"Steven Popkes - Holding Pattern" - читать интересную книгу автора (Popkes Steven)

at Playa Grande. I struck down the Americans with parasites at the battle of Campur. I forced my own
people to march on the Americans and then detonated the toxins in their bodies as soon as the battle was
engaged. I did terrible things."

Coban patted him on the arm. "Yes. Yes. I know. I have the same memories. But who is to say it was
you? The Americans? It could have been any of us. Truth be told, it could have been all of us. We were
all there. We were all present at these places at one time or another. Perhaps we all gave some of the
orders. Would that make you feel better?"

"All of us?" Tikal said faintly.

Coban let his gaze wander over the river. How curious the same river that borders Texas is also here, so
many hundreds of miles away. "I think Tomas emasculated us at the end. He took from us the memories
that made him what he was. Could you have truly done what we remember doing?"
Tikal shook his head.

"Nor I." Coban stared at the water. "Tomas was a sociopath, obviously. Perhaps I am--perhaps we
are--as well. But to express your pathology on such a grand scale." Coban sighed. "I am not capable of
that."

Tikal stared at him, horrified. He stamped his cane on the ground. "You feel no remorse for what he
did?"

"What difference would it make if I did? Would one village remain unslaughtered if I managed to feel bad
about it?" Coban held up his hands. "Besides, Tomas changed our memories and altered our minds. Can
we truly be considered the same person? Have we not been absolved by that alteration?"

Tikal shrank back against the bench.

"Who am I, anyway?" continued Coban, leaning forward. "A timid professor? A coerced peasant? A
rabid volunteer? I can never know. Or am I the man who attempted, however misguided, to modernize
my home country? To bring them electricity, water, roads? At the expense of some of their lives, I grant
you. Which would you rather be? Tomas or what you were, knowing that what you were is forever
gone? The alternative to being Tomas is to be nothing."

Tikal seemed to huddle into himself. "What I did was wrong."

"You sound like a little boy crying to his father. Is that what they did to you in Washington?" Coban
looked at him speculatively. "Maybe you are the original. Perhaps repentance for the act can only come
from someone in whose brain still resides those deeper synapses and circuits." He leaned toward him. "I
can only remember from when I took power to seeing my own face before I went into the machine. Can
you remember beyond that? Think, man."

Tikal shook his head. "No. But what I did in power, I remember. And what I remember, I repent. I have
thought on it for years. I sit on the patio outside my house--"

"A house? You have a house?" Coban stood and paced. "It becomes clear. You must have been
suspected from the very beginning. Do you remember meeting any of us before we were captured? I only
remember meeting you, and the rest, when they brought us to Leonard Wood. The seven of us, copies
all, sitting in that room staring at each other. One by one they took us and I never saw any of the others