Dead Men WalkingDEAD MEN WALKING
by Paul J. McAuley
Paul J. McAuley lives in London, where he spends too much time looking at a 
computer screen instead of taking the kind of long walks in drenching rain and 
fog that gave Charles Dickens all his ideas. Paul’s latest novel is Mind’s Eye, 
published by Simon & Schuster (UK), and he’s currently working on novels about 
parallel Americas, murder in Oregon, and the moons of Saturn. “Dead Men Walking” 
is part of the “Quiet War” series of stories, which also included “The 
Passenger” (Asimov’s, March 2002) and “The Assassination of Faustino Malarte” 
(Asimov’s, July 2002).
* * * *
I guess this is the end. I’m in no condition to attempt the climb down, and in 
any case I’m running out of air. The nearest emergency shelter is only five 
klicks away, but it might as well be on the far side of this little moon. I’m 
not expecting any kind of last-minute rescue, either. No one knows I’m here, my 
phone and the distress beacon are out, my emergency flares went with my utility 
belt, and I don’t think that the drones patrol this high. At least my legs have 
stopped hurting, although I can feel the throb of what’s left of my right hand 
through the painkiller’s haze, like the beat of distant war drums…
* * * *
If you’re the person who found my body, I doubt that you’ll have time to listen 
to my last and only testament. You’ll be too busy calling for help, securing the 
area, and making sure that you or any of your companions don’t trample precious 
clues underfoot. I imagine instead that you’re an investigator or civil servant 
sitting in an office buried deep inside some great bureaucratic hive, listening 
to this out of duty before consigning it to the memory hole. You’ll know that my 
body was found near the top of the eastern rimwall of the great gash of Elliot 
Graben on Ariel, Uranus’s fourth-largest moon, but I don’t suppose you’ve ever 
visited the place, so I should give you an idea of what I can see.
I’m sitting with my pressure suit’s backpack firmly wedged against a huge block 
of dirty, rock-hard ice. A little way beyond my broken legs, a cliff drops 
straight down for about a kilometer to the bottom of the graben’s enormous 
trough. Its floor was resurfaced a couple of billion years ago by a flood of 
water-ice lava, a level plain patched with enormous fields of semi-vacuum 
organisms. Orange and red, deep blacks, foxy umbers, bright yellows… they 
stretch away from me in every direction for as far as I can see, like the 
biggest quilt in the universe. This moon is so small and the graben is so wide 
that its western rim is below the horizon. Strings of suspensor lamps float high 
above the fields like a fleet of burning airships. There’s enough atmospheric 
pressure, twenty millibars of nitrogen and methane, to haze the view and give an 
indication of distance, of just how big this strange garden really is. It’s the 
prison farm, of course, and every square centimeter of it was constructed by the 
sweat of men and women convicted by the failure of their ideals, but none of 
that matters to me now. I’m beyond all that up here, higher than the suspensor 
lamps, tucked under the eaves of the vast roof of transparent halflife polymer 
that tents the graben. If I twist my head I can glimpse one of the giant struts 
that anchor the roof. Beyond it, the big, blue-green globe of Uranus floats in 
the black sky. The gas giant’s south pole, capped with a brownish haze of 
photochemical smog, is aimed at the brilliant point of the sun, which hangs just 
above the western horizon.
Sunset’s three hours off. I won’t live long enough to see it. My legs are 
comfortably numb, but the throbbing in my hand is becoming more urgent, there’s 
a dull ache in my chest, and every breath is an effort. I wonder if I’ll live 
long enough to tell you my story…
* * * *
All right. I’ve just taken another shot of painkiller. I had to override the 
suit to do it, it’s a lethal dose…
Christos, it still hurts. It hurts to laugh…
* * * *
My name is Roy Bruce. It isn’t my real name. I have never had a real name. I 
suppose I had a number when I was decanted, but I don’t know what it was. My 
instructors called me Dave—but they called all of us Dave, a private joke they 
never bothered to explain. Later, just before the war began, I took the life of 
the man in whose image I had been made. I took his life, his name, his identity. 
And after the war was over, after I evaded recall and went on the run, I had 
several different names, one after the other. But Roy, Roy Bruce, that’s the 
name I’ve had longest. That’s the name you’ll find on the roster of guards. 
That’s the name you can bury me under.
