"Charles Stross - Glasshouse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

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 Glasshouse

fugue. I don't like it, but they tell me it's an essential part of the process.

"I emigrated to Zemlya right after my previous memory dump." Something about her expression strikes
me as evasive. What could she be omitting? A failed business venture, personal enemies? "I wanted to
study ghoul society from the inside." Her cocktail emerges from the table, and she takes an experimental
sip. "They're so strange." She looks wistful for a moment. "But after a generation I got . . . sad." Another
sip. "I was living among them to study them, you see. And when you live among people for gigaseconds
on end you can't stop yourself getting involved, not unless you go totally post and upgrade yourтАФwell. I
made friends and watched them grow old and die until I couldn't take any more. I had to come back and
excise the . . . the impact. The pain."

Gigaseconds? Thirty planetary years each. That's a long time to spend among aliens. She's studying me
intently. "That must have been very precise surgery," I say slowly. "I don't remember much of my
previous life."

"You were human, though," she prods.

"Yes." Emphatically yes. Shards of memory remain: a flash of swords in a twilit alleyway in the
remilitarized zone. Blood in the fountains. "I was an academic. A member of the professoriat." An array
of firewalled assembler gates, lined up behind the fearsome armor of a customs checkpoint between
polities. Pushing screaming, imploring civilians toward a shadowy entranceтАФ"I taught history." That
much isтАФwasтАФtrue. "It all seems boring and distant now." The brief flash of an energy weapon, then
silence. "I was getting stuck in a rut, and I needed to refresh myself. I think."

Which is almost but not quite a complete lie. I didn't volunteer, someone made me an offer I couldn't
refuse. I knew too much. Either consent to undergo memory surgery, or my next death would be my last.
At least, that's what it said I'd done in the dead-paper letter that was waiting by my bedside when I
awakened in the rehab center, fresh from having the water of Lethe delivered straight to my brain by the
molecular-sized robots of the hospitaler surgeon-confessors. I grin, sealing the partial truths with an
outright lie. "So I had a radical rebuild, and now I can't remember why."

"And you feel like a new human," she says, smiling faintly.

"Yes." I glance at her lower pair of hands. I can't help noticing that she's fidgeting. "Even though I stuck
with this conservative body plan." I'm very conservatively turned outтАФa medium-height male, dark
eyes, wiry, the stubble of dark hair beginning to appear across my scalpтАФlike an unreconstructed
Eurasian from the pre-space era, right down to the leather kilt and hemp sandals. "I have a strong self-
image, and I didn't really want to shed itтАФtoo many associations tied up in there. Those are nice skulls,
by the way."

Kay smiles. "Thank you. And thank you again for not asking, by the way."



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 Glasshouse