"Alastair Reynolds - Diamond Dogs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

Alastair Reynolds

Diamond Dogs
Copyright (c) Alastair Reynolds 2002


ONE

I met Childe in the Monument to the Eighty.
It was one of those days when I had the place largely to myself, able to walk from aisle to aisle without
seeing another visitor; only my footsteps disturbed the air of funereal silence and stillness.
I was visiting my parents' shrine. It was a modest affair: a smooth wedge of obsidian shaped like a
metronome, undecorated save for two cameo portraits set in elliptical borders. The sole moving part was a
black blade which was attached near the base of the shrine, ticking back and forth with magisterial
slowness. Mechanisms buried inside the shrine ensured that it was winding down, destined to count out
days and then years with each tick. Eventually it would require careful measurement to detect its
movement.
I was watching the blade when a voice disturbed me.
'Visiting the dead again, Richard?'
'Who's there?' I said, looking around, faintly recognising the speaker but not immediately able to place
him.
'Just another ghost.'
Various possibilities flashed through my mind as I listened to the man's deep and taunting voice - a
kidnapping, an assassination - before I stopped flattering myself that I was worthy of such attention.
Then the man emerged from between two shrines a little way down from the metronome.
'My God,' I said.
'Now do you recognise me?'
He smiled and stepped closer: as tall and imposing as I remembered. He had lost the devil's horns since
our last meeting - they had only ever been a bio-engineered affectation - but there was still something
satanic about his appearance, an effect not lessened by the small and slightly pointed goatee he had
cultivated in the meantime.
Dust swirled around him as he walked towards me, suggesting that he was not a projection.
'I thought you were dead, Roland.'
'No, Richard,' he said, stepping close enough to shake my hand. 'But that was most certainly the effect I
desired to achieve.'
'Why?' I said.
'Long story.'
'Start at the beginning, then.'
Roland Childe placed a hand on the smooth side of my parents' shrine. 'Not quite your style, I'd have
thought?'
'It was all I could do to argue against something even more ostentatious and morbid. But don't change
the subject. What happened to you?'
He removed his hand, leaving a faint damp imprint. 'I faked my own death. The Eighty was the perfect
cover. The fact that it all went so horrendously wrong was even better. I couldn't have planned it like that
if I'd tried.'
No arguing with that, I thought. It had gone horrendously wrong.
More than a century and a half ago, a clique of researchers led by Calvin Sylveste had resurrected the
old idea of copying the essence of a living human being into a computer-generated simulation. The
procedure - then in its infancy - had the slight drawback that it killed the subject. But there had still been
volunteers, and my parents had been amongst the first to sign up and support Calvin's work. They had