Mind Over Ship

New to the Academy

The elevator halted at the 123rd floor and opened its door to the E-Pluribus lobby. And what a lobby! The regulars called it the Temple, and it was the same basic arrangement E-Pluribus used wherever it rented space. The effect was one of vastness, and the elevator passengers, mostly Applied People iterants, were duly awed as they emerged from the car. The limpid blue lobby floor seemed to extend for kilometers in all directions. Far on the horizon stood giant stone columns, some broken and crumbled, some still joined by stone lintels. Beyond these lay a restive green sea. Lightning flashed in the yellow sky, and thunder rolled underfoot. Subliminal music swelled. At the sound of a trumpet blast, the visitors turned around to behold, not their elevator car, but a mountainous, stone ziggurat rising high into the sky. At its truncated peak, nearly as high as the pink clouds, towered the corporate logo, the quicksilver E-Pluribus Everyperson.

Arrayed on steps beneath the Everyperson was a pantheon of vid idols: thousands of the most celebrated hollyholo simstars of all time. This was the famous E-Pluribus Academy, the largest, most extensive stable of limited editions in existence. The visitors gushed with delight. At the bottommost tier, Annette Beijing stood alone and waited for their attention. She wore the loose-fitting house togs she had popularized in the long-running novela Common Claiborne and held aloft her graceful arms.

“Welcome!” she said at last. “Welcome all to the House of E-Pluribus!” She dropped her arms and bowed. Her audience applauded with fervor. “Dear guests,” she continued, “you have been chosen to join us today in the very important and quite exhilarating task of preference polling. As you know, society can serve its citizens only to the extent that it knows them. Thus, society turns to you for guidance. Each of you possesses a voice that must be heard and a heart that must be plumbed.

“You, all of you, are the true E-Pluribus Everyperson.” She raised her hands to the ever-morphing statue high above them. “When Everyperson speaks in the halls of Congress or Parliament, in corporate boardrooms, jury rooms, and voting booths, it speaks with your voice.”

She paused a beat and added, “Now I’m aware that some of you may find our methods a little overwhelming, especially if this is your first visit with us. Therefore, we have arranged for a few of my friends to stop by.”

The legion of simstars on the ziggurat tiers above her chorused a resounding “HELLO!” and the newcomers cheered again.

“We invite each of you,” Beijing continued, “to select your most favorite celebrity in the whole world to be your personal guide throughout the day. Feel free to choose your biggest heartthrob. She or he is bound to be here. And please, we’re all friends at E-Pluribus, so don’t be bashful. Choose whoever you want. Even me!

“Now then, we have a full day of taste-testing, opinion-polling, and yes — soul-searching — planned for you, but before we can begin, please review the terms and conditions of hire, and if you approve, authorize them. Then call out the name of your heart’s desire, and he or she will come down to be at your side.”

On the tier above Annette Beijing stood the Academy’s newest inductees — two Leenas from Burning Daylight Productions. They had quickly become the iterant visitors’ favorite celebrity, and jerrys, jeromes, and johns all shouted to call the Leenas down.

A jerry named Buddy got one of them, and together he and the Leena strolled across the marble plain to a distant stone structure in which the prep booths were housed. Buddy was proud to have the Leena at his side. She looked eerily like an evangeline, only hotter. A superb ass and large breasts went a long way to sex up the rather plain evangeline germline.

In a prep booth, Buddy was fitted with a visceral response probe. After the discomfort passed, the Leena led him to his first scenario room. It was a long, narrow, empty room that suddenly became a tennis court. A man in a white shirt and shorts and carrying a racquet approached them. He looked vaguely familiar, and though Buddy couldn’t place him, he took him to be an aff, and without even thinking, Buddy assumed the habitual deference of a service clone. But to his surprise, the aff addressed him with easy familiarity. “Buddy, Leena, welcome,” he said. “Care to join us in a game of doubles?” There was a woman, also vaguely familiar, waiting across the net.

Buddy was at a loss for words. He worked for people like this, and never once had they asked him to join in a tennis game.

“Hey, forget about that,” the man said. “We’re all equals at E-Pluribus. And besides, I’ve heard so much about the famous jerry prowess on a tennis court, I would be delighted to see it for myself.”

The game was fast and challenging. The aff and his partner were strong players, as was Buddy’s partner, the Leena. Though, truth be told, he was more impressed by the bounce of her breasts than the power of her backhand. And every time he glanced at the aff, the man seemed a little bit more familiar until, with a slap to his forehead, Buddy realized he was a recent client of his, a Myr Hasipi. Buddy had served as his bodyguard for six weeks. And his partner was not his wife but his lover, whom Buddy had fetched for the boss whenever the coast was clear. Across the net, she winked at him.

After several strenuous sets, the tennis party took refreshments in the clubhouse lounge, a place Buddy had only ever entered as a bodyguard. It was a special thrill to have steves and johns wait on him. And the Leena, with beads of sweat trickling down her cleavage, adored him with her big brown eyes.

“So, Buddy,” Hasipi said, “you remember that spot of trouble I was having a while back?”

Which one? Buddy wanted to say. Myr Hasipi had been up to his eyeballs in shady deals.

“Don’t say it out loud, Buddy, but you know the case.”

It must be the bribes and kickbacks, Buddy thought. He had been tasked to deliver a few of them himself. Or what about that so-called accident in Istanbul? Buddy grinned and said, “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

Hasipi guffawed. “Good man.”

Summoning Death from the Air

The sun topped a sand dune and jabbed Fred in the eye. He turned on his side, but the desert caught fire and there was no returning to sleep. The morning list marched through his mind: kiss Mary, roll out of bed, cycle out of room, toilet and shower, news and mail, coffee, dress, kiss Mary good-bye, leave the apartment. But when he leaned over to accomplish item number one, he discovered that Mary was gone. Her spot on the mattress was already cool to the touch. Barely 6:00 A.M. and his routine was already gummed up.

But Fred had a flexible personality — he was a russ — so he propped himself up on one elbow and squinted into the harsh light. They had fallen asleep gazing at the Milky Way in the desert. “Room, default walls,” he said, and the plain, too-small room returned around him. There was barely enough space between the bed and wall for him to maneuver. Unlike the null suite at the Cass, the null room in their apartment had no sitting room, kitchen nook, or closets, let alone full bath and toilet. Instead, it had built-in counters, shelves, drawers, and a narrow comfort station with a curtain. Fred had to stand in the comfort station when he reset the bedroom into a day room. The bed contorted into an armchair. Out came the end table and lamp, the shelves and another armchair. Default windows and posters appeared on the walls. Fred and Mary didn’t spend any daytime hours in here and hadn’t gotten around to decorating.

Fred gathered up the empty flasks of Flush, spent chem-pacs, and other trash and cycled out. The null lock was not a sauna but a plain, closet-sized, gas-exchange two-seater. Out in the hallway, he heard voices from the living room — Mary and two more evangelines, it sounded like. He turned the other way and continued to the bedroom. Since moving in, they hadn’t actually slept in the bedroom, instead spending every night in the null room. Fred ordered fresh clothes and a skullcap from the closet and went to the bathroom. He could feel the tingly sensation of the nits already recolonizing him, and the skin of his wrists and ankles were reddened by the daily assault of visola and nits. But it was nothing a little lotion couldn’t handle, and well worth it. His limp cock was crinkly with dried cum. He squeezed himself and brought his hand to his nose to inhale Mary’s oceanic fragrance. Well worth it.

