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

leaders and lynchpins of the revolution, who had already spent two years being
interrogated at Tycho, on EarthтАЩs Moon, were moved here to serve the rest of their life
sentences of reeducation and moral realignment. At first, the place was run by the
Navy, but civilian contractors were brought in after Elliot Graben was tented and the
vacuum organism farms were planted. Most were ex-Service people who had settled in
the Outer System after the war. I was one of them.
I had learned how to create fake identities with convincing histories during my
training; my latest incarnation easily passed the security check. For eight and half
years, Roy Bruce, guard third class, cricket breeder, amateur freestyle climber, lived a
quiet, anonymous life out on the fringe of the Solar System. And then two guards
stumbled across the body of Goether Lyle, who had been the leader of the Senate of
Athens, Tethys, when, along with a dozen other city states in the Outer System, it had
declared independence from Earth.
IтАЩd known Goether slightly: an intense, serious man whoтАЩd been writing some kind of
philosophical thesis in his spare time. His body was found in the middle of the main
highway between the facility and the farms, spreadeagled and naked, spikes
hammered through hands and feet. His genitals had been cut off and stuffed in his
mouth; his tongue had been pulled through the slit in his throat. He was also frozen
solidтАФthe temperature out on the floor of the graben is around minus one hundred
and fifty degrees Centigrade, balmy compared to the surface of Ariel, but still a lot
colder than the inside of any domestic freezer, so cold that the carbon dioxide given off
by certain strains of vacuum organisms precipitates out of the atmosphere like hoar
frost. It took six hours to thaw out his body for the autopsy, which determined that the
mutilations were postmortem. HeтАЩd died of strangulation, and then all the other stuff
had been done to him.
I was more than thirty klicks away when Goether LyleтАЩs body was discovered,
supervising a work party of ten prisoners, what we call a stick, that was harvesting a
field of vacuum organisms. ItтАЩs important to keep the prisoners occupied, and stoop
labor out in the fields or in the processing plants leaves them too tired to plan any
serious mischief. Also, export of the high-grade biochemicals that the vacuum
organisms cook from methane in the thin atmosphere helps to defray the enormous
cost of running the facility. So I didnтАЩt hear about the murder until IтАЩd driven my stick
back to its block at the end of the shift, and I didnтАЩt learn all the gruesome details until
later that evening, at the sweat lodge.
In the vestigial gravity of worldlets like Ariel, where you can drown in a shower and
water tends to slosh about uncontrollably, sweat lodges, saunas, or Turkish-style
hamams are ideal ways to keep clean. You bake in steam heat, sweat the dirt out of
your pores, scrape it off your skin, and exchange gossip with your neighbors and
friends. Even in a little company town like Herschel City, there are lodges catering for
just about every sexual orientation and religious belief. My lodge, #23, is for
unattached, agnostic heterosexual males. That evening, as usual, I was sitting with a
dozen or so naked men of various ages 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.
тАЬYou had the guy in your stick last year, Roy. He have any enemies you know of?тАЭ