"Bernard Wolfe - Limbo '90" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Bernard)

What a sick one was this poor Moaga, Moaga the troublemaker, the sullen, the never-speaking, the
vilifier of neighbours, and husband-slasher. The riot had been drained from her body now, she lay
stretched out on the operating table like a mound of tapioca so completely anaesthetized by rotabunga
that although her eyes were wide open they could see nothing. She was naked and Ubu could see the
tangle of wires that led from her arms, her legs, her chest, her eyelids, from all the orifices of her bronze
body, to the measuring machines scattered around the room. He knew that in a few minutes, when
Mandunga took place, the indicating needles on those machines would sink from the level of distress to
the level of ease and Moaga's sickness would be over, she, would stay away from ganja ('marijuana', in
the doctor's peculiar language) and eat more tapioca, take more rotabunga. Done with electric trepans
and chrome-steel scalpels and sutures, or with an old-fashioned chisel driven by an old-fashioned rock,
the result was always the same magic: the troubled one came out of it no longer troubled, only a little
sleepy. When, of course, he did not die. It was true, fewer patients died since the doctor had introduced
trepans and asepsis and anatomy and penicillin.

Dr Martine inserted a thin metal instrument into the incision and pried; in a moment the skull gave and
began to come away. An assistant was standing by with gloved hands held out, in spite of the surgical
mask Ubu recognized him as Martine's son Rambo. The boy took the bony cup, holding it like a bowl in
the ritual of the tapioca feast, and immediately submerged it in a large tray containing the usual saline bath.

Despite the dozens of times Ubu had watched this ceremony, despite the hundreds of times he had
performed it (at least the ancient rock-and-chisel version of it) himself in the old days, before Martine, he
still felt a certain thrill at the sight of the brain's crumpled convolutions - 'those intellectual intestines, that
hive of anarchy', the doctor called them.

Suddenly Ubu thought of the black dot he had seen on the horizon: had it really been moving?
Involuntarily his shoulders hunched and he sucked his lips in until they were thin and bloodless.

'You are lucky, Moaga,' he said, reverting to English. 'Soon no more worries, prognosis good. But for
some worries, no scalpel, prognosis very bad...' This time he did not add the articles and verbs and so
on.

CHAPTER 2

Pulse normal, respiration normal: the rubber bladders through which she breathed clenched and
unclenched in perfect rhythm, two pneumatic fists. Rambo trundled a large Monel metal cabinet over to
the table, through its glass front a bank of electronic tubes glowed. Everything was in order.

From the machine, which contained an array of slender steel probes attached by coiled wires to the
electronic circuits within, Martine selected a needle and brought it close to the exposed brain. He applied
the point carefully to an area on the cortex, signalled his readiness with a nod. Rambo twisted one of the
control dials on the machine's operating panel. Moaga's left leg shot up and twitched in an absent-minded
entrechat. Another contact made the shoulders writhe, another doubled the hands into fists and sent them
paddling in the air, a fourth set the teeth to grinding.

Now the doctor began the multiple stimulation tests, applying four, then six, then eight and ten needles
simultaneously to various cortical centres; with the final flow of current Moaga's face grew contorted, its
muscles worked in spasms and her abdomen arched away from the table and began to heave. In spite of
himself Martine felt his own abdominal muscles contracting, he always had this sympathetic response to
the mock intercourse induced by a few expertly distributed amperes. 'I got rhythm,' he said to himself.