"Niven, Larry - Rammer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

He asked, "And what happens to me?"

"I've never learned how to answer that question. Call it a matter of metaphysics," said the checker. "Let me detail what's happened to you so far and then you can decide for yourself."

There was an empty man. Still breathing and as healthy as most of society in the year twenty-one ninety. But empty. The electrical patterns in the brain, the worn paths of nervous reflexes; the memories, the personality of the man had all been wiped away.

And there was this frozen thing.

"Your newspapers called you people "corpsicles," said the blond man. "I never understood what the tapes meant by that."

"It comes from popsicle. Frozen sherbet." Corbett had used the word himself before he had become one of them. One of the corpsicles, frozen dead.

Frozen within a corpsicle's frozen brain were electrical patterns that could be recorded. The process would warm the brain and destroy most of the patterns, but that hardly mattered, because other things must be done too.

Personality was not all in the brain. Memory RNA was concentrated in the brain, but it ran all through the nerves and the blood. In Corbett's case the clumps of cancer had to be cut away-then the RNA could be extracted from what was left. The operation would have left nothing like a human being. More like bloody mush, Corbett gathered.

"What's been done to you is not the kind of thing we can do twice," said the checker. "You get one chance and this is it. If you don't work out we'll terminate and try someone else. The vaults are full of corpsicles."

"You mean you'd wipe my personality," Corbett said unsteadily. "But I haven't committed a crime. Don't I have any rights?"

The checker looked stunned. Then he laughed. "I thought I'd explained. The man you think you are is dead. Corbett's will was probated long ago. His widow-"

"Damn it I left money to myself! A trust fund!"

"No good." Though the man still smiled, his face was impersonal, remote, unreachable. A vet smiles reassuringly at a cat due to be fixed. "A dead man can't own property-that was settled in the courts long ago. It wasn't fair to the heirs. It took the money out of circulation."

Corbett jerked an unexpectedly bony thumb at his bony chest. "But I'm alive now."

"Not in law. You can earn your new life; the State will give you a new birth certificate and citizenship if you give the State good reason."

Corbett sat for a moment, absorbing that. Then he got off the table. "Let's get started then. What do you need to know about me?"

"Your name."

"Jerome Corbett."

"Call me Pierce." The checker did not offer to shake hands. Neither did Corbett, perhaps because he sensed the man would not respond, perhaps because they were both noticeably overdue for a bath. "I'm your checker. Do you like people? I'm just asking. We'll test you in detail later."

"I get along with the people around me but I like my privacy."

The checker frowned. "That narrows it more than you might think. This isolationism you called privacy was, well, a passing fad. We don't have the room for it-or the inclination either. We can't sent you to a colony world ..

"I might make a good colonist."

"You'd make terrible breeding stock. Remember, the genes aren't yours. No. You get one choice, Corbett. Rammer."

"Rammer?"

'Fraid so."