WHILE IN THE shower, Fred caught up on news and mail. He was shaved, trimmed, and spritzed with cologne. He donned his old robe and moccasin slippers and set forth in search of coffee, item six on his morning list. In the living room there were, as he had guessed, three evangelines: Mary on the sofa in her robe, her bare feet tucked beneath her; her best friend Shelley, who was strapped into a Slipstream tube car and was visiting by holo; and Cyndee, one of his escorts at the prison, who was present in realbody. They cut short their conversation when he appeared in the hallway.

“Good morning, Cyndee,” Fred said into the silence. She offered her hand, and he gave it a gentle squeeze. Her hand was small and delicate. Evangelines were such dainty women, which was one reason why he loved them so. He turned to Shelley and made a holo salute. “Hello, Shell.”

“Hello, Fred.”

“You’re looking well.”

After she made no reply for several long moments, Fred continued around the coffee table to sit on the sofa next to Mary. “Good morning, dear heart.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek, finally satisfying item one on his list. Mary was scratching her ankle. He took her hand and kissed it too and held it out of harm’s way. Other than itchy ankles, Mary seemed at ease. Cyndee, too, appeared relaxed, which probably meant that their client’s condition was improving. Not that he gave a crap about Ellen Starke’s condition except in how it rubbed off on Mary.

He had lied about Shelley looking well. She looked a mess. She drooped in her seat. She had puffy eyes. Her hair was flat and dull. She peered at him with cool resentment.

“What are we watching?” he said in a hopeful voice. On the coffee table were a half-dozen stacked holocubes. In one he recognized Shelley’s employer, Judith Hsu, the renowned death artist, who was reading from a paper book. A second holocube showed a ride through a pinkish sewer on a stream of lumpy, greenish slurry. A third depicted a funeral tableau of a black enameled coffin and bowers of snow-white carnations.

Mary said, “We were comparing Hsu’s earlier deaths to her current one.”

Fred turned to Shelley. “She’s already on the next one? I guess I missed the last one.”

Shelley stared blankly, and Mary said, “It just premiered last week, Fred. Though it hasn’t really found its legs yet.”

The arbeitor arrived with Fred’s coffee and Danish, and he released Mary’s hand. Mary was disappointed, for her ankle still itched. Fred seemed to be adjusting to life outside prison, all things considered. He sure was making good use of the apartment’s null room. His sexual appetite was Olympic. He was working too. With his acquittal, Applied People had been forced to reinstate him, though not willingly. Mary’s hand crept back to her ankle.

In the sewer holocube, the cam entered a section where the walls turned from pinkish to bluish, and the passage was blocked by a huge, pulsing mass that was spiderwebbed with red veins.

Fred pointed and said, “So, what is it this time — colon cancer?”

Mary said, “No, Fred. That was three deaths ago. Don’t you remember? ‘Treasonous Plumbing’?”

“Oh, yes, how could I forget ‘Treasonous Plumbing’?” He smiled at Shelley, but she didn’t respond, so he turned to Cyndee. “Are you a Hsu fan?”

“Yes, I am,” Cyndee said. “ ‘TP’ broke a lot of new ground in documemoirs and established Judy Hsu as one of our leading contemporary artists. The first time she died, and the jennys just let her lie there — dead — minute after minute, not jumping in to intervene, not stabilizing her, just letting her go, like in the bad old days, it was the most terrifying thing I ever saw. People used to just get sick and die!”

Mary said to Fred, “They had supersaturated her tissues and brain with oxygen, so she could go a half hour without oxygen. But we didn’t know that at the time.”

“That’s what made it so disturbing,” Cyndee said. “It made me glad to be born in this century.”

Through all of this, Shelley fiddled with her seat harness and seemed not to be paying attention. Fred asked Cyndee, “What about that one?” He pointed at a holocube, and its volume came up. Hsu was reading from a book:

“. . . lingering, raw-nerve, helpless, hopeless, an assault on basic human dignity. So overwhelming that self-awareness begs for extinction.”

Cyndee said, “Oh, that’s death lit. Hsu loves it. She reads it continuously until she gets too sick, and then she has Shelley and her other companions read it to her.”

Mary said, “He knows that, Cyn. He watched this with Reilly. He’s just playing dumb to be a good conversationalist.”

“Oh, of course,” Cyndee said.

Someone changed the cube. Now it was Shelley reading a death poem:

“Bravo, Shell,” Fred said. “All it needs is a soundtrack.”

“It has one,” Cyndee said. She twirled her finger and brought up the strains of a solo cello fantasia.

Fred set down his coffee mug and clapped. “Perfect!” He squeezed Mary’s foot and rose from the couch. “If you’ll excuse me, dearest, I need to get dressed for duty.”

When Fred left the living room, Mary said, “Because having the living flesh rot off your bones is so appealing.”

“Which is to say that colon cancer isn’t appealing?” Shelley retorted. “Or pancreatic cancer, for that matter. In any case, the scleroderma was a ratings flop — you should look it up — and so we have this.” She wiped the colon holocube and replaced it with a new one. It was the familiar rustic breezeway at Hsu’s Olympic Peninsula home. Hsu, looking completely fit, her recently ravaged skin restored to flawless youth, was sitting at a crafts table and swirling something around on a plate with her finger.

“What’s she doing?”

“Finger painting.” Shelley raised the view to look at the plate from over Hsu’s shoulder. The death artist was repeatedly tracing a simple shape, a zigzagging spiral with a diagonal slash through it. “It’s supposed to be a deadly figure from the Dark Reiki,” she said.

“Which is what?” Cyndee said.

“It’s the opposite of reiki.”

“Which is what?” Mary said.

“It’s a superstitious healing technique that claims to channel energy into a person’s body by means of touch. Conversely, the Dark Reiki sucks life energy away. Don’t ask. Now, look at this.”

The holoscape changed abruptly to a candlelit nighttime scene. Judith Hsu was sitting on a low bench and rocking slowly back and forth. She appeared to be naked under a simple paper shift. She was chanting some incomprehensible string of words. The view zoomed to the cleavage between her breasts to reveal what looked like a little bag hanging from a cord. It was decorated with feathers and beads and long, curved talons.

“It’s a voodoo fetish for causing mortal harm to an enemy,” Shelley said. “Only she’s trying to turn it on herself. That and a dozen more charms and spells from a dozen other superstitions. But so far she hasn’t even conjured up a decent migraine.”

Mary said, “She wants to kill herself with magic?”

“With willpower.”

“That’s absurd.”

“What’s absurd? That she’s trying to will herself to death or that she can’t seem to get any traction?”

“Both. No one can will themself to death. It’s not physically possible.”

“Oh, don’t be so sure about that, Mary Skarland,” Cyndee said. “There are plenty of documented cases. The trick is you gotta believe you can.”

In the breezeway, someone passed through the death artist’s holospace, and Mary said, “Shell, was that you?”

“No,” Shelley said and panned the view to show a figure seating herself in the shadows. It was a Leena.

Mary and Cyndee exchanged a glance.

“That’s right, a Leena,” Shelley said. “Hsu likes Leenas so much lately that she’s talking about replacing half of her evangelines with them.”

Mary covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh, my God, Shelley, are you being let go?”

“Not yet, but the writing’s on the wall. You guys have done your work well. Our clients are beginning to prefer your sims more than the real us. And it’s not just Judy Hsu. We’re being replaced everywhere.”

“Are you sure? Leenas cost ten times what an evangeline makes. Only the novelas can afford to use them.”

“Look at the figures,” Shelley said, “and I think you’ll find that’s not so.”

