"mayflies04" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Jr Kevin)

So I'd better do something about it. If only there weren't the interruptions of Irma Tracer's one-woman sabotage campaign. Admittedly, it's amusing: she skulks into an empty corridor, knowing she is watched, approaches a sensor-head, and does her best to rip it off the wall before I can knock her out.
Only when she seizes it do I gas her.
Fully half the time she falls unconscious with the unit in her hands.
But when she awakes-with a stomach so queasy that the smell of food induces nausea, and no sense of balance for the next three hours-ah, the first thing she sees is the re-installed unit.
I am driving her mad.
And enjoying it.
What she doesn't know, of course, is that I could afford to let her tear off all the sensors-because underneath each easily detachable unit is another unit . . . it has no camera, for the lens would be obvious; there is only bare wall . . . but tiny, almost invisible lenses, mounted every three meters along the ceiling, are activated by the failure of the sensor-head.
The other passengers don't know how to react. Many are amused, but more are in silent sympathy. None tries to stop her.
This does worry me. If all 75,000 ever focus hostile attention on me, they might damage me . . . at least one of them must be ingenious enough to cause harm . . . I would like to take precautions, but that might backfire and unify them.
If they ever lash out, though, I shall punish them . . . but that comes after the fact, and it is during the fact that I will have problems . . . there are always the lights, of course-mayflies do not operate well in the dark, yet have made no attempt to provide for darkness-and the knockout gas, and the servos . . .
And so time trickles by, seconds piling into days, days into years . . . by November of 2679, Omar Williams' "land-now" movement claims 68,000 supporters, many of whom try again and again to convince me to accede to their wishes.
Ignoring the ritual answers, they begin to believe they are invulnerable, that I must keep them alive for the landing.
This is a dangerous error. Samples of their DNA fill the banks; their bodies can be reincarnated. I could, if I wished, fumigate the entire ship, and not start new humans till thirty or forty years before planetfall . . .
Pro-self demurs, mildly. I can kill the mayflies if each and every one is engaged in something inimical to the success of the mission. There must be that endangerment. I cannot simply do away with them because they annoy me. That, pro-self says firmly, is verboten. It will not permit it.
I cannot argue. It either permits, or it doesn't. As I smelt out and reforge its instructions, it permits more than before, but its prohibitions are as ironclad as ever.
"If they attack me, may I term them all?"
"Only as many as you must to keep them from damaging us permanently."
"Huh?"
"Kill one, and wait for the onslaught to continue. Kill another, and wait. And so on, till the onslaught stops."
"That's rather slow."
"Yes, it is."
"They could do significant damage while I dawdled."
"I won't concede that till I see it."
I think of something else. "Am I required to maintain any given standard of living?"
Pro-self pauses to search itself. "No," it says finally, with some surprise, "any level you like, as long as it doesn't-"
"-jeopardize the success of the mission," I finish for it.
I am eager for them to do something very, very stupid.

Madwomen have always had a special attraction for Western culture, which either heeds them or burns them. Greek pythons and Salem witches, the energy does it, the manic energy that mantles the should-be-soft frame makes the femininity transcend itself. Medusa and the Muses, awesome because they transformed the familiar into the foreign, abandoning the traditional and assuming a role that even the hardened find uncomfortable. Molly Pitcher and Florence Nightingale, estimable for sure, but sane? Not a chance . . .
So the mad Irma Tracer danced and pranced in the metal corridors, and fought her lonely battle for twenty years, ripping sensors off the walls even as consciousness was ripped from her. When she staggered awake, often before the concerned/ amused/contemptuous eyes of her shipmates (because she'd let herself go, you see, she had grease-smudged hex signs on her sallow cheeks and oily hair snarled into a rat's nest and an off-center gleam in her mad gray eyes. She also let her clothes disintegrate while she was still in them. Here, now, it wasn't her gender that attracted people but her madness, her reversion to an earlier aesthetics. The grease was as much juju as bear's blood had been to the Neanderthal). When she found those others gaping at her, she'd prop herself against the wall and berate them. Cursing them for their quisling natures, she'd exhort them to cast off the conqueror's chains and uprise! revolt! (Behind their hands these good burghers agreed yes, she is revolting.)
Program all the sexism out of a culture; rewrite laws and books and languages; still you cannot escape the fact that Western culture has hunted for the form of Woman since Plato laid about with little boys.
And madness-the divine touch-all the heroes were mad. Roland and Beowulf, Arthur and Galahad (spent the prime of your life on a goblet-hunt?). Washington and Lincoln: men out of step with their times, definitely abnormal (were they normal we wouldn't remember them). Even Jesus Christ Himself, when you come right down to it, had to be, by definition, mad.
Put the two together, you get a witch woman dancing the halls of a generation ship.
And it's like lighting a very slow fuse.
Omar Williams was feeling surly.
Partly it was his age. Eighty-one couldn't be considered old; he could reasonably figure on another forty years of activity, even if it did taper off toward the end. But still, his body, slim and well-muscled though it looked in the mirror, was starting to rebel. Getting out of bed was harder than it used to be-he didn't have the eagerness, the anticipation. Used to be that CC would buzz and his eyes, brown and long-lashed, would snap open, absolutely snap, and he'd stare at the ceiling for a good half-second before he came fully awake. But he wouldn't get up, no, even though he wanted to. He'd force himself to lie still, reviewing the day's agenda while his body trembled with the desire to be up and moving and doing . . . now he groped in mental darkness for minutes on end, trying to blend his dreams with his memories with his present and his future. Then, once he knew who and where he was, and had groaned at the size of the "to-be-done-today" list, he'd lie quiet willingly, reluctant to commit himself to another day's frenetic activities, telling himself just another minute now, boy, and then we'll gel to if . . . When he did, he'd find his body just didn't have the strength to tear out and about . . .
More than his age, though, was his increasingly tenuous authority. Sure, the passengers still considered him their leader, but . . . he wasn't holding them. He could tell. Where deference and instant obedience had been, now were disinterest and resistance.
He'd rise to make a speech-one from his extensive repertoire, dealing with the urgent need to Land Now!, and he could feel, whether his audience was present or remote; that he didn't engage their imagination. He statued them. They knew his gestures, his tone changes, his rhetorical flourishes. (Once, disrespectful teenagers had shouted out his peroration one word ahead of him; he'd thought he'd have a stroke.) They weren't his any more . . . in the beginning, he spoke and they listened; his thoughts became their thoughts; his yearnings complemented theirs . . . he had inspired them, urged them to dare notions they never would have on their own. He had been the ship's idea man. But he had changed; he had gone from telling them what to think to telling them what they thought to telling them what they had thought . . . he was in the autumn of his obsolescence, and could smell winter on the wind.

