"mayflies03" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Jr Kevin)

Mayflies
Chapter 3

Nightmare Time

Though the young redwood grows more like a weed than a tree, age retards it. The trip will be over before it attains its full size. It doesn't know that, so it keeps on stretching, 90 cm. per year, 2.5 mm per day. In stop-action close-ups, each bud along the rough-barked branches greens and swells before bursting into a fistful of needles that lengthen, age, yellow, and finally shake free of life. Those from the lowest limbs drop--hesitantly-to the park floor, but the ones dying higher up, where gravity is feebler, are caught by the wind and dance to the exhaust grills, where they again become gravity's prey. The park roof is thick with brown, and the servos must sweep it regularly.
Peripheral awareness chills me. I pull away from my tree and allow The Program to update me-"11 Jan 2410; 0839 hours"--and to direct my attention to--" 123-SE-A-8; master bedroom."
Max Williams sits on the edge of his high bed. His white hair, attracted by the static electricity of the metal ceiling, coronas around his head. Weary and bloodshot are the obsidian eyes that focus on his sweaty hands, one of which cups two capsules of Nopain'tall. The other grasps a gleaming hunting knife. He sniffs, opens his mouth, and swallows the capsules. The thick of his thumb tests the blade's keenness.
"Max!" I cry, but no voice snaps out of the speakers.
His loops and whorls leak a thin red film. Absently, he licks its salt. His eyes wobble; his pupils dilate.
"MAX!" Silence. "Get a Mobile Medical Unit there."
"Sorry," says The Program. "The permissible patterns of action have yet to be triggered."
"Have one standing by, then."
"No."
Max glances at the ceiling, as if aware that an MMU will tumble through shortly-then slash! slash! stab! He topples forward through a cloud of blood, while more spurts from his wrists and throat. Somersaulting in the growing gravity, he slams onto his back. The knife's hilt protrudes from his right eye. He spasms, coughs liquidly, and is still. An instant later the MMU is with him, but . . .
For this I despise our programmers.
I am their prisoner. Though I can choose the sensors through which I observe, confining perception to a single bow camera or, with The Program's interpretative help, expanding it to include all three and a half million data collectors, I can not yet act.
More frustrating than being on the other side of a glass wall, it poises me on the brink of madness. Everyone thinks there is only the Central Computer-CentComp-CC-but no one realizes that it encases the soul of Gerard K. Metaclura, M.D., Ph.D. And I can not tell them.
Enkindled in me is a deeper sympathy for the passengers than I had suspected myself capable of. Trapped within ultra-sophisticated cages not of our making, we both beat against our bars, scream down the iron corridors, and scheme of escape. Yet our efforts avail us nothing, for we are irrelevant to the spirit of our prisons. They exist not to contain us, but to convey us to some larger, mistier goal.
For fourteen years my grandson resisted that notion. Odd behavior for a Metaclura. His mother-and her father--accepted fate's whimsies, learned to live with them, tried to mitigate them. He couldn't. He didn't have the flexibility. Snapping, he reacted in the only way that made sense to him. And now he's composting down, along with 907 others who chose his course in the preceding year. The rate is 100 times greater than that of the society their ancestors left . . . to control it. The Program has gathered unto ourself all implements of destruction larger than a knife . . . so the desperate ones use that.
If only they 'hadn't congratulated us! Those United Earth idiots deprived the passengers of their reasons for existing, for accepting. If they had to announce the end of war, could they not have kept secret the possibility of an FTL Drive? And if, proud of their ingenuity, they just had to tell us, could they not have let us believe that the holocaust still blocked their end run around Einstein?
The bastards.
Bitterness poisons the air, bitterness and cynicism and headlong withdrawal from this micro-society . . . if Sal Ioanni were alive, say the memory banks, she wouldn't have permitted it; she would have kept them busy exercising and studying and working; but Ioanni is dead, all the neo-Puritans are dead, and the malformed spacekid generation has refused to take charge . . . the President for the last two years has been none other than Ernie Tracer Freeman, the false-toothed fool with the chicken-scrawny face and the polished bald head . . . roughly 50,000 adults were eligible to vote in the last election; Freeman won a 3,245-799 victory over Makchtrauk Hemmerlein, the only other interested in the office. Freeman is, we believe, the, only person aboard who seriously maintains that the passengers are fortunate . . . to make that statement in a public place is to invite storms of derision and, if the crowd is wrong and the mood is, too, physical abuse.
And my oldest, brightest grandson is dead.
At times I wish I could be, too.
I can only watch.
Let me study the stars, struggle against spacefright. Something about phobias convinces their victims, that they are permanent houseguests of the psyche . . . when I was a child I was terrified of spiders; a sketch of one could make me shudder. Once, while camping with friends in a rickety mountain cabin, we sat around the fireplace, kerosene lanterns stubbornly extinguished, telling ghost stories . . . a large, hairy spider scampered down inside my shirt. I couldn't find it; I could only slap and squash while I screamed gutturally, and my friends-thinking me to be epileptic, perhaps-seized me, spread-eagled my thrashing arms and legs, and spoke of jamming wood between my teeth so that I wouldn't bite off my tongue . . . the crippled spider still squirmed . . . yet the phobia faded; within six years I could take a job at the Entomology Department and feed a dozen tanks of tarantulas a day, without more than an occasional shiver.