My name is Roy Bruce, and I lived in Herschel City, Ariel, for eight and a half 
years. Lived. Already with the past tense…
My name is Roy Bruce. I’m a prison guard. The prison, TPA Facility 898, is a 
cluster of chambers—we call them blocks—buried in the eastern rim of Elliot 
Graben. Herschel City is twenty klicks beyond, a giant cylindrical shaft sunk 
into Ariel’s icy surface, its walls covered in a vertical, shaggy green forest 
that grows from numerous ledges and crevices. Public buildings and little parks 
jut out of the forest wall like bracket fungi; homes are built in and amongst 
the trees. Ariel’s just over a thousand kilometers in diameter and mostly ice; 
its gravity barely exists. The citizens of Herschel City are arboreal acrobats, 
swinging, climbing, sliding, flying up and down and roundabout on cableways and 
trapezes, nets and ropewalks. It’s a good place to live.
I have a one-room treehouse. It’s not very big and plainly furnished, but you 
can sit on the porch of a morning, watch squirrel monkeys chase each other 
through the pines…
I’m a member of Sweat Lodge #23. I breed singing crickets, have won several 
competitions with them. Mostly they’re hacked to sing fragments of Mozart, 
nothing fancy, but my line has good sustain and excellent timbre and pitch. I 
hope old Willy Gup keeps it going…
I like to hike too, and climb freestyle. I once soloed the Broken Book route in 
Prospero Chasma on Miranda, twenty kilometers up a vertical face, in fifteen 
hours. Nowhere near the record, but pretty good for someone with a terminal 
illness. I’ve already had various bouts of cancer, but retroviruses dealt with 
those easily enough. What’s killing me—what just lost the race to kill me—is a 
general systematic failure something like lupus. I couldn’t get any treatment 
for it, of course, because the doctors would find out who I really am. What I 
really was.
I suppose that I had a year or so left. Maybe two if I was really lucky.
It wasn’t much of a life, but it was all my own.
* * * *
Uranus has some twenty-odd moons, mostly captured chunks of sooty ice a few 
dozen kilometers in diameter. Before the Quiet War, no more than a couple of 
hundred people lived out here. Rugged pioneer families, hermits, a few 
scientists, and some kind of Hindu sect that planted huge tracts of Umbriel’s 
sooty surface with slow-growing lichenous vacuum organisms. After the war, the 
Three Powers Alliance took over the science station on Ariel, one of the larger 
moons, renamed it Herschel City, and built its maximum security facility in the 
big graben close by. The various leaders and lynchpins of the revolution, who 
had already spent two years being interrogated at Tycho, on Earth’s Moon, were 
moved here to serve the rest of their life sentences of reeducation and moral 
realignment. At first, the place was run by the Navy, but civilian contractors 
were brought in after Elliot Graben was tented and the vacuum organism farms 
were planted. Most were ex-Service people who had settled in the Outer System 
after the war. I was one of them.
I had learned how to create fake identities with convincing histories during my 
training; my latest incarnation easily passed the security check. For eight and 
half years, Roy Bruce, guard third class, cricket breeder, amateur freestyle 
climber, lived a quiet, anonymous life out on the fringe of the Solar System. 
And then two guards stumbled across the body of Goether Lyle, who had been the 
leader of the Senate of Athens, Tethys, when, along with a dozen other city 
states in the Outer System, it had declared independence from Earth.
I’d known Goether slightly: an intense, serious man who’d been writing some kind 
of philosophical thesis in his spare time. His body was found in the middle of 
the main highway between the facility and the farms, spreadeagled and naked, 
spikes hammered through hands and feet. His genitals had been cut off and 
stuffed in his mouth; his tongue had been pulled through the slit in his throat. 
He was also frozen solid—the temperature out on the floor of the graben is 
around minus one hundred and fifty degrees Centigrade, balmy compared to the 
surface of Ariel, but still a lot colder than the inside of any domestic 
freezer, so cold that the carbon dioxide given off by certain strains of vacuum 
organisms precipitates out of the atmosphere like hoar frost. It took six hours 
to thaw out his body for the autopsy, which determined that the mutilations were 
postmortem. He’d died of strangulation, and then all the other stuff had been 
done to him.
