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

"Iceheart," he says gravely, "it's time we got this straightened out."
"What?"
"The matter of your consenting to your cannibalization."
"I thought we'd finished that a long time ago."
"No." He scratches his head, then shakes it. He doesn't glance at the others for support-he just cracks his knuckles and goes on, "We've figured it out, and we can't see us surviving without the material in you."
"Forget that," I say. "You don't get if."
"We have to have it."
"All right." I am about to lie, but they'll never know. "I won't part with my body, and you can't survive without it. Therefore, rather than condemn you all to death, I'll bypass the planet. We're already heading into the system, soil's too late to skip the whole thing entirely, but I can slingshot around the sun. Maybe next time we pass a habitable world, you won't be so greedy. It shouldn't be more than a couple hundred years."
Having heard me out in head-bowed silence, he raises his eyes. Their blue irises are dark, and determined. "We thought you'd say that-but we'll give you a chance to change your mind. As your monitors have probably told you, we posted a squad outside the door of the corridor to your vault. Let them enter and detach you from the circuitry."
I laugh. "Who'll run the ship?"
"We've built a replacement." He gestures to the far corner, where squats a bulky but competent unit I helped them design ten years ago. Should it be installed in my place, it will do the job-without my originality or sense of humor, perhaps, but the Landers don't enjoy those attributes anyway. "We'll move it up to your vault once you're out."
"Sorry," I say. "I refuse."
He shrugs; it is beautifully nonchalant. "Then we'll have to attack you, and seize control."
"Take me twenty seconds to knock every one of you out."
"Afraid not." He opens a survival kit, and extracts a transparent plastic hood. "Recognize this?"
"I should. I did the chemistry on it." It is a selectively permeable membrane, worn shiny side out. Oxygen can osmose into it; carbon dioxide can permeate out. My gas would eddy against it in vain. "And I presume all of you have them?"
"Exactly." He smiles like a chess-player who's worked his opponent into a tight, but not fatal, corner.
I bring up a rook: "Of course, it wouldn't take my servos more than-" nanosecond pause for the calculation "-three minutes to take them all away from you-which means that within two hundred seconds-"
"Sorry." He holds up the electric-shock pole. "We discovered something about this-they'll not kill a large mammal, but they sure will scramble the innards of a servo. One touch-sprxt! Useless."
"Hmm." And I manufactured 100,000 of them, too . . . I should have seen what it would do to my minions, but . . . "Mind if I test that?"
"Be my guest."
I roll a servo through the doorway; Kinney swings around, pole at the ready. I feint. He dodges. The table wobbles and tools fall off. I reach. He pokes. With a shower of sparks, the servo dies.
"Impressive," I say. Calculating the time needed to design an immune device, and then the time it would take to produce enough to demask the Landers, I realize that if they have three unopposed weeks . . . "I'll bet you think you've got me over a barrel."
The smile on Kinney's long face widens slightly; a millimeter more of teeth shows white and shiny. "We think," he says, mildly, "that you'll see the advantages of cooperation."
"Of suicide, you mean," I snort. "But I don't. See, you will have one helluva time trying to cut me out of the circuitry if you have to work in five-G. I can turn those g-units back on up there, you know."
"The nice thing about computers," he says tangentially, or so I think, "is that they're so predictable . . . we figured you'd say that. Check the service corridors between three two five and three two six, and the ones leading into your core-notice the people? And the equipment?"
I look. In each of the four corridors, scores of workers press against the inner hatches. Oxy-acetylene torches, braced against floor and ceiling so that shifting gravity won't budge them unless it rips the decks out, stand bare-snouted and ominous. Each worker carries a survival pack and a stun-pole; looped around his waist, a tool belt contains wire cutters and crowbar to pry up plating. "Damn," I say, annoyed with myself. "I thought they were maintenance crews."
"We've calculated," says Kinney modestly, "that the torches, operating without guidance, can cut through your hatches in less than ten minutes. Of course, there are no g-decks beyond them-but the core does hold the cables to all the g-decks. The g-units everywhere will shut down eleven, twelve minutes after I give the signal. For that long, Five-G is tolerable. We'd rather not have to do that-the ship isn't designed for Zero-G, and things would float around until we patched up the wiring-but we will, if you don't drop out of the circuitry."
"As you probably know," I counter, "I have tremendous exhaust fans-and if you give the signal, if even one of your men unholsters a bolt-cutter-I'll switch them on. You say I have ten minutes? I can slash atmospheric pressure to forty-eight percent of normal in that time, and the vents will stay open until you've repaired all the wiring. Even if you work at top speed, it'll take you another twenty minutes to splice the wires, and then you still have to schlep your replacement computer upstairs, and get it on-line . . . tell me, Kinney, do you enjoy breathing vacuum?"
His face has gone pale; his eyes are robins' eggs in a snowbank. His knees shake. His voice, though, is admirably level. "You'd term everybody aboard if you tried that."
"Uh-huh."
Somebody in the front row twitches his head, and Kinney seems to draw strength from it. "No," he says, "no," and this time confidence buttresses his lone, "you'd not be able to do that-surely you're programmed against it."
The only order that affects me-and I'm not about to tell him this-is that I have to land people on a habitable world in the Canopus system. But trimming off all the mayflies wouldn't jeopardize the mission: I have plenty of sperm and ova in the DNA banks, thousands of vats in which to grow them . . . aloud, I say, "Try me."
"Goddammit, you're just a machine! You can't go around killing humans!"
It is time to tell them. "I'm not a machine, although all my body and most of my data-centers are. I am-or was-a human being. Have you ever heard of a brain-puter?"
The listeners gasp; Kinney recoils as though he's just taken a blow. "I-" his throat, hoarse, fails him. He clears it. "I can't believe that," he says at last. "It's a . . . a gambit, that's all."
"Please study the display screen."
The heads turn to the right wall, to the large screen hung in its middle. The camera scans my central unit-tall, box-like, wheeled, with wires and tubes running in, out, and all around. A servo stands in the vault with it (it is never unguarded), and I move that to the unit. Its claw unlatches the cabinet door. In the plastic case within floats my brain-me. It looks remarkably obscene.
"My God!" chokes Kinney. His right hand shields his jugular.
"Now, do you begin to understand why I defend myself? Do you see why I will not allow you to use me for housing?"
He recovers quickly, I'll give him that. "But, look," he placates, "we'll not kill you-we'll just go on using you . . . or-" he is flustered "-I suppose you might not like that, well give you your freedom-your unit there has wheels and all, we could attach a motor, you could-"
"You can't give me freedom, Kinney-I already have it. I am not going to surrender it. I am also not going to trade my body for a one-half horsepower motor. I like what I am now. I intend to remain this way. Now, will you please act like reasonable beings, or-"
"Jesus." He is groping for a solution which won't involve killing. Give credit where credit is due: mayfly culture has come a long way. Now that they understand my nature, they are willing to look for a better resolution.
"You people," I break the tomb-like silence, "must have spent a long time getting that plot ready."
"Three years." replies Kinney absently. "Since BJ . . . "
"I never picked up on it-why?"
"It was all done in bleepspeak." He demonstrates, and at last I know why some mayflies seemed so verbose. "Or notes passed surreptitiously in eyeless rooms. Everything down to the last detail . . . but we weren't onto, we didn't have any idea-"
"I see." I pause for thought. They really want my body-more, they are honestly convinced that they have to have it to survive.
Under these circumstances, setting them down would be . . . well, not quite tantamount to murder, but awful damn close . . . they have psyched themselves into a position where a self-fulfilling prophecy could ruin them all . . . I can't just let it happen.
"I have an idea," I say.