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

Dead Men WalkingDEAD 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. PaulТs latest novel is MindТs Eye,
published by Simon & Schuster (UK), and heТs currently working on novels about
parallel Americas, murder in Oregon, and the moons of Saturn. УDead Men WalkingФ
is part of the УQuiet WarФ series of stories, which also included УThe
PassengerФ (AsimovТs, March 2002) and УThe Assassination of Faustino MalarteФ
(AsimovТs, July 2002).
* * * *
I guess this is the end. IТm in no condition to attempt the climb down, and in
any case IТm 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. IТm
not expecting any kind of last-minute rescue, either. No one knows IТm here, my
phone and the distress beacon are out, my emergency flares went with my utility
belt, and I donТt think that the drones patrol this high. At least my legs have
stopped hurting, although I can feel the throb of whatТs left of my right hand
through the painkillerТs haze, like the beat of distant war drumsЕ
* * * *
If youТre the person who found my body, I doubt that youТll have time to listen
to my last and only testament. YouТll be too busy calling for help, securing the
area, and making sure that you or any of your companions donТt trample precious
clues underfoot. I imagine instead that youТre 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. YouТll know that my
body was found near the top of the eastern rimwall of the great gash of Elliot
Graben on Ariel, UranusТs fourth-largest moon, but I donТt suppose youТve ever
visited the place, so I should give you an idea of what I can see.
IТm sitting with my pressure suitТs 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 grabenТs 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 yellowsЕ 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. ThereТs 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. ItТs 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. IТm 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 giantТs 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.