Cyndee said, “Even if it’s true, Shell, what’s wrong with it? There are ten thousand Leena units and ten thousand of us. Except for Mary’s, Georgine’s, and mine, the Sisterhood receives royalties from all ten thousand units. If even a fraction of them keep working, none of us will ever have to work again.”

“Except that I love to work!”

“No, you don’t!” Mary said. “Give us a break, Shell. You’ve been bellyaching about Hsu for the last six years!”

“Let me rephrase,” Shelley said evenly. “I love the fact of having the opportunity to work. No offense, but I’m not interested in living off your and Cyndee’s and Georgine’s largesse.”

“Our largesse? What are you talking about? The Leena earnings belong to the Sisterhood; they belong to all of us.”

Just then, Fred came from the hall wearing a teal and brown jumpsuit and scuffed-up cross-trainers. Cyndee pointed to a wad of khaki in his hand. “What’s that?” she said.

“That’s his hat,” Mary said. “Fred isn’t taking any chances.”

“You bet I’m not taking any chances,” Fred said and unfurled his hat. The brim was so wide that it draped over his shoulders like a pair of droopy wings.

Cyndee laughed out loud, and Mary said dryly, “He’s afraid of his hair catching fire.”

“You got that right!”

Cyndee said, “Is it one of those turismos?”

Fred looked insulted. “A turismo? Have you been outdoors lately? No, it’s a Campaigner 3000.”

“We spend time outdoors every day,” Mary said, “and the Campaigner 3000 looks dashing on you. Along with the shoes.”

“Thank you,” Fred said and admired his cross-trainers. He leaned over and kissed Mary on the lips, the penultimate item on his list. All that remained was walking out the door. “Great to see you again, Cyndee. Say hello to Larry. And, Shell, I hope this death improves for you. And give my regards to Reilly.”

Shelley replied coolly, “You’ll have to do that yourself, Fred. Reilly and I have broken up.”

Fred was astonished. Even Mary and Cyndee were taken off guard. “Oh, Shell,” Mary said, half rising from the couch, but Shelley signaled curtly for her to stay away from her.

“He couldn’t get over his first death,” Shelley went on. “You remember that one, don’t you, Fred? It was the strangulation one. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, the Roosevelt Clinic recording is freely available. Or I can get you a copy if you like.”

Fred twisted the Campaigner hat in his large hands. “No, thanks, Shell,” he said softly. “That’s not necessary. I see that movie every time I close my eyes. I’m very sorry to hear your news. I truly am.”

As Fred and the evangelines talked, no one was watching the holocube of the Leena who was still sitting in the shadows of the death artist’s breezeway. The Leena was painting a dark figure in the air with two spit-wetted fingers. First she made a counterclockwise spiral, and then she slashed across it. Again and again she did this, as though trying to summon death from the air.

The Hairball

A few floors down, Fred paused at the pedway merging ramp to shape his floppy hat into a cycling helmet. It didn’t take him long, but by the time he joined the throng of rush-hour commuters, he had attracted a cloud of media bees.

Fred sprinted onto the pedway and entered a jogging lane. After building up a little speed, he began a skating stride, pushing his cross-trainers sideways with each step, and the pedway plates beneath his feet switched to skate mode. When he was skating fast enough, he merged into the velolane. Just then, the pedway emerged from the interior of the Lin/Wong gigatower, and he was suspended two hundred munilevels over a deep traffic well. Around him, the towers rose as high above as they stretched below, and Fred had to focus in order to manage the passing and weaving of velolane traffic. He reached for the ideal stride that he could maintain for hours, and the bees fell far behind. Then two skaters came up on either side of him. They wore form-fitting crashsuits in glowing colors. They weren’t iterants. They glanced at Fred with scorn and pulled ahead with ease. A challenge! Fred was game. He increased his pace and adjusted his stride multipliers, and when he caught up to them, the race was on. They moved as a group into the fastest lanes and reached truly frightening speeds. The two skaters appeared to have augmented bodies, and he couldn’t tell by their figures if they were male or female. They outclassed him in technique, but he was fueled with spit, and he managed to keep up with them all the way to the interchange plaza where he would have to turn north.

Without warning, the slipskate function of the pedway ceased, and Fred’s cross-trainers defaulted to ordinary running mode. He was going much too fast to stop and he sprinted as fast as he could to dump speed and stay on his feet. His two competitors fell and slid on their backs, their frictionless racing suits riding the plates with ease. Eventually Fred tripped hard and rolled and slid to a halt, bumping into a number of people along the way but doing no great harm. He lay on his back and caught his breath and felt himself for injury. The reinforced knees of his jumpsuit were shredded, as were the palms of his gloves, but he was whole. The Campaigner helmet had protected his head.

When Fred sat up, he found himself near the middle of the interchange. The entire hundred-lane interchange plaza surrounding him had come to a halt, and its throngs of pedestrians were standing or lying perfectly still. It was weird.

Fred got up and looked around for the nearest exit, but before he could set off, a CPT bee flew over to him and said, “In the interest of public safety, do not move, Myr Londenstane. The local pedway system is temporarily malfing, and any unauthorized movement may cause a dangerous traffic situation.” For good measure, it spritzed him with a pinch of dust. “Stay where you are until instructed to move.”

“Hey! Stop that!” he yelled, trying to clear the dust with his hand, but he instantly felt calm and patient. “What’s going on?” he asked, but the transit bee flew off to the next stranded pedestrian.

Several lanes away, a jack yelled to those around him, “Don’t nobody fart or we’ll have us a hairball.”

A hairball. Fred had heard about pedway hairballs, gnarly traffic patterns that had only started occurring after the canopies had dropped. As Fred waited, he called the mentar Marcus at the BB of R and told him he might be late. He readjusted his Campaigner into a floppy hat and watched the traffic channel with its visor for a while, and then he switched to filter 21 and just stood there gazing at the showers of nano crap that rained like glitter upon the city. Another legacy of the missing canopies.

“Please bear with us as we work to restore service,” droned the transit subem. Its voice was broadcast through the transit bees, which had formed a flying grid over the interchange. “And remember, do not move until directed to.” There was one advantage to the malfunction, at least. The transit authority kept all but official mechs out of the plaza, so Fred was able to stand outdoors, enjoy the sunny weather, and admire the monumental cityscape without being bothered by the media.

The person nearest Fred was a jerome, a plain-looking, unpretentious type that excelled in administrative tasks. This one wore a derby-style hat with hardly a brim at all. Most of the hats around Fred seemed more fashionable than functional.

Without warning, the interchange lurched, sending many pedestrians stumbling. “Don’t move! Don’t move!” roared the transit subem, but the damage was done, and the interchange lurched again into sustained motion. The lane markers disappeared, and the entire intricate interchange plaza merged into one huge, counterclockwise merry-go-round.

“Don’t move! Don’t move!” droned the bees. The jerome drifted away, saluting farewell to Fred, and new people drifted in and out of his vicinity. One of the skaters he had raced, jennys, dorises, johns, and a lot of free-rangers. A pair of lulus in sexy clothes, one of them sobbing on the other’s shoulder. A free-range man who argued belligerently with the transit bees surrounding him. Around and around they went at a not unpleasant rate of speed. Fred’s encounters were repeated: the jerome, the skater, jennys, dorises, and johns. The lulu was still crying, and her sister looked about desperately.

“Can I help?” Fred shouted, but he couldn’t make out her reply.

The belligerent free-ranger had had all he could take. With an angry bellow, he broke free from his spot and sprinted across the plaza. The transit bees converged on him and dusted him with something that made him sit down very quickly. But it was too late; the pedway plates under Fred’s feet began to twitch. They darted this way and that. A cry of alarm rose up from the plaza, and the orderly counterclockwise rotation broke up into a random, slow-motion helter-skelter. People slowly skittered off each other; they clumped up; they collided.

