"Paul J. McAuley - Dead Man Walking" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

DEAD 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.
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