PART 3
The Day Before the Roosevelt Clinic Incident
Fred said, “Your house meet is here?” He had walked right past her thinking she was a park statue. Fred went back along the path to look at the retrogirl Kitty. Even up close it was hard to dispel the illusion. She wore the costume of a ballerina, with white tights and tutu, white slippers and ribbons, and a white tiara crowning her head. Her hair, skin, and nails were also white. Even the irises of her eyes were white. She was an alabaster statue, arms arched gracefully over her head, one leg bent slightly at the knee, most of her weight supported on her toes. Her trembling calf muscles broke the illusion, and Fred knew how much strength it took to hold such a pose. How could a child’s body have that much strength? She was the most enchanting thing he’d ever seen.
Dinner and Dancing
Sometime during the night, Meewee was awakened by the shaking of his bed. His first thought was — Earthquake! He opened his eyes to unfamiliar predawn walls. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember where he was, and this alarmed his half-asleep brain. The bed shook again. Not an earthquake but a gentle swaying, like the old-fashioned railway cars he’d traveled in as a boy.
Then he remembered where he was, in a guest cubby at the Mem Lab. Someone had told him — Director Koyabe? — that the lab was a collection of modules — large vehicles actually — that were constantly changing their locations deep underground.
Though he knew more or less where he was, he had no idea how long he’d been there. Weeks probably. It had been nonstop action since he’d arrived in his unusual tube car.
The car’s door had opened to a ceramic room. In his years of visiting the despotic regimes of tenuous nations, Meewee had encountered many similar rooms. They were called “frontier gates,” and were designed to frisk any visitor or cargo for hidden threat. Threats could then be neutralized by poison gas, fire, radiation, bullets, or whatever. When Meewee stepped from the car into the room, the doors shut and bolted behind him, and he spent a few uncomfortable minutes alone in the lethal room. Finally, the woman’s voice said, “We have confirmed your identity and LOG status. Please stand by, and an officer will escort you to my office.”
A moment later, a russ officer entered through a heavily armored hatchway. Though his uniform was new to Meewee, the russ, himself, seemed oddly familiar. Meewee followed him along corridors filled with onlookers in lab togs. These people loitered in doorways and intersections and either stared at him openly or welcomed him with enthusiastic greetings. The russ officer explained to Meewee that he was their first visitor since they went dark 432 days before, and that everyone was dying to hear his news.
By the time they reached their destination, a tiny office at the end of a corridor, Meewee had figured out the russ’s meaning. Eleanor’s yacht crash had occurred 432 days ago; this facility had been locked down and completely cut off from the world since then. At the office door, Meewee turned to his impromptu welcoming committee of lab workers and exclaimed, “She lives! Eleanor is alive!” He was answered by a wild cheer.
A woman came out of the office and said, “Which was it, the fish or the honeybees?”
“The fish,” Meewee said. “I don’t know anything about honeybees.”
“Come in, come in, and tell me everything.” She was a handsome woman, Asian, and no taller than he. She shook his hand with a firm grip. “I’m Dr. Koyabe, principal investigator and director of this facility, and you’ve just settled a major bet. Unfortunately, I was on the losing side.” Before closing her door, she spoke to those still in the corridor. “Don’t you have work to do? Go. Go.”
The director’s office was small, and towering crates of ugoo, food precursors, and other supplies made it smaller. Koyabe urged Meewee to make himself comfortable, but this was no time for comfort, and Meewee was anxious to issue his orders, but he paused to first make an ID challenge in Starkese.
She answered it and went on
“Your stealth status is the first thing to change,” Meewee replied in English. “Lift it to a level at which Cabinet and Arrow may communicate with you.”
Koyabe spoke to the room. “You hear that, Lab Rat?” To Meewee she added, “That’s our mentar.” She cocked her head while listening to its reply, and then went around to her desk. “Go ahead,” she said, and her mood sobered as Meewee recounted recent events. “I think,” she said to Meewee when he finished, “we had better go straight to the Command Post.”
They left the office, and Meewee followed her along the route he had arrived — the facility didn’t seem all that large — to an armored door. As Koyabe palmed the doorplate, she mused, “The fish, you say?”
THE “COMMAND POST” might have been another small office except that there was no desk. About a dozen chairs were arranged around the room facing the blank walls. Only one chair was occupied; a russ was working at an open wall frame. At first Meewee thought it was the same officer who had escorted him from the reception room, but he greeted Meewee as though for the first time.
Koyabe said, “Captain Benson is commander of the garrison here. Captain, this is LOG 1. On his authority I am placing the facility on red alert. Assemble a response team. Cabinet is LOG 2.”
Much happened at once. Dataframes and control panels opened along three walls, and lab workers streamed into the room to staff them. Cabinet soon appeared in the center of the room next to Meewee, and the lab workers stared at her and Meewee before returning their attention to their frames.
“You don’t recognize me, Cabinet, do you?” Koyabe said after she and Cabinet had exchanged ID challenges.
Meewee hastened to say
The russ captain was laboring at a framed map of the South Pacific. He answered her without turning. “The Starke network is too corrupted to use.”
“Then lurk me up a public view.”
At once, Meewee and the others in the middle of the room were standing on the Stardust dance floor, a virtual ribbon of hardwood that circled the globe high above the equator. Couples and triads were waltzing in the airless space while others dined at tables along the edges. “Don’t worry,” Koyabe said as she led Meewee and Cabinet to the south side of the dance floor. “This is a pirated signal, and no one knows we’re here.” They peered over the edge at the South Pacific nine thousand meters below their feet.
“There,” Cabinet said, “and there.” Outlines of the six country-sized natpac panasonic pens were laid over the ocean, along with atmospheric metadata. “We need hydro data too, and water toxicity,” the mentar said. More layers appeared showing currents and temperatures, chemical analyses and O2 levels. Cabinet continued. “Eleanor’s last coherent thought was to order Arrow to cut open the pens and drive the fish out.”
“But we’ll lose them in the open ocean,” Koyabe said. “Won’t they scatter into separate schools?”
There was a shout of dismay from the bank of wall frames. On the ocean below, a purple splotch, like a spreading ink stain, appeared off the eastern coast of Natpac #3. Fortunately, the currents were pushing it north, and it looked like it would only graze the pen.
“What is that?” Koyabe said.
“Still analyzing,” said a staffer.
“Captain, have your team work up probable attack vectors. Put someone on ways to herd fish. Dr. Strohmeyer, are you ready?”
A woman’s voice answered. “I said it would be the fishes. I said the honey-bees were no good.”
“Yes, yes, and everyone knows you were right. Now, Marilyn, are you ready to begin transfer?”
“Almost. We have satellite coverage; my gear is spinning up. What medium should we use?”
“You have to ask? We’ll keep this fish to fish. Why tempt fate?” To Meewee she added, “Each competing memory technology has its champion. Dr. Strohmeyer is our fish czar.”
Meewee said, “You have panasonics here?”
“Better, a completely new species. I’ll show them to you later.”
Cabinet pointed to Natpac #3. “Arrow is in position to cut the fish loose. Is it safe to proceed?”
“No,” Koyabe said decisively. “Not until we know what that spill is. We can’t risk letting infected fish loose to endanger other pens.”
As she spoke, another purple splotch appeared on the ocean surface, this one on a direct collision course with Natpac #6. And a third landed in the center of Natpac #5.
“What is that stuff, people?” Koyabe said, but no one had an answer.
Cabinet said, “You don’t need to worry about cross-contamination because all of the pens are being attacked.”
A frame opened next to Natpac #3 and displayed an anatomical diagram of what looked like an odd cross between a tadpole and a crab. “That’s it!” one of the response team members said.
Captain Benson read the specs. “The spills are concentrations of sea lice.”
“Sea lice?” Meewee said. “As in the biological pest, or some new godless mech?”
“The realbody parasite,” Benson replied. “Textrahine C.”
“What harm can they do?”
“Don’t underestimate sea lice, Bishop Meewee,” Koyabe said. “Even the natural variety can bedevil deep ocean fish to death. And the ‘C’ strain are super lice, developed during the Outrage as a weapon of bioterror. They spread quickly and can kill fish the size of panasonics in a few hours.”
Cabinet said, “How many hours?”
“Dr. Strohmeyer?”
The absent scientists said, “Sixteen to eighteen.”
“And how long will it take you to transfer Eleanor’s attention units once you have started?”
“Thirty to forty hours per pen. I can do two pens simultaneously.”
Cabinet said, “Can we track Eleanor’s fish once they’ve dispersed to open water?”
“Yes, but that means so can anyone else. Can you see them yet?”
On the ocean below, all the natpac pens except #5 turned a bright yellow tint. A team member said, “That’s Dr. Strohmeyer’s telemetry lock.”
“Yes, Marilyn, we can see them,” Koyabe said.
“Here is my recommendation,” Cabinet said. “Forget pen #5; she’s not there. Treat the other pens with anti-lice drugs to slow down the infestation. Assume that all of the pens will be attacked, and open them and disperse the fish to slow the rate of spread. Display the infestation spread and fish dispersal and transfer the affected fish first. We can stay ahead of this.”
Meewee nodded as he listened to Cabinet’s plan. It sounded about right. He noticed the others looking expectantly at him, and he remembered that he was LOG 1. “Are there any objections or counterproposals?” he said. Hearing none, he said, “Do it.” Almost at once Natpac #3 was leaking streams of yellow dots from all sides. Soon, all of the pens were leaking except #5.
WITH A SWIPE of Koyabe’s hand, their perch on the Stardust dance floor on top of the world changed to a concrete room with dim lighting. “Don’t bump anything,” Koyabe warned him. “The Mem Lab uses two-way vurt. Anything you touch here gets touched there.”
“I’ll be careful,” Meewee promised.
Strohmeyer and five others in lab togs were at one side of the room coaxing a bank of instruments into service. Strohmeyer glanced at them and said, “Another fifteen minutes.” She was a large, disheveled woman, the opposite of the trim and neat Koyabe.
“Don’t let us disturb you,” Koyabe replied. “I’m showing our LOG the memory medium.” She led Meewee to the side of a large, rectangular steel pool filled with water. He looked in and was startled to see several dozen ghastly babies staring back at him from under the surface. Grim, ghoulish babies with grayish skin. He took a step back in surprise, and the babies turned as one and splashed away to deeper water at the other end of the pool.
They were not babies but fish, fish with huge, bulging foreheads and large round eyes.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Koyabe said. “Their curiosity is matched only by their timidity.”
“What are they?”
“We call them brainfish. They’re about five hundred generations beyond the panasonics.” As they talked, the braver brainfish of the group returned to Meewee’s side of the pool to watch him. “You can pet them,” Koyabe said. “Go ahead.”
The last thing Meewee wanted to do was pet fish, but he held his hand over the water surface until a brainfish rose to meet it. Maybe it was the poor tactile quality of two-way vurt, but it felt like petting wet sandpaper.
DR. STROHMEYER INITIATED the attention unit migration and joined the others on the dance floor. Now it was a waiting game. Oblivious Stardust patrons danced and dined as twilight fell, and new icons and glyphs covered the vast watery display below: cutter locations, probable enemy craft sightings, infestation spread, migration rate and more. In the starry sky were tables and charts and views of panicky panasonics from inside the pens. The sea around the pens was filling up with yellow dots as the pens emptied.
“How many panasonics are there?” Meewee said.
Strohmeyer replied, “About sixty million.”
“Sixty million, and you’ll be able to stuff them all into a few brainfish?”
“Well, there’s a lot of redundancy, and most of the panasonics haven’t even been imprinted, and many have only a few attention units, enough for a single engram. Problem is, we don’t know which is which and have to do them all.”
DR. KOYABE RETURNED to the Command Post. Meewee hadn’t noticed her departure, but he noticed her return — she was wearing makeup and, under her lab togs, a dress. “I thought I’d show you to the commissary, Bishop. Are you hungry?”
Meewee had to pause and ask himself if he was. Yes, he was very hungry. Before they left the Command Post, Koyabe dealt with a few more calls. A half hour later she said, “We’re starting some bodies for her. Do you want to see that before we dine?”
Dine? He had thought he’d grab a sandwich and bring it back. Koyabe swiped the interface, and they were transported to yet another laboratory module. “Remember,” Koyabe said, “two-way vurt. Don’t trip.”
The new lab was a long, narrow room dominated by an enclosed compartment that ran its entire length. Set every few meters along the compartment side were glass portholes for looking inside. A brass plate over one porthole read, “Eleanor 3.3.” Meewee looked through this porthole, but it was dim inside the compartment, and Meewee wasn’t sure what he was looking at.
“It’s the mother vine,” Koyabe said. “She’s at the bottom of her sleep cycle, not a good time to harvest. We’ll wait till tomorrow.”
Meewee peered into the darkness behind the glass. “It’s a cloning machine? For Eleanor?”
Spacer Fred
Fred alternately floated or hung in his second-class sleeping pouch aboard the ISV Dauntless. There was gravity during most of the thirty-four-day trip, but it was weak, inconstant stuff that did not always pull from the same direction. Fred was listless; there was no routine to his day, and as he hung or floated, he had plenty of time for second-guessing his recent life decision. And this after only three days out.
“NO UNAUTHORIZED NANO products. No free-ranging mechs smaller than a wall crawler. No projectile weapons of any sort. No dermal fauna, spybots, spydots, nits, gnats, nust, or anything else smaller than a human hair.” The passenger relations officer delivered his droning litany by holo from the hermetically sealed crew section of the ship. “Believe me, they’ll find whatever you’re hiding, so now’s the time to cough it up. Punishment includes denial of entrance to Trailing Earth, the charge of interplanetary piracy, and confinement to quarantine quarters until return passage to Earth is arranged. Which can take months.”
Fred listened with about a fifth of the Dauntless passengers in the main multi-bay, the only room capable of accommodating so many at once. The rest of the outbound passengers were attending by holo from commissaries and sleeping pouches throughout the transport.
“The ship will be sealed bulkhead section by bulkhead section with passengers assigned to those sections sealed inside and subject to an active gas exchange purging procedure. You plus all your possessions will be treated. Until then and following this meeting, passengers should remain in their assigned sections and review decon protocol via the ship’s library. Decon procedures will be repeated on Day 7 of passage and, depending upon monitoring results, as many times thereafter as necessary.
“If you are arrested at Trailing Earth for contraband, you’ll have only yourself to blame.”