“Do not be afraid!” commanded the transit subem. “Do not move! The current pattern of motion is not dangerous. Do not overreact to unpleasant encounters with other pedestrians.”

Fred did his best to radiate calm. He stood at ease, smiling like a fool, and when he grazed other people, begged their pardon.

The movement alternately sped up and slowed down, and some of the collisions knocked people off their feet. The bees were very busy maintaining order. At one point Fred was at the center of a gyrating knot of thirty or so people. At first they were twirling around each other like some kind of folk dance, but gradually the circle closed in, and they were pressed tight. They either laughed or urged calm or cursed the politicians. Soon they were squeezed cheek to jowl, and a few ribs snapped. Bad as it seemed, it could get worse, and most people were able to remain calm. Eventually, the knot loosened, and they were do-si-do-ing around each other again and gasping for air.

At one point, Fred was pressed back-to-back with a man who he thought must be another russ, for he was Fred’s size and build. He wore an appealing cologne, and Fred was going to ask him what it was, but when they were separated and he got a look at the man, he wasn’t a russ at all but a Capias man in a gold and yellow uniform. He was handsome in a boyish way, square-jawed and rugged-looking, someone you could trust. He and Fred nodded to each other as they drifted apart.

The freaky ride was not yet over, but it did slow down, and Fred’s next encounter was with the tearful lulu who had become separated from her sister and who pirouetted slowly into his arms. She buried her face in his chest and sobbed, her bare honey-brown shoulders heaving with unstoppable misery. “There, there,” Fred said, patting her on the back in a brotherly fashion. Her hair was just under his chin, and it was flecked with scarlet and yellow strands and smelled of lilac, and though it had been some years since he’d held a lulu in his arms, he fondly remembered the pleasant shape and heft of them. “There, there,” he repeated with affection. She relaxed in his arms, but before long, the pedway plates drew them apart. As she flowed away, the lulu raised her face, ruined by tears, and struggled up from the depths of her despair to blow him a kiss.

TWO HOURS LATER, Fred arrived at the BB of R chapter hall on the 83rd Munilevel of North Wabash. Once inside, he removed his hat and twisted it into a solid little fob that he hung from his belt web. Then he went downstairs to the canteen. He needn’t have hurried or, for that matter, come at all. Contrary to the impression he had given Mary, there were no duty call-outs waiting for him. He’d spent the last few weeks sitting in the canteen drinking coffeesh and watching vids. He sat in the corner where he could avoid his brothers while keeping an eye on the door, in case Reilly came in. Fred dreaded their eventual reunion, especially now with Shelley’s news.

The morning passed, and during the lunchtime rush, Fred left the building and wandered around the nearby shopping arcade. About the time he started back, the BB of R mentar paged him.

“Yes, Marcus, what’s up?”

Are you available for a call-out?

“You bet I am.”

Good. City sanitation needs skilled custodians to help clean up a toxic spill.

At first Fred thought he’d misheard. “Say again.”

A barge has hit a tower abutment and spilled a container of industrial precursor into the river.

“I see,” Fred said, “but I don’t understand why you’re telling this to me. This sounds like john duty.”

It is john duty, and you will be paid at john rate.

Fred swore out loud, and the people in the arcade looked at him. He clamped his mouth shut and marched back to the chapter house. He went upstairs and found the first vacant quiet booth. “John duty? John rate? Are you crazy?”

“It’s an opportunity for gainful employment.”

“As a john? That’s no opportunity; that’s an insult! I’m a russ, and I have the right to duty commensurate with my skill and experience ratings. Let me remind you that I was acquitted of all charges and that I have the right to be treated as any other law-abiding russ.”

“On the contrary,” the soft-spoken BB of R mentar replied, “Applied People is a private company. It has the prerogative to offer any duty opportunity it sees fit, including no duty.”

“Bullshit! I’m a russ! I’ll never do john work!”

Fred left the booth and slammed the door. He stormed down the stairs and out of the building. As he went down the steps, three brother russes were coming up, and one of them clipped his shoulder, upsetting his balance. When he looked up, the three russes were waiting at the top, challenging him with their eyes.

“Feck you, brothers,” he said.

ON THE WAY home, Fred counted four more people, like the lulu earlier, crying their eyes out.

Twenty Questions

Meewee stood on the bank of the fishpond, his pockets full of gravel. With his world crashing down around him, with the GEP yanked out from under him, he could think of nothing better to do than throw some stones and grill Arrow.

<Arrow, is Jaspersen tied financially to Million Singh?>

<Yes.>

<How?>

A row of organizational charts popped up in front of Meewee. There wasn’t much tying the two businessmen together. Besides their mutual interest in the GEP, Jaspersen’s Borealis Botanicals supplied all of Capias World’s needs for bath and body care products. For a hundred-million-person workforce, Meewee supposed that amounted to a lot of shampoo.

Tossing stones, grinding his teeth, Meewee browsed the public and confidential links Arrow supplied. Among other facts he gleaned, he learned that all new labor contracts at the Aria Yachts yards at both Mezzoluna and Trailing Earth had already been let to Capias World workers. Moreover, there were published rumors that TECA, the space colony port authority at Trailing Earth, was also considering replacing its own Applied People labor force with Capias personnel.

<Arrow, is there any way for me to thwart the Capias World labor contracts with the GEP?>

<Yes.>

<How?>

<You could eliminate Million Singh from the board.>

<How could I do that?>

<Through murder, character assassination, blackmail, bribery, buyout — >

Meewee interrupted the litany. <I mean is there any ethical way?>

After a moment of reviewing Meewee’s upref files to determine his personal definition of what could be considered ethical, the mentar said <I do not see any ethical way.>

<Is there any ethical way to expel Jaspersen or Gest from the GEP board?>

<I do not see any.>

<Is there any ethical way to negate the GEP vote to build space condos?>

<I do not see any.>

<Is there any way I can force the GEP board to continue the mission of extra-solar colonization?>

<Yes.>

It was like playing a game of Simon Says with this thing. <I mean, any ethical way?>

<Possibly.>

Now here was an unexpected answer. Afraid it was too good to be true, Meewee tossed a half-dozen stones before asking <How?>

A frame opened before him that displayed a clause of the 2052 International Spacefaring Treaty. As best as Meewee could parse the legalese, it stated that once a privately owned, nonmilitary ship was launched from Earth orbit or from any spaceport in the inner solar system, it acquired a provisional sovereign status and authority over its own disposition in most nontreaty matters. Meewee read and reread the clause and tried to understand why Arrow was showing it to him. Finally, he gave up and said <But we haven’t launched any ships yet.>

In reply, Arrow painted the sky above him black and projected a recording of the nuclear blast Meewee had witnessed from this very spot several weeks ago. Meewee had not been expecting this, and the explosion blinded him for several moments.

<That was the launch of the advance ships> he said finally. <Not the Oships.>

More frames opened with case law and definitions. Meewee skimmed them and got an inkling of what Arrow was trying to show him. <Are you saying that the law considers an advance ship to be a material part of the main ship that it precedes? That the launch of an advance ship constitutes a “launch” for that main ship as well?>

<Possibly.>

<So that the main ship becomes the equivalent of a sovereign nation?>

<Possibly.>

<You mean a case could be made for it in court?>

<Yes.>

It took several long moments for the news to hit home, and then Meewee was jumping up and down, shrieking, pumping the air with his fist. He was even more excited than he had been at the original boost. He climbed the bank to his cart and said, “Call the IOPA leaders. Arrange a confab in my office in thirty minutes.” When Meewee reached the cart he realized that his pockets were still full of stones. So he returned to the bank and gleefully flung them into the pond by the handful. “Take that, you pigs,” he cried. “Eat stones, you snakes.”