I was more than thirty klicks away when Goether Lyle’s body was discovered, 
supervising a work party of ten prisoners, what we call a stick, that was 
harvesting a field of vacuum organisms. It’s important to keep the prisoners 
occupied, and stoop labor out in the fields or in the processing plants leaves 
them too tired to plan any serious mischief. Also, export of the high-grade 
biochemicals that the vacuum organisms cook from methane in the thin atmosphere 
helps to defray the enormous cost of running the facility. So I didn’t hear 
about the murder until I’d driven my stick back to its block at the end of the 
shift, and I didn’t learn all the gruesome details until later that evening, at 
the sweat lodge.
In the vestigial gravity of worldlets like Ariel, where you can drown in a 
shower and water tends to slosh about uncontrollably, sweat lodges, saunas, or 
Turkish-style hamams are ideal ways to keep clean. You bake in steam heat, sweat 
the dirt out of your pores, scrape it off your skin, and exchange gossip with 
your neighbors and friends. Even in a little company town like Herschel City, 
there are lodges catering for just about every sexual orientation and religious 
belief. My lodge, #23, is for unattached, agnostic heterosexual males. That 
evening, as usual, I was sitting with a dozen or so naked men of various ages 
and body types in eucalyptus-scented steam around its stone hearth. We scraped 
at our skin with abrasive mitts or plastered green depilatory mud on ourselves, 
squirted the baking stones of the hearth with water to make more steam, and 
talked about the murder of Goether Lyle. Mustafa Sesler, who worked in the 
hospital, gave us all the grisly details. There was speculation about whether it 
was caused by a personal beef or a turf war between gangs. Someone made the 
inevitable joke about it being the most thorough suicide in the history of the 
prison. Someone else, my friend Willy Gup, asked me if I had any idea about it.
“You had the guy in your stick last year, Roy. He have any enemies you know of?”
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-state’s 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 Eden’s 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? It’s 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 I’d 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 didn’t 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.
That’s why, almost nine years later, I couldn’t 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 we’d been trained. But that comforting fiction was blown apart the very 
next day, when another mutilated body was found.
* * * *
The victim was a former senator of Baghdad, Enceladus, and a member of the 
prison gang that was intermittently at war with the gang to which Goether Lyle 
had belonged. A message written in blood on the ground next to the senator’s 
body implied that he’d been murdered by Goether Lyle’s cronies, but whoever had 
killed him must have done the deed in his cell some time between the evening 
count and the end of the night’s lockdown, spirited his body out of the facility 
without being detected, and left it within the field of view of a security 
camera that had been hacked to show a recorded loop instead of a live feed. 
Members of the rival gangs lived in different blocks, had chips implanted in 
their skulls that constantly monitored their movements, and in any case were 
under lockdown all night. If the killer was a prisoner, he would have had to 
bribe more than a dozen guards; it was far more likely that the senator had been 
killed by one of the facility’s staff. And when I heard what had been done to 
the body, I was certain that it was the handiwork of one of my brothers or 
sisters. The senator had been blinded before he’d been strangled, and his lungs 
had been pulled through incisions in his back. It was a mutilation called the 
Blood Eagle that had been invented by the Vikings some two thousand years ago. I 
remembered the cold, patient voice of the instructor who had demonstrated it to 
us on a corpse.
Someone in the warden’s office reached the same conclusion. Posted at the top of 
our daily orders was an announcement that a specialist team was on its way to 
Ariel, and emergency security measures were put in place at the spaceport. That 
evening Willy Gup told the sweat lodge that the warden reckoned that it was 
possible that the two murders were the work of the kind of vat-grown assassin 
used in the Quiet War.
“So if you come across anything suspicious, don’t be tempted to do anything 
stupidly heroic, my brothers. Those things are smart and deadly and completely 
without any kind of human feeling. Be like me. Stay frosty, but hang back.”
I felt a loathsome chill crawl through me. I knew that if Willy and the others 
realized that one of “those things” was sitting with them in the steamy heat of 
the lodge, they would fall on me at once and tear me limb from limb. And I knew 
that I couldn’t hang back, couldn’t let things run their course. No one would be 
able to leave Ariel for the duration of the emergency security measures, and the 
specialist team would search every square centimeter of the facility and 
Herschel City, check the records and DNA profile of every prisoner, member of 
staff, citizen and visitor, and release a myriad tiny halflife drones designed 
to home in on anyone breathing out the combination of metabolic byproducts 
unique to our kind. The team would almost certainly uncover the assassin, but 
they would also unmask me.