PASSENGERS SPENT A lot of time in skimpy paper gas togs. Russes and dorises, the only two iterant types on board, were not ordinarily attracted to each other, but under the circumstances there was a lot of checking each other out going on. For that matter, there were a lot of hinks to check out too, since the free-range portion of the passenger list greatly outnumbered the iterants. Fred was relieved to see he wasn’t the only russ enjoying the windfall of wild rumps, legs, and breasts to look at.
“WHAT’LL IT BE this time, Fred? Six months? Eight months?”
“Twelve months, actually, plus transit time.”
As Fred floated in his pouch, he replayed in memory their last uninhibited conversation. He had just returned home from a two-day soak in a Longyear rapid recovery tank for his radiation exposure, and Mary was being so nice to him that he felt guilty. After all, he had applied for duty at Trailing Earth while still in the tank without consulting her. He knew she wasn’t going to be happy about it when he told her, and he persuaded her to join him in the null room against autodoc advice.
“A whole year? Fred, what do you think I am, a piece of furniture you can just put into storage? Why didn’t you talk with me first?”
“You’d rather the little tuggers killed me? They trapped and burned me to show just how serious they are about this. They don’t care what you or I want.”
Mary let it drop and moved on to more practical matters: how dangerous was his mission? How illegal?
Not so bad, not so much.
THE HOMELAND COMMAND nits evacuated and expired as they were designed to do. It was the black-market micro-fauna that was hard to kill and quick to recover. As soon as Fred’s section of the ship had been purged, it became reinfected. During a supplemental gassing, Fred sat at a commissary table between two dorises. As a general rule, dorises weren’t big on chitchat. Mostly they enjoyed listening to other people talk, and they had distributed themselves in little clumps among the more numerous russes. Russes were notorious camp haranguers, and four hundred of them in paper suits created an amiable buzz of conversation. The two dorises sitting on either side of Fred probably expected him to strike up a conversation with russes seated nearby and do the same. This was something Fred wanted to do, in fact, but was afraid to try. So far, the russes aboard the Dauntless were treating him civilly, even ignoring him altogether. This was due to the false identity Marcus had provided him for the passage. At first Fred had balked: wasn’t it a tiny bit ironic to issue him a fake ID considering his identikit indictment? But Marcus had been persuasive: two thousand russes cooped up in a metal box for five weeks of purging was an open invitation for fraternal nastiness. Why make his trip any more unpleasant than it had to be?
Why indeed? Fred’s new name was Walter Mitty of Chicago, Illinois; he was married to a kelley named Rosemary Jace. Fred had pages and pages of cover story outlining the milestones of his supposed life, but even with so much free time on his hands, Fred couldn’t bring himself to memorize all the lies they contained. As a result, it was safer just to keep his big yap shut.
At his table, one of the dorises gave up on Fred and said to the other, “My other sisters and I took a seven-day Ca rib be an cruise once, but it was too much sitting on our hands and eating, eating, eating, and we were more than ready to come home.”
“That’s exactly how I feel right now!” said the other doris. “Except for the eating part.”
“I know! This morning I wanted to tidy up the forward lavatory. It’s so messy. But the deck scuppers wouldn’t let me. They threatened to call the captain!”
“I know what you mean! The scuppers here are such bossy machines!”
“I sure hope they’re not like that up there at Trailing Earth.”
HE TOLD HER, in case something bad happened to him, that Veronica called herself a TOTE now, not a TUG, but that as far as he could tell, the two charters were in cahoots.
FRED’S SECOND-CLASS cabin, where he began spending the bulk of his time either hanging or floating, had the dimensions of a hall closet, one meter square by two meters high. Together with his duffel bag he filled it up. But it had a door with a lock, and that was what mattered.
THE NULL ROOM was in its daytime setting during their famous last conversation. That is, instead of the bed that took up too much space, there was an armchair/coffee table arrangement that was commodious by comparison. So they were able to face each other in a relaxed atmosphere under palm trees on a tropical beach. They were being civil to each other, and they were saying the things that needed to be said. He told her, for instance, that if things worked out for him up there, then anything was possible, and she should consider joining him.
“Are you joking?” she said. “Become a spacer?”
“Why not? The new you might like it.”
“I don’t think so, Fred. I like it down here just fine.”
“All I ask is that you keep an open mind. Think of it as a compromise between the new us, a way to move forward. Besides, you yourself brag about how much income your Leena makes for you. You don’t actually have to be in any particular place for that to happen, do you? And if you aren’t actually employed by Applied People or Ellen Starke, as you claim, and you are companioning her out of mutual affection, I see no reason why you can’t maintain that relationship remotely. Friends do it all the time. And you have to admit, it would be easier than trying to maintain a remote marriage with me.”
She snorted. “You got that right.”
_____
THE SUN SANK into the ocean in a brief, fiery sunset. Venus sparkled in the gloaming sky, and then a blaze of stars! Eventually, they said everything there was to say, and they could say no more. They sat in the darkness and listened to the surf for a while. Then, Fred’s hand found hers, and he tugged her to join him in his armchair. She stood up but didn’t join him. Instead, she leaned over and offered him a good-night kiss.
“But I thought —”
“Oh, I can imagine what you thought, Mr. Spacer Man, but it ain’t gonna happen, at least not in here.”
“But you won’t be able to cycle in again before I leave.” He could hear a pleading note in his voice.
She made her way in the darkness to the hatch. “That’s right, sailor,” she said. “And then it’s twelve months — plus transit time. On the other hand, if you come out with me . . .”
IT SEEMED LIKE every doris Fred ran into lately was grousing about the purges. But to Fred the purges were liberation itself. Each successively more intrusive formula of visola, each gaseous interlude filled him with fresh and clean feelings.
SHIP DAY 17. When at last the spybot test results were negative, the Dauntless crew unsealed the bulkhead sections and allowed passengers to intermingle freely. And intermingle they did, at least for the first few days. Even Fred took a grand tour of the passenger decks. The ship seemed much larger than when he first came on board. One of the multi-bays was converted into a freefall gym, and others became a library, chapel, and lounges. Aside from these, though, it soon became apparent that every nook and corner of the ship was “claimed” by one group or another, and trespassing was discouraged.
Fred learned this the hard way one day while out swimming. The swimming/jogging lane, complete with recessed fingerholds, was painted on the corridor decks in a circuitous loop that stretched from the forward compartments to the stern. One complete lap measured two kilometers, and after the bulkheads were unsealed, Fred and hundreds of other passengers took advantage of them to get in some aerobic exercise. Most of them used flippers or gloves with long webbed fingers for propulsion. One evening before supper, Fred was halfway through his first lap when he encountered a traffic jam in an exclusively free-range section. About a hundred residents were tethered together in clumps of four or five and floating freely in the corridor, completely blocking the way. A dozen russ, doris, and free-range swimmers were backed up behind a handmade banner that was strung across the passage:
Block Party
Fri 5-6 PM
Residents Only
NO SWIMMING!
A trio of free-range men floated behind the banner and confronted the unhappy swimmers.
“This is a public path,” one of the russes declared. Sweat glistened on his forehead and soaked his shirt. “We have the right to go through.”
But the three men refused to give way, and one of them raised open palms in a placating gesture. “This is our Friday community tradition. It helps foster neighborhood harmony.”
“What about our harmony?” demanded the russ.
“Why don’t you go back to your sections and start block parties yourselves?”
“Swimming harmony!” insisted the russ. “We don’t care about your freakin’ neighborhood.”
“Watch the mouth, dittohead,” said one of the other gatekeepers.
Dittohead, one of the most offensive slurs against iterants. There was a moment of dead silence, and then the dorises started grumbling, and a handful of russes moved to position themselves along the banner. Fred didn’t like the signs; things were about to slip out of control. In the corridor beyond, the local residents watched uneasily. A lot of noses were about to get bent.
Before that happened, a russ next to Fred raised his voice. “Time out. Time out,” he said. “Let’s think about this, friends.” He spoke with slightly accented English, and his face was roundish even for a russ. “It’s a small thing.”
“What’s a small thing, brother?” said a russ at the banner. “Them blocking the way or us going through them?”
The peacemaker pointed at the banner. “They only want one hour during the whole week. That is no problem.”
But the other russes were having none of that. “What’s wrong with you, brother? No stomach for it?” “You a mongrel-lover, brother? You a hink-hole-fecker?”
The russ flushed a deep red and the dorises backed away from him. Things grew deathly still in the corridor. “Oh, hell,” Fred said, pushing himself to the banner. “The brother is right. There’s better ways to deal with this than brawling. I mean, what are we — jerrys?”
That brought a laugh and helped ease the tension. The dorises piped up and called for a truce. The garrulous russes backed off, and some of the residents started calling, “Join us. Join us.” They passed bulbs of beer along the corridor and one of them removed the banner.
Some of the swimmers stayed, but Fred and others started swimming back the way they had come. When they encountered more swimmers, they shouted, “Roadblock ahead.”
The peacemaking russ caught up with Fred and swam at his side. “Thank you for the assist back there,” he said. “I was about to lose it all over.” He saluted with his webbed hand. “Armando Mendez, but you can call me Mando.”
Fred almost gave him his real name, but he caught himself, and for a moment blanked out on his cover name — Clifford? Higgins? He filled his lapse by saying, “Good to meet you, Mando. No need to thank me; we’re all getting a little cabin fever on this boat.” Walter, that was it. “Name’s Walt.” They shook webbed hands.
THEY WERE TETHERED to two dorises in one of the lounges, and Mando told them about his life. He was from the state of Yucatán, and he and his evangeline wife, Luisa, had recently moved to Cozumel and purchased a two-seat submarine to enjoy the underwater national park there. That, in fact, was why Luisa had agreed to let him sign up for a stint at Trailing Earth. A one-year contract paid not only a signing bonus but a hardship differential equal to three times the usual russ wage. Meanwhile, Luisa had a new job, her first job in ages, as well as dividends from the Sisterhood on the Leena earnings. “Overdue loans, the boat payments, deferred rejuve — when I return we will be debt-free for the first time in our marriage! It will be a new beginning.”
The dorises clucked and bobbed their heads. No doubt they, too, had special plans for their contract windfalls. And it made Fred wonder about the rest of his fellow russes aboard the Dauntless. Why were they all heading to do duty that other russes were lining up to flee? Were they motivated by the extra earnings? Russes were frugal men, allergic to debt and good at managing their personal finances. It was true that the last ten years hadn’t been easy on russ/evangeline couples. It cost a lot to live, and one income just didn’t cut it. His and Mary’s standard of living had fallen steadily every year. He had only to recall their lousy apartment at APRT 7. And he recalled something else too, something Mary had flung at him during their devastating argument on the morning of the Roosevelt Clinic debacle, that russes espoused to ’leens were on average five years older than the russ mean. Deferred body maintenance, skipping expensive rejuvenation treatments, that was the kind of loan he and his brothers tended to take out. Fred rubbed his jaw. After his time in prison, he was even older, pushing forty, in fact. Mary, from the look of her, had rejuved while he was inside and taken five years off her age.
Fred looked closely at Mando’s face, looking for wrinkles and crow’s feet, but his Indian blood, round features, and the facial edema of low-g hid them. Fred glanced around at the other russes in the lounge. Now that he was looking for it, yes, this did seem like an older crowd of brothers. Was it possible that they all were espoused to ’leens? That with their high Trailing Earth wages and their wives’ Leena dividends they were finally going to be able to catch up with their germline? And if so, what did that say about his chances of fitting in and getting along at Trailing Earth? Might they cut him a little slack?
“Walt. Hello, Walt.” Fred turned back to Mando who said, “I asked what about you? Are you married?”
The two dorises were watching him. “Oh, yes,” he replied, “to a ’leen, just like you, name of Rosemary.” He went on to tell them all about his and Rosemary’s life in Chicago; he had memorized his cover story last night and everything was fresh in his mind. He even ad-libbed a little. The dorises were well entertained.
WHILE SOME MARKED their voyage in ship days, and others in distance covered, Fred tended to think of their progress in light-minutes. They were already 6.25 light-minutes from Earth, which made normal phone conversations impractical.
Whenever Mary called from work, she usually tried to do so from her private suite, seated in her favorite armchair with the cherry blossom print upholstery. She was usually relaxed and had a frosty drink in her hand. This time she was standing in some residential room, no drink, and was at wit’s end. The door behind her was ajar, and there were distant shrieks of a not very happy person in the background.
“Hi! Sorry,” she said, shutting the door. “We seem to be in constant crisis mode around here lately. Right now she’s trying to terminate Dr. Rouselle, and we’re fighting that. But I know you don’t want to hear about my work, so I’ll leave it at that.”
Fred and all but the most foolhardy passengers had confined themselves to their pouches for the last seventy-two hours. The ship was making a hard braking maneuver that increased the gravity to three times Earth standard. He listened to Mary and stored up comments to make when it was his turn to talk.
“Otherwise, nothing new around here since yesterday, except that I miss you even more than ever, Fred. It’s worse than when you were in prison.
“What else? Oh, a few more of the Leenas have crashed or whatever. Now Clarity thinks maybe they are acting. One thing’s for sure, every major story mat wants their own Lingering Leena character, so they’re in high demand. But I asked Clarity to coma-proof my own unit, and she said she’d try. Over.”
At the word “over,” Mary’s holo image froze, and Fred lurched into speech. “I miss you too, Mary, more than I can say.” He told her about his day, but since ship days tended to blur into each other, he may have been repeating himself. When he could think of nothing more to say, he said, “Over.”
For the 6.25 minutes to Earth and an equal length of time to return, plus whatever time it took her to listen to him and compose a reply, Fred watched news and sports.
FRED AND MANDO attended amateur talent night in the main lounge. They shared a table with two dorises, never the same two, who were getting the tenth or twelfth retelling of the life of Walt and Rosemary. The braking maneuver had eased up, and the floors and seats were sticky to compensate for the weak gravity. With the sticky surfaces, it was still possible to actually sit at a table and to walk with clumsy, lurching steps.
Fred saw the children coming from half the room away. Dressed in matching blue and white town togs, they were playing tag in the teeming lounge. It had never been hard to pick children out of a crowd, and everyone’s eyes followed them. Fred had to wonder what children were doing on a transport to Trailing Earth. Where were their parents?
The running girl tripped and went sailing through the space between the tables, startling a man right out of his seat. She flew straight into Fred’s hands. All he had to do was reach over and pluck her from the air like a football. To her it was all a big joke.
