"Peter Watts & Derryl Murphy - Mayfly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

So here's one of my (very rare) collaborations, with Derryl Murphy. We must have done something
right, because it's being reprinted in Dozois's Year's Best antho and is an alleged Aurora finalist to
boot. Personally, I'm not sure what all the shouting's about; it's not that good (not that the
Auroras are any kind of infallible index of literary merit, mind you). I mean, geez: it's about a cute
kid...


Mayfly
by Peter Watts & Derryl Murphy



“I hate you.”

A four-year-old girl. A room as barren as a fishbowl.

“I hate you.”

Little fists, clenching: one of the cameras, set to motion-cap, zoomed on them automatically. Two others
watched the adults, mother, father on opposite sides of the room. The machines watched the players: half
a world away, Stavros watched the machines.

“I hate you I hate you I HATE you!”

The girl was screaming now, her face contorted in anger and anguish. There were tears at the edge of her
eyes but they stayed there, never falling. Her parents shifted like nervous animals, scared of the anger,
used to the outbursts but far from comfortable with them.

At least this time she was using words. Usually she just howled.

She leaned against the blanked window, fists pounding. The window took her assault like hard white
rubber, denting slightly, then rebounding. One of the few things in the room that bounced back when she
struck out; one less thing to break.

“Jeannie, hush....” Her mother reached out a hand. Her father, as usual, stood back, a mixture of anger
and resentment and confusion on his face.

Stavros frowned. A veritable pillar of paralysis, that man.

And then: They don’t deserve her.

The screaming child didn’t turn, her back a defiant slap at Kim and Andrew Goravec. Stavros had a
better view: Jeannie’s face was just a few centimeters away from the southeast pickup. For all the pain it
showed, for all the pain Jeannie had felt in the four short years of her physical life, those few tiny drops
that never fell were the closest she ever came to crying.

“Make it clear,” she demanded, segueing abruptly from anger to petulance.

Kim Goravec shook her head. “Honey, we’d love to show you outside. Remember before, how much
you liked it? But you have to promise not to scream at it all the time. You didn’t used to, honey, you—”