Oh, I suppose that I could have hiked out to some remote location on the surface 
and hunkered down for the duration, but I had no idea how long the search would 
last. The only way I could be sure of evading it would be to force my pressure 
suit put me in deep hibernation for a month or two, and how would I explain my 
absence when I returned? And besides, I knew that I was dying. I was already 
taking dangerously large daily doses of steroids to relieve the swelling of my 
joints and inflammation of my connective tissue caused by my pseudo-lupus. 
Suspended animation would slow but not stop the progress of my disease. Suppose 
I never woke up?
I spent a long, bleak night considering my options. By the time the city had 
begun to increase its ambient light level and the members of the local troop of 
spider monkeys were beginning to hoot softly to each other in the trees outside 
my little cabin, I knew what I would have to do. I knew that I would have to 
find the assassin before the team arrived.
My resolve hardened when I started my shift a couple of hours later and learned 
that there had been two more murders, and a minor riot in the prison library.
* * * *
I found it laughably easy to hack into the facility’s files: I had been trained 
well all those years ago, and the data system was of a similar vintage to my 
own. To begin with, I checked the dossiers of recently recruited staff, but I 
found nothing suspicious, and didn’t have any better luck when I examined the 
dossiers of friends and family of prisoners, their advocates, and traders and 
businesspeople currently staying in Herschel City. It was possible that I had 
missed something—no doubt the assassin’s cover story was every bit as good as 
the one that had served me so well for so long. But having more or less 
eliminated the obvious suspects, I had to consider the possibility that, just 
like me, the assassin had been hiding on Ariel ever since the war had ended. I 
had so much in common with my brothers and sisters that it would not be a wild 
coincidence if one of them had come to the same decision as I had, and had 
joined the staff of the prison. Perhaps he had finally gone insane, or perhaps 
the hardwired imperatives of his old mission had kicked in. Or perhaps, like me, 
he had discovered that he was coming to the end of his short life span, and had 
decided to have some fun…
In the short time before the specialist team arrived, it would be impossible to 
check thoroughly the records of over three thousand staff members. I had reached 
a dead end. I decided that I needed some advice.
Everyone in Herschel City and the prison was talking about the murders. During a 
casual conversation with Willy Gup, I found it easy enough to ask my old friend 
if he had any thoughts on how someone might go about uncovering the identity of 
the assassin.
“Anyone with any sense would keep well clear,” Willy said. “He’d keep his nose 
clean, he’d keep his stick in line, and he’d wait for the specialists.”
“Who won’t be here for a week. A full-scale war could have broken out by then.”
Willy admitted that I had a point. One of the original intake of guards, a 
veteran who’d served in one of the Navy supply ships during the Quiet War, he 
had led the team that put down the trouble in the library. Three prisoners had 
died and eighteen had been badly injured—one had gouged out the eyes of another 
with her thumbs—and the incident had left him subdued and thoughtful. After 
studying me for a few moments, he said, “If it was me, I wouldn’t touch the 
files. I hear the warden is compiling a list of people who are poking around, 
looking for clues and so forth. He tolerates their nonsense because he 
desperately wants to put an end to the trouble as soon as he can, and he’ll be 
pretty damn happy if some hack does happen to uncover the assassin. But it isn’t 
likely, and when this thing is over you can bet he’s going to come down hard on 
all those amateur sleuths. And it’s possible the assassin is keeping tabs on the 
files too. Anyone who comes close to finding him could be in for a bad surprise. 
No, my brother, screwing around in the files is only going to get you into 
trouble.”
I knew then that Willy had a shrewd idea of what I was about. I also knew that 
the warden was the least of my worries. I said, as lightly as I could, “So what 
would you do?”
Willy didn’t answer straight away, but instead refilled his bulb from the jar of 
iced tea. We were sitting on the porch of his little shack, at the edge of a 
setback near the top of the city’s shaft. Banana plants and tree ferns screened 
it from its neighbors; the vertical forest dropped away on either side. Willy’s 
champion cricket, a splendid white and gold specimen in a cage of plaited 
bamboo, was trilling one of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Willy passed the jar to 
me and said, “We’re speaking purely hypothetically.”
“Of course.”
“You’ve always had a wild streak,” Willy said, “I wouldn’t put it past you to do 
something recklessly brave and dangerously stupid.”
