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

and body types in eucalyptus-scented steam around its stone hearth. We scraped
at our skin with abrasive mitts or plastered green depilatory mud on ourselves,
squirted the baking stones of the hearth with water to make more steam, and
talked about the murder of Goether Lyle. Mustafa Sesler, who worked in the
hospital, gave us all the grisly details. There was speculation about whether it
was caused by a personal beef or a turf war between gangs. Someone made the
inevitable joke about it being the most thorough suicide in the history of the
prison. Someone else, my friend Willy Gup, asked me if I had any idea about it.
УYou had the guy in your stick last year, Roy. He have any enemies you know of?Ф
I gave a noncommittal answer. The mutilations described by Mustafa Sesler were
straight out of my training in assassination, guerrilla tactics, and black
propaganda. I was processing the awful possibility that Goether Lyle had been
murdered by someone like me.
You must know by now what I am. That I am not really human. That I am a
doppelganger who was designed by gene wizards, grown in a vat, decanted fully
grown with a headful of hardwired talents and traits, trained up, and sent out
to kill the person whose exact double I was, and replace him. I do not know how
many doppelgangers, berserkers, suicide artists, and other cloned subversives
were deployed during the Quiet War, but I believe that our contribution was
significant. My target was Sharwal Jah Sharja, a minor gene wizard who lived
alone in the jungle in one of the tented crevasses of East of Eden, Ganymede,
where he orchestrated the unceasing symphony of the city-stateТs closed loop
ecosystem. After I took his place, I began a program of ecotage, significantly
reducing the circulation of water vapor and increasing the atmospheric
concentration of carbon dioxide and toxic trace gases. By the time the Quiet War
kicked off, some four weeks later, the population of East of Eden was wearing
breathing masks, the forests and parks were beginning to die, and most food
animals and crops had died or were badly stricken, forcing the city to use
biomass from vacuum organism farms to feed its citizens. A commando force of the
Three Powers Alliance annexed East of EdenТs farms in the first few hours of the
war, and after two weeks its starving citizens agreed to terms of surrender.
I was supposed to turn myself in as soon as the city had been secured, but in
the middle of the formal surrender, dead-ender fanatics assassinated half the
senate and attacked the occupying force. In the subsequent confusion, the tented
crevasse where I had been living was blown open to vacuum, Sharwal Jah Sharja
was posted as one of the casualties, and I took the opportunity to slip away. I
have successfully hidden my true identity and lived incognito amongst ordinary
human beings ever since.
Why did I disobey my orders? How did I slip the bonds of my hardwired drives and
instincts? ItТs quite simple. While I had been pretending to be Sharwal Jah
Sharja, I had come to love life. I wanted to learn as much about it as I could
in the brief span IТd been allotted by my designers. And so I adopted the
identity of another casualty, and after the war was over and the Three Powers
Alliance allowed trade and travel to resume, I left East of Eden and went out
into the Solar System to see what I could see.
In all my wanderings I have never met any others like me, but I did find a hint
that at least one of my brothers and sisters of the vat had survived the war.
All of us had been imprinted with a variety of coded messages covering a vast
range of possibilities, and a year after going on the run I came across one of
them in a little-used passageway between two chambers of the city of Xamba,