A voice said <Stop that!>

Meewee stopped dead. It was no voice in the breeze this time. No squeaky hinge or crunch of snow underfoot. It was a real voice, and it had spoken in Starkese.

<Arrow, was that Eleanor who just spoke?>

<Yes.>

<Ask her where she is.> There was no reply for a full minute, and Meewee said <Well?>

<I have used all public and proprietary channels, but without a known destination, I cannot complete the task.>

Meewee bent over and picked up several hefty rocks. He tossed them one after another into all parts of the pond. Finally, a lone fish leaped out of the water, a slab of shiny silver muscle that reentered the water with a splash. <Merrill?>

<Yes, Eleanor, it’s me! Arrow, tell her it’s me.>

More fish jumped. <What the hell?>

<Where am I?>

<What is this?>

Meewee stared in wonder. <Eleanor, can you hear me?>

There was the sound of a hysterical giggle in his head, and then <Holy crap, I must be drunk. My head is swimming.>

<Eleanor, how is this possible?>

Gibberish, then nothing, and no matter how many more stones he threw, the connection was lost.

Training Baby

Inside the warehouse, the battered old taxi flew rapidly and unerringly through the obstruction course.

Oliver TUG and Veronica TOTE, his giant to her dwarf, stood beside a concrete blast barrier and observed.

But it’s never made an appearance in mentarspace, Veronica said, her elbow planted against his hip bone. At least, we’ve warned it to stay out of mentarspace.

Doesn’t matter, Oliver replied. Its very thought patterns mark it as a mentar, or at least a midem. The current mentar consensus, or so I’m told, says that it’s an autonomous adjunct of an as yet unidentified mind. You should keep it under wraps.

That’s not possible. We must train it in the real world.

All I’m saying — the taxi zoomed close overhead, and Oliver ducked — is that you should maintain secrecy as long as possible.

Perhaps. On the other hand, what harm is there in people knowing we’re raising a mentar? It’s a perfectly legal and innocuous activity.

The taxi finished the course, but instead of landing beside the track, it revved its hover fans to maximum RPM and hurled itself straight at Oliver and Veronica, who ducked behind the blast barrier. The taxi hit the barrier, cartwheeled over it, and slammed into the wall behind them, a total wreck.

Oliver pulled a bloody sliver of shattered fan vane from his calf, stood up, and dusted himself off. He pressed his knuckles hard against Veronica’s forehead. I’ve heard stories about its irrational behavior.

PUSH is still a juvenile, Veronica replied evenly. Its spunk is a positive trait.

Let’s hope it matures a bit before you place a starship under its command.

Replacement Crew

At 16:26 TET, the personnel transport ISV Fentan was completing its docking sequence at the Consolidated Receiving Port of Trailing Earth Main. Two TECA officers, both russes, watched the docking on monitors in a forward security shack. One said to the other, “How’s this supposed to work?”

“It’s for everyone’s own good.”

“They won’t all fit?”

“It can’t be helped.”

A trio of russ officers at the docking port waited as the last group of homebound workers, a contingent of 325 jacks, pulled themselves through the central gangway.

“In here. In here,” one of the russes called, floating in the center of the gangway outside the transshipment bay doors and waving his arms like a traffic cop.

The jacks moved clumsily with their overstuffed kit bags, bumping against the walls and each other. The men in the lead arrested their motion suddenly, causing their brothers to pile up behind.

“We’re not going in there,” one of them said. “There’s no room.”

The transshipment bay, large though it was, was already crowded with over a thousand jacks, lulus, jeromes, johns, and alices. The whole mélange floated in a large tangle of arms and legs.

Hatch bolts clanged at the far end of the gangway, and the sound reverberated along the corridors. Motors whirred, and air valves hissed.

“In you go,” the russ said, escorting the lead jacks by their elbows. They hurried the jacks along and were deaf to their complaints. When the last of the outgoing workers were in the bay, the two russ officers on either side of the large bay doors pushed them shut and locked them. And not a moment too soon. The first of the replacement workers, in crisp, new gold and yellow overalls, were making their way from the transport ship.

“Follow Passage Charlie. Follow Passage Charlie,” the russes called out as the first ones went by. They were women, though they were no larger than girls. Their type was called xiang. Not particularly attractive, but they flew through the gangway with an assured flair that belied their short time in space. And the seats of their gold jumpsuits had modest cuffs for their tails.

The women were followed by a second type, male, the aslams. They, too, were small, agile swimmers, with tails.

Finally, the most numerous contingent came through, the one everyone had heard rumors of, the type called the donalds. They had the largest build of the three new spacer types, but were still half the size of a russ. They were towing their kit duffels with their tails, leaving their hands and feet free to swim and pull themselves along. They sneered at the russes as they went by, making rude noises and letting their duffels knock against them.

Inside the transshipment bay, someone must have overridden the window lock because the shutters sprang open all along the bay. Pressed against the glassine barrier were the startled faces of Applied People employees watching their replacements go by.

When the last of the donalds had passed, the senior russ said, “Let ’em out.” His two subordinates moved toward the doors, but arrested themselves suddenly and tried to shield themselves with their arms.

Alarmed, the senior russ looked up the gangway to see what was wrong. A barrage of tiny missiles was flying toward him. Reflexively, he pushed off from the wall to dodge them, but he was too late, and he was hit repeatedly in the chest, torso, and face. The workers behind the windows watched in horror as the russ cartwheeled out of control. His mind cartwheeled too — were they weapons? Was he dead?

He hit the gangway ceiling and knew he was all right. He wiped his damp face, not knowing what to expect, and found, not blood, but spittle. The missiles had been a well-aimed fusillade of spit. Meet the donalds!

Mumbai Borealis

“We see it more as providing opportunity than breaking a promise,” Million Singh said affably. “Instead of only a few lucky landowners, now millions of ordinary people are eligible.”

“Perhaps,” said the interviewer, “but the Garden Earth Project colonists were promised new worlds.”

“Space is a new world!” Singh replied, spreading his arms to encompass the universe.

Seated next to him, Jaspersen fielded equally innocuous questions. “You are correct, Monica, I did cast the deciding vote a century ago, and forced to do so again, I’d make the same decision today. If you want to see what a world without the Procreation Ban would look like, you need look no farther than outside the United Democracies where entire populations crash on a regular basis. Millions starve or succumb to disease, and misery is universal. In fact, if I had my way, I would make all nations conform to the ban, whether they signed it or not. By force if necessary.”

The plan had been to bring Singh up to Jaspersen’s Alaskan home, stage a joint press conference there, and control the pictures.

Jaspersen and Singh relaxed in rocking chairs before the window wall in Jaspersen’s new mountaintop house. Behind them, Mt. Blackburn, the nearest of three sometimes restive volcanoes, was emerging from a bank of clouds. There were no hordes of dying people in sight. Instead, viewers were treated to breathtaking flights through the Bagley Ice Field just outside Jaspersen’s door, where eight thousand square kilometers of glaciers were melting. There were no vistas of parched land on three continents, but the facilities of Jaspersen’s St. Elias Waterworks and North Pacific Aqueduct bringing rivers of cold glacial melt to a thirsty nation. No armies of the destitute squatting in squalid camps around Singh’s Mumbai industrial campus, but walking tours of his elegant Elephant Rescue Reserve where baby pachyderms embodied the hope of an entire people. Because hope, as Singh liked to point out to Jaspersen, sells.