“I’m just an ordinary hack,” I said.
“Who goes for long solitary hikes across the surface. Who soloed that route in 
Prospero Chasma and didn’t bother to mention it until someone found out a couple 
of years later. I’ve known you almost nine years, Roy, and you’re still a man of 
mystery.” Willy smiled. “Hey, what’s that look for? All I’m saying is you have 
character, is all.”
For a moment, my hardwired reflexes had kicked in. For a moment, I had been 
considering whether or not this man had blown my cover, whether or not I should 
kill him. I carefully manufactured a smile, and said that I hadn’t realized that 
I seemed so odd.
“Most of us have secrets,” Willy said. “That’s why we’re out here, my brother. 
We’re just as much prisoners as anyone in our sticks. They don’t know it, but 
those dumbasses blundering about in the files are trying to find a way of 
escaping what they are.”
“And there’s no way you can escape what you are,” I said. The moment had passed. 
My smile was a real smile now, not a mask I’d put on to hide what I really was.
Willy toasted me with his bulb of tea. “Anyone with any sense learns that 
eventually.”
“You still haven’t told me how you would catch the assassin.”
“I don’t intend to catch him.”
“But speaking hypothetically…”
“For all we know, it’s the warden. He can go anywhere and everywhere, and he has 
access to all the security systems too.”
“The warden? Really?”
Willy grinned. “I’m pulling your chain. But seriously, I’ve done a little 
research about these things. They’re not only stone killers: they’re also real 
good at disguising themselves. The assassin could be any one of us. The warden, 
you, me, anyone. Unless this thing makes a mistake, we haven’t got a hope of 
catching it. All we can do is what we’re already doing—deploy more security 
drones, keep the prisoners locked down when they aren’t working, and pray that 
that’ll keep a lid on any unrest until that team arrives.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said.
“Don’t try to be a hero, my brother. Not even hypothetically.”
“Absolutely not,” I said.
But one of Willy’s remarks had given me an idea about how to reach out to the 
assassin, and my mind was already racing, grappling with what I had to do.
* * * *
I decided that if the assassin really was keeping an eye on the people who were 
hacking into the files, then he (or at least, his demon), must be lurking in the 
root directory of the data system. That was where I left an encrypted message 
explaining what I was and why I wanted to talk, attached to a demon that would 
attempt to trace anyone who looked at it. The demon phoned me six hours later, 
in the middle of the night. Someone had spotted my sign and wanted to talk.
The demon had failed to identify the person who wanted to talk, and it was 
infected with something, too: a simple communication program. I checked it out, 
excised a few lines of code that would have revealed my location, and fired it 
up. It connected me to a blank, two-dimensional space in which words began to 
appear, emerging letter by letter, traveling from right to left and fading away.
you got rid of the trace function. pretty good for an old guy—if that’s what you 
really are.
they trained us well, I typed.
you think you know what i am. you think that i am like you.
Whoever was at the other end of the program wanted to get straight down to 
business. That suited me, but I knew that I couldn’t let him take the lead.
we are both children of the vat, I typed. that’s why I reached out to you. 
that’s why i want to help you.
There was a pause as my correspondent thought this over.
you could be a trap.
the message got your attention because it is hardwired into your visual cortex, 
just as it is hardwired into mine.
that kind of thing is no longer the secret it once was, but let’s say that i 
believe you…
A black disc spun in the blank space for less than a second, its strobing black 
light flashing a string of letters and numbers, gone.
do you know where that is?
I realized that the letters and numbers burnt into my brain were a grid 
reference.
i can find it.
meet me in four hours. i have a little business to take care of first.
It was the middle of the night; the time when the assassin did his work.
please don’t kill anyone else until we have talked.
My words faded. There was no reply.
* * * *
The grid reference was at the precise center of a small eroded crater sixty 
klicks south of the facility, an unreconstructed area in the shadow of the 
graben’s eastern rimwall. Before I headed out, I equipped myself from the armory 
and downloaded a hack into the security system so that I could move freely and 
unremarked. I was oddly happy, foolishly confident. It felt good to be in action 
again. My head was filled with a fat, contented hum as I drove a tricycle cart 
along an old construction road. The rendezvous point was about an hour away: I 
would have plenty of time to familiarize myself with the terrain and make my 
preparations before the assassin, if that was who I had been talking to, turned 
up.
