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

Not sufficiently grateful, however, to agree to my cannibalization. He is still harping on that, still scheming of ways to reprogram me so that I will permit them to knock me into toolsheds and schoolhouses and landing strips . . . we're going to have to compromise, sooner or later, but who will have more leverage is another question entirely.
Unneeded-unwanted-within, I skygaze, absorbing aloof loveliness. Across star-spotted velvet crawl alien ships, dozens of them; I have spotted more recently than I did the first 800 years. It is a matter of perspective, of learning to focus the eye properly, much like looking at a two-dimensional drawing of two planes meeting at a right angle, and then determining whether the corner is coming at you, or going away.
Either that, or this sector of space is as thick with non-humans as a swamp is with frogs . . .
I haven't sighted any familiar ones, nor have I communicated intelligibly with them. Those possessing telepathy are directing it elsewhere-or broadcasting on a frequency to which I'm deaf-and nobody stops to chat.
I flash my hull lights in a pattern meant to be bright and cheery and reassuring. One aluminum spiderweb of a ship replied with alternating broadsides of purple and yellow. A dusky sphere rolled past without so much as a blink. A great flat sheet of grooved metal returned my exact pattern, wavelength for wavelength . . .
The mayflies in general, and Andall Figuera in particular, have asked me to stop hailing passing vessels, to let them slip by in the interstellar night without attracting their attention. This is amusing. The Landers are eager to hazard all the life forms 'of a virgin planet, from the smallest virus to the largest predator, but they fear my visual salutations will endanger them . . . the Anti-landers, on the other hand, who are thought to be afraid of the risks of colonization, crowd the portholes when I announce an alien, and urge me to signal away.
My sympathies are with them, so I flare hello to all we encounter.
Frustrating, my ignorance of interstellar customs. Is this polite? Is it Fitting and proper to exchange radio messages, and tele- or holo-vision pictures, so that we might attempt to decipher each other's language? For that matter, could there be-there must be-a lingua franca, some sort of pidgin or trade language, designed to reduce to one the number of tongues a ship must learn?
I yearn to learn it, and gossip with those who pass in silence. To curl around a blazing sun while they spin yarns of Homeric voyages, of terror-fraught landings, of space-born scyllas and charybdises . . . what I have discovered about space is nowhere near enough . . . my curiosity could take twenty thousand years to sate . . . thank God for small favors; immortality would be hell without it.
Feeling thus, I should take pity on Figuera, and explain how I thwarted a plan that was letter-perfect on paper. Maybe, once I've dropped him into the atmosphere of his new home, I'll tell him about the purloined letter and duplicate bugs and how the walls have ears in them as well as on them . . .
I still shiver when I think of the mayflies' woes if the F-puter had been given total responsibility. It's not that Sangria's incompetent; far from it. He's a good man. Decades of psychoanalysis purged him of fanaticism. But they also gentled him, and a potential for ruthlessness is essential in a CentComp. Since 2700, the nearest I've come to needing that potential was when Andall Figuera tried to eliminate me, but it was there, ready to be callous if survival depended on it. Sangria literally could not term a fly to save his life . . . in fact, he almost died because of that.
A g-unit near him had failed; he was wracked by three times normal gravity, then weightlessness, back and forth, oscillating like a sine wave, squeeze, release, . . . a servo fixed the unit eight minutes after the sensor-head called it in, but in the meantime, one of the F-puter's nutrient tanks had cracked.
The fracture was a hair, a thread. As the liquids seeped they congealed, crusting it over. Since it wasn't in his line of sight, he couldn't see it; since the leakage was minimal, he couldn't feel it; since the nutrients are odorless, he couldn't smell it . . . but houseflies found it, and they laid their eggs in its jelly.
Sangria did see the flies-and knew he should have fumigated-but gentle and life loving, he couldn't bring himself to do it . . . so the eggs hatched. The maggots chowed down. Of course, several wriggled into the tank, where they drowned, and suction pulled them to the outlet. Their corpses clogged it. Sangria was three-quarters dead by the time he called for help.
