"mayflies07" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Jr Kevin)

Mayflies
Chapter 7

Release

The Mayflies have changed in the few days since that encounter; they've gained a self-confidence that I lost . . . how can I be confident? After identifying the strangers as harmless, I attracted their attention by exploding a flare under their bow, and kept my transmissions screaming for them to home in on. I was helpless to resist their entry. Worst of all, while the mayflies were averting their telepathic onslaughts, I again danced like a puppet, my strings worked by the bitter old brain that runs that ship . . .
I was pretty cocky before they arrived. "Pride goeth before a fall" and all . . . helluva fall. I'm still hurting-both psychologically (that brainputer did things I hadn't dreamed were possible) and physically. It will be three years before the airlocks are repaired and functioning again . . .
And for the first time since the death of F.X. Figuera in 2365, a human will tread on my hull. The aliens ripped from its bolts the antenna that beams work orders to external servos . . . a human has to reinstall it . . . I have to ask for volunteers.
"I'll go," says Gregor Cereus, interrupting my request. He thinks there will be competition, and is hoping I'll apply the first come, first served rule-but he is wrong. Every other mouth aboard stays shut.
"It's dangerous," I warn him. "I can give you magnetic boots, but there's not much gravity out there, and what there is is unpredictable. If something happens to both your lifeline and your boots-"
"It won't," he says calmly. He is impressive: brawny, bushy-haired, green eyes that miss less than a microscope, and a way of walking that would make a cat seem clumsy.
"You've never suited up before," I point out.
"So we'll go to a park, you throw up a scaffold, and I'll practice in the null-g zone. When you're convinced I won't kill myself, I'll put in that damn antenna."
So we do, drawing 1,289 sightseers who have only viewed pictures of spacesuited men before. While they flatten the grass and scrape buffalo shit off their shoes, Cereus climbs into zero-g. There he cavorts for half an hour on so. Even in the bulky outfit, he's graceful.
"I've got it," he says, swinging hand over hand down the ladder.
"Think so?" "Sure, it's easy."
"Good." I advance a servo like a chess piece; it is carrying the ten-meter antenna that will jut out of my hull. "Now sling this over your shoulder and crawl back up. There's a socket in the scaffold where it belongs."
He hefts its twenty kilos dubiously, shrugs, and starts up. The tool belt cinched around his waist-rises and falls in syncopation. When he's at the top, the servo removes the ladder. He fumbles a bolt wrench out of its loop and sets to work. As he learns how difficult it is, he swears. Telemetry tells me he's sweating like a cold glass in a sauna.
"Visor's fogged; hotter'n hell in here, Iceface. Whaddo I do?"
"The controls are on your chest. Turn down the suit temperature, and raise the dehumidifier. Let your faceplate clear before you work again."
While he waits, circled by curious birds, he flaps his feet and waves to the bystanders. They wave back; some shout encouragement. After six minutes, he starts in on the bolts again, then on the swearing. For all his brilliance, he sticks to monotonous repetitions of unimaginative four-letter words . . .
"Fuck, if I could just get my damn weight into this piece of shit-"
"There is no weight, only mass, and-" Seeing his boot about to slip off the scaffold, I say, "Don't move!" but it is too late.
He floats straight away from the antenna, reaches the end of his tether, and recoils slightly. Null-g is a misnomer: at 20 meters, the g-deck exerts .00125 G on him. Catching at his legs, it pulls him down a centimeter per second. He drifts like a reluctant bridegroom to the end of the lifeline, where-he hangs, infuriated, upside down. "Gimme a hand here," he demands.
"Uh-uh. Pull yourself back up. II' you can't do it here, you can't do it out there. Out there, I can't help you unless the antenna's working."
Grunting and cursing, he hauls himself back. His pulse hits 165 before he secures himself; his blood pressure is dangerously high. I'm not sure if it is the exertion, the frustration over making a misstep, or the embarrassment of appearing foolish to witnesses, but I tell him, "Sit and rest till your body processes are normal."
He does, fortunately, and for Fifteen minutes studies the antenna. When I tell him he can work again, he gets up, and bolts it down in less than three minutes.
"All right!" I approve. "Want to do the real thing tomorrow?"
"Today," he says. And he does it, too.
It is good to have human feet on my hull again.
No, it isn't,
It is good to know that the thudding feet aren't alien, and aren't there to rip out sensors, or to establish control lines between me and my humiliator, but they still disturb me. They go where they want, and do what they want, and until the antenna has been implanted I have to tolerate them.
I don't like that.
In the midst of something resembling an identity crisis, I actively resent everything. To have a human galumphing around on my skin, to need a human on my skin, makes me feel inferior . . .
Although I realized long ago that my aims are not the mayflies'-that differences separate us in every possible facet of existence-I never stopped thinking of myself as human.
But when the aliens stormed my portals, and the mayflies banded together to repel them, neither viewed me as a member of the race. The latter excluded me; the former turned me over to their brainputer. Left alone, violated, and afterwards ignored, I questioned what I really am.
The answer that arises-and that I, or some part of me, doesn't want to hear-is that I am not human. I was, once. The cells of my brain are still homo sapiens cells. My memories-are a man's; my emotions are akin to the mayflies' . . . but I am something else. More than them-less than them-I don't know. There is humanity in me, but not all of it, and there is much in me that is nothing human at all . . .
Like pro-self-who is gone.
I thought to resist. When the Presence came upon me like a thunderstorm, I buried the three of myself at It. Amused, It seized me-measured me-and joined us.
We are one, now: self, pro-self, and the metaphor.
It is nice not to hear pro-self's constant bitching-it is good to be whole, and done with the schizophrenia of the sphere-but it is lonely, too. After 900 years of the most intimate companionship possible, solitude is difficult. Especially when the mayflies exclude me . . .
My only friend is the F-puter. It bears with me while I struggle to determine my identity.
Eventually the crisis resolves itself. Days flick by like clouds of butterflies; years doppler into the past while I lick my wounds. Gradually and almost imperceptibly, as these things are wont to do, it fades away. By 3275, or thirty-five years after my second rape, it is completely over.
I have learned-or come-to accept-that I am neither human nor non-human. I am, in fact, unique: myself, and nothing else.
That realization disintegrates the last bone tying me to Earth.
In the meantime, public opinion among the mayflies has shifted. Where in 3235, 95 percent wanted to ride me into eternity, only 12 percent still do. Stella Holfer continues to speak for the dwindling minority, and speechifies against forcing all passengers to land, but isn't taken seriously.
The aliens truly shook the others up.
Gregor Cereus has become the most prominent of the "landers," as they call themselves, and the most outspoken. It is he who said, "They destroyed us once, and came close to doing it again, without ever using their weapons. What if we meet their less-restrained cousins?"
Holfer's had but one reply: "We drove them off!"
To which the landers always retort, "Last time."