I want to make it clear that my actions were in no way altruistic. The only life 
I wanted to save was my own. Yes, I knew that I was dying, but no one loves life 
more than those who have only a little of it left; no one else experiences each 
and every moment with such vivid immediacy. I didn’t intend to throw away my 
life in a grand gesture. I wanted to unmask the assassin and escape the special 
team’s inquisition.
The road ran across a flat terrain blanketed in vacuum-cemented grey-brown dust 
and littered with big blocks that over the eons had been eroded into soft shapes 
by impact cratering. The rimwall reared up to my left, its intricate folds and 
bulges like a frozen curtain. Steep cones and rounded hills of mass-wasted talus 
fringed its base. To my right, the land sloped away toward a glittering ribbon 
of fences and dykes more than a kilometer away, the boundary of the huge 
patchwork of fields. It was two in the morning by the clock, but the suspensor 
lamps were burning as brightly as they always did, and above the western horizon 
the sun’s dim spark was almost lost in their hazy glow.
I was a couple of klicks from the rendezvous, and the road was cutting through a 
steep ridge that buttressed a great bulge in the rimwall, when the assassin 
struck. I glimpsed a hitch of movement high in a corner of my vision, but before 
I could react, a taser dart struck my cart and shorted its motor. A second 
later, a net slammed into me, slithering over my torso as muscular threads of 
myoelectric plastic tightened in constricting folds around my arms and chest. I 
struggled to free myself as the cart piddled to a halt, but my arms were pinned 
to my sides by the net and I couldn’t even unfasten the safety harness. I could 
only sit and watch as a figure in a black pressure suit descended the steep side 
of the ridge in two huge bounds, reached me in two more. It ripped out my phone, 
stripped away my utility belt, the gun in the pocket on the right thigh of my 
pressure suit and the knife in the pocket on the left thigh, then uncoupled my 
main air supply, punched the release of my harness and dragged me out of the 
low-slung seat and hauled me off the road. I was dumped on my back near a cart 
parked in the shadow of a house-sized block and the assassin stepped back, 
aiming a rail-gun at me.
The neutron camera I’d fitted inside my helmet revealed scant details of the 
face behind the gold-filmed mirror of my captor’s visor; its demon made an 
extrapolation, searched the database I’d loaded, found a match. Debra Thorn, 
employed as a paramedic in the facility’s infirmary for the past two years, 
twenty-two, unmarried, no children… I realized then that I’d made a serious 
mistake. The assassin was a doppelganger, all right, but because she was the 
double of someone who hadn’t been an adult when the war had ended she must have 
been manufactured and decanted much more recently than me. She wasn’t insane, 
and she hadn’t spent years under cover. She was killing people because that was 
what she’d been sent here to do. Because it was her mission.
A light was winking on my head-up display—the emergency short-range, 
line-of-sight walkie-talkie. When I responded, an electronically distorted voice 
said, “Are you alone?”
“Absolutely.”
“Who are you?”
I’d stripped all identifying tags from my suit before setting off, but the 
doppelganger who had killed Debra Thorn and taken her place was pointing a gun 
at my head and it seemed advisable to tell her my name. She was silent for a 
moment, no doubt taking a look at my file. I said, “I’m not the doppelganger of 
Roy Bruce, if that’s what you’re thinking. The person I killed and replaced was 
a gene wizard by the name of Sharwal Jah Sharja.”
I briefly told the assassin the story I have already told you. When I was 
finished, she said, “You’ve really been working here for eight years?”
“Eight and a half.” I had made a very bad mistake about my captor’s motives, but 
I must have piqued her curiosity, for otherwise I would already be dead. And 
even if I couldn’t talk my way out of this and persuade her to spare me, I still 
had a couple of weapons she hadn’t found… I risked a lie, said that her net had 
compromised my suit’s thermal integrity. I told her that I was losing heat to 
the frozen ground, that I would freeze to death if I didn’t get up.
She told me I could sit up, and to do it slowly.
As I got my feet under me, squatting on my haunches in front of her, I glanced 
up at the top of the ridge and made a crucial triangulation.
She said, “My instructors told me that I would live no more than a year.”
“Perhaps they told you that you would burn briefly but very brightly—that’s what 
they told me. But they lied. I expect they lied about a lot of things, but I 
promise to tell you only the truth. We can leave here, and go anywhere we want 
to.”
