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

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-stateтАЩs 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 EdenтАЩs 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? ItтАЩs 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 IтАЩd
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, Rhea.
To anyone else it was a meaningless scrawl; to me, it was like a flash of black
lightning that branded an enciphered phone number on my brain. The walls of the
passageway were thickly scribbled with graffiti, much of it pre-war. The message could
have been left there last year or last week; it could have been a trap, left by agents
hunting renegades like me. I didnтАЩt have the nerve to find out. I went straight to the
spaceport and bought a seat on a shuttle to Phoebe, the gateway port to the other
moons of Saturn and the rest of the Outer System. Six months later, wearing the new
identity of Roy Bruce, I became a guard at TPA Facility 898.
ThatтАЩs why, almost nine years later, I couldnтАЩt be certain that any of my brothers and
sisters had survived, and I was able to convince myself that Goether Lyle had been
the victim of the vicious internal politics of the prison, killed and mutilated by
someone who knew about the black propaganda techniques in which weтАЩd been