Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World
- Автор: Мосли Уолтер
- Год: 2001
- Язык: английский
- Год: Aspect / Warner Books
- ISBN: 978-0-446-52954-9
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World». Краткое содержание книги:
The operation that Bel-Nan had performed on Leon was a more sophisticated version of the experiments that had put him in prison. Taking living brain tissue from an anonymous donor, the surgeon replaced certain regenerative tissue in Jones’s cortex and frontal lobe. These cells stimulated the atrophied portion of his brain, allowing the onetime history professor to survive without taking Pulse.
“Sometimes there are vestigial memories, pieces of thoughts that the donor once might have had,” Bel-Nan explained as he pushed the long and greasy blond hair away from his eyes.
“But, Doctor,” Jones complained. “It’s not just a word or a patch of color, something like that. There’s questions and sometimes I have yens, desires for things I never wanted before.”
Bel-Nan smiled. His face was long and somehow crooked, as if maybe the man who knocked his tooth out had also broken his jaw. Jones had seen quite a few misshapen faces like that during the years he managed his daughter’s boxing career.
“The brain is a mysterious thing, Professor Jones,” Bel-Nan said. “It is the most volatile and creative material in the world, maybe even the universe. It can evolve without dying. It can conceive of itself. Its concepts are beyond the living cells that comprise it, so that life for us is defined by the faculty of thought rather than the ability to breathe. Breath, as magical as it is, is nothing compared to the reality of personality.”
The ugly scientist smiled, unashamed of the crooked grin and missing tooth.
“What does that have to do with this voice in my head?” Jones asked.
“Your brain has discovered new material,” Bel-Nan explained patiently. “It’s making up this voice to explain it. The shock of the new cells becomes a question in your conscious mind. Where am I? That’s the feeling of the new cells. They are displaced and that feeling of displacement becomes a question. This strangeness of the new cells seeks out a new answer, therefore you try new things. A different taste. A walk in the park. Tell me, do you have headaches before you hear this voice?”
“Yes, I do. I get a headache that lasts for hours, and then, when it subsides, the voice comes out. Not a voice, really, but ideas. Some come across as words, and others, others are images. Why? What does a headache mean?”
“The cells are integrating. As they come together there’s friction and maybe a little heat. That particular phase of the integration is successful, the pain subsides, and a new member is added to the collective of brain cells. There must be something old in those cells and a confusion arises. But all of that will pass. Maybe if you take vitamin E3 or, even better, hedroprofin, the swelling will be contained. But I wouldn’t if I were you.”
“Why not?”
“This is a moment of discovery that very few humans have ever undergone. You are experiencing the reintegration of your mind. You are absorbing the life and the soul of another. Feel it, Professor Jones. Record it. It could be one of the most valuable self-examinations since Freud.”
“You think somebody’d pay for it?”
“I’d read it, Professor. I’ve done a dozen of these operations since they were legalized. But this was the deepest and most extensive transplant of living tissue. I replaced a rather large portion of the cortical stem and interior with various materials from a single donor. We were relying on the similarity of the neuronal material, hoping that the new elements would adapt to the function required of them.”
Leon had been on life support, he was told, for eighteen months after the operation. Machines the size of a brown-stone maintaining basic functions that his brain had to re-learn.
“You are the first to survive this long,” Bel-Nan said.
“Well,” Leon said. “I guess a few echoes aren’t so bad compared to death.”
“Not so bad at all, Professor.”
Professor Jones had spent all of the money he made in boxing on the operation. His daughter had helped only insofar as she used her influence to get him well placed on the waiting list for the highly experimental procedure. But even with her help he was lucky to have been chosen.
It had been three months since his release from the hospital, and so far Leon’s health was fair. He still felt weak after very little exertion, and sometimes when he woke up in the morning he was a little disoriented. He’d look around the room searching for something familiar. Once he thought he saw a small dog sitting patiently in the corner. But one blink and the dog was gone.
2
When Leon took the hedroprofin the voice disappeared. He was happy not to feel that he was going crazy, but he discovered that he missed the voice. It had been an anchor after years of Pulse addiction. With no obsession left he found himself drifting.
His daughter was in D.C. testing the waters for a greater political career. As a onetime drug addict, he was an embarrassment to her. The newspapers that backed Fera Jones’s political ambitions blamed the elder Jones for forcing his daughter into the ring to pay for his drugs. It wasn’t true. As a child Fera had begged to fight. She was overactive, and boxing was the one thing that calmed her down.
They talked every day for a few minutes. But she was busy and he had nothing but time.
Professor Jones lived in two small rooms on Middle One twenty-fifth Street near Adam Clayton Powell. When he was a child Harlem was an entirely black neighborhood, one of the centers of African-American culture. But now it was as faceless and multicultured as any other neighborhood in Manhattan. The Schomburg Residence Hotel was happy to take a congresswoman’s father for a tenant. The rent was $2,000 a week, 60 percent of his disability insurance.
He read and reread books about history. Not histories, but books that spoke of the art of recording the past. Colling-wood and Hegel and Ahn Min. That’s what intrigued Jones: the intangibility of what was. The passage of time and the forgetfulness of humanity. Even his talk with the unsightly Dr. Bel-Nan. Did he say that the cells of the donor remembered details from the previous life? No, not exactly. He hadn’t exactly said anything.
“The best history is a shopping list,” one of his professors at Howard had said. “Three bananas, two lengths of copper wire, and a broad-brimmed hat. Now that’s something to sink your teeth into.”
Bel-Nan wasn’t even his real name. He’d changed it hoping, like the rulers of a new dynasty in China who rewrote history, to be seen in a new light. From many years of study Jones had decided that nothing anyone ever said was true; at best it was what they believed.
On a temperate December morning Professor Jones decided to go down to Morningside Park, a green valley between towering buildings. In his childhood his Aunt Bing would tell him that the park was a dangerous place where drug dealers and gang members met. And so when his Uncle Bly took the short cut through the park little Leon would turn his head every which way to see where the killers were hiding.
“It’s okay in the daytime,” Bly would assure him.
But Leon never stopped his vigil until they were back on the regular streets, safe from harm.
“Mister?” a child’s voice asked.
At first he thought it was the voice in his head. The question was not a lament, however. Professor Jones looked down and saw a blond-haired child, no more than five, standing at the far end of the park bench.
He blinked once, expecting the child to disappear.
“Are you cold, mister?” the girl asked instead of dissipating.