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

Or I could kinder.
I think the mayflies should hold a referendum.
My voice echoes through the ship; the drama on 318 is replayed on every HV set. When it's done, I ask, "What should be done with Derbacher?"
They decide that, since she has already given birth .to two children, and hence made her contribution to the gene pool, she is redundant to the mission.
Since she has trimmed a man, and no one can swear she won't do it again, she is a threat to the mission.
They ask me to term her.
I refuse: "I do not disagree with your judgment, but for it to have a positive impact on your culture, you must implement it yourselves."
They hold a second referendum.
Then the maintenance crew hangs her.

It was October 16, 2799, and the weather hadn't changed in five centuries--at 20 degrees and 50 percent relative humidity, only a trace of staleness hung in the air. Mak Cereus, a hundred years old but kangaing like a kid, entered the 89-SE Common Room, where he knew he could find Manley Holfer Onorato, Simone Krashan Holfer's grandson.
Onorato was sprawled across the tattered beige sofa at the far end, head pillowed on one vinyl arm, and feet draped over the other. His blue overalls were grease-stained, and black crescents under-circled his eyes. Just off shift in the servo maintenance department, he was in a lousy mood. Working with his hands bored him. What he liked was lying on the sofa, watching the eagles soar in the 81 Rocky Mountain Park.
"Manley," called Cereus, sidestepping the straw-haired Figuera boy, Sangria, who was plunked down in front of a troubled display screen. Its picture flickered like a butterfly's wings; its speakers threw static at the kid's ears. "Got a proposition for you, Man."
Onorato turned his head slowly, as though statued by Cereus but aware that he had to acknowledge his presence before he'd go away. "Whuh?"
Cereus stroked his beard. "Listen, you're what, sixty-five?"
"Seventy."
"And your parents are--"
"Dad's a hundred and twenty-three. Mom's a hundred and nineteen." He blinked his washed-out gray eyes. "Why?"
"Well--" he gestured at Onorato's legs, which reluctantly swung their owner into a sitting position. Cereus dropped onto the sofa next to him. "Geeze, this thing is eft out--somebody take a knife to it?"
"Just old, that's all, like the rest of us."
"Whyn't you buy a new one?" He slid a finger over it. The vinyl was as greasy as Onorato's coveralls. The fingertip came up black.
"Can't kyoom the money--folks don't wanna inshare, and I sure as hell ain't gonna deb for it myself."
"Can't blame you, but listen--" a high-pitched chatter distracted him again, and he jerked the tip of his beard at the Figuera boy. "Who's his display time debited to?"
Onorato's thin shoulders rose and fell. "Damfino--he's in here all the time, though."
"Glitchy picture."
"Uh-uh. Twenty pictures, each a fifth of a second long. He likes it." He scowled at the pudgy little blond. "Claims he can make sense out of 'em. Loopy kid. So what's your proposition?"
"Well, I'll tell you, Man, I been thinking . . . " He coughed into his half-fist, then snorted, and swallowed hard. His Adam's apple jiggled like a puppet's head. "I was just a few months old when CC cleared us with that RNA-phage. Your ma was exempted from that, since she hadn't knuckled up, but I got it, it wandered through my brain eating up the RNA . . . and you know, now that I'm grown, a father and all, and remind me to show you their ho-cubes, Ralph and Betty are grown up themselves, now . . . but I'll tell you, Man, there's something missing--it's like all my life I've been short something or other, but I'll be damned if I've ever known what it was . . . guess it's a sense that there should be more than there is--not to life, but to me . . . like maybe that stuff chipped off a piece of my humanity, you know?"
"Mighty frosty thoughts for somebody who spends all his time plotting new ways to earn a laitch," said Onorato, but he sat up straighter. In his gray eyes shone a small gleam that hadn't before; it compensated for the wateriness and the yellow-tinged corners and the spider's webbing of red in the white. "But now that you've gone and done it, whatcha come to me for?"
"Well, I been thinking . . . " He slouched deep in the sofa, his legs thrust out straight. He seemed to be studying the toes of his sandals. "Your family represents a direct link to the past--a link nobody else has 'cause nobody else stayed out of that melee there--thinking it might be worth your while to quit your jobs and work for me."
"Doing what? And for how much?"
"What you making down there in servos?"
"Two point one for one. Usually put in eight, ten hours a day."
"Give you, your sister, your mother, your uncle Bruce, and his kids two point five for one, three point zero if you're really good." Kicking off his sandals, he rubbed his crooked toes on the worn-out gold carpet. Bits of grit rolled against his callouses.
"Two point five . . . " His voice, expression, and posture suggested ennui; his careful phrasing contradicted them. "Still haven't told me, doing what?"
"Two things. One is--" He broke off as another teenager entered the Common Room.
She was tall, tall and skinny and still-growing gawky. First thing he noticed was a powder burst of frizzy brown hair, and eyes so huge there couldn't be room for anything else on her face. Falling into them, he felt that if they were a millimeter deeper, he'd be staring all the way around the universe at the short hairs on the nape of his own neck.
"Gonna be a dice-drawer, that one will," murmured Onorato.
"Without a doubt, without a doubt . . . " While she padded over to Sangria, tapped him on the shoulder, and called his name, he knew envy.
But the boy bounced straight up, uncurling his legs and clenching his hands as he rose, turning in mid-air to land on coiled springs, with his fists cocked. Hatred warped his round face.
"Sangria!" snapped Cereus.
"Sir?" he replied, not taking his glare off the girl.
"'Pears to me you're about to do something you might regret--take a hold of yourself, boy--you're loopier than a shorted servo."
"She made me mix my channels," protested Figuera, in his high, child's voice. "She hurt me, and I got a right to eft her back."
"How'd she hurt you?" scoffed Onorato.
"Up here." He doubled his fist to wave vaguely at his head. "She made them all slip and crash into each other and it hurt."
The two men found puzzlement on each other's face. "She made what slip?" asked Cereus.
"Them." He pointed to the screen, still flipping through broken images at the rate of five a second. "I had them all banded right and she melted the bands together--so I got a right to clear her."
"Nobody has a right to hit anybody else unless that somebody else eft you first--and we were sitting right here, so we can tell you she didn't do anything you could call impingement." Cereus paused to chew on a thumbnail. It tasted greasy. "Seems to me that if you're so easy to hurt when you're watching the display, you oughta watch it in private. Can't blame people for hurting you if they treat you polite--gotta blame yourself."
The girl beamed her silent eyes at Cereus and Onorato. They blinked moistly, gratefully---and then, with a whisper of sleek fabric, she was gone.
Sangria Figuera said, "I wanna ask CC if it ons you."