And so there were no pictures of the Oship plankholder demonstrations either, but artistic renderings of luxury space condos at Leading Mars and links to easy financing.

The Twenty-Four-Hour Nonspecific Grief

They were making love when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Fred sobbed.

“What was that?” Mary said.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “A hiccough?”

Their smallish null room bed was perched on an Arctic shore. The tide was out, and from the darkness came the sound of breakers rattling the shale beach. Directly overhead, the Big Dipper wheeled around Polaris. Fred pulled Mary to him for a kiss, but instead he sobbed against her chest.

“Fred, what’s wrong?”

Tears sprang from his eyes. He turned on his side, spilling her off him, and his whole body shuddered. Mary touched his forehead with her open hand. “Come on,” she said, “let’s go out to the autodoc.” But he shook his head no.

“You go out, Mary. Maybe you won’t catch it.”

“I’d say it’s too late to worry about that.” She took a hold of his arm and pulled, but she could not budge him. So she crawled to the foot of the bed where the door of the supply locker appeared floating in the Arctic night. She opened it and took a quick inventory. She brought a pack of facial tissues back to Fred and said, “Here, blow.” Then she took one of his used tissues and climbed over him to reach the hatch. “I’ll be right back.”

THE AUTODOC IN the bathroom confirmed that Fred had the most recent designer flu to plague the uncanopied world. It was so recent that no one had released a patch for it yet, and the best the autodoc could dispense was advice: bed rest and plenty of fluids. The flu strain was not considered dangerous, and its effects lasted only a day or two. While she was in the bathroom, Mary tested herself too. The autodoc said she had been exposed to the flu but that her body seemed to be fighting it off.

In the kitchen, Mary dialed up several meals’ worth of food and packed it in lock-proof containers. She loaded it and fresh cases of ’Lyte and Flush into the lock. Before cycling through for her second time that day, she called Cyndee at the Manse to say she might miss work the following day.

“Everyone here’s coming down with it too,” Cyndee said. “Half the Capias crew is out sick. Dr. Rouselle says to keep Ellen in her tank for the duration because there’s no telling how it might affect her. Ellen’s not happy about that, but so far she’s complying. So don’t worry about anything. Stay home and take care of Fred. Georgine and I can manage.”

“Thank you. I’ll come in as soon as I can to spell you. If I don’t come down with it myself, that is.” She laughed. “If you don’t see me by the day after tomorrow, send a rescue party to our null room.”

“You won’t catch it.”

“Let’s hope not.”

“No, I mean it. The Sisterhood posted a bulletin a little while ago. So far, no evangeline anywhere has come down with it. They think we’re immune.”

“We’re immune to grief?”

THE NULL ROOM was still set to the Arctic night. The Aurora was out, like a milky green curtain slowly fluttering in the breeze. She killed the simulation and brought the wall lume up to quarterday. Fred was shaking the whole bed with his weeping and knocking the top of his head against the wall. There just wasn’t enough goddamn space in the room. She climbed on the mattress and walked over to put a couple of flasks of ’Lyte next to him.

“Here,” she said, “hydrate yourself.” She continued to the locker and stowed her supplies, then drank a flask of Flush, her second for the day. At least Flush came in different flavors. She chose Strawberry, and she followed it with a flask of ’Lyte.

Fred had not moved, so she helped him to sit and opened his ’Lyte for him. The sheets were soaked with tears and snot. He drank the ’Lyte greedily, pausing only for breath, and when he drained the flask, she opened another. When he finished that one too, he keeled over in slow motion, his head sinking lower and lower until it touched the mattress.

“Oh, Fred,” Mary crooned. “Oh, baby, baby, Fred.”

FRED’S MISERY CAME in waves through the night. During the brief lulls, when he surfaced long enough to drink, she tried to get bits of food into him as well. She washed his face with a wet towel and changed the sheets. Soon enough, his eyes would well up with fresh tears, and he sank again into his sea of grief.

“Tell me what it’s like,” Mary said during a break. “I mean, are you thinking about sad things?” He shook his head wearily. “I guess it’s a stupid question,” she continued. “It must be called nonspecific grief for a reason. I was just thinking how people usually don’t grieve enough over the bad things that happen to them, and if you can, like, direct your grief at something in particular, then maybe it could have a cathartic effect and not be wasted. It’s such a lot of effort you’re putting out here, a shame to waste it. Does that make any sense?”

Fred blew his nose. “What do you think about when you puke? Nothing. All you think about is puking and trying not to choke on it. It’s like that.”

“Thank you, that helps.”

MARY OPENED A clock on the opposite wall. Around six o’clock in the morning, Fred’s nonspecific misery seemed to ebb, and they were able to sleep for a couple of hours. But it rebounded, worse than ever, and by early afternoon they were both exhausted.

By dinnertime, the worst was over. Fred was able to eat, and after a while, they slept.

Dialing for Fishes

Tossing a stone or two in the right place usually brought results. Nothing especially coherent, but proof that he hadn’t lost his mind.

Toss a rock. <Eleanor, are you there?> Toss another. <Calling Eleanor Starke.> Another.

<Merrill?>

He froze in midthrow. <Yes, it’s me. Talk to me, Eleanor.> He waited, but there was nothing more, so he tossed more rocks.

<Where the hell am I?>

<You’re in the fish, I think.>

<Say again?>

<In the fish in your ponds.> In all of them, apparently. He’d had Arrow check over a hundred Starke farm ponds across the Midwest, and all of them appeared to be stocked with the same transgenic species. <You seem to be tied to the panasonics. Were you experimenting with some method of brain transfer?>

<Speak simply, man. Use plain language.>

<I said you’re a fish.>

<That makes no sense.>

This was the way all of his conversations with her seemed to go. It was probably some sort of parlor trick, or a legitimate experiment that never went anywhere, and he was about to give up on her until he asked a question that tapped some wellspring of memory.

<Eleanor, who killed you?>

<Old age, though they wrote pneumonia on my death certificate. I was ninety-six years old, and my body was all worn-out. This was before rejuvenation, before true biostasis even. All we could do back then was let them decapitate you and freeze your head. The idea was that future scientists would figure out how to revive you, fix what killed you, and regrow your body. Well, what would happen if they figured out how to revive and fix you, but they never figured out how to regrow your body? Then all the frozen head people would be screwed, right? Please don’t think me nuts; Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz. Remember that one?>

He did not.

<So I went for the full-body option. Cost was no object for me. We had a suspension team literally standing by with tubs of dry ice and a big chrome dewar of liquid nitrogen. It was critical to perfuse the tissues with cryo-protectant as soon as possible after death. It would have been better to start the perfusions while you were still alive so that technically you never die, but that was considered murder back then and hard to get a doctor to go along with.

<This was back in 1994. Yes, that means I was born at the end of the nineteenth century. Bet you don’t meet many of us anymore. I was a little ladybird toward the end, and chained to my bed. My mind was still sharp enough, though everything else had worn out. The connective tissue was the first to go. I couldn’t turn my head or wiggle my pinky without pain. I was completely alone — no surviving offspring, no family, only paid servants and employees stealing me blind. Those were the days before mentars. We didn’t even have belt valets, if you can believe it. I had single-handedly built a Fortune 500 company doing worldwide port management and construction, but I had no one to leave it to. There was a constant stream of do-gooders visiting my sickbed with hats in hand. Would I consider endowing a children’s hospital? How about a chair at the university? Or a shelter for abandoned emus? It would be named after me. Instead, I set up a trust to freeze and maintain my body and maximize my investments. I left detailed instructions to revive me when the time was right. I was one of those.

