"Alastair Reynolds - A Spy In Europa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

Not easily, anyway. The Gilgamesh surgeons had promised him they could

undo the work - but he didn't believe them. After all, the Demarchy was

ahead of Ganymede in the biosciences, and even Cholok had told him

reversals were tricky. He'd accepted the mission in any case: the pay

tantalising; the prospect of the sulphur projects rather less.

Cholok spent most of the day with him, only breaking off to talk to other

clients or confer with her team. Breathing exercises occupied most of that

time: prolonged periods spent underwater, nulling the brain's drowning

response. Unpleasant, but Vargovic had done worse things in training. They

practised fully-submerged swimming, using his lungs to regulate buoyancy,

followed by instruction about keeping his gill-openings - what Cholok

called his opercula - clean, which meant ensuring the health of the

colonies of commensal bacteria which thrived in the openings and crawled

over the fine secondary flaps of his lamellae. He'd read the brochure:

what she'd done was to surgically sculpt his anatomy toward a state

somewhere between human and air-breathing fish: incorporating biochemical

lessons from lungfish and walking-catfish. Fish breathed water through

their mouths and returned it to the sea via their gills, but it was the

gills in Vargovic's neck which served the function of a mouth. His true

gills were below his thoracic cavity; crescent-shaped gashes below his

ribs.

"Compared to your body size," she said, "these gill-openings are never

going to give you the respiratory efficiency you'd have if you went in for
more dramatic changes..."

"Like a Denizen?"

"I told you, I don't know anything."