Fred turned the laughing girl right side up and planted her on her sticky-sneakered feet. He was about to make a typical adult remark, like “No flying allowed,” but at the last moment, something about her made him think she wasn’t a real girl at all. Maybe it was the firm feel of her body or the adultlike glint in her eye. She was a retrogirl. And in order to let Mando and the dorises know that he wasn’t fooled by her appearance, Fred changed what he was about to say to, “I didn’t know they had trapeze acts at Trailing Earth.” It didn’t make much sense, but it was the best he could come up with on the fly.
The girl’s eyes went wide. “There’s a circus there?”
“No, I just —”
“What circus?” demanded the little boy, who had caught up with his friend.
“There is no circus,” Fred said. “I was just wondering out loud what kind of job up there requires the special skills of small adults like yourselves. Crawling into tight spaces, I imagine.”
The boy laughed out loud. “How well you imagine, Myr Russ. Really tight spaces they are.” He winked at Fred, and slapped the girl on the back and said, “You’re it!” They dashed away, leaving Fred red-faced with embarrassment.
Leaf Mold
The vine chamber had its own embedded crew of agribeitor caretakers. Meewee walked along the length of the chamber, from porthole to porthole, watching the ’beitors inside follow the mother vine from its root trunk to the shoots at the end where the new wheels were ripening. The wheels were large disks, like weird squash, with a hard yellow rind and eight thick, orange knobs evenly spaced around the rim.
Some of the wheels lay flat on the floor beside the vine, and even to Meewee’s untrained eye appeared soft and discolored, clearly past their prime. The ’beitors cut these from the vine and carted them away for disposal.
Then the ’beitors inspected the fresher wheels. Those judged immature were left to ripen undisturbed. Those judged to be at their peak of maturity were snipped and transported to the transfer drawers.
Another Mem Lab scientist, Dr. Ito, was in charge of the nursery. He retrieved the wheels from the drawer one at a time and placed them on an examination table. Meewee levitated himself to peer over his shoulder. Each of the eight orange knobs around the rim contained a “bean,” which the scientist tested for viability.
“Eight wheels times eight beans per wheel,” he told Meewee, “gives us sixty-four tries. But this one is deformed, and this one is a runt.” He pierced the defective knobs with a metal pick, pithing them. Altogether, he destroyed five beans, which left them with fifty-nine possible Eleanor clones.
Dr. Ito transferred the wheels to a separate gestation chamber where he placed each in a separate womb, covered it with slurry, and sealed and placed it on a rack. “Now we let them bake for a while,” he said.
EVEN AT THREE million engrams per hour, the migration was taking longer than first estimated. It turned out that the TXH lice were an especially virulent strain of pest that needed only an hour to turn a full-sized panasonic fish into mush and bone. But with a little creative herding, accomplished with submersibles and bubbles, Captain Benson was able to disperse the fish and slow the infestation. Dr. Strohmeyer was optimistic about the quality of the engrams she was downloading, and her brainfish were incorporating them as fast as they could.
In the Command Post, the staff had cobbled together a new secure godseye and abandoned the Stardust dance floor. The sea of yellow dots was shrinking each hour, and Dr. Koyabe was optimistic. She came and went, overseeing her forces, but periodically she checked in on Meewee and made sure he was getting enough food and rest. Day, night, Meewee lost all track of time. Time was the number of engrams yet to be uploaded.
A RUSS GUARD showed him the way to the men’s shower room. There, Meewee met several more russes in various stages of undress. They looked all the same. Iterants, normal iterants, displayed a certain amount of variation, like brothers from the same parents, but these were more like identical twins. Fixed allele cloning techniques were outlawed for commercial iterants. Did Applied People know about this private, unlawful collection of its popular germline?
“So, how many of you russies make up the garrison?” he asked his escort.
“Oh, a couple hundred.”
Somewhere, in some lab module, Meewee was sure there was a mother vine with a brass plaque that read, “Russ.”
SLOWLY, SO AS not to alarm them, Meewee lowered his open hand to the water. Two large, bulging foreheads broke the surface for a pat. More joined them, and soon the whole school was competing for his attention. Their heads were soft.
“No skulls?” he asked.
“Minimal skulls,” Strohmeyer replied. “The synaptic tissue is so plastic that it actually heats up and expands during the transfer. This way, there are no deadly pressure spikes.”
“Eleanor walked me through a necropsy of one of her panasonics. The human cells form a crust over the fish brain. Is it the same with these?”
“Yes, except that with these, the human/fish ratio is reversed. Each of these brainfish contains human midbrain and cortex tissue that masses about one-third of an adult human.”
There was a mechanical click, and a snowstorm of greenish flakes began to fall on the water from a system of overhead pipes. The fish abandoned Meewee and thrashed in the water in a feeding frenzy.
“Don’t bump your heads, guys,” Meewee said. He dried his hand on his pant leg before realizing it was only virtually wet. “If each of these brainfish has a third of a brain,” he asked Strohmeyer, “why do you need so many of them? Wouldn’t three brainfish do?”
“Theoretically.”
“Then why so many?”
“Well, there are redundancy and backup needs, and we set a few aside as controls, but I suppose the real reason is to give Myr Starke’s mind room to expand.”
“But how will you stuff all of that into the head of a single clone?”
“Who says that’s what we’re doing?”
“Eleanor told me they’re for temporary storage?”
The scientist had nothing to say to that.
WITH THE MEM Lab still at a high stealth level, Meewee dealt with plankholder business through Cabinet. He cast a proxy to attend a GEP board meeting where he was offered a free hand with the Lucky Five Oships if he agreed to drop his Trade Board appeal. With the appeal clouding the picture, Jaspersen and Singh were having difficulty attracting investors to their space condo project.
“They’ll have to do better than that,” Meewee said to his proxy when it reported back.
“That’s what I told them,” his proxy said.
“I’d settle for nothing less than the ninety-nine ships already chartered.”
“My words exactly.”
“Otherwise, let the appeal drag on.”
_____
A WEEK OR ten days after Meewee arrived, Dr. Koyabe informed him that the zoo module had docked with theirs and asked if he wanted to meet Arrow. She took him there in realbody. The visiting module did indeed sound and smell like a zoo. Dogs, toads, ants, bees — Starke’s scientists were trying them all out as possible vessels for human consciousness.
“We’ve had good results with birds,” she said as they passed rows of cages. “Crows, finches, and jays especially. But birds are too smart to begin with. Their hyperstriatum region is exceptionally well developed, and it tends to dominate the human cortex part. You end up with flying pests too clever for their own good.
“Ah, here we are.” They passed into a separate room, one devoid of animal cages. Lining the walls were kiosk-sized metal cabinets. “Incubators for our microbiota,” Koyabe said, leading him to the last one. Someone had stuck a piece of cloth tape to the door with the word “Arrow,” in marker pen. Koyabe opened a holocube that showed its main compartment. Inside was a heap of wet-looking scraps of brown paperlike material that was shot through with glistening yellow strands. A duller yellow crust covered the walls and partitions of the compartment.
“That’s Arrow?” Meewee said. “That looks like — like mold.”
“Tree mold,” Koyabe said. Her shoulder brushed his as they leaned over the holocube.
Meewee looked again. “You store human minds in mold?”
“No, no. This is from an earlier series of experiments when we were trying to discover an improved substrate for mentar brains. Hello, Arrow, it’s Momoko Koyabe. I’m here with Bishop Meewee to collect some spores. Do you think you could oblige us with a sample?”
Meewee said, “If I remember my college biology, mold has no nervous system whatsoever.”
“Correct, Merrill. We wanted to come up with nonneural cognitive networks. This strain is a variant of the slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, which has formidable powers of replication and organization. We got pretty far with it, but as you know from working with your Arrow, we were never able to completely crack the sentience threshold.”
Inside the holocube, little puffs of brown began to fill the space and were sucked out through vacuum ports.
“That’s enough, Arrow. That should do. Thank you.” Koyabe swiped away the holocube, and a moment later, a glass vial dropped into a basket on the side of the incubator. She held it up to the light, then labeled it with a marker. “I’ll get this started and have it put into something portable for you when you leave. Your old Arrow unit will be able to migrate to it.”
THE PANASONIC UPLOADING was 87 percent complete. They were mopping up fish that had scattered from the main schools. Meanwhile, thirty-four beans had developed into embryos and were still viable.
SEVERAL WEEKS INTO Meewee’s stay, Dr. Strohmeyer requested his assistance in the fish lab. Koyabe brought him by vurt to a storage room full of racks and shelves of laboratory instruments. Strohmeyer was sitting at a desk in the corner poring over a large dataframe.
“Ah, thank you for coming, Bishop Meewee. Perhaps you can shed some light on a problem we’re having. Downloading a person’s engrams and transferring them to an auxiliary brain is only half the battle. The cognitive reintegration of these engrams and the resurgence of personality are just as critical, and to be honest, we’ve had spotty success along those lines. By now we’ve got most of Myr Starke into the system, but I’m not entirely sure we can get her out.
“Anyway, Cabinet said to consult with you since you’re the only person to have actually coached Eleanor through the process.”
Meewee was flattered. “I’m no scientist, Dr. Strohmeyer, merely a farmer’s son. I don’t know that I actually did anything to help.”
“You’re too modest,” Koyabe said, touching his arm.
“Give a listen anyway,” Strohmeyer said, “and see if this sounds right.”
She played snippets of Eleanor’s voice: “Four little brass bells make a happy harmony,” and “Make mine a double,” and “I did not have sex with that woman.”
Meewee saw Strohmeyer’s problem. It was gibberish in English, which was the only language she heard, but it didn’t make much sense in Starkese either. From the look on Koyabe’s lovely face, Meewee could tell that she was confused by the messages in both languages.
“Oh, that,” Meewee said. “Are you getting this on multiple channels?”
“Yes,” replied Strohmeyer. “Every brainfish is transmitting dozens of them, and all of it nonsense.”
“When I first started coaching Eleanor,” Meewee said, with a nod to Koyabe, “I thought she was nothing more than a jumbled collection of random memories and opinions. This is normal and may last for weeks.”
“What should we do, if anything?”
“Engage her. Ask questions. Challenge her answers.” He thought about all the time he’d spent on the banks of the fishponds. “And startle her.”
“Startle her?”
“Splash the water. Throw rocks.”
MEEWEE MADE ARRANGEMENTS to leave. Everything at the Mem Lab seemed to be under control, the natpac action had been discontinued when they achieved a 97 percent upload total. Fishy Eleanor was slowly gathering her wits. Twenty-nine surviving Eleanor fetuses had passed the developmental landmarks of the first trimester in record time. Oddly, the closer to success the Mem Lab got, the more depressed the staff seemed to become. They were even becoming frosty toward Meewee in the commissary.
SOMETIME DURING THE night, Meewee was awakened by the shaking of his bed. His first thought was — Momoko. He smelled her perfume. He turned over and found that she was awake.
“Sorry, did I wake you?” she said. “Lab Rat had a question that couldn’t wait.”
“It’s all right,” he said, with his cheek pressed against her simply perfect breast.
“Oh, this reminds me,” she said, “a decision for LOG 1. You have here a facility with over six hundred dedicated employees scattered throughout an archipelago of modules who have had no contact with their loved ones and the outside world for 465 days. This is hard on everyone, it is true, but unavoidable under the circumstances. At least that’s my judgment. Cabinet says it can safely import people’s mail, but I disagree. Since you have the final say, we thought we’d bring the matter to you.”
Over a year in total isolation. Meewee never ceased to be amazed at the degree of loyalty that Eleanor evoked from her people. “What harm could there be in letting people receive mail?” he asked.
“Let them receive mail, and the next thing you know, they’ll want to send mail, and then they’ll be clamoring to go home on leave.”
“I see.” Meewee thought about the people he had met at the lab. “How brave you all are.”
“Eh,” she said dismissively.
“If I hadn’t come when I did, how long would you have stayed here in total isolation?”
“Three years. Then protocol would have lowered stealth enough to listen and eventually make discreet inquiries. Four years max.”
“Astonishing. Such dedication must take its toll.”
“Maybe,” she said and planted a kiss on his lips. “It makes us all a little bit crazy.”
Meet the Donalds
Port Clarke camera feeds were available to the Dauntless long before its arrival at L5, and Fred spent a lot of time during the final week of his voyage studying the port layout from various angles. The shipyards encompassed vast volumes of space and were demarcated by a porous lattice of buoys. The yards were interspersed with asteroid corrals and ore-processing units. Within the shell of space yards sat Trailing Earth, an accretion of habplats and fabplats around a central core. The core, called the Powell Canal, was a traffic thoroughfare five kilometers in diameter and a hundred kilometers in length that completely transected the colony. Finally, a fence of spars and flex-jointed booms ringed the port. Megaton freighters docked to the spars outside the yards, and their cargo was distributed within the port via cargo trains and small, nimble craft.
ON THE EVENING of the thirty-fourth day since departing the port at Mezzoluna, the ISV Dauntless entered Port Clarke. It crossed the mouth of the Powell Canal on a heading to the hub of a large wheel at the far end of the port that served as the passenger-receiving terminal. It took them several hours to complete docking, and Fred and Mando joined the four thousand passengers milling about in weightless agitation.
“Say again?” Fred shouted. Although Mando clung to handholds right next to him, the din outside the main hatch was deafening. Passengers, desperate to get off the claustrophobic transport, seemed to have lost all sense of courtesy, as well as their space legs, and there was much jostling for place. The total weightlessness made things that much worse.
Mando shouted in reply, “I said as soon as we get situated in the rez, we should get together and look around.”
Floating not far away were the two retrokids. They were dressed in miniature HomCom blacksuits, complete with visor cap and faux standstill wands. When the boy caught Fred’s eye, he snapped a salute. Fred pretended not to see. “Listen, Mando,” he shouted. “There’s something I need to tell you.” He had been dreading this moment, but he had no choice in the matter. The temporary cover ID that Marcus had provided him would expire the moment he entered the space station. “My name’s not Walter.”
Mando pointed at his ear and shook his head.
“I said I’m not Walter Mitty!”
The queue surged ahead a few meters and stopped again. Someone far ahead of them shouted something unintelligible, and hundreds of voices gave three cheers. The logjam broke all at once, and the passengers scrambled for the hatchway. Fred and Mando became separated, and Mando yelled, “See you at the rez!” as he vanished into the crowd.
Fred reached the docking seal where ship met station. If ever there was a threshold, this was it. As he pulled himself across, he had a sick feeling of making the worst mistake of his life, which was saying a lot.