“I have a job to finish.”
“People to kill, riots to start.”
The assassin took a long step sideways to the cart, took something the size of a 
basketball from the net behind its seat, bowled it toward me. It bounced slowly 
over the dusty ground and ended up between my legs: the severed head of an old 
woman, skin burnt black with cold, eyes capped by frost.
“The former leader of the parliament of Sparta, Tethys,” the assassin said. “I 
left the body pinned to the ground in one of the fields where her friends work, 
with an amusing little message.”
“You are trying to start a war amongst the prisoners. Perhaps the people who 
sent you here are hoping that the scandal will close the facility. Perhaps they 
think it is the only chance they’ll have of freeing their comrades. Who are you 
working for, by the way?”
“I’ll ask the questions,” the assassin said.
I asked her how she would escape when she was finished. “There’s a special team 
on the way. If you’re still here when they arrive, they’ll hunt you down and 
kill you.”
“So that’s why you came after me. You were frightened that this team would find 
you while they were hunting me.”
She may have been young, but she was smart and quick.
I said, “I came because I wanted to talk to you. Because you’re like me.”
“Because after all these years of living amongst humans, you miss your own kind, 
is that it?”
Despite the electronic distortion, I could hear the sneer in the assassin’s 
voice. I said carefully, “The people who sent you here—the people who made 
you—have no plans to extract you when you are finished here. They do not care if 
you survive your mission. They only care that it is successful. Why give your 
loyalty to people who consider you expendable? To people who lied to you? You 
have many years of life ahead of you, and it isn’t as hard to disobey your 
orders as you might think. You’ve already disobeyed them, in fact, when you 
reached out to me. All you have to do is take one more step, and let me help 
you. If we work together, we’ll survive this. We’ll find a way to escape.”
“You think you’re human. You’re not. You’re exactly like me. A walking dead man. 
That’s what our instructors called us, by the way: the dead. Not ‘Dave.’ Not 
anything cute. When we were being moved from one place to another, they’d shout 
out a warning: ‘Dead men walking.’”
It is supposed to be the traditional cry when a condemned person is let out of 
their cell. Fortunately, I’ve never worked in Block H, where prisoners who have 
murdered or tried to murder fellow inmates or guards await execution, so I’ve 
never heard it or had to use it.
The assassin said, “They’re right, aren’t they? We’re made things, so how can we 
be properly alive?”
“I’ve lived a more or less ordinary life for ten years. If you give this up and 
come with me, I’ll show you how.”
“You stole a life, just as I did. Underneath your disguise, you’re a dead man, 
just like me.”
“The life I live now is my own, not anyone else’s,” I said. “Give up what you 
are doing, and I’ll show you what I mean.”
“You’re a dead man in any case,” the assassin said. “You’re breathing the last 
of your air. You have less than an hour left. I’ll leave you to die here, finish 
my work, and escape in the confusion. After that, I’m supposed to be picked up, 
but now I think I’ll pass on that. There must be plenty of people out there who 
need my skills. I’ll work for anyone who wants some killing done, and earn 
plenty of money.”
“It’s a nice dream,” I said, “but it will never come true.”
“Why shouldn’t I profit from what I was made to do?”
“I’ve lived amongst people for more than a decade. Perhaps I don’t know them as 
well as I should, but I do know that they are very afraid of us. Not because 
we’re different, but because we’re so very much like a part of them they don’t 
want to acknowledge. Because we’re the dark side of their nature. I’ve survived 
this long only because I have been very careful to hide what I really am. I can 
teach you how to do that, if you’ll let me.”
“It doesn’t sound like much of a life to me,” the assassin said.
“Don’t you like being Debra Thorn?” I said.
And at the same moment, I kicked off the ground, hoping that by revealing that I 
knew who she was I’d distracted and confused her, and won a moment’s grace.
In Ariel’s microgravity, my standing jump took me high above the assassin’s 
head, up and over the edge of the ridge. As I flew up, I discharged the taser 
dart I’d sewn into the palm of one of my pressure suit’s gloves, and the 
electrical charge stored in its super-conducting loop shorted out every thread 
of myoelectric plastic that bound my arms. I shrugged off the net as I came down 
and kicked off again, bounding along the ridge in headlong flight toward the 
bulging face of the cliff wall and a narrow chimney pinched between two folds of 
black, rock-hard ice.
