital shuttle, a
crawling across his nerves, pinpricks in the flesh. By the time he crossed the
Houston port to take his domestic flight to L.A. there were stabbing pains in
his joints and behind his eyes. He asked a flight attendant for aspirin and
chased the pills with American whiskey.
As the plane jetted west across Texas, Ric dropped his whiskey glass
and screamed in sudden pain. The attendants gave him morphine analogue but the
agony only increased, an acid boiling under his skin, a flame that gutted his
body. His vision had gone and so had the rest of his senses except for the
burning knowledge of his own pain. Ric tried to tear his arms open with his
fingernails, pull the tortured nerves clean out of his body, and the
attendants piled on him, holding him down, pinning him to the floor of the
plane like a butterfly to a bed of cork.
As they strapped him into a stretcher at the unscheduled stop in
Flagstaff, Ric was still screaming, unable to stop himself. Jacob had poisoned
him, using a neurotoxin that stripped away the myelin sheathing on his nerves,
leaving them raw cords of agonized fiber. Ric had been in a hurry to finish
his business and had only taken a single sip of his wine: that was the only
thing that had saved him.
22
He was months in the hospital in Flagstaff, staring out of a glass wall at a
maze of other glass walls -- office buildings and condecologies stacked
halfway to Phoenix, flanking the silver alloy ribbon of an expressway. The
snows fell heavily that winter, then in the spring melted away except for
patches of white in the shadows. For the first three months he was completely
immobile, his brain chemically isolated from his body to keep the pain away
while he took an endless series of nerve grafts, drugs to encourage nerve
replication and healing. Finally there was physical therapy that had him
screaming in agony at the searing pain in his reawakened limbs.
At the end there was a new treatment, a new drug. It dripped into his
arm slowly via an IV and he could feel a lightness in his nerves, a humming in
his mind. Even the air seemed to taste better. The pain was no worse than
usual and he felt better than he had since walking out of the meeting back in
Granada with the money spike in his pocket.
"What's in the IV?" he asked, next time he saw the nurse.
The nurse smiled. "Everyone asks that," he said. "Genesios Three. We're
one of the few hospitals that has the security to distribute the stuff."
"You don't say."
He'd heard of the drug while watching the news. Genesios Three was a
new neurohormone, developed by the orbital Pink Blossom policorp, that could
repair almost any amount of nerve damage. As a side effect it built additional
neural connections in the brain, thus raising the IQ, and made people high.
The hormone was rare because it was very complex and expensive to synthesize,
though the gangs were trying. On the west coast lots of people had died in a
war for control of the new black labs. On the street it was called Black
Thunder.
"Not bad," said Ric.