"David Brin - Senses Three and Six" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

But I remember forging Chuck's birth certificate almost two years ago. I set him
up as a role, I recall,
someone They'd never find because They were looking for somebody else. I
remember diving into Chuck and burning everything that came before, old habits, old
ways, and most of all the old memories.
Until tonight, that is.
Okay, let's be rational about this. What are the possibilities?
One is that I'm crazy. I really am Charles L. Magun, and all that shit about having
once upon a time played the piano, done calculus, piloted jet planes, piloted... other
things... that's all a crock of madman's dreams.
It's amazing. For the first time in two years I can actually stand here and
dispassionately remember doing some of those things. Some of them. Stuff not
directly associated with the breakout. They seem so vivid. I can set up a
hyperdimensional integral in my head, for instance. Could Chuck do that?
But I also remember, from long ago when I was a boy, those weird old men who
used to come to the Institute bugging Dad and the other profs, to try to get someone
to listen to their ideas for perpetual motion machines and the like. Their fantasies
seemed sophisticated and correct to Them, too, didn't they?
The irony isn't lost on me--using a memory of the Institute to demonstrate that
it's possible for me to falsely remember learning calculus.
Droll.
All right, perhaps I did construct Chuck. Maybe I was someone like who I think I
was. But maybe everything that I'm currently afraid of is a fantasy. Maybe I simply
went crazy some years back.
Look at me, spending an entire evening in a nonstop internal monologue,
describing everything I think and feel as it happens, and every whimper and moan is
out of some goddamn psychodrama, I swear. Like this paranoid delusion of
vengeful creatures I call Them . . .
Oh, something terrible must have happened to me two years ago or so. But might
it be something more mundane, like an accident? Or a murder? Maybe I created a
terrifying and romantic fantasy to cover memories of the real trauma... something of
this Earth, hidden under a bizarre mask of science fiction.
No one I know has even heard of the Cabal, or the Arks, or Canaan, or even a
fiery crash on a mountainside just a hundred miles from here. I remember we Broke
Out a bit early because elections were coming and the old administration was sure to
lose. We thought the new crowd would be sure to blow the whistle. But not a word
of any "secret project under the Tennessee hills" has ever hit the press. There
wouldn't be any point in secrecy any longer, but there's been no word.
 When you get right down to it, the story I remember is pretty damn preposterous.


A cool breeze is blowing now. The last drifts of fog fall away in tatters, fleeing
into the gloom just past the streetlamps. The wind feels fresh on my face.
A third possibility is that I didn't make any of it up. I'm the hunted last survivor of
a secret plot against a powerful outsider civilization, and my enemies will stop at
nothing to catch me.
Hmmm. I never put it quite that way before. The next question, I now see, is
obvious.
So what?
A smile? Is that what my answer is? A smile?