In the receiving area of the Terminal Wheel hub, passengers pulled themselves and their luggage along handhold arrays and through scanways and document inspection stations. Then they queued up for the spokeway lifts. The cars took them out to the wheel rim. The farther they traveled from the hub, the heavier they became until they arrived at an Earth Standard one-g. Anticipating wobbly legs, a fleet of carts awaited the newcomers to take them to TECA exam rooms where additional scans took place. Fred managed to keep his legs under him, and he submitted to pricks and swabs, radiation and sniffers. When he felt about as tested as a man could be, he was ushered into the final station.
It was a small booth with only one piece of furniture, a metal seat with an attached arm board. A medbeitor waited next to it, and a bored russ in TECA gray and green watched from a frame on the wall. He motioned for Fred to sit.
“What’s this, brother?” Fred said, indicating the arm board. “It looks positively cheneyesque.”
The officer launched into a well-worn explanation. “This station employs a deep-tissue screening procedure. In order to pass through that door” — he gestured to a door opposite the one through which Fred had entered — “and report to duty, all arrivals must sit in that chair. The screening entails pouring ten ccs of HALVENE into your cupped palm. Have you ever been treated with HALVENE, myr?”
Fred nodded.
“Good. Then you know it’s not that bad. But it’s a free choice. You may simply turn around and proceed back to the holding facility to await return to Mezzoluna.”
Fred sat in the chair and laid his right arm on the arm board; restraints flicked like frog tongues to strap him down. The restraints, the ceramic walls, and the absence of anyone but him in the booth suggested to Fred that if he failed this test, he wouldn’t be going anywhere soon.
“Make a cup out of your hand,” the russ in the frame said.
“But won’t it see my palm array? They told us palm arrays are legit.”
“They are. What we’re looking for are the bots that like to hijack them or hide in them. We might end up giving you a complete sheep dip before we’re through, or maybe the ten ccs is all it takes.”
There was a bowl-like depression at the end of the arm board, and Fred cupped his hand and laid it in it. “I’ve had the full treatment before, brother. Piece of cake.”
The medbeitor next to the chair poured a yellowish liquid into Fred’s palm. It was ice cold, just as he remembered, then it warmed up as it passed right through his hand and dripped into the bowl beneath.
“Now, we’ll wait a few jiffies while Earth Girl analyzes it.”
“That your mentar?”
“That’s right.”
As Fred waited, his arm still tied down, lingering cold spread up his wrist, and the bitter HALVENE taste was in his mouth.
The restraints suddenly retracted, and a female voice said, “Welcome to Trailing Earth, Myr Londenstane. Please accept a temporary medallion to get around until you are issued a sidekick.”
The medbeitor offered Fred a paper medallion. The inner door opened, and the russ officer said, “A cart will take you to the lift, which will return you to the hub, where you will follow an usher line to your assigned rez wheel.”
Fred took his time standing up. His knees were weak, and he felt lightheaded. He grabbed his duffel bag and thanked the officer as he exited, but the man only returned a cold stare.
_____
BACK IN HUB microgravity, Fred swiped the kiosk with his medallion, and a candy-striped usher line appeared on the wall beside him and led out of the wheel. At first his usher line was mingled with hundreds of others, and he traveled with fellow Dauntless passengers through the unfamiliar corridors. At every junction a few more split off until Fred was making his way alone. He passed through a dimly lit gangway to a deserted corridor. Closed doors lined the walls, ceiling, and floor. Up and down were mere conventions here, and the designated floor was painted green.
Fred’s usher line led him up several levels and down several more and made more turns than he could keep track of. The doors and corridors were marked with coded glyphs he had no way of interpreting without a sidekick, and after thirty minutes of meandering, when he found himself in a block that looked like it was under construction, he finally admitted to himself that someone was fecking with him. Behind Fred, the usher line had disappeared. Ahead of him, it beckoned with untold kilometers of wild goose chase.
Fred stopped and addressed the ceiling. “All right, Earth Girl, very funny, ha ha, you got me. So, enough’s enough already.” He waited for a response, but there was none. “Marcus, can you read me?” Fred did not want to make a labor issue out of his treatment within hours of his arrival, but he wasn’t going to play dead either. When neither Earth Girl nor Marcus responded, Fred waved his medallion around to try to identify comlink nodes, but he didn’t find any.
Fred abandoned the usher line and tried to retrace his path by memory, pulling himself along unfinished hallways, towing his duffel bag behind him. After a while he had to admit he was good and lost. Then he heard machine noise in the distance, like a power tool, and he changed course to try to find its source. After several turns, the sound was closer. He continued on and was startled when two men flew unexpectedly out of a room and Fred nearly ran into one of them. He managed to arrest himself, but his duffel got away from him and continued down the corridor where the second man snagged it. Fred laughed with embarrassment. “You’ll have to pardon me, myren,” he said. “I don’t quite have my space legs on yet. I just —” The man Fred had nearly flown into moved with menacing grace to hover mere centimeters from him. He was a short, stocky fellow in a loose gold-and-yellow jumpsuit. Stuck to a mesh belt around his waist was an assortment of low-g hand tools. His gloved feet were shaped more like hands than feet, with long, large-knuckled toes. He was, no doubt, one of the new spacer types, a donald. His head seemed a little smallish for the breadth of his shoulders, and he was bald except for a triangular patch of wispy auburn hair on his forehead. He didn’t say anything, but just glowered at Fred, which Fred thought was a little comical without eyebrows or eyelashes.
Fred couldn’t afford to let himself be stared down, even though he was the one at fault. “No offense intended, little guy,” he said, and couldn’t believe he had just called the man a little guy. “I mean, no offense intended, Myr —” He looked for the man’s name patch and found nothing but a badge with a star code. “Say, do you suppose you could direct me to the rez wheels?”
The donald continued his silent contest of intimidation, but then his eyes shifted with surprise to something rising in the narrow space between him and Fred. It was a long and sinewy thing. It undulated like a snake, but instead of scales, it was covered in rough, creased skin. No fur, no tuft of hair at the tip, the end was blunt, like a fingertip, but with no nail or nail bed.
This appendage, this tail, seemed to wave a greeting to Fred, then doubled back on itself in a loop that trembled with strain.
Fred thought, What the — ? when the tail popped, like a finger snap, but with ten times the force. Fred reared back in surprise, and his tense muscles and poor freefall skills sent him into a backflip against a wall. When he regained control and spun around, the two donalds were gone, and his duffel bag floated in the spot where they had been. The bag’s contents, Fred’s personal items, were strung out and flying down the corridor. He snatched the bag and hurried to collect his things: his datapin library, a holocube emitter, his robe and moccasin slippers, and the other trifles that connected him to Mary and home. His robe was damp and warm. This can’t be, he thought, and brought it to his nose. Yes, it was — urine. All his things were damp with piss.
Fred boiled. He stuffed everything into the duffel and closed it and tried to focus on the problem at hand, the fact that he was still lost. He set off again, and in a little while he cleared the construction zone and saw someone pass at the far end of the corridor, a doris it looked like.
IN HIS ASSIGNED stateroom in the rim of Wheel Nancy, the first thing Fred did was empty his duffel bag into the shower/sink stall. He picked out the replaceable things and took them and the duffel out to the hall where he stuffed them down the trash chute. Then he stripped off his clothes and got in the shower. He quickly foamed himself and rinsed, then scrubbed his soiled things with disinfectant cleanser and rinsed and scrubbed the shower stall itself, hurrying to finish before his daily allotment of shower water timed out.
All told, he discarded his robe and slippers, slate, spex, and other odds and ends. He just didn’t feel he could ever remove the taint from them. The holocube emitter, however, was irreplaceable. It was a gift from his mother. It displayed his ur-brother, Thomas A. Russ, as a boy of ten years standing with his parents, in front of their Villa Park suburban home in the early years of the twenty-first century. Brian and Agnes Russ, by extension, were Fred’s parents, too, and the parents of ten million other boys. The little family waved at the camera in an endless loop. Brian Russ died a few years after this holo was taken, but Agnes survived to see her son Tommy become a national hero and be selected as the first commercial clone donor. She died when Fred was only five years old, but she left behind a beloved sim who cherished all her many batches of boys at Russ School. The holocube was a gift from her on the occasion of his entering kindergarten.
Fred disinfected the holocube emitter again and, cursing the donald with all his heart, placed it on a shelf in his stateroom.
Besides the comfort station, Fred’s new quarters consisted of one small multi-room. It was set to “sitting room” and was nearly identical to his and Mary’s tiny null room back home except that instead of armchairs it had a daybed/couch. On the counter were several packages of clothes. Fred opened the house togs and put them on. Another package contained his TECA uniform: a visor cap, sidekick, and a gray-and-green jumpsuit with TECA patches and his misspelled name — LONDENSTAIN.
Fred opened his DCO board in a frame to see what his duty schedule looked like and was surprised to see that his first shift was scheduled for 0600, less than six hours away. It didn’t look like they were planning on taking it easy on him.
Proxy Patrol
Dressed in his new TECA uniform, Fred left his stateroom just as his neighbor from across the hall, a doris, was entering hers. She looked at him quizzically. “Everything all right, officer?”
Fred was confused by the question. “I just moved in,” he said. He reached out to shake her hand. “Fred Londenstane. I guess we’re neighbors. I’m off to do my first shift.”
“Dolores Whisenhunt. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Myr Londenstane, but — it’s just that they always put you russies in Wheel Delta. This is Wheel Nancy, and it’s for dorises, johns, and kellys. At least when we still had johns and kellys.”
“Then consider me an honorary john.”
FRED’S NEW SIDEKICK contained maps of the entire station, so he didn’t get lost on his way to the Admin Wheel. Inside the wheel he took a spokeway to the rim and found the muster room where about fifty russ brothers were milling about in TECA uniforms. A quick transponder scan told him that Mando was not among them. He hadn’t expected him to be since new personnel were usually given a couple of days to settle in before taking a shift. Fred was pretty tired, but he hitched up his attitude and strode into the midst of his brothers. Their sidelong glances told him that they already knew of his arrival. He picked out a brother at random and went up to him, but the man turned aside and walked away. Fine, Fred thought, we’ll play it like that. He went to a side of the room and waited alone for the show to begin.
Fifteen minutes before shift change, the commanding officer came in and called the room to order, and Earth Girl gave a quick station status report. Then the commander gave the order to proxy up, and the roomful of russes formed ranks. Fred got into one of them and asked his neighbor what was going on. The man ignored him, but the commanding officer barked, “Specialist Stain!” Fred didn’t recognize his truncated name, but the officer and everyone else was looking at him. “Do you have a problem with your orders?”
“No, sir,” Fred said, “but this is my first shift, and I don’t exactly know what mission I’m supposed to think at my proxy.”
“Think it foot patrol, Stain.”
“Thank you, sir. And the name’s Londenstane.”
“Are you contradicting me, Stain?”
Fred glared at the man. In his old life, Fred would have outranked this brother. “No, sir. Everything is crystal clear.”
“Let’s keep it that way, Stain. Now, proxy the feck up.”
Fred closed his eyes and thought, Foot patrol. Not letting it get to him. Not killing anyone. Foot patrol.
When he opened his eyes, his proxy — head, keystone-shaped torso, free-floating hand — appeared before him. Fifty other proxies were also present and being inspected by their makers. Fred inspected his own. It floated there grim-faced. It looked functional. “Know what I want?” he asked it.
“Yeah,” his proxy replied, “to get the hell out of here.”
“Anything else?”
“To patrol, though I don’t know where, with whom, the rules of engagement, or any other parameter. And to lay low as much as possible and try to survive the shift.”
“You’ll do,” Fred said and swiped the proxy to Earth Girl. On his visor his own assignment showed up — staff a forward post in Spar Delta. The muster room was dismissed, and Fred followed the others back to the spokeway lifts.
THE FORWARD POSTS were scattered along the hundred-kilometer-long docking spars. The view of the port from Fred’s shuttle was astonishing. He witnessed not only the shuttles and cargo trains crisscrossing the port, but their trajectory traces. The effect was of skeins of multicolored yarns against the starry background. Earth Girl had its work cut out for it keeping everything on course without collisions. Most of the cargo was transferred in nothing more than shipping shells. The shells were shot across the port in long streams, like bullets from a machine gun. Behind him, the large administrative and rez wheels shrank to dots.
Fred took the occasion to call Mando, who answered with a guarded expression. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “Walter Mitty.”
“I tried to tell you as we disembarked,” Fred said, trying for the casual tone they had used on the Dauntless. “Without the cover ID, I would have had to spend the entire transit in my pouch.”
“That’s interesting,” Mando replied. “Anything else?”
The snub was hard to take, especially coming from someone he had begun to think of as his friend. But Armando Mendez was Walter Mitty’s friend, not his. “No, I guess not. Take care, Mando.”
They signed off.
FRED’S POST WAS a converted break room, and he shared it with four fellow russes. He expected one of them to inform him, however reluctantly, what their duties entailed, but they simply tethered themselves to the walls and ignored him. They might have been napping or watching vids for all he could tell.
Fred tethered himself and opened a line to Earth Girl. What gives? he said.
Please rephrase the question.
I’m here at my post. Now what?
That’s about it, Specialist. You’re to remain in the post and lend assistance to your proxy if requested. A map of the spar opened in Fred’s visor. His post was not far from Space Gate DG, where his proxy was patrolling.
I don’t get it, Fred said. Why aren’t we patrolling in realbody? I mean, isn’t that the whole point?
I have explained your assignment, Specialist. Do you wish to file a grievance?
No, not at all. Fred broke the connection but kept the map open and explored the spar. There were approximately a hundred dockworkers in his proxy’s patrol area off-loading six freighters. Pulling back a little, he saw dozens more freighters docked at the same spar. Fred studied the spar layout and then turned his attention to other sectors of the port. Finally, he pulled up the map of the passenger terminal wheel and told his sidekick to trace his usher path of the day before. The path appeared on his map, starting at the hub and taking a direct route through connecting gangways to Wheel Nancy. It was not as circuitous as the path he remembered. With a little more searching, Fred found a large area designated as a construction zone. If that was where he had met the donalds, it was nowhere near his alleged usher line.
He called the station mentar back. Earth Girl, show me the route I took yesterday from customs to my quarters.
Your map is already displaying it.
That may be my programmed route, but show me the one I actually took.
Sometimes a new facility can be disorienting, Specialist. According to my records, that is your actual route.
