"George R. R. Martin - Override" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

wall. "I barely started." There was a pile of loose stones in a rough semicircle around the area he'd been
working, and a large bite missing from the rock. But most of the wall was untouched, stretching away
from them in sheets of shimmering green.
"You sure no one else knows about this place?" Cochran asked. "Reasonably. Why?"
Cochran shrugged. "When we were coming through the caves, I could have sworn I heard another
launch behind us somewhere."
"Probably echoes," Kabaraijian said. He looked toward his launch. "Anyway, we better get going."
He hit his corpse controller, and the three still figures in the boat began to move.
He stood stock-still on the sand, watching them. And as he watched, somewhere in the back of his
head, he was also watching himself with their eyes. They rose stiffly, and two of them climbed out onto
the sand. The third walked to the chest in the front of the launch, and began unloading the equipment;
vibrodrills and picks and shovels. Then, his arms full, he climbed down and joined the others.
None of them were really moving, of course. It was all Kabaraijian. It was Kabaraijian who moved
their legs, and made their hands clasp and their arms reach. It was Kabaraijian, his commands picked up
by controller and magnified by synthabrain, who put life into the bodies of the dead men. The
synthabrains keep the automatic functions going, but it was the corpse handler who gave the corpse its
will.
It wasn't easy, and it was far from perfect. The sense impressions thrown back to the handler were
seldom useful; mostly he had to watch his corpses to know what they were doing. The manipulation was
seldom graceful; corpses moved slowly and clumsily, and fine work was beyond them. A corpse could
swing a mallet, but even the best handler couldn't make a dead man thread a needle, or speak.
With a bad handler, a corpse could hardly move at all. It took coordination to run even one dead
man, if the handler was doing anything himself. He had to keep the commands to the corpse separate
from the commands to his own muscles. That was easy enough for most, but the task grew increasingly
complex as the crew grew larger. The record for one handler was twenty-six corpses; but all he'd done
was march them, in step. When the dead men weren't all doing the same thing, the corpse handler's work
became much more challenging.
Kabaraijian had a three-crew; all top meat, corpses in good condition. They'd been big men, and
they still were; Kabaraijian paid premiums for food to keep his property in good condition. One had dark
hair and a scar along a cheek, another was blond and young and freckled, the third had mousy brown
locks. Other than that, they were interchangeable; all about the same height and weight and build.
Corpses don't have personality. They lose that with their minds.
Cochran's crew, climbing out onto the sand in compliance with his work orders, was less impressive.
There were only two of them, and neither was a grade-one specimen. The first corpse was brawny
enough, with wide shoulders and rippling muscles. But his legs were twisted matchsticks, and he
stumbled often and walked more slowly than even the average corpse. The second dead man was reedy
and middle-aged, bald and under-muscled. Both were grimy. Cochran didn't believe in taking care of his
crew the way Kabaraijian did. It was a bad habit. Cochran had started as a paid handler working
somebody else's corpses; upkeep hadn't been his concern.
Each of Kabaraijian's crew bent and picked up a vibrodrill from the stack of equipment on the sand.
Then, parallel to each other, they advanced on the cave wall. The drills sank humming holes into the
porous rock, and from each drill bite a network of thin cracks branched and grew.
The corpses drilled in unison until each drill was sunk nearly to its hilt, and the cracks had grown
finger-wide. Then, almost as one, they withdrew the drills and discarded them in favor of picks. Work
slowed. Crack by crack, the corpses attacked the wall, laboriously peeling off a whole layer of greenish
stone. They swung the picks carefully, but with bone-jarring force, untiring, relentless. Incapable of pain,
their bones could scarce feel the jars.
The dead men did all the work. Kabaraijian stood behind, a slight, dark statue in the sand, with
hands on hips and eyes hooded. He did nothing but watch. Yet he did all. Kabaraijian was the corpses;
the corpses were Kabaraijian. He was one man in four bodies, and it was his hand that guided each