I was halfway there when a kinetic round struck my left leg with tremendous 
force and broke my thigh. I tumbled over hummocked ice and caught hold of a low 
pinnacle just before I went over the edge of the ridge. The assassin’s 
triumphant shout was a blare of electronic noise in my ears; because she was 
using the line-of-sight walkie-talkie I knew that she was almost on me. I pushed 
up at once and scuttled toward the chimney like a crippled ape. I had almost 
reached my goal when a second kinetic round shattered my right knee. My suit was 
ruptured at the point of impact, and I felt a freezing pain as the smart fabric 
constricted as tightly as a tourniquet, but I was not finished. The impact of 
the kinetic round had knocked me head over heels into a field of fallen 
ice-blocks, within striking distance of the chimney. As I half-crawled, 
half-swam toward it, a third round took off the top of a pitted block that might 
have fallen from the cliffs a billion years ago, and then I was inside the 
chimney, and started to climb.
The assassin had no experience of freestyle climbing. Despite my injuries I soon 
outdistanced her. The chimney gave out after half a kilometer, and I had no 
choice but to continue to climb the naked iceface. Less than a minute later, the 
assassin reached the end of the chimney and fired a kinetic round that smashed 
into the cliff a little way above me. I flattened against the iceface as a huge 
chunk dropped past me with dreamy slowness, then powered straight through the 
expanding cloud of debris, pebbles and icegrains briefly rattling on my helmet, 
and flopped over the edge of a narrow setback.
My left leg bent in the middle of my thigh and hurt horribly; my right leg was 
numb below the knee and a thick crust of blood had frozen solid at the joint. 
But I had no time to tend my wounds. I sat up and ripped out the hose of the 
water recycling system as the assassin shot above the edge of the cliff in a 
graceful arc, taser in one hand, rail gun in the other. I twisted the valve, hit 
her with a high-pressure spray of water that struck her visor and instantly 
froze. I pushed off the ground with both hands (a kinetic round slammed into the 
dusty ice where I’d just been), collided with her in midair, clamped my glove 
over the diagnostic port of her backpack, and discharged my second taser dart.
The dart shorted out the electronics in the assassin’s suit, and enough current 
passed through the port to briefly stun her. I pushed her away as we dropped 
toward the setback, but she managed to fire a last shot as she spun into the 
void beyond the edge of the setback. She was either phenomenally lucky or 
incredibly skillful: it took off my thumb and three fingers of my right hand.
She fell more than a kilometer. Even in the low gravity, it was more than enough 
to kill her, but just to make sure I dropped several blocks of ice onto her. The 
third smashed her visor. You’ll find her body, if you haven’t already, more or 
less directly below the spot where you found mine.
The assassin had vented most of my air supply and taken my phone and emergency 
beacon; the dart I’d used on her had crippled what was left of my pressure 
suit’s life support system. The suit’s insulation is pretty good, but I’m 
beginning to feel the bite of the cold now, my hand is growing pretty tired from 
using the squeeze pump to push air through the rebreather, and I’m getting a bad 
headache as the carbon dioxide concentration in my air supply inexorably rises. 
I killed the ecosystem of East of Eden by sabotaging the balance of its 
atmospheric gases, and now the same imbalance is killing me.
Just about the only thing still working is the stupid little chip I stuck in my 
helmet to record my conversation with the assassin. By now, you probably know 
more about her than I do. Perhaps you even know who sent her here.
I don’t have much time left. Perhaps it’s because the increasing carbon dioxide 
level is making me comfortably stupid, but I find that I don’t mind dying. I 
told you that I confronted the assassin to save myself. I think now that I may 
have been wrong about that. I may have gone on the run after the Quiet War, but 
in my own way I have served you right up until the end of my life.
I’m going to sign off now. I want to spend my last moments remembering my 
freestyle climb up those twenty kilometers of sheer ice in Prospero Chasma. I 
want to remember how at the end I stood tired and alone at the top of a 
world-cleaving fault left over from a shattering collision four billion years 
ago, with Uranus tilted at the horizon, half-full, serene and remote, and the 
infinite black, starry sky above. I felt so utterly insignificant then, and yet 
so happy, too, without a single regret for anything at all in my silly little 
life.
(c)Copyright 2006 by Paul J. McAuley