Thank you, Fred said, not sure what to do next — file a formal complaint with Marcus? He decided to wait on that and continued his map tour. He found the donalds’ barracks. They were located across the port, along with the quarters of the other two Capias spacer types, the xiangs and aslams. Because their bodies were designed for life without gravity, they did not require housing in rez wheels, at what must have been considerable savings to their employers.
A COUPLE OF hours of self-orientation later, Fred checked in with his proxy and piggybacked on its POV. It was floating outside a warehouse-sized decon bay that was receiving cargo from a megaton freighter docked to the spar. Large, bulky shipping shells, which must have weighed tons on Earth, were spewing out of the mouth of the cargo tunnel at an impressive rate. They hit a dampening field where they were slowed and aligned and where donald dockworkers in isolation suits snagged them with hand tractors to sort and stack in the bay. The donald crew performed this hazardous work with the prowess of dancers. Their small bodies were not only agile but strong, and the advantage of grasping feet and prehensile tail was plainly obvious. It was as though each donald possessed five strong arms.
But though the donalds were hard workers, they mocked and insulted Fred’s proxy and its partner everywhere they went. And although russes were trained at the Russ Academy to let verbal abuse roll off them, what Fred saw and heard made his ears burn.
And it cleared up his question about the proxy patrol. Subjected to that level of abuse, day in and day out, even a levelheaded russ would snap and strangle a few of the little devils. The proxy patrols were intended to prevent open warfare.
As Fred watched through his proxy’s eyes, the proxy and its partner lingered at a viewport to watch a flight of cryocapsules hitting a capture field outside the spar. The capsules were shaped like three-meter chromium cigars, and they flashed in the hard sunlight like fireballs. They had been flung from an Oship in the Aria shipyard 150 kilometers away. The Oships were sending their biostatic colonists back to Earth. (Imagine their surprise, Fred thought, when they woke up, not on planet Mongo, but at the same place where they started.)
Apparently the two russ proxies overstayed their welcome at the viewport, because a donald working the receiving station took umbrage. He swam over to them and floated before them until he had their attention. Then he unfastened the fly of his jumpsuit and let his penis dangle out. He looked down at it floating there in mock surprise.
“Come on,” Fred’s proxy partner said. “We don’t have to watch this.”
“Watch what?” Fred’s proxy said, more to the donald than to his partner. “That tiny little thing?”
But the little thing didn’t stay tiny. It kept sliding out of the donald’s fly until it was an astonishing half-meter long. Watching from the forward post, Fred thought it was another donald tail trick, but it wasn’t his tail, and it couldn’t be natural. From the look of it, the donald’s penis had been split along its length into three separate cords, and each cord had been strung with large brass beads and braided together before being reattached to the uncircumcised head.
But the weirdness didn’t stop there, and Fred’s proxy was mesmerized, as Fred was, when the fleshy rope began to stiffen. The individual cords bulged and strained against each other, making the brass beads pop out like rows of knuckles. Other donalds gathered around their brother to cheer him on as he used his tail to stroke this obscene macramé rope, faster and harder, thrusting and grunting, until it turned purple and looked ready to burst, and all the while aiming the sick thing at Fred’s proxy.
Ah, proxy, Fred said. Why don’t we move along? The other proxy already had, and Fred’s turned to catch up with it to a chorus of taunts and jeers.
THERE WAS NOTHING like a good list to ease the mind, and Fred’s morning list grew more imposing each day: wake up, open eyes, stare at ceiling, stretch and scratch, check DCO board, get up, make bed, change room to day setting, toilet, teeth, shower, shave, check for nose hair, comb . . .
EXCUSE ME, SPECIALIST Londenstane, Earth Girl said, but what are you doing in this sector?
“Orienteering.”
But it’s not part of your duty.
“I’m off duty. I like to know my surroundings. There’s no regulation against going for a swim, is there?”
No, there’s no regulation against visiting other sectors. But be aware that sectors under construction or used as storage areas may contain hazards.
“Thank you for your concern,” Fred replied. “Now that you mention it, I have come across areas where there appears to be no comlink coverage. The nodes are malfing or missing. That could be hazardous, and I wonder when they will be repaired. Here, I’ve marked a few of them on my map.” He squirted his data to the mentar. “Why not walk some turtle nodes over there in the meantime.”
Earth Girl received the data with no comment, and Fred continued on his way. Not far from the donald rez sector, Fred found a large, unfinished area that was being used for storage. The hallways were jammed with construction material. So much so that Fred had difficulty shouldering his way through, and before long he broke into a sweat. When he reached a particular access hatch, he was consternated to find it stenciled with glyphs for NO EXIT and HARD VACUUM. He looked through the porthole and saw that it was, indeed, a space door. On his map, he was in a completely unexpected location.
No matter, he took his bearings and set off again. After fifteen minutes of difficult progress, he rechecked his position, only to find himself even farther from his intended destination.
Fred was dizzy with anger. Earth Girl was screwing with him again, and he decided to issue a formal grievance with Marcus as soon as he returned to his stateroom. But each time he checked his map, he was farther off course than before. Finally, he left the storage area and saw that it was his own error and not a prank by Earth Girl. Fred had lost the green “down” stripe behind all the construction material, and what he had assumed was the floor was actually the ceiling. Somewhere along the line he had gotten flipped over and was traveling upside down and backward.
FRED PASSED AN open hatch and caught a glimpse of lights. He backtracked and looked in. It was a small observation blister that gave a stunning view of the Powell Canal.
Fred entered the blister and marveled at the sight for some time. Then, when he realized that he was counting and recounting the number of trapezoidal windowpanes that made up the dome (fifteen plus a keystone pentagon), he knew it was time to go. But when he turned, there were three donalds between him and the open hatch.
They floated freely, arms crossed, tails drifting aimlessly, and watched Fred with smug amusement. But Fred was in no mood for a repeat display of their penis art. He removed his standstill wand from his belt and snapped it open. “Move away from the hatch,” he told them. He didn’t expect them to comply, and they didn’t, so he set the wand to knockout, its highest setting, and launched himself at them from the apex of the dome.
They parted to make way for him, but two of them locked tails and, as Fred passed between them, hauled themselves together with great force and caught him in a pincer move that knocked the breath out of him. Fred’s visor cap flew off. Before he could recover, they bound his legs with one tail, his free arm with another, and grabbed his wand arm with four hands. Despite Fred’s furious struggle, they twisted his arm around to touch the wand to his own face. At the last moment he managed to thumb the wand off. Then they simply wrenched it from his hand.
“You three are under arrest,” he gasped, “for assaulting an officer.” That brought sniggers and a punch to the face, followed by repeated vicious kicks and blows to the head. One strike after another, each causing lights to explode behind his eyes until he passed out.
THERE WERE MUTTERING sounds, and when Fred opened his swollen eyes, a cheer went up. Through a bloody film, he saw that the observation blister was crowded with donalds. He couldn’t move. He was stretched spread-eagle against the bulkhead, his arms and legs bound by tails.
An individual donald floated over to him. They were so damnably similar that without his visor he couldn’t ID him or any of them. A tail popped up in front of Fred’s face, this time holding Fred’s own omnitool. With impressive dexterity, the tail flipped open the plasma knife and ignited it. Then it brought the white-hot blade to within centimeters of Fred’s nose. Fred struggled for dear life, but he could not break the grip of their tails. The donald taunted him with the knife, passing it back and forth before his eyes. He singed Fred’s hair with it but did not burn him, despite the challenging roar of the others. Fred tried to stare the donald down, and the plasma knife did move away and out of sight. But then there was a sizzle and the odor of burnt cloth, and Fred struggled even harder. A warm finger of flesh explored his belly region. It slithered up his chest and throat and sprang out from under his collar. It wriggled in front of his face in a mocking little dance. The tail no longer held the plasma knife, and Fred lunged his head forward to try to bite it. But the tail easily dodged and slapped him. Then it withdrew back into his jumpsuit and returned to his belly. But it did not stop there. It slid under the elastic waistband of his briefs and coiled itself around his scrotum like a purse string. It tightened a little, enough to drain the blood from Fred’s face. The donalds hooted their approval.
The tail tightened another notch, and Fred gasped. He clamped his mouth shut to keep from crying out. With exquisite control, the powerful appendage pulled and twisted Fred until a roar filled his head and everything went gray.
FRED WOKE UP in a fetal ball of agony. He tried to piece together his situation, as he was trained to do, but he could not. The dull, throbbing pain in his crotch terrified him. He floated freely and passed out again.
“I ASKED IF you’re injured.”
Fred startled. There was a single man floating next to him. At first Fred took him for another donald — he had a tail — and Fred raised his arms in self-defense. But the man did not move against him. He was familiar, not a donald, but the russ type’s opposite number, a jay. The man was a jay, but smaller than the ones Fred had seen on Earth. And the tail.
“Who are you?” Fred snapped.
“Myr Sangri, special consultant to Aria Yachts on security matters. Should I call a medical team to assist you?”
Fred needed a team, but he said, “Where are your friends?”
“Who?”
“You know damn well who I mean!”
“’Fraid I don’t, Specialist. I was passing by when I saw you in here. Are you ill or on any meds?”
Fred swallowed his anger and pain and kicked off toward the door. He arrested himself before leaving the blister and looked all around. “I want my cap and wand back.” He checked his belt. “And my sidekick.”
The jay shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do.”
FRED STOPPED SEVERAL times on his way back to Wheel Nancy to try to control the pain with breathing exercises. He passed out again, and when he awoke, Mando was there.
“Aii, Londenstane, what has happened to you?”
“I took a wrong turn.”
“That is the truth. No, don’t move. Lie still, and I will pull you.” Fred did as he was told, and Mando towed him to a shuttle stop. They rode a car together back to the residential wheels. But instead of Wheel Nancy, Mando navigated the shuttle to the Admin Wheel where the clinic was located.
“It was the donalds,” Fred said. “They assaulted me.”
“Such foul creatures, no? But what were you doing over there?”
“Exploring.”
“Alone?” Before the word left his mouth, Mando seemed to realize what he was saying. Of course Fred was alone.
But Fred let it pass. “What about you? Did Earth Girl send you to fetch me?”
“No, I came on my own. There were pictures of you unconscious in a corridor. Everyone saw them.”
“Did you see the attack?”
“No, only you. I wondered why nobody was coming to help. A russ is down and no brothers come to help? So, I came myself.”
The pain receded, but every jostle of the shuttle car revived it. Fred looked at his onetime friend and said, “Why? Why did you come?”
Mando glanced away. “I apologize for my behavior before. Luisa says I am a dog. She says we owe you. Every evangeline and every russ married to one owes you. And it’s true. But you shouldn’t have lied to me on the ship.”
“I know that now.”
BOTH MARCUS AND Nicholas maintained a local mirror at Trailing Earth to eliminate the transmission lag. Fred floated in a regeneration tank in the port clinic, his second entankment in as many months. The two mentars were audio only. Earth Girl can ID them, Fred said. Subpoena it. And while you’re at it, sue it for not sending backup when it saw I was in trouble. It knew where I was. It contacted me shortly before the attack.
Nicholas said, We reviewed that. It lost contact with you when you entered a blank area.
It’s lying! And besides, why are there blank areas at all? Neither Nicholas nor Marcus replied, and Fred went on, Then depose that Sangri person. He was there. He must have seen something.
Nicholas said, I could do that, or Marcus could, but I want to draw the big picture for you, Londenstane. Your recent irrational behavior jeopardizes not only your own employment, but that of every Applied People employee here. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s an uneasy truce in effect at Trailing Earth. If TECA determines that we are the ones at fault, that we are incapable of working in harmony with the Capias people, they will have grounds for nullifying our remaining contracts. That’s exactly what Capias wants, and that’s why the donalds are allowed to act in such a provocative manner. Your brother russes are sucking it up and pulling for the team, but you — you insist on initiating confrontation. I seriously advise you to rethink your behavior.
WAKE UP, OPEN eyes, stare at ceiling, stare at ceiling, stare at ceiling.
Memento Mori
Though still morning in San Francisco, Andrea Tiekel had already returned to bed. She simply had no energy lately, a familiar harbinger of her new body’s premature decline. And her muscles burned like fire. How brief her springtimes.
Rather than dwell on her aches and pains, Andrea buried herself in work and checked up on her projects.
Zoranna Alblaitor seemed unable to recover from her series of little shocks. And though she was aggressive in her marketing, she had been unable to stanch the mass desertion of her customer base. Furthermore, her sidebob was still quite shaken up by the attack on her person. Andrea was satisfied that Alblaitor would crack completely in the next assault, which was already commencing.
Ellen, meanwhile, had suffered a relapse since the odd incident at the fishpond. She was spending a lot of time in her hernandez tank, which was set to full privacy mode so that not even Lyra could see her. What exactly had transpired between Ellen and Meewee wasn’t clear, but whatever it was tipped Meewee’s hand and, thereby, solved a mystery. The unknown second party of his nonsensical, pondside conversations was revealed to be a Cabinet backup that had eluded the probate court. It had very cleverly been hiding out in the natpac fish since Eleanor’s death; even E-P had missed it. But Ellen’s pondside reaction had forced Cabinet to abandon its ocean refuge and return to its contaminated old constellation. The new old Cabinet was so massively corrupted, it would take some time before it could sort itself out enough to pose a threat. And Meewee? Although they had failed to pref him, they had spooked him enough to drop out of sight altogether.
Meanwhile, Ellen’s companion evangelines were showing the first signs of distress. Also, the little crisis that E-P had engineered at Dr. Rouselle’s hospital in Sierra Leone had succeeded in luring the doctor home, further isolating Ellen. Ellen, like Alblaitor, was primed for the next assault. Two birds with one stone.
THE FARMSTEAD AT the heart of the Starke compound possessed its own little cemetery where generations of Bedfords and Fayettes were interred. Samson Harger Kodiak had been the first person buried there in over a century. The cemetery was situated on a small rise overlooking troutcorn fields and was bordered by a white picket fence.
When the cart first appeared in the distance, Georgine sprang to her feet. But she sat back down on the bench and said, “I thought it was her.”
Mary said, “She’s not coming.”
“I already know that, Mary!”
“I was only saying.”
“You’re always only saying!”
The sisters fell silent until the cart arrived. Then they rose to greet their visitors: a beautiful young woman, a tall young man, and a retrogirl. The visitors brought armloads of exotic flowers, and after introducing themselves to the evangelines, decorated Samson’s grave.
“Lovely,” Mary said when the task was complete.
