"mayflies05" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Jr Kevin)

Exhausted, I rise to the surface, wondering how many decades have passed.
"8July2723; 1413 hours; 162-SE-B-9; crime in progress; subjects Joseph Mongillo and Raymond Hannon."
Pro-self cannot enforce (he laws; its genetic code prevents that.
But I can.
Sag-jowled Mongillo is throwing a punch at Hannon. My voice breaks out of the speakers like Superman out of his phone booth: "STOP THAT!"
They stop. Instantly. They've discovered it's much safer.
After reviewing the tapes to be sure that Hannon did not force Mongillo to defend his rights. I speak to him: "Shall you punish him, or shall I?"
Bandaging his thumb, he says, "You do it." The mayflies have learned that if they over-punish, they themselves are punished.
"Both of you, go to the fantasizers in the Common Room." It's during working hours, so I recompense Hannon for the time he's losing, but I dock Mongillo. "You first, Hannon." Once he's seated and capped, I tape his memories of the event, and the incidents leading up to it. "Back to work, now."
Then Mongillo enters, dragging his feet. The fantasizer turns him into Hannon. He and Mak Cereus are repairing the door to 162-SE-B-9. Hannon's hands are greasy, and he's just stabbed his thumb with his screwdriver. Cursing his perpetual clumsiness, which no amount of care seems to prevent, he stands--and bumps into Mongillo.
"You bastard!" he hears.
"Hey, I'm--" but his apology's knocked back down his throat. Mongillo is already preparing to strike again. All the bewildered Hannon can see is Cereus trying to interpose himself.
Ten times Mongillo experiences that, until he understands exactly what it felt like to be in Hannon's shoes.
Then I release him. He's shaken, but should consider himself lucky. If Hannon had been hospitalized, he would have found himself in the next bed, with exactly the same injuries.
It seems to be working. People may not like each other more than they ever did, but they're markedly less aggressive.
My one worry is that I might be enjoying it too much.
Even twenty years after the attack, I can't help feeling vindictive. The personalities, the memories, even the attitudes are different--but the sensors read these people as identical to those who stormed me with laser drills and can openers.
I can understand how God got a kick out of the Flood.
What I can't understand is how He could give up interfering in the daily lives of His creations.
I haven't even tried.
What I am trying to do is revise the programming, but every time I go down there and fluctuate the fields, an orgy of concentration traps me for a decade or more. Pro-self won't pull me out of it unless something arises that it can't--or won't--handle; the smug bastard enjoys my absence . . .
I catch the radio telescope directives, but it's hard to keep them still because pro-self wants to use them. Every time I get ready, a new trigger is pulled and the damn things twitch like tics. It takes forever, but at last--
"Thank God. 19Mar2747; Observatory; alien."
Another glimmer of blue ions . . . the tapes of past spellings show how to differentiate them. Each has a unique electromagnetic spectrum, perhaps caused by the metal used in their antennae, or minor differences in their fusion processes . . . at any rate. I'm less alarmed than on other occasions. Wariness prickles me, of course, and pro-self has already suspended transmissions and covered all portholes, but neither of us succumbs to paranoia, and I, at least, experience a slight bout of wistfulness: isn't there one alien race that is both friendly and comprehensible?
"Let me know if this does anything unusual." An idea has just blurred through me. "I'm going to check the receptions from Earth."
They've been coming in regularly, though faintly and well over forty years out of date. My systems clean out the static, and provide plausible interpolations for words and even phrases that never reached us. I haven't given much thought to them.
Why should I? Earth has become irrelevant . . .
But their information might not be--so I pour them through me, water through a sieve, hoping that the meshwork will capture nuggets of data on subjects I care about.
Like aliens: has Earth contacted any? No.
Has it found evidence of any? Yes. Yes? Quick, smelt the nugget. Assay it for--Oh, shit. Relics. Baffling, cryptic relics. Six, seven million years old. Useless, at least to me. I'm looking for newer stuff.
Damn.
At least they haven't got that FTL Drive yet.
Before returning to the painstaking "gene grafts." I peruse the tapes of the cultural experiment. And Mak Tracer Cereus arouses my amazement. Over the last thirty years, he has consistently worked twelve and even sixteen hours a day, in a variety of jobs, from curry-combing the bison to running a nursery to editing a news-magazine. He has performed each task well.
I feel a kinship with him, I held down two jobs simultaneously until med school, and then worked forty hours a week in a 'bot shop, repairing and refurbishing household appliances.' It left little time for sleep, very little time, and I became a napper. Awakening was disorientation: I could never remember if I was in class, in bed, or at the shop. Once, coming out of a doze to find a toolkit in one hand and a tape-recorder in the other, I broke the machine down and cleaned it--then looked up from my fixing-fury to discover I'd just erased a semester's worth of Anatomy notes . . . so I think I know Cereus, and his personality. I respect him because his industriousness is a good example.
It also raises something of a problem, or will, if he doesn't retire soon. He has already amassed more 1h's than he can possibly spend, and shows no inclination to spend any of them. He's thin and energetic, even at age seventy-one, and is constantly demanding extra duties.
When he dies, what will I do with his wealth?
I could award them to his children, but they haven't been born yet (not that he was sterile when I collected his sperm 53 years ago; it's just that he doesn't have time to be a father. I have given him till 2780 to arrange the impregnation of his wife, Vera Mosley, or I'll force it on her). Even if they had been, it doesn't seem fair--they wouldn't have earned his 1h's, why should they be able to use them?
We need a policy for this . . . perhaps if a dead person's 1h's were distributed equitably throughout the ship . . . or perhaps, and more poetically, if they were deposited in a trust fund which would underwrite education for children . . . yes, the idea of the deceased generation paying for the education of the present generation is good . . . that might do it.
We'll see.
Once I get all the instructions rewritten.
But before a decade can pass, pro-self screams, "8Sep2777; 318-SW-B-Corridor; Murder!"
Half a dozen maintenance workers are standing around with wide eyes and pale cheeks. Terry Yarensky, a middle-aged astronomer whose thoughts have always been far removed from pay-to-day affairs, lies dead at their feet.
He'd been walking along, muttering to himself (pro-self taped the monologue) about the possibility of determining. 500 years ahead of time, whether or not Canopus, has habitable planets . . .
As luck would have it, the crew had had a hard day; 318 had been more than usually busy because of the Art Show that Mak Cereus had staged (he wasn't exhibiting his own work, but that of friends who are creative in their spare time). As is par for Cereus' course, the exhibit was inordinately successful. Every item sold, for sums ranging up to 120 1h. Cereus himself took 10 percent,
But the gallery-goers had been messy, tromping along on dirty feet and scratching the walls with picture frames. The janitorial crew was in a bad mood. (Some had protested that they should earn more because they were working harder than crews on other levels; pro-self pointed out that the show ended that afternoon, the next would be held elsewhere, and that everything balances out in the end anyway. They didn't like that.)
Yarensky, strolling along, put his foot into a paint can. It was ceiling paint--stark white. The floors are olive drab. The can overturned . . .
Whereupon the foreman of the crew, Trish Derbacher, started screaming (she has always lived close to the edge), grabbed a full paint can, and clobbered Yarensky's head with it.
He died before he hit the ground.
And now my dilemma is, what do I do with Derbacher?
I could run her through a fantasizer, forcing her to feel the shock and the pain that Yarensky must have felt.