"Hamilton, Peter F - Softlight Sins" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

Douglas thought about it, and couldn't see an out. "Very well," he said.
"I have no objection to clearing Adrian's brain entirely."
"You want me to wipe every past life?" Dr Elliot asked in astonishment.
"But that will probably mean going back down to pre-sentience, Neanderthal
man, that's the Palaeolithic age. And from what we've seen so far there
are about two or three lives per century. If that holds constant, you are
talking about four-hundred-plus incarnations. It'll take a week."
"Did you have anything else planned?" Judge Hayward asked icily.

The third personality was called Rosin, another slave from Mississippi. He
died from a whipping while James Monroe was President. He was still
uttering little dog-like whines when Dr Elliot lowered the Softlight
imprinter over his eyes.
Number four was French, a peasant killed at the start of the revolution.
They had some trouble coaxing number five to speak, there was no response
to any European language. Barbara Johnson solved it by accessing Cambridge
University's linguistics department computer, and requesting a list of
greetings in all the languages known to be in use around seventeen
hundred.
"If we have to do this each time, the whole process is going to take a
month," Dr Elliot said as the terminal droned through the catalogue. "And
I doubt that the university's memory cores will be able to help us when we
enter pre-Roman history."
The man sitting in the chair mumbled something in response to the
terminal.
"African," Barbara Johnson said triumphantly.
His name was Ingombe, a member of the Fon tribe; they were migrants based
in Abomey, prey to the coastal slavers. He remembered the Ardra war canoes
coming upstream to attack his village, a fight.
Listening to him, and the ones that followed, it seemed to Douglas as
though Adrian had turned the tables on them, condemning them to witness a
seemingly endless litany of misery, a refined torment for the empathic.
They had lunch delivered to the laboratory, compartmentalised
airline-style trays from the canteen. Douglas just ate the cheese and
biscuits, staring out through the window. The mist which swirled through
the woodland outside was thickening, it already obscured the yellow-brown
carpet of dead bracken.
Incarnations ten to twenty were mainly European -Portuguese, English,
Dutch, German. Two of them awoke screaming and pleading in Spanish, their
anguish so deep set it was beyond even the hypnogenic's ability to quell.
Harvey Boden grimaced while Dr Elliot hurriedly manoeuvred the Softlight
imprinter over the first. "Spanish Inquisition," he said softly. "The time
fits."
"And LIFE! thinks Softlight is medieval," Barbara Johnson said grimly.
Douglas abandoned his cheese and biscuits. He walked over to the window
wall, only half listening to a man called John Diker give an account of
Cambridge in the thirteen-forties; his job as a freemason, how he lost his
mother, wife, and five children to the Black Death before succumbing
himself. The autumn frost seemed to reach in through the thick glass to
frost Douglas's body to the core.