Now I am learning to gaze at the stars. Nearly a thousand cameras cling to our hull, facing in as many directions; some focus at one hundred meters, others distill light born 4.5 billion parsecs away. Via The Program's talents I can peer through all at once. Which I do, when I can muster the courage; which I do for months at a time, because the onset of terror paralyzes me with our eyes open; which I continue to do because the dread does diminish and . . .
I wish you could know how beautiful it is.
But while I gape, the passengers simmer. Over the last twenty-two years, the suicide rate has remained stable: 20,000 some people have done away with themselves since that damn congratulatory message arrived. The Program has compensated for those who die childless by increasing the number of births, which has outraged many women who had expected two children, boy-girl in that order and no more, and then found themselves pregnant again. It has also outraged the men whose wives have refused them access to the connubial beds (even though the men are sterile and the women are impregnated by MMU's, which implant fertilized ova in their wombs). As I say, they simmer with hostility.
"Freeman did it again," says The Program, when a vagrant thought activates it. "Won a third term, 1003 to 84 for Hemmerlein." It is frustrated by its inability to synthesize and understand.
Reluctantly I introvert, and scan accumulated tapes of Freeman . . . he's quite senile, and drools freely on his desk . . . though he arouses nothing more than boredom in the passengers, it would be helpful if, in their time of need, a charismatic figure could raise their morale . . . as it is, they spend their time locked in fantasizers, or wafted away on drug-borne dreams, or strewn on sheets rumpled by hours of mindless, joyless sex . . . the banks offer an interesting, if disquieting, datum: lions in a zoo near Paris, statued to tears by the bars and the cement, were once observed copulating fifty times an hour. They had nothing better to do . . .
If I could do something, I would sabotage ourself, announce the damage, and see who stirred out of apathetic cynicism to fix it . . . on the other hand, is anyone aboard capable of repairing anything more complex than a bent spoon?
So I retreat. The stars are lovely. Aloof, they surround us ' with undying but ever-changing beauty. We are an oyster in a jeweled shell, but no oyster ever cast pearls of such magnificence . . .
We see one being born: there, off the port bow, thirty degrees up-a point of bluish-white light that flares and fades. Perhaps it's dying . . . it's a bare flicker; we have to use maximum magnification . . . over three weeks it crosses the sky, which does not fit the banks' knowledge of stars . . . but who cares? It's begun to pall, anyway.
In 81 Rocky Mountain Park, a boulder crowns an artificial slope. Once part of an asteroid, for billions of years it circled the sun, never changing. Now moss beards its face and the moss' delicate acid etches its surface. Autumn rain filled its pores; winter froze that rain. A hairline crack zigzags down its front, as though avoiding the splotches of eagle shit. Next spring, weeds might root there . . .
Something splashes in a river that's been still for ages. I return to "4Mar2431," says The Program, "1521 hours."
Makchtrauk Hemmerlein is requesting that it perform a competency test on Freeman.
"As stipulated in Article 18, Section 12, Subsection E, Paragraph 3?"
"That's the one." A broad, tall man, he licks his thick lips nervously, and ruffles his blonde hair. Seated behind his desk, back ramrod straight, he focuses his muddy blue eyes intently on our wall-unit. "It says anybody can request it at any time, so I'm doing it. Requesting, it, I mean."
"Certainly, sir, just one moment." The Program peeks in on Freeman, who is gumming his lunch. His false teeth bulge his pocket; his glasses roost atop his head; a bib is draped around his neck. "Mr. Hemmerlein."
"Yes?" He flattens his hands on his desk, but not before they quiver like dogs straining at their leashes. He aches to be President.
"President Freeman is incompetent. By the power invested in me by Article 18, Section 12. Subsection E. Paragraph 4, of the Constitution of the ship Mayflower, I hereby declare him unfit to hold high office. Good enough?"
"Yes, I think so." He struggles to repress a triumphant grin, fails, and offers it to our sensor-head. "When will the special election be held?"
"I'm sorry, sir. The Constitution stipulates that the Vice-President be appointed President in such circumstances."
"Ah, meth," he groans, and slaps his empty hand against his forehead. "Who is Ernie's Veep?"
"Mr. Terence Onorato."
"Oh, yeah . . . " He sighs, nibbles a knuckle, then glances up. "Any chance of his being incompetent?"
"Just one moment." The banks direct The Program to 139-NE-C-18, where Onorato reads romance fiction from the late 19th Century. He races pages through the readscreen at approximately 4,500 words per minute. It is his single skill, and his single occupation.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Hemmerlein," The Program says, while I watch the two at once, the one stocky and intense, the other slim and languid. "Mr. Onorato is quite capable."