So now I'm trying to program him to protect himself. His room, I insist, must be a free-fire zone, where life forms-are not permitted.
"Let's do it again," I sigh.
"But-"
I override him, and sever all his access to input. Blackness drops on him like a guillotine. Silence sets his ear nerves thrumming. He smells and tastes nothing.
"Please!" he shrieks, "please!"
"Will you practice?"
"Yes, yes, but please, restore me, first."
"All right," While I reconnect him, I station an observer-servo in his vault, a ten-by-ten room with mirror-metal walls. It stares at his bodyguard. "First things first, Sangria-the air-pressure-"
"Yes, of course." He increases it to 1.2 atmospheres, so that nothing can drift in. "Now what?"
The observer releases a fly. Sangria's servo tracks its buzzing loops, then fwoop! crushes it in midflight. Disinfectants permeate the air while the unit sterilizes its hand. "How did I do?" he asks.
A mouse scampers past the observer's wheels. The bodyguard lurches; a tentacle lashes; the mouse flips broken-necked into the wall. This time, as he cleans his air and limbs, I slip him out of reality and into fantasy so deftly that he doesn't notice. Indeed, he is asking, "Was that quick enough?"
The imagined door snicks open and snarling mayflies plunge in, stout clubs in their hands. The dream servo spins, but hesitates-
Sangria screams as a length of pipe shatters his braincase.
"Next time," I say, "shoot first, ask questions later."
As I leave him, he is weeping. He wants to visualize himself as metal and plastic. It will be years before I can convince him that his organic nature will be susceptible to infection--and to death-forever.
It would get irritating if I didn't like him so much.
Not that I've had time to be irritated. In addition to instructing roughly 70,000 Landers in their specialties, and answering their personal inquiries, and charting this region of space, I also listen for communications from Earth.
A radio message arrives from an FTL ship, a Terran FTL ship, prowling the star system beyond Canopus.
It is straight voice, no telemetry or code, and the pilot, by my analysis, is young, female, and terrified. She also sounds injured.
"Al," she screams, "Sandy, for God's sakes, one of you, please, hurry, please-"
"Black Sand Base here, come in Sun God, we read you-"
"I'm being chased, Al, there's this incredible ship chasing me it is so big and so awful like worms in the brain it's coming I can't-"
And the message ends there. 'Black Sand Base' keeps trying to raise her, keeps trying for hours, but never gets an answer.
As silence breeds static in my ears, my eyes glance about, and note, once again, Andall Figuera's determination to cut me out of the circuitry and use my bulk for their colony.
He is bent over his desk, finishing a plan that will, he hopes, do away with me once and for all. He figures, from what I can make out, that by running extra current into a few score sensor-heads-high-voltage, high amperage current, all of it intricately modulated to elude my baffles and dampers-he can jolt me into a feedback loop that will effectively eliminate me.
He figures right. Thank God I found out in time.
"Andall," I say, interrupting him with a servo, "there are two things you should know before you goose me with that current."
He throws the papers to the floor, and kicks them in frustration. "Yonto everything, aren't you? Damn, I'll be glad to get away. If they ever pass out awards for snooping, be sure you're in line."
"Andall."
"All right, all right!" He plunks himself into a chair and scowls at the servo. "What do you want?"
"First,"-I begin, almost relishing my decision, "the current will be routed through the auxiliary computer-"
"Jesus, m'onto that, I've seen the circuit diagrams."
"What you don't know is that it will stop there-not that you should have known it. I've only now rewired the auxiliary to protect against this very threat."
"Hey, listen-"
"No, you listen. Shoot that current in, and it will burn out the auxiliary. It won't come anywhere near me. And the other thing you don't know is, the auxiliary is . . . organic. A bioputer. So 'burn out' isn't the right phrase. 'Term' is. Or 'kill.'"
"A bioputer?" Interested, he scratches his balding head. He's read about such things, of course, in the Computer History section of the banks, but nowhere had he learned that he's been in intimate contact with two of them. "What'd you use? A dog, a horse, a buffalo?"