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

Sunset’s three hours off. I won’t live long enough to see it. My legs are
comfortably numb, but the throbbing in my hand is becoming more urgent, there’s
a dull ache in my chest, and every breath is an effort. I wonder if I’ll live
long enough to tell you my story…
* * * *
All right. I’ve just taken another shot of painkiller. I had to override the
suit to do it, it’s a lethal dose…
Christos, it still hurts. It hurts to laugh…
* * * *
My name is Roy Bruce. It isn’t my real name. I have never had a real name. I
suppose I had a number when I was decanted, but I don’t know what it was. My
instructors called me Dave—but they called all of us Dave, a private joke they
never bothered to explain. Later, just before the war began, I took the life of
the man in whose image I had been made. I took his life, his name, his identity.
And after the war was over, after I evaded recall and went on the run, I had
several different names, one after the other. But Roy, Roy Bruce, that’s the
name I’ve had longest. That’s the name you’ll find on the roster of guards.
That’s the name you can bury me under.
My name is Roy Bruce, and I lived in Herschel City, Ariel, for eight and a half
years. Lived. Already with the past tense…
My name is Roy Bruce. I’m a prison guard. The prison, TPA Facility 898, is a
cluster of chambers—we call them blocks—buried in the eastern rim of Elliot
Graben. Herschel City is twenty klicks beyond, a giant cylindrical shaft sunk
into Ariel’s icy surface, its walls covered in a vertical, shaggy green forest
that grows from numerous ledges and crevices. Public buildings and little parks
jut out of the forest wall like bracket fungi; homes are built in and amongst
the trees. Ariel’s just over a thousand kilometers in diameter and mostly ice;
its gravity barely exists. The citizens of Herschel City are arboreal acrobats,
swinging, climbing, sliding, flying up and down and roundabout on cableways and
trapezes, nets and ropewalks. It’s a good place to live.
I have a one-room treehouse. It’s not very big and plainly furnished, but you
can sit on the porch of a morning, watch squirrel monkeys chase each other
through the pines…
I’m a member of Sweat Lodge #23. I breed singing crickets, have won several
competitions with them. Mostly they’re hacked to sing fragments of Mozart,
nothing fancy, but my line has good sustain and excellent timbre and pitch. I
hope old Willy Gup keeps it going…
I like to hike too, and climb freestyle. I once soloed the Broken Book route in
Prospero Chasma on Miranda, twenty kilometers up a vertical face, in fifteen
hours. Nowhere near the record, but pretty good for someone with a terminal
illness. I’ve already had various bouts of cancer, but retroviruses dealt with
those easily enough. What’s killing me—what just lost the race to kill me—is a
general systematic failure something like lupus. I couldn’t get any treatment
for it, of course, because the doctors would find out who I really am. What I
really was.
I suppose that I had a year or so left. Maybe two if I was really lucky.
It wasn’t much of a life, but it was all my own.
* * * *
Uranus has some twenty-odd moons, mostly captured chunks of sooty ice a few
dozen kilometers in diameter. Before the Quiet War, no more than a couple of