"Dead Men Walking" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Dead Men WalkingDEAD MEN WALKING
by Paul J. McAuley
Paul J. McAuley lives in London, where he spends too much time looking at a
computer screen instead of taking the kind of long walks in drenching rain and
fog that gave Charles Dickens all his ideas. Paul’s latest novel is Mind’s Eye,
published by Simon & Schuster (UK), and he’s currently working on novels about
parallel Americas, murder in Oregon, and the moons of Saturn. “Dead Men Walking”
is part of the “Quiet War” series of stories, which also included “The
Passenger” (Asimov’s, March 2002) and “The Assassination of Faustino Malarte”
(Asimov’s, July 2002).
* * * *
I guess this is the end. I’m in no condition to attempt the climb down, and in
any case I’m running out of air. The nearest emergency shelter is only five
klicks away, but it might as well be on the far side of this little moon. I’m
not expecting any kind of last-minute rescue, either. No one knows I’m here, my
phone and the distress beacon are out, my emergency flares went with my utility
belt, and I don’t think that the drones patrol this high. At least my legs have
stopped hurting, although I can feel the throb of what’s left of my right hand
through the painkiller’s haze, like the beat of distant war drums…
* * * *
If you’re the person who found my body, I doubt that you’ll have time to listen
to my last and only testament. You’ll be too busy calling for help, securing the
area, and making sure that you or any of your companions don’t trample precious
clues underfoot. I imagine instead that you’re an investigator or civil servant
sitting in an office buried deep inside some great bureaucratic hive, listening
to this out of duty before consigning it to the memory hole. You’ll know that my
body was found near the top of the eastern rimwall of the great gash of Elliot
Graben on Ariel, Uranus’s fourth-largest moon, but I don’t suppose you’ve ever
visited the place, so I should give you an idea of what I can see.
I’m sitting with my pressure suit’s backpack firmly wedged against a huge block
of dirty, rock-hard ice. A little way beyond my broken legs, a cliff drops
straight down for about a kilometer to the bottom of the graben’s enormous
trough. Its floor was resurfaced a couple of billion years ago by a flood of
water-ice lava, a level plain patched with enormous fields of semi-vacuum
organisms. Orange and red, deep blacks, foxy umbers, bright yellows… they
stretch away from me in every direction for as far as I can see, like the
biggest quilt in the universe. This moon is so small and the graben is so wide
that its western rim is below the horizon. Strings of suspensor lamps float high
above the fields like a fleet of burning airships. There’s enough atmospheric
pressure, twenty millibars of nitrogen and methane, to haze the view and give an
indication of distance, of just how big this strange garden really is. It’s the
prison farm, of course, and every square centimeter of it was constructed by the
sweat of men and women convicted by the failure of their ideals, but none of
that matters to me now. I’m beyond all that up here, higher than the suspensor
lamps, tucked under the eaves of the vast roof of transparent halflife polymer
that tents the graben. If I twist my head I can glimpse one of the giant struts
that anchor the roof. Beyond it, the big, blue-green globe of Uranus floats in
the black sky. The gas giant’s south pole, capped with a brownish haze of
photochemical smog, is aimed at the brilliant point of the sun, which hangs just
above the western horizon.