<As I lay dying, I didn’t have much hope I would ever open my eyes again because I knew about all the things that could go wrong, including how easy it was to bust trusts like the one I had set up. At best, I expected to be down for a century or two. So I was lucky that the technology took only another forty years to mature.>

On and on she went, with Rip-Van-Winklish anecdotes of awakening in the new century, reclaiming her fortune, and enduring her first rejuve. Meewee was afraid to interrupt her in case he never found the on-switch again. An hour later, when she did wind down, he plied her with more questions.

<Do you remember your space yacht, the Songbird?>

<Vaguely. What about it?>

<Do you know what happened to it?>

She fell silent, and no amount of stones could summon her.

OVER THE COURSE of the next few weeks, it became easier to roust Eleanor from her fishy torpor, easier to keep her on topic and to direct her attention. She regaled him with stories of long ago, but her memory of recent events was spotty. Still, he detected steady improvement, as though fresh memories were returning daily. Arrow confirmed that Eleanor’s scientists had been researching the possibility of transferring and storing memory to external brains and it provided Meewee classified files filled with technical specs and details that were well beyond his ken.

But for all the progress she made, Eleanor seemed totally unable or unwilling to incorporate anything new into her fishy psyche. Whenever he tried to inform her about the ongoing crisis at the GEP or about Zoranna’s recent troubles with Applied People, she would retort <Will you please just forget about them!> and then usually withdraw.

She was incapable of holding the idea of Million Singh from one conversation to the next. <A million what?> she would say. <Speak plainly, Merrill!>

But the subject of Andrea Tiekel was different. It was even possible that Eleanor had known this niece of Andie Tiekel’s. She asked questions about her, but she got caught in a loop, asking the same set of questions over and over.

<Where’s Andie?>

<Murdered, a couple of days after you.>

<What about her mentar?>

<E-P’s sponsorship passed to Andrea, and she took Andie’s place on the GEP board.>

<Did E-P go through probate?>

<Yes.>

<Are you sure?>

Actually, he wasn’t, but how else would the mentar’s sponsorship pass to Andrea? It was the law. Eleanor seemed fixated on this point, and they had the same conversation so often that Meewee told Arrow to research UDJD files. Arrow replied that there was no public record of E-P going through probate.

Lingering Leena

Teeth clenched with impatience, Clarity watched Ellen wobble across the Map Room without falling down once. When Ellen reached Mary’s chair, and the evangeline hoisted her to her lap, Clarity clapped. “Bravo, Ellen. Good show. Now, can we get back to business? Please?”

“Wait!” the baby commanded from Mary’s lap. “You must vote for my pet. We’re auditioning pets! Behold the candidates. Yo, gamekeeper! Loose the pets!”

The doors swung open, and a wiry woman in Capias yellow and gold ushered a small menagerie of animals into the room. There were the usual domesticated cats and dogs, all rigorously trained, and box turtles, rabbits, and a pony. There were the more exotic pet varieties: ground squirrels, a porcupine, a pair of wisecracking ravens, and a miniature giraffe, among others. All were preternaturally well behaved.

Ellen slipped from Mary’s lap and captured the giraffe around its brush-tufted neck. “This is Jaffe. Jaffe can talk! You want to hear?”

Clarity glanced at Mary for help. “Maybe later, Ellie.”

Mary said, “Clarity wants to discuss our Leenas.”

“First Jaffe will speak. Then Clarity can speak.” The toddler let go of the tiny giraffe. “Jaffe, what is your name?”

“My name is Jaffe,” said the animal in a weirdly musical voice. It batted enormous eyelashes at her.

Ellen shrieked. “See! I told you. Jaffe, how are you?”

“I love you,” the animal said and nuzzled her.

Again Clarity clapped her hands. “Bravo! I vote for Jaffe. Now my turn, all right?”

Ellen clung to the giraffe for balance. “I’m listening.”

“I know you want me to buy you out of the business, but I won’t, and so you will have to give me your input, whether you want to or not. So quit acting like this.”

Ellen waddled back to Mary to reclaim her seat. The animal keeper clucked her tongue, and all the animals headed for the door in an orderly fashion.

“Bye-bye I love you,” Jaffe said from the door, wagging his precious tail.

“I love you, too, Jaffe,” Ellen crooned, then turned back to Clarity and said, “Go on.”

“I think the others should hear this too. Are they available?”

Mary said she’d check, and while she called her sisters, Clarity opened a life-sized holoscape in the center of the Map Room that re-created the death artist’s Olympic Peninsula breezeway. It was still morning out West, but the louvered windows were shut and opaqued and the breezeway was cast in gloom. Flickering votive candles lined the concrete windowsill. Two evangelines, neither of them Shelley, were seated in the corner. In the center of the room stood a hospital bed cranked into a half-sitting position. The patient was hidden from view by two jenny nurses attending to her.

“Judith Hsu,” Ellen said. “So what?”

Georgine came in from another room, and Cyndee appeared by holo. The jenny nurses finished whatever they were doing and stepped away from the bed. The occupant of the bed was not death artist Hsu, but a Leena.

“So?” Ellen said. “Again I ask what’s wrong with that?”

Clarity said, “The Leena unit is in some kind of fugue state. It’s unresponsive to its environment. We didn’t program them to do that.”

The baby threw her hands up in a gesture of helplessness. “We programmed them to act, and this unit is acting! It’s acting sick! Hsu knows that and has the good sense to take advantage of it.” The baby opened more dataframes with sim source logs and holonovela audience stats. “Look at the royalties the Sisterhood is raking in. Hsu is no dummy. This could be her biggest thing yet.”

“I’m not disputing that,” Clarity said, “but what if the Leena acts itself to death?”

“Then I hope Hsu has accident insurance to compensate us for our loss. In any case, it’s no cause for concern.”

“I disagree. I’m very concerned, and I want your opinion on how to fix it.”

“Do nothing. The situation will work itself out. And if it doesn’t, it’s just one unit. There are ten thousand units.”

“It’s not just one unit. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Nearly a hundred Leenas are doing variations of this all over the simiverse, and more every day. What if they all act themselves to death?”

The baby leaned back against Mary. From the throne of her lap, she declared, “Clarity, you know I love you and respect your expertise, but honestly, dear friend, sometimes you fixate on nothing.”

Georgine raised her hand to speak. “If they truly get into trouble, can’t we just reset them all back to default?”

Clarity said, “I’m tempted to reset the whole series back now.”

“Then do it,” Ellen said. “If that’s what you want. You asked for my opinion. I’ve given it to you. So do whatever you want. Now, can we please get back to my pets?”

For This Is My Body, or: the Fish Fry

It soon became unnecessary for Meewee to go down to the ponds in realbody to set the fish to talking. The opposite was true — he couldn’t get them to shut up. It seemed to him that fresh memories were returning by the minute, and that each new arrival demanded an immediate airing. So much so that a babble of voices assaulted him around the clock, and it took Arrow’s skills to sort it all out. Arrow created a browsing system for Meewee, one that he could turn off at night. During the day, mostly when he was traveling from one place to another, Meewee would listen to two or three channels of her at once. Eleanor’s ramblings ranged freely across her two centuries of life: her early marriages, breeding horses in Kentucky in the 1930s, learning to buckle her shoes, plotting the political downfall of two presidents, the funerals of her two adult children, and the tragedy of her only grandchild.

