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

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 hundred
people lived out here. Rugged pioneer families, hermits, a few scientists, and some
kind of Hindu sect that planted huge tracts of Umbriel’s sooty surface with
slow-growing lichenous vacuum organisms. After the war, the Three Powers Alliance
took over the science station on Ariel, one of the larger moons, renamed it Herschel
City, and built its maximum security facility in the big graben close by. The various