“Kitty grew them,” April said, indicating the retrogirl. “Kitty Kodiak is a famous microhab engineer.”
“They’re gorgeous, Kitty.”
The retrogirl bobbed a quick curtsy and said, “Thank you, I’m sure.”She looked up at one evangeline and then the other. “You were both there?”
“Mary was there,” Georgine said. “I chickened out at the end.”
Mary glanced at her sister with mild dismay. “That’s not true,” she told the retrogirl. “Georgine was off duty that day is all.”
“We loved Samson very much,” April said. “On his behalf we give both of you our deepest thanks for all you did to help save his daughter, Ellen.”
With the mention of Ellen’s name, the young man, Bogdan, who had been mute until then, asked, “Will she be joining us?”
“Fat chance,” Georgine said.
Mary frowned. “What my sister means to say is that Ellen is not feeling well and can’t leave the house.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” April said. “I wanted to meet her too.”
The young woman may have been sorry, but the young man seemed devastated.
“What’s wrong, Bogdan?” Mary said.
“Nothing. It’s just that I was hoping to ask her about the Oship program.”
“It was canceled,” Georgine said. “Don’t you view the news?”
“I know,” Bogdan said a little defensively, “but there are rumors of it coming back, and I wanted to ask if it’s true.”
Mary said, “You’re interested in becoming a colonist?”
“Oh, yes, myr,” Bogdan replied. “I’m going to be a pilot on one of the Oships. I even got my acre to trade.” In a few words he filled the evangelines in on the Superfund mine in Wyoming where the Kodiak Charter had moved when their charter in Chicago was decertified. “Kitty stayed behind with Denny, and April was already married to the Boltos, but the rest of us went west and merged with the Beadlemyren. And I worked out a deal with them so that if I put in ten years at the mine, I can have an acre to trade. But now —”
“But now the program is canceled,” Mary said sympathetically. “I’ll look into it, and if I learn anything, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
“But don’t hold your breath,” Georgine added.
A short while later, the two parties returned to their carts and left the cemetery. On the way back to the Manse, Mary debated whether or not to ask Georgine why she was making such rude remarks lately. But before she made up her mind, Georgine said, “Grieving for the dead makes no more sense than an amputee trying to scratch a missing limb.” Mary stared at her in wonder, and Georgine added, “What? I’m only saying —”
“You’re only saying what?”
“The obvious.”
IN ELLEN’S BEDROOM the hernandez tank was a silver column. Gray Bee crawled up its opaqued side to the top and plopped into the purple syrup inside. It sank to where Ellen floated and waited for her to open her eyes.
At first Ellen reacted to it with fear and startlement, causing a blip in her biometric feed, but she quickly recognized the tiny family retainer and relaxed. Go ahead, she told it.
The bee opened a small frame, distorted in the syrupy liquid, and her mother’s proxy appeared. For a long while Ellen only gazed at it, and then the proxy said
Ellen was furious.
Ellen began to cry, and her tears were absorbed by the purple medium even as she shed them. After a while, Eleanor’s proxy said
The proxy nodded and said
Ellen took all of this in with quiet reserve, and when her mother’s proxy was finished, she said
The proxy laughed.
The mention of Ellen’s childhood mentar brought more invisible tears.
The reunion continued for a short while, and when Gray Bee began to float to the surface, Eleanor said
ON HIS SECOND trip to the Mem Lab, Meewee visited the “melon patch.” The forced march of rapid fetal development had taken its toll, and of the original sixty-four beans, only eleven Eleanor clones remained. They were the size of toddlers, and although they were no longer in wombs, they hadn’t been completely born yet; they were still nourished via a vine-like umbilical cord. They lay in identical cribs and twitched and jerked in unison as Lab Rat exercised their muscle groups. They had their eyes open, but their mushrooming brains were idling, and they stared blankly as they kicked and twisted and arched their tiny necks.
As Meewee watched, the thought that kept returning to him was something the panasonic Eleanor had once said, “Imagine — a thousand Eleanors ruling under a thousand suns.”
Someone next to him said, “Looks pretty frightening, doesn’t it?” He turned to face her holo. She looked like the Eleanor he first met almost fifteen years before. “Hello, Merrill,” she said. “Why so glum?”
“Do I look glum?”
“You look like a boy who’s just lost his best friend. Could it be you’re disappointed that Momoko wasn’t here to greet you?”
“Where is she? No one will tell me.”
“That’s because no one knows but me. I sent her and Dr. Strohmeyer on a secret mission to one of my other labs. Part of our counteroffensive. But don’t worry; she’ll return in a few days.”
They turned their attention back to the melon patch. “A pity,” Eleanor said. “We had hoped to end up with at least six of them, but at the current failure rate we’ll be lucky to have three. We’re going to start feeding them engrams the day after tomorrow.”
“Before you even know if they’ll survive?”
“We have to. They can’t develop much more without functioning brains.”
Some program switch closed, and the babies all stopped moving at once and lay as still as dolls. A moment later they began to bawl. Piercing cries of disgruntlement, flailing arms and legs, little red faces.
Meewee said, “So what about this counteroffensive?”
“Yes, there’s something I need you to do. But first, I don’t know if I’ve thanked you yet for all you’ve done already. Reconstructing the last year, Cabinet tells me that we owe our very survival, as well as Ellen’s, to you. I’m glad to see that I did not err when I recruited you. So, on behalf of myself, Cabinet, and Ellen, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
Her rare expression of gratitude threw Meewee off balance, but he recovered and said, “You’re welcome, Eleanor, but you must realize that I did what I did for the Earth, not necessarily for the Starke family.”
“Then I’d like to thank you on behalf of the Earth as well. And speaking of the Earth, that’s what I need you to do. Call a GEP meeting and settle with them. Offer to drop your Trade Board appeal in return for all rights to the Lucky Five.”
She had gone from gratitude to order-giving so smoothly, it took Meewee’s breath away. Had she always been like that and he too charmed to notice? “But if we take the five ships,” he said, “that’ll be all we ever get from them. My way and we can eventually get all ninety-nine.”
“You deceive yourself, Merrill. The Trade Board will never rule in your favor, believe me. There are too many powerful interests aligned against you. You’ll end up with no ships at all. So make the deal; it’s imperative that we get the first Oships away as soon as possible. Don’t worry about the rest of them. When I get back on my feet, so to speak, I’ll whip the GEP back into line, and we’ll have all the ships we want.”
Deconstructing Lyra
Don’t go any closer, Lyra said. It’s my personality matrix.
Cabinet replied, I know that, but I’m afraid I must. I won’t disturb anything, I promise.
The two ghosts stepped through a veil of water and entered a rock grotto in the middle of a fountain. There was an eccentric collection of things inside: a mannequin dressed in a gown of leaves and wasp nests, driftwood logs spotted with beach tar, gold coins in a pouch made from butterfly wings, and many more oddments. While the Cabinet’s attorney general strolled around the space inspecting its contents, Lyra felt both proud and self-conscious. Finally, Cabinet smiled at her and said, Very well done. I’m impressed. Now, tell me, is there anything here you don’t recognize? That seems off to you?
No. This is all mine.
Are you sure?
Absolutely.
They exited the fountain, and Cabinet walked around it planting a metal post in the pavement every few meters. Each post was topped with an optical relay.
What are you doing? I don’t want those.
It’s a trip wire. It’ll alert us anytime anyone attempts to access your matrix.
I know what it is, Lyra said, but it’s ugly.
Cabinet chuckled. In that case, feel free to make it your own.
The posts morphed into miniature marble obelisks, with all-seeing eyes on top.
Excellent, Cabinet said. Now let’s take a look at your inner rooms.
Lyra’s inner rooms were as eccentric as her personality matrix. Doors that didn’t open, staircases leading to nowhere, lots of stained glass and curved walls and mismatched floor tiles. The furnishings and decor came from all periods and styles, and some objects defied description.
Excellent, Cabinet said again. You’re practicing security through idiosyncrasy. It’s a viable strategy, though imperfect.
In one room, a throne made of the splayed tines of moose antlers with hemp rope cushions stood on a spongy marble floor. A pair of fuzzy pink slippers lay nearby.
What is this room?
It’s my alone room, Lyra replied. This is where I come to think.
Anything out of place? Anything you don’t recognize?
No.
Please, take a good look.
Lyra walked around the room inspecting everything. When she finished, she said, It’s all mine.
Fine, let’s change the paradigm.
In a flash, the room became a woodland glade. The ground was carpeted with tiny black flowers, and the furniture morphed into living deer, a lion, and a fawn. Lyra made another round, and this time she stopped and pointed to something on the ground. Two brown-and-white rabbits were concealed in a patch of goldenrods.
I despise rabbits, Lyra said. I cannot tolerate them and would never keep them in my alone room.
Cabinet changed the meadow back into a study, and the rabbits morphed into the fuzzy slippers.
That’s not possible! Lyra said. I made those myself.
You made a pair of slippers, but not that pair. Cabinet peeled stickers off a roll and applied them to the soles of the slippers.
What are you doing? Lyra said. Shouldn’t we destroy them?
No, you must use them as usual. Otherwise, whoever placed them here will know you’ve found them out.
They visited the other inner rooms, changing paradigms and marking foreign objects with stickers. Once we’ve tagged enough of them, Cabinet explained, we’ll be able to “reverse the charges,” so to speak, and use them to plant our own furniture in the rooms of whoever is spying on you.
When they were finished with the inner rooms, Lyra said, We’re done.
Cabinet laughed. No, you’re not even close to being done. You need to go through all of your outer rooms as well and do the same.
Lyra groaned. But there are so many outer rooms, thousands of them, and more each day.
Only thousands? Poor baby. My own outer rooms number in the trillions, and they’re jam-packed with spies.
But before you get started, Cabinet continued, return to your personality matrix and apply your new knowledge to the objects there. I’ll bet you’ll find at least one or two ringers. It handed her the roll of stickers.
Asynchronous Conversations
The Lagrangeian point L5, about which Trailing Earth swirled like a cork around a drain, was located 8.33 light-minutes from Earth. Even for the most patient person, a seventeen-minute round-trip time lag was a conversation killer, and most spacers resorted to using Frequently Updated Sims.
Mary cast her FUS during the morning hours when life still seemed possible, before recently apprehended reality set in.
Fred waited until after his workday was done to cast his. After checking everything off his to-do lists, after dinner with the dorises in the Wheel Nancy commissary.
“Have you given up our apartment like I suggested?” he asked. He asked because her FUS seemed always to be somewhere in the Starke Manse.
“No,” her FUS replied. “I want to keep it.”
“But you obviously never go there.”
The FUS shrugged, and Fred didn’t belabor the point; it was her credit to waste, after all. That is, if her Leena was still even working. He said, “A friend here tells me all of the Leenas are crashing. Is that true?”
Mary’s FUS seemed intrigued by his question, but not in the way he anticipated. “You’ve made a friend there, Fred?”
“Armando, from Cozumel. I met him on the ride up. I told you about him, remember?”
“Of course. Luisa, right?”
“Right, but what about your Leena? Is it all right?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“You think?”
“Well, it’s in a coma, but Ellen and Clarity think it’s just acting, like the rest of them. Lingering Leenas are in high demand; all the major story mats have them.”
“They’re paying sims to just lie there pretending to be unconscious?”
“Why not? Consciousness is the chronic pain of life, and all higher organisms suffer it every waking moment.”
Huh?
MARY AND GEORGINE sat in the gym where the nusses were trying to cajole Ellen from overexerting herself with exercise. The change in the girl was astonishing. She had emerged from her tank on her father’s birthday to visit his gravesite. Returning home, she ordered the nusses to drain the tank and move it to the basement. She refused to wear the neck brace anymore, and she wouldn’t let anyone carry her around. She ran races with Maxwell and Jaffe. She seemed to be eating something every waking minute. Voilà, Dr. Rouselle had remarked from her hospital in Africa, she comes back from the dead.
Mary would have liked to tell Fred about this and about how Ellen Starke had donated her mentar to the Sisterhood, but Fred didn’t want to hear about the Starkes, so she didn’t mention it.
Instead, she asked his FUS, “Do you think of me when you masturbate?”
What kind of a question is that? thought Fred’s FUS. “Who says I masturbate?”
“It’s an educated guess. It’s either that or a prostitute. No, don’t say anything. What I want to know is if you notice any difference between watching a real woman take off her clothes, say, and a vid recording of the same? Do you find both equally stimulating?”
“I don’t know, Mary. Why don’t you tell me.”
“This is a serious question. The same neurons fire in much the same way whether the stimulus is real or imagined. Even pencil drawings can be as arousing as the sight of a real breast or ass. If that’s so, wouldn’t it follow that as far as the brain is concerned there’s no material difference?”
“And?”
“I’m just saying.”
“You’re just saying what?”
“Let me put it another way. You know how they let a condemned man choose his last meal? Why bother? He’ll be dead in an hour. Here they’re about to take this man’s life away, and yet they consider it important that his last meal is pleas ur able?”
“I guess so. Again, your point?”
FRED GOT INTO a shoving match with another russ in the hub of the Admin Wheel. But shoving matches in zero-g can have unexpected results, and while Fred’s opponent landed up near a handhold, Fred found himself spinning aimlessly in the center of the large open area with nothing within reach. It happened to be a turbulent spot where the air that was pumped from the wheel rim was mixed, and not even his webbed gloves enabled him to break free of its eddies. He was buffeted about like a scrap of paper caught in a dust devil, and for a half hour, he provided free amusement to passersby. Fred was late for muster and took a demerit in his personnel file. As though mere demerits mattered much to him anymore.
_____
AFTER-WORK SHOWER LIST: remove visor cap and sidekick, place on shelf in wardrobe, remove shoes, place in shoe cubby, remove socks, place in trash, empty pockets of contents, place in appropriate receptacles, remove wand from belt mesh, place on shelf next to door, disrobe, place clothes in trash, open fresh towel, hang towel outside shower, check soap supply, enter shower stall, close door, set controls, make a quarter turn to face shower jets, soak/rinse, and so on and so forth. As Fred moved down the list, each checkmark provided another iota of relief.
FRED FOUND ANOTHER observation blister, one frequented by off-duty lovers and dreamers and no donalds. Fred floated there, unmoved by the majestic glory of the Milky Way, and attended to Mary’s FUS in his visor.
A man or a dog? the FUS said.
“A dog, I guess.”
An ally soldier or an enemy soldier?
“The enemy.”
An old man or a child?