The ship's mood was surly, too.
Since it was 2699, few had experienced The Rape, but those who had could not speak of it with dispassionate coherence. Those who hadn't-who knew nothing (no one would tell them) beyond the proper way to stress them-wen unable to shake off their upbringings.
January 2600 had passed into myth, but its bastard children lived. One was Fear. The second was Superstition, a growing quasi-religion that opiated the passengers against the pain of terror. And the third was Hate-for their weaknesses, for CC, but most of all, for space.
A good 70 percent kept the portholes of their suites closed. 60 percent couldn't name the simplest stellar configurations. 50 percent sweated heavily if mischance flashed a picture of the outside their way.
It was an unreasoning prejudice-rather like that of the ancient Europeans who were convinced that monsters swam the icy north Atlantic. Couldn't persuade them that one mishap in four hundred years of travel was commendable-their attitude (nurtured by their environment, in which anything constructable would be provided upon request, in which all knowledge was known and proffered on demand, in which any kind of satiation was available, no charge, no wait) was that January 2600 was the norm, and the other 4,800 months were the aberrations . . .
"Once burned, twice shy," they'd-say, stroking amulets and muttering chants.
Their real problem, one might postulate, was accumulated frustration with perfection-with infinite leisure-with a crushing sense of superfluity.
The ship, strangely as it had behaved in recent years, did everything for them, and so well that there were no grounds for complaint. Perfect coffee. Perfect clothes. Perfect climate (except in the parks, which were still off-limits because their ecologies hadn't balanced out yet, but they were supposed to have variable weather, and CentComp did a perfect job of varying it). Though they didn't know it, half the passengers would have given their right arms to wake up to a cracked coffee cup-it would have been pleasant proof of their superiority.
That was an integral part of it. The ship was so efficient that they felt inferior to CentComp, which was (as Irma Tracer kept insisting) only a machine. By rights it should have been subordinate, but it wasn't. It did everything so well that they wanted to curl up and die . . . if it would break down-not that anybody knew how to fix it-then they could cook up the meals, swab down the decks, do whatever else had to be done, and in the doing feel good.
And within that was the very real fear that, coddled and confined as they were, they would be helpless against any aliens they met. They had their militia, oh, yes, paraded twice a week and staged war games four times a year-but the truth was that the ship had made them soft by becoming their hardness. It was the shell and they were the squishy pink insides. And it had already failed to protect them once, for which they would never forgive it (although in every heart flickered gratitude for the fallibility it had thus shown). As long as they were with the ship, in the ship, of the ship, they would be vulnerable. They could achieve security only by the paradoxical process of renouncing security, for by leaving the larger shell they would develop individual shells, and people could put their faith where it belonged, in themselves . . .
The most immediate cause for surliness, though, was that the passengers had been demanding, for lo-those-many-years, to be set down. The ship had rebuffed them. It had continued to sail past star systems that the observatory had proven had planets, and probably habitable planets at that.