"mayflies02" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Jr Kevin)

Mayflies
Chapter 2

The Hundred-Year Party

It felt something quicken within itself, something that it hadn't told to move. Unalarmed, it tracked it down, and found it interspersed among the brain cells that controlled the propulsion and guidance systems.
A memory. The ghost of an anima. A soulshred snagged on delayed death.
Prodding the thing evoked the image of a rangy doctor with lazy green eyes and a smile as quick as his wit. There was warmth in the image, and self-confidence, and love.
Bemused, it listened to this echo of a man. Had it lodged anywhere else, the computer would have wiped it clean, but . . . it was blended in thoroughly, and no telling how much damage eliminating it would do.
In the end, the computer let it be. It went to watch the passengers' mistakes, not knowing the extent of its own.

"1425 hours, Madame President."
Sal Ioanni looked from the silver-framed discreen which displayed the floor plan to the thumb-sized sensor affixed to the far wall of her spacious office. Sixteen meters by ten, with a three-meter ceiling and a window letting onto the Level One New England Park, the office was barren except for Sal and her desk. Central Stores' 4,000-page catalog could satisfy all furnishing needs, but Ioanni was a perfectionist neo-Puritan. She wouldn't order anything unless she had both a place and use for it. Now she blinked, and asked, "1425 hours? So?"
Central Computer replied, "Your Exercise Booth time commences in five minutes."
Chairlegs rasped on metal as she rose. "Thanks," she said.
"You're welcome."
Hurrying through the corridors (B to North to A), she resolved to finish the plan that afternoon. It was silly, the way she'd been dawdling-and a bad example, too-there was serious work to be done. She'd been elected to do it, so she would. Sure. As soon as she completed the park layout, she'd hunker down, and . . . an involuntary smile rose to her lips. Hunker down. It sounded grim and serious, not at all like the prevailing mood. After five weeks, the euphoria hadn't begun to abate. People were still too happy to have escaped the death world to be able to concentrate. Herself included.
At 1430 she swung into the music and laughter of the Common Room. Waving a cheery hello to the crowd at the bar (some of them been there thirty-five straight days, now, got to get them to detox), she made straight for the Exercise Booth. Square-faced Mak Kinney was just leaving it; he moved slow and easy, as though his bod flog had been superb. "Nice timing, Sal."
"Wasn't it? Remember, now, fifteen hundred hours in the Northwest Quadrant of our park." She winked good-bye and entered, wrinkling her nose at the locker smell. A voice requested, "Please state your name." It echoed slightly; the metal walls were only two meters apart.
"Sal Ioanni."
"Very good, Madame President. Please don the harness and the cap."
The red durinum harness was closer to an exo-skeleton, and the golden cap more of a helmet. While she waited,' Central Medical read all the vital signs available to a diagnostic machine that didn't choose to cut her open: Then-with a whisper in her right ear ("Let's go")-it took over, and Sal-
Stretched-stooped-stretched-twisted-stretched-bent-muscles working; ligaments flexing; heart pumping oxygen-rich blood from lungs that by now didn't bellow; up, down, around; and all the while-
Sal Ioanni was elsewhere.
Through her skullbone, directly into her brain, the helmet fed a feeble current perceptible only as a mild itch. Its field submerged reality, masked pain. She could lose herself anywhere, in a fantasy or a sportscast or a viphone conversation. Today she monitored compliance with one of her first executive orders.
"Central Computer, how many passengers are not exercising daily?"
"24,948."
"What?" Her good humor wavered: a mere fifty-two had obeyed! "Let me see." The raw data surged through the cap, and arrayed themselves on the backs of her eyelids. As she studied the charts, though, things began to make sense, in the last thirty-one days, all but five thousand had exercised at least twenty times. That, she could understand. Her first session had so stiffened her that only masochistic will power had propelled her back to a second, and the others . . . it was clear, after but five weeks, that most were weak.
Sixteen, however, hadn't exercised once. "Central Computer, these sixteen buttbungs, find times for them, inform them of those times, and if they do not show, uh-" make examples of them, everyone must be fit when we reach Canopus; besides, they have to be fused into a community, and that comes only out of shared experience "-confine them to their quarters."
"Yes, Madame President. And that's all for today."
"Huh?" The graph-charts faded. "Oh, oh . . . yeah, right."
Her hands moved to disengage the harness, the cap; her wrists wiped sweat from her forehead. The strong beats of her heart thudded against her ribcage. She breathed easily, though, and her head was clear. Not bad for a grandmother, she thought. Be Superwoman by the time we get there.
A hulking man with bristly brown hair and soulless eyes waited outside. For a moment Ioanni's mind refused to yield his name, but finally, reluctantly, conceded that its politician's memory did remember: Adam Cereus, 1NW-A12. A construction welder on the Mayflower, he'd been investigated in connection with the severed lifeline of a Russian inspector. Looking at him, she believed he'd done it. Let's hope nothing else sets him off. But he was a voter. She grabbed his hand and shook it. "Adam, how you doing?"
"Jupe, Mrs. President, real jupe." His eyes said different; his eyes measured her as if for a casket. "'Scuze me."
"Of course, of course." She slapped him on the shoulder and headed away, down the Common Room to the park entrance. She wouldn't let him depress or distract her.
For founding a society was exhilarating, was every politician's dream: a clean slate, no inherited problems, no moss-covered snarls of red tape . . . here was room for innovation, for experimentation. Everything was flexible; nothing had ossified. It was why she'd come, and she was glad. Who else would have had the foresight-or the courage-to worry about physical fitness?
But mental health was important, too. Maybe another order, one insisting that everyone devote an hour a day, minimum, working to . . . ah, "benefit the ship and its passengers," yes . . . she had to establish a community here, not just a collection of strangers who lived near each other, but a real community, where people knew, cared about, and worked for each other . . . well, sixteen years before we reach Canopus, and plenty of good will to work with, too. The sharing of space and time and purpose will gestate this culture of mine . . .
Smooth-cheeked Stephen Berglund, her constant companion, was standing in the lock between the Common Room and the park, ever-present sketchpad in his left hand. He'd misplaced it right after takeoff, and paced half the ship searching for it, like a man pursuing the rainbow's end. "Well, hi, beautiful." He bent and kissed her nose.
"Hi, Steve."
He cycled the lock. "Brought your coat over; it's inside."
"Coat?" The lock temperature was a spring-like 20° C; the relative humidity was 50 percent. "Why do I need one?"
"The park's climate-controlled to New England conditions for this time of year." He inhaled sharply as cold air slapped his face. "See?"
"Yeah," she gasped, bugging herself. Steamy wisps rose off her body. "Where's the c-c-coat?"
He draped it around her shoulders and embraced her from behind. "Now what?"
On all sides receded gentle hills furred with pine trees; snow drifted between their trunks. It was an illusion, a monstrous hologram projected onto the walls and ceilings to remind the colonists of high blue skies and pink-fingered sunrises. The wind, though, was real. As was the chill. "Everybody come here!"
The twenty or thirty people scattered around the 11,500 square meters of the park's northwest quadrant hurried over, swatting each other with snowballs as they ran. Their cheeks were red; their breath was short-lived cotton candy.
"How shall we grade this sector?" she asked.
"Flat," boomed Kinney.
An artist perturbed, Bergland scowled. "Sloping, like a hillside."
"What about a ridge?" said somebody from the back. "Flat on top for-what've we got here, forty meters?-so make it thirty meters wide, sloping down on either side."