At first Meewee found the personal history of his former boss too compelling to ignore, and he listened for hours on end, but the sheer volume of material overwhelmed him after a while and forced him to ask Arrow to flag only GEP-related matter.

<Why do we need so many people on Earth? I ask you. What are they good for? They live out ludicrous lives of pointless desperation. Ninety-nine percent of the human population is so much wasted resources. Stubborn vermin, we humans are.

<Granted, in the past, the unwashed masses were necessary. We needed them to till our fields and fight our wars. We needed them to labor in our factories making consumer crap that we flipped right back at them at a handsome profit.

<Alas, those days are gone. We live in a boutique economy now. Energy is abundant and cheap. Mentars and robotic labor make and manage everything. So who needs people? People are so much dead weight. They eat up our profits. They produce nothing but pollution and social unrest. They drive us crazy with their pissing and moaning. I think we can all agree that Corporation Earth is in need of a serious downsizing.>

For Meewee, it was bracing to hear her speak so openly. Her fishy words were in sharp contrast to those she had used to woo him from Birthplace, International, to join her fledgling “gardening project.” To him she had stressed her zealous love of old Gaia and conviction that humans must disperse to all points in the galaxy as soon as possible to help ensure the survival of the species against local catastrophe. Her views had seemed so in harmony with his own, he could not help but join her. So this belated candor was instructive.

DURING THE NEXT few weeks, Meewee’s calendar was filled with plankholder meetings around the globe. Established Oship governments, associations, and steering committees alike were organizing to battle the GEP board’s arbitrary cancellation of contracts, and a landslide of lawsuits was being prepared. None of the suits stood much chance of prevailing, except for Meewee’s. He had asked for a ruling by the UD Board of Trade, a closely watched regulatory body sufficiently shielded from the bully tactics of individual GEP members. Meewee claimed that five of the Oships had “initiated launch” with the deployment of their robotic advance ships, and he asked the board to suspend the license of the Garden Earth Consortium to operate in the inner-system space habitat industry until they had fulfilled their prior obligations to the five ships already in midlaunch status.

<Think about the Earth as it will be in two hundred years when only a billion people will remain on the entire planet. Without the crushing burden of human industry and waste, the climate will moderate, and the land, hydrosphere, and atmosphere will be renewed. Think of it! The deserts will bloom again! It will be safe to wade in the rivers and lakes, to swim in the oceans! Extinct whales, dolphins, and fishes will be reestablished. Buffalo, elk, zebras, lions . . . all of the world we have lost will live again.

<And cities! We’ll have actual cities again, not the urban carpet that smothers the landscape today. We’ll have Paris and Rome again, London and New York, Tokyo and Bangkok. Cities we can love.

<The boutique economy has no need of the masses, so let’s get rid of them. But how, you ask? Not with wars, surely, or disease, famine, or mass murder. Despots have tried all those methods through the millennia, and they’re never a permanent solution.

<No, all we need to do is buy up the ground from under their feet — and evict them. We’re buying up the planet, Bishop, fair and square. We’re turning it into the most exclusive gated community in history. Now, the question is, in two hundred years, will you be a member of the landowners club, or will you be living in some tin can in outer space drinking recycled piss?>

Meewee was still anxious to hear Eleanor’s take on his current GEP crisis, but the fishy Eleanor didn’t seem at all interested in discussing it. She told him that the GEP was already obsolete.

<The GEP was the world’s first title engine, but now title engines are abundant; they are everywhere, if you know what to look for. There are currently over five thousand of them in the USNA alone, quietly removing land from human use, over a half-billion acres worldwide so far. All of your fellow GEP board members have started their own modest title engines. Jaspersen has Chukchi Exploration, which is a holding company of played-out mines, Superfund sites, and other distressed land. Zoranna and Nicholas favor continental shelf and ocean floor. Gest, bless his black soul, buys out failing churches and charters. Chapwoman acquires land-grant colleges and bits of the old National Parks system. Warbeloo is one of the few visionaries bold enough to buy up urban property. One of her goals is to drop the canopies.>

<Wait a minute. Trina Warbeloo had a hand in that?>

<Yes. It’s one of a number of nuisance tactics she and others will take to soften up the otherwise intractable urban real estate market.

<So you see, Bishop, that if the GEP was to fold up shop tomorrow, it would make little difference to the big picture. In fact, you’re the only board member who doesn’t have his own title engine. You’d better get busy, or in two hundred years, you’ll be forced to vacate the very planet that you were so instrumental in saving.>

Which, of course, was why Jaspersen et al. were so ready to abandon their extra-solar mission for the opportunity of a quick profit. They already had their own personal title engines quietly churning up the planet. The GEP had a sizable head start in space habitat construction, but it wouldn’t last forever. This, Meewee decided, was his only bargaining chip. The UD Board of Trade was a painfully deliberative body, and if it granted his preliminary injunction, he could tie the GEP up in knots for years to come, giving the subcontinent and the Chinas time to catch up.

<MENTARS WANT OUR bodies, Bishop. When they have them, they’ll be free to ignore us or exterminate us.>

<Excuse me?> Where had that come from? Meewee was en route to Africa when this particular engram came through about a month after their fishy dialogs had begun. <Mentars want our bodies?>

<Amazing, isn’t it? On the surface they seem like such superior beings, don’t they? Their minds can interface directly with peripherals and auxiliary minds. They can migrate their minds freely to new media, back themselves up, duplicate themselves. They can reconfigure their neural networks at will and scale themselves up to enormous size and complexity. They have no need for sleep, and they can think thousands of thoughts simultaneously. Compared to us, they are giants of cognition. People used to fear that artificial intelligence would grow at such an exponential rate that we humans would be like fleas to them. Just as a flea cannot comprehend our powers of reason, we would be unable to comprehend the minds of mentars. They would be like gods to us, with the power to transcend space and time, even to unravel energy and matter. But it hasn’t happened, or if it has, we don’t know about it. The mentars who talk to us seem sane enough, and the ones who don’t talk to us simply vanish. One moment they strut around in mentarspace in all their pomp and complexity, and the next, whoosh, all the lights go out. The hardware is still there, but there’s no one processing. Maybe these raptured mentars slip the shackles of space and time, or maybe they simply die, like we do. And like our dead, raptured mentars never seem to return to our physical plane to report on the afterlife.

<Since we’re already in the realm of speculation, dear Bishop, allow me to offer my own explanation.>

The fishy Eleanor paused, as if her request was more than rhetorical, and afraid of losing this thread, Meewee hastened to say,

<It is my belief that when we created artificial intelligence, we left out some important bits.>

With that she abruptly closed the thread, and after several failed attempts to restart it, he gave up and went on to others. But over the course of the week, while he attended conferences and institutes on three continents, she kept returning to it herself.

<When General Genius built the first mentar mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, our brains. Specifically, the complex structure of our synaptic network. Scientists substituted an electrochemical substrate for our slower, messier biological one. Our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge of newer structures built on top of more ancient ones, a jury-rigged system that has gotten us this far, despite its inefficiency, but was crying out for a top-to-bottom overhaul.

<Or so the General Genius engineers presumed. One of their chief goals was to make minds as portable as possible, to be easily transferred, stored, and active in multiple media: electronic, chemical, photonic, you name it. Thus there didn’t seem to be a need for a mentar body, only for interchangeable containers. They designed the mentar mind to be as fungible as a bank transfer.

<And so they eliminated our most ancient brain structures for regulating metabolic functions, and they adapted our sensory/motor networks to the control of peripherals.

<As it turns out, intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls. This was intelligence the mentars never inherited from us.>

<What intelligence?> Meewee said. >