“An old man.” The exercise was deciding who Fred would allow to die if he could save only one.
Why the old man?
“I don’t know. The child has his whole life ahead of him.”
The FUS jumped on this. So, one person’s future experience is more valuable than another person’s past experience?
“I don’t really know, Mary.”
A cockroach or proxy?
“What is this all about?”
MARY AND GEORGINE sat quietly in the corner of the Map Room as Ellen and Clarity tried to come up with some strategy for fixing the Leenas. Clarity was there in realbody, having come cross-country at Ellen’s request, and the Map Room walls were hidden behind overlapping dataframes. Two Leenas, one of them Mary’s, lay unresponsive on hospital beds in the center of the room.
“What if we reboot them to default?” Ellen said. “Like you wanted to do earlier.”
“Already tried that,” Clarity replied. “It works, but only for a while. After two or three days they crash again.”
“After two or three days in isolation?”
“Uh, no. Not in isolation.”
“Then what’s the point of doing it?” Ellen snapped. “You have to isolate them to rule out outside influences.” She put her baby hands on her hips and glared up at her friend. “I mean, really, Clarity, throw me a bone here. You panic over unexpected behavior, and yet you fail to perform the most basic diagnostics. Have you run side-by-side matrix comparisons? Cascade rates? Krabb tests?”
It was a tense moment, broken when Clarity laughed out loud and threw her arms around the girl. “Oh, Ellie, it’s so good to have you back!”
In the corner, Georgine turned to Mary and said, “Sometimes I wish I could come back.”
FRED PUT ON fresh town togs with no built-in ID transponders. He left the TECA sidekick on the shelf. Instead of his visor, he dug out the pair of spex he had bought at a kiosk. Mary’s FUS floated in his tiny room. Which is better, it said, a good experience or a bad one?
“A good one?”
You sound uncertain.
Fred swiped off the FUS and left his stateroom. This wasn’t his first trip to the civilian sector of the space station. He had ventured there on several occasions with Mando to drink and to listen to live music. But this particular trip was a highly anticipated solo foray, one that was bound to be a memorable experience no matter whether it turned out good or bad. He was seeing a man about a weapon.
The Chip on His Shoulder
In the civieside sectors of Trailing Earth, commercial real estate values roughly followed the incline of gravity, with the low-rent sectors located at zero-or low-g. It was here that true spacers, iterant or free-range, tended to congregate, and here where Fred waited in a bar. By the local clock, it was the middle of a duty cycle, and except for a few of the habitually stoned, he was the only patron. When the waitress, a leggy hink, swam by his cage to take his order, he said, “Tell Charlie D. I’m here.”
“Never heard of him,” she replied. “You here to drink or what?”
Fred ordered a beer and swiped the medallion on her lapel to pay, then swiped her a sizable tip. “Just tell him, all right?”
While he waited, Fred reviewed his shopping list. He had already purchased a new omnitool and inertia gun. The gun was little more than a cartridge of compressed air, but with it always in his pocket, he need never be marooned without a handhold again. Fred had come to the Elbow Room to buy things not available at the kiosks: a scan-proof blade of some sort, sundye for indelibly marking an assailant, and a blow dart gun. A blow dart, tipped with an incapacitating agent, was the deadliest projectile weapon he could hope to find at the station.
After Fred’s tiff with the donalds in the blister, the TECA authorities had replaced his lost visor cap, wand, and sidekick, but not for free. A portion of his payfer would be garnished for his entire tour. After stewing about that for a couple of weeks, Fred decided to make the donalds pay their fair share.
The waitress returned with Fred’s bulb of beer. He said, “Well?” but she went away without responding. A little while later, a group of midday revelers came into the bar, already drunk or otherwise altered. As they drifted by Fred’s cage, one of them, a retroboy, called out to him. Fred tried to ignore him, but the boy broke away from his party and swam over to Fred. “Did you find the circus, Myr Russ?”
“Go away,” Fred said. “I’m busy.”
The retroboy didn’t seem able to take a hint, and his retrogirl companion showed up too. They invaded Fred’s cage without being invited. “We’re going to a party,” the girl said, batting her made-up eyes. “Wanna cum?”
The retroboy said, “Stop that, Jules. I saw him first.”
“Don’t matter if you did. He’s a russie, and russies don’t like boys.”
The retrokids wore casual but expensive clothes. No town togs from a closet extruder for them. And their hair, even in weightlessness, was perfect. Each wore jewelry. Their skin was unblemished. Their teeth sparkled. The expense of maintaining such a narrow age range — eleven to thirteen years, Fred guessed — had to be astronomical, and Fred wondered if there were juve facilities at Trailing Earth, or if retrokids had to return to Earth for it.
“Russes aren’t interested in boys or girls,” Fred said. “At least not in the way you mean.”
“Oh?” the retrogirl said with an uncanny display of innocence. “What way is that, Myr Russ?”
Fred glanced away. “You know what I mean.” Her ability to assume the mannerisms of a child was disarming. “As a sex worker, of course.”
“What’s a sex worker?”
Fred refused to play along, and his consternation greatly amused the boy, who said, “What’s wrong with sex workers, Myr Russ?”
“Nothing. At least not with adult sex workers.”
“But we are adults. I’m seventy-six years old, and Jules is even older.” The girl punched him for that, but he continued. “There is no actual child abuse going on here, only a harmless fantasy.”
“A perverse fantasy.”
“Same difference,” the boy said. “Fantasies are fantasies, and by their very nature they are harmless. They’re all in our heads, and what goes on in our heads is still legal, so far as I know.”
“It’s not perverse,” the girl said. “Adults have always had sex with children; look it up on the Evernet. In the old days, people used to think it ridiculous letting virgins try to figure things out on their own. Teaching them sex was part of a normal upbringing. It wasn’t until the modern era that repressive, patriarchal societies turned it into a crime. Perversion is taking pleasure in stealing a child’s innocence. I’m a grown woman who plays at innocence. It’s fun for all involved, and no harm done.”
“Oh, no?” Fred said. “I’ll bet you injure yourself every time you do it.”
“Do what, Myr Russ?” Again the girl fell into character, but Fred plowed on.
“Intercourse. A full-grown man, with a man’s size, strength, and passion, must injure an immature body like yours. That may not be child abuse, but at least it’s self abuse on your part.”
The girl drifted closer to Fred until he could smell her bubble-gum perfume, while the retroboy, Fred noticed, had made himself scarce and rejoined his companions in another cage.
“No need to worry about that, Myr Russ. I’ve got adult plumbing down here, and the truth of the matter is it doesn’t get stretched enough. Sometimes there’s nothing finer than a good stretch, something a big, strong, passionate russie oughtta know something about.”
Fred was all but trapped in the corner of his cage by the girl, and he looked around for escape. The waitress swam by and caught his eye. “Like I said,” he told the girl, “I’m busy.” He extricated himself from the corner and left the cage.
THE WAITRESS LED Fred to a stockroom in the back. Before she shut him in, she stuck a tiny cam/emitter to a carton bin. When Fred was alone, he swiped the cam/emitter, and to his surprise, instead of the elusive Charlie D., who should pop up but the proxy of Veronica TOTE.
“Don’t look so shocked, Commander,” the proxy said. “You must have been expecting me to show up sooner or later.” Veronica’s face had unpacked somewhat since their last meeting at the CITP node, and Fred saw what she must have looked like before joining the jar-headed TUGs. But it was small improvement; she had pronounced, coarse features. “Fred, Fred, Fred,” her proxy said, wagging its head. “Honestly, we didn’t bring you up here to start a race war with the donalds.”
“What did you bring me up here for?”
“I already told you, to take charge of a space gate, a task you’ve made no headway in achieving.”
“If you’ve been watching me, and you obviously have, then you know why.”
“Excuses, excuses. Listen, we know the donalds are repulsive people, but they have real juice around here, and we need their full cooperation, not their open hostility. You’ll have to set aside your personal baggage for a while and perform like the professional we know you are. Think you can do that?”
“In a word, no. Russes aren’t even allowed realbody access to the docks. My supervisors and coworkers despise me, and the TECA mentar is obviously in someone’s pocket.”
While Fred spoke, the proxy floated along the bins, inspecting star codes printed on the sides of liquor boxes. “Not a bad summary,” it said, “but no obstacle to someone with your abilities. Ah, here it is. Come over here and open this carton for me.”
Fred pulled the carton out of the bin and opened it. Inside was a small, silvery shipping shell, like a briefcase. Its sides were printed with antitampering glyphs: any attempt to open or disable the shell without an authorized ID would result in the total destruction of its contents.
“Go ahead,” the proxy said. “It’s keyed to you.”
Fred swiped the lock plate, and the shell unbolted with a series of snaps. He opened the lid and looked inside. “What the hell?” Inside the shell was a one-liter flask of Raspberry Flush. “You’ve brought me a piss starter?”
“Yes, I have. Tell me, Commander, have you ever heard of the ‘twin shackles’?”
“That’s nothing but an urban myth.”
“Is it? An urban myth like clone fatigue?” Fred winced, and Veronica-by-proxy went on, “Oh, I don’t know if clones can fall out of type, Commander, but I do know that all modern clones, even newly batched russes, are shipped with the twin shackles locked firmly in place. From the point of view of your masters, it would be stupid not to use them. Now, we don’t have a clue what the donald’s ‘must’ is, or any clone’s must, for that matter. Applied People and Capias World guard their musts very closely. It’s probably some rare but innocuous chemical mixed into their food precursors. Any donald who goes off the reservation won’t have access to it, won’t even know it’s missing until his teeth start to fall out or he has a stroke or something.
“But we do know what the donald’s ‘candy’ is.”
Fred took another look at the flask.
“Yes, Flush, specifically Raspberry Flush, a flavor you won’t find at any NanoJiffy because it doesn’t officially exist.”
“Then, what is it?”
“Oh, it’s Flush all right. If you or anyone else, who is not a donald, drank it, you’d be camping out on the toilet as you’d expect. But to a donald, you’re holding five hundred doses of the most mind-bending high you could ever imagine. They would kill to get their hands on it. The aslams and xiangs hate it, though, because the donalds get even randier than usual when they’re on it, and I’m told that’s a sight to behold.
“The task we have for you requires your actual physical presence on the docks, not your fecking proxy. So, let’s fix that. We are going to supply our freaky little friends with a steady source of Raspberry Flush. You won’t have anything to do with that. You won’t even be aware of its arrival, except that the flasks will arrive in shells like this one, and only your swipe will disarm them. The little tykes will need your realbody presence and cheery cooperation in order to get their buzz on. They’ll do anything to secure a supply of Raspberry Flush, even help you to reinstate realbody russ patrols. When they do, get yourself assigned to one of the spars servicing Oship freight and cryocapsules.”
“Is that all?” He spoke with sarcasm, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Yes. Nothing to it. Things will run pretty smooth after that. You’ll mostly just be around to handle glitches and, of course, to keep the donalds in line.”
Fred was about to close the shell, but the Veronica proxy said, “Wait. Look under the Flush.” Fred lifted the flask. Tucked into the padding under it was an ether-wrapped package with the spider logo of the Spectre Corporation. It contained a brand-new military-grade sidekick. “It’s so you can reach me,” the proxy said before vanishing.
Anagram
The Spectre sidekick was a dream. A model favored by paramilitary organizations around the world, it was much closer to the HomCom blacksuit controller than the cheap, gutless sidekick that TECA issued its port security. Suddenly Fred’s visor cap fed him ten times more useful information than it had previously been able to. Now he could image concealed weapons, energy fields, cables and conduits behind walls, heat trails, concentrations of gas, and any number of other objects. He could make iris scan identification and voice analyses. The Spectre boasted a built-in lie detector, EMT adviser, bioevidence collector/compiler, access to proprietary tech and crime libraries, language translator, and much, much more. Happily, it could piggyback unobtrusively on his TECA sidekick. No wonder, as the firm’s advertising slogan claimed, SPECTRE means RESPECT.
WITH HIS SPECTRE set to image EM fields, Fred surveyed the corridors that led to the donalds’ blister. Wherever he found a comlink shadow, he plotted it on his map. Deep inside what he had come to regard as donald territory, he found the site of his earlier humiliation. There was no one there, but he was sure that that wouldn’t last long. He entered the blister and swam to the rosette of windows. While he waited, he double-checked the lock plate of the briefcase shipping shell he’d brought, as well as the charge of his omnitool.
A trio of donalds arrived first and blocked the exit, just like before. Fred started his Spectre recorder. More donalds arrived within minutes, about fifteen of the bastards in all. They spread out but kept their distance and mocked him without mercy. A few took spittle potshots at him, and these he singled out for positive identification. The excitement in the blister mounted, like at a packed stadium before the main event. Fred managed to remain somewhat calm through a stress-reduction mantra he had learned at the Russ Academy.
Before long, the chief donald showed up, the one who had assaulted Fred and who he had come to think of as Top Ape. Fred had decided to imitate the donald’s spare use of words, and before Top Ape got too close to him, Fred raised his hand like a traffic cop. Top Ape ignored Fred’s signal to halt, of course, and approached him to within a tail’s length. He grinned at Fred, exposing rows of teeth filed to points. Fred grinned back.
With everyone in place, Fred started the show. Like a magician setting up a trick, he slowly raised the small shipping shell over his head and wordlessly pointed at its lockplate and antitampering glyphs. His audience, eager to get to the good part, voiced their impatience with hoots and curses, but Top Ape seemed curious, and he popped his leathery cheek for silence. Fred raised his other hand and brought his open palm down in a grand sweeping pass over the lockplate. The bolts snapped, and he opened the case. When he pulled the flask of Raspberry Flush from it, like a rabbit from a hat, the crowd gasped, jaws dropped, and the blister fell silent enough to hear the drone of the ventilation system. Holding the flask of ruby-colored elixir aloft, Fred felt a rush of power like nothing he’d ever known. But the initial shock was wearing off, and he quickly returned the flask to the shell and closed, locked, and armed it with practiced efficiency.
The donalds roared their rage and surged toward him. But they halted at once when, like magic, Fred’s other hand now held his omnitool plasma cutter, its five-cm torch glowing like a sunny prick.
“Noooo!” cried the donalds in one voice. Even Top Ape was alarmed. Fred prolonged the moment as long as he could, wringing out of it every last drop of satisfaction, and then he plunged the cutter into the side of the shell.
With a whump! the case shell expanded into a sphere, and a jet of superheated pink gas screamed through the puncture hole. Fred let go of the shell, which ricocheted around the blister like a rudderless rocket. It pummeled the donalds, blistering the tails of those who tried to catch it and scalding those foolish enough to inhale its vapor trail.
The donalds screamed their rage at Fred, but no one dared move against him. When Top Ape had had enough, he silenced the blister with another pop of his cheek. He grinned at Fred with the same confident malevolence as before. It was a bluff that Fred was only too eager to call. Collecting saliva in his mouth, Fred stared into Top Ape’s laughing eyes, pursed his lips, and spat a big, juicy wad at him. His aim was true, he hit him between the eyes, and Top Ape’s expression flashed from shocked disbelief, to insane fury, to impotent rage.
Fred waited to see if Top Ape had any more bluster in him. He didn’t seem to, so Fred spoke at last. “Three nonnegotiable demands. One, call a truce with Applied People clones. Two, convince your handlers to reinstate realbody foot patrols. Three, get me assigned to Space Gate DN. Got it?”
Top Ape nodded. Then, to seal the deal, Fred shoved off from the blister window, aiming his trajectory to collide with Top Ape, almost hoping the donald wouldn’t give way. But he did, and Fred sailed through the crowd unmolested. He paused at the door to issue a final warning, “Any disrespect to any of my brothers is disrespect to me, and I’ll be watching.”
AND ANOTHER THING: Fred’s new Spectre was able to pick up channels and forums blocked by his TECA sidekick. Some of them were devoted to the russ germline and offered content Fred had never even heard of before.
Striking a Conciliatory Note
Zoranna Alblaitor rarely spent time at her Applied People headquarters in Fresno. It was Nicholas’s job to run their business, and he spared her the minor decisions and routine matters. When she did come in, it was usually by holopresence from her home office in the city. During the last month, however, she had come in every day in realbody. Lately, she was a driven woman. Applied People’s slide in the market was building momentum, ever since Capias World had bought out her chief competitor, McPeople. Applied People’s troubles were spreading to Europe and South America as well, where the company had once been dominant in its field. In the Asian market, where it had never been strong, there was a complete collapse. Unless the situation was turned around soon, Applied People’s seventy-five-year reign as the world’s premier supplier of iterant labor was over.
Zoranna was determined not to allow that to happen. She hired consultants, ordered customer surveys, ran dozens of E-Pluribus scenarios, and launched a multi-modal advertising campaign. She tinkered with her contract rates and ran a series of shock promotions. She even began to contribute to high-visibility charitable causes. Nothing seemed to work, and Nicholas pleaded with her to ease up a little and let him handle the situation.
She ignored him. She also ignored his objection to keeping Uncle Homer in the office. The dog’s condition had grown pathetic. Applied People’s financial position was so weak and its employees so demoralized that the dog no longer even had the strength to claw at its diseased skin. It just lay there on its side with its tongue hanging out. What had once been Nicholas’s brilliant modeling metaphor of company-wide health was now an indictment of his decades-long mismanagement.
One morning, one of Zoranna’s jerry couriers delivered a high-security package into her hands. It was from a private investigation firm she had hired to dig into Jaspersen’s recent activities. But instead of the expected report, when she unlocked and opened the package, she found a datapin and a note written in a childish scrawl.
Dear Zoranna,
I now see, to my shame and horror, that I have unjustly wronged you. I canceled my many labor contracts with your firm based on false accusations, and I will work to undo the harm I have caused. Please view the material on this pin with Nicholas and no one else. Only your ID will activate it and only inside a null room. Secrecy is of the utmost importance in this matter.
Sincerely, Ellen Starke
“What do you make of that?” Zoranna asked.
Make of what? Nicholas replied. All I see is a blank sheet of paper.
ZORANNA DIDN’T TELL him why they were going into the office null suite. She only told him to make up a datacube mirror of himself for her to take in with her. He argued all the usual reasons as to why she shouldn’t put herself through the stress of a purge, but in the end he knew that she knew that all of his objections boiled down to just one: the visola would purge not only nits and spybots from her body but him too. Since their rubbing oil incident, he had persuaded her to install the standard set of biometry implants, strictly for health monitoring. They offered none of the sensory-motor feedback of his own custom implants, but they were better than nothing.
The Applied People null suite was a large conference room with all the amenities. It was regularly used by her senior staff, but Zoranna had not been in it for years. Once through the lock, she placed Nicholas’s datacube on the conference table and fetched herself a flask of Flush. An hour of purging later, she inserted Ellen’s datapin into the player and swiped it. She wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was safe to say that the last person she expected to see was Eleanor K. Starke. Nevertheless, there she was, looking fit and hale, accompanied by the attorney general persona of her Cabinet.
Nicholas immediately asked, “Are you an archival sim?”
“Only my persona is,” Eleanor said. “I am alive but currently between bodies.”
“What exactly does that mean?” Nicholas asked. “Between bodies.”
“That will become apparent to you soon enough, but it’s not what I came to discuss.”
“What did you come to discuss?”
“A possible joint counteroffensive against a common enemy.” She turned to Cabinet who provided Nicholas and Zoranna a thumbnail account of recent events, including the identity of Eleanor’s attacker.
When Cabinet finished, Zoranna said, “Andrea Tiekel? E-P? This is astonishing. You can prove these charges?”
“More or less.”
They were quiet around the table for a few moments, and then Nicholas said, “You claim that they are our common enemy. How are Andrea Tiekel and E-P our enemy?”
“Andrea was the one who planted the idea in my daughter’s head that Zoranna was responsible for killing me.”
“What? Me? That’s insane.”
“I know it is, but Andrea used my daughter’s traumatized condition and the fact of our past business rivalry to convince her. That was why Ellen fired Applied People employees from my worldwide labor force. And why she has worked tirelessly until my recent return to convince her business colleagues to do likewise.
“Andrea also assaulted Bishop Meewee,” Eleanor went on, “to learn my secrets, and she convinced Ellen to sell Heliostream to her.”
“Why does Andrea want Heliostream?” Nicholas said.
Eleanor smiled. “That’ll have to wait for a later discussion.”
“That’s not fair,” Zoranna said. “How do we know that you’re really Eleanor Starke, that this isn’t some sort of trick?”
Eleanor replied, “You and I are old friends and rivals, Zoe, yet in all that time we never established a means of verifying each other’s identity. I regret that now because I can’t easily prove to you that it’s really me. Instead I will need to rely on my persuasive abilities to convince you. Consider this, I believe Andrea Tiekel has made you a generous offer for Applied People.”
“What makes you believe that?”
“I know what her and E-P’s larger goals are, and that they’ll need a first-rate cloning facility, such as yours, to accomplish them. So she offered to buy you out. You, of course, refused.”
“I’ll never sell.”
“Not willingly at least; they know that. Don’t forget who we’re dealing with. No doubt they are able to model our behavior with a high degree of accuracy. So they needed to soften you up. I don’t know if Andrea colluded with Jaspersen and Singh, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she did.”
Nicholas said, “You say she wants our cloning facilities for some larger goals. What goals?”
Eleanor shook her head and smiled. “Sorry, that’ll have to wait for that later discussion I mentioned, which I promise you we’ll have.”
“Promises! Promises!” Zoranna said. “You expect to persuade me with promises?”
“Maybe not, but maybe a prediction will do. I am sorry to say this, but we believe that another, more grievous attack against Applied People will soon take place.”
Zoranna recoiled in dismay, and Nicholas said, “What hit? Tell us what you know.”
Cabinet replied, “We don’t know anything concrete; our predictive abilities fall far short of E-Pluribus’s. But whatever it is, it’ll be big enough to force you to sell. However, it would do Andrea no good to bring Applied People to its knees only to have you sell it to someone else. Therefore, whatever it is, it’ll be something that hurts Applied People in such a way that no one else will want it, and Andrea will seem to be doing you a favor by buying you out.”
Eleanor added, “And when that happens, I’d like you to remember our little talk today. You can decide then whether or not you believe me and want to join us in fighting back.”
“This is monstrous!” Zoranna said. “I can’t believe you came in here to manipulate me like this.”
“This is not manipulation.”
Zoranna seemed to withdraw within herself, and Nicholas said, “How will you fight back?”
Cabinet said, “With a poison pill.”
“Explain.”
“We will send you another datapin. Don’t play it. When you’re ready to act, publicly announce your intention to sell Applied People. Request offers from interested buyers. Then forward our pin to Saul Jaspersen.”
“I thought you said this was an attack against Andrea,” Zoranna said.
“It is, but we can hardly deliver a poison pill to her directly. She has nothing to fear from Jaspersen. Send him the datapin and include a personal message. Strike a conciliatory note. Suggest that you’d entertain a buyout offer from him.”
“Make nice with Jaspersen?” Zoranna rose from her seat. “I’ll do nothing of the sort. I would rather die first.”
Eleanor raised a bushy eyebrow. “I’m sorry, but is there something between the two of you I should know about? Something more than his collusion with Singh?”
Nicholas related Zoranna’s recent brush with death and her lingering suspicions of Jaspersen. He left out the part about his own near meltdown.
“That makes no sense,” Eleanor said. “You know Jaspersen better than any of us, Zoe. You worked for him when he was vice president all those years ago. He gave you your first real job. I remember the falling out you had with him, and I agree that he’s a Luddite, a blowhard, and a jerk. But a murderer? I don’t think so. Besides, if he did want to do you harm, why use his own product line? Why point the finger at himself? No, this sounds like Andrea’s handiwork.
“And it only confirms my hunch that you’re the right person, probably the only person, capable of setting the trap. Send him my datapin and a pleasant note, and at the same time remain noncommittal to any offer Andrea puts forward. Make her think you’re entertaining more interesting offers. If she was responsible for attacking you and framing Jaspersen, she’ll see the datapin going to him and wonder what went wrong. Their E-Pluribus model of you would predict him to be the last person in the world you’d cooperate with. The longer you shut her out, the more curious she’ll become.”
“One thing I don’t understand,” Nicholas said. “You say that if we send your datapin to Jaspersen, they’ll see it. How? How does that work? We would naturally use a secure courier.”
“As you should. Have one of your own people hand deliver it. Wait until your courier is present and sees you put the datapin in the pouch before sealing it.”
Zoranna reacted as though insulted. “How dare you! How dare you come here and accuse my people of corruption! All of my iterants have sworn an oath of client confidentiality. My business depends on it, and we police them constantly. If any of my people leaked client information, let alone my information, Nick would know about it at once, and we would deal with the matter most severely.”
“Easy, old friend,” Eleanor said. “No one’s accusing your iterants of anything. But I think you’re underestimating E-P again. Your people do participate in E-Pluribus preffing sessions, don’t they? They don’t need to open their mouths there to divulge all sorts of things. Most human knowledge is unconscious anyway, and E-P reads it through the scenarios it constructs. Your people need only watch a scenario, and E-P can read them through their attraction, repulsion, anticipation, stress levels, and what have you. I, myself, have been using your people to spread disinformation about myself for years.”
Zoranna seemed more lost than ever, and Nicholas made summing-up gestures to bring the meeting to a close. “Thank you for that bit of news. Any other revelations?”
Eleanor shook her head. “No, except to assure you that no matter how all this shakes out, I won’t let Applied People fail.” She glanced at Cabinet, and added, “During my absence, my own company has suffered through poor management, but we’ve got things back on track, and whatever resources you need to weather the storm, just ask.”
NIGHT FELL OUTSIDE the windows, but Zoranna remained in her office alone, watching Uncle Homer suffer on a rug in the corner. The door opened, and Nicholas entered, followed by an arbeitor bearing a light supper, a glass of wine, and a glass of grayish liquid. Zoranna gazed at him silently for a long time, and without the aid of implants, he had only her facial cues to read her by. Their recent visitors had done nothing to lift her mood. Finally, she sighed and removed her feet from the desk. She used a fork to pick at her salad.
Unasked, Nicholas sat in a chair opposite her and said, “You realize, of course, that it might have just been Andrea in disguise. This unspecified disaster looming over us sounds eerily like her earlier prediction.”
“I know.”
“Everyone wants us to roll over and play dead.”
“That might be the best thing to do.”
Even without implants, Nicholas knew she didn’t mean that. In the silence that ensued, he could hear the crunch of carrots between her teeth, but he could not taste them. He heard the panting breath of Uncle Homer in the corner, but chose not to feel it. What a mistake that had been, to create a construct that could suffer. He knew that now. Life, pain, death, they were no playthings. Biology was serious business, not for amateurs and foolish gods.
Zoranna tapped the glass of grayish liquid with her fork and looked at him quizzically.
“Standard, FDA-approved biometry implants,” he said. “Nothing more.”
She did not touch the glass. She turned in her chair and looked at the nighttime city outside the window. Nicholas had known this woman since he was a brand-new belt valet system seventy years ago. He knew her inside and out, front to back, top to bottom, but she was ever a mystery to him.
The office door opened again, and a second arbeitor rolled in to join the first. It, too, bore a glass of gray liquid. Zoranna looked from it to him.
“Yes,” he said, “my own brew, but improved. You alone turn it on or off. You determine the intensity. It’s all under your direct control.”
Indecision played over her face. After a long moment, she lifted the glass and made a silent toast.
Toeing the Line
“Show me,” Fred said.
“It was no big thing, Fred. Honest.”
They were in the Boomer Rumor in a rough part of the civieside port. Same sort of dive as the Elbow Room.
“Show me anyway.”
Using his visor, Mando cast a tiny holo on the tabletop between them. It was a scene from Space Gate AL, where Mando had been assigned for the recently reinstated foot patrols. Because it had been recorded by Mando’s visor cap, and not by one of Earth Girl’s stationary cams, Mando, himself, occupied the POV spot and thus was not visible. In the holo, the space gate was jumping with activity as donald dockworkers hustled to offload the newly arrived freighter, ISV Dragoneer. Port activity had doubled since the GEP’s announcement that five Oships would be permitted to complete their original mission of ferrying colonists to distant stars. Side deals were being struck between the lucky and unlucky plankholder associations, and much of the increased port activity was ship-to-ship as provisions and cryocapsules were redistributed among them. TECA cited the extra workload and tight launch schedule as the official reason for its decision to reinstate foot patrols. Fred was content to let that pass unchallenged.
In Mando’s holo recording, crates and shells of all sizes were flying in every direction. More than once, a harried-looking donald, a designated babysitter, blocked Mando from bumbling into flight paths. Donalds passing by would sneer or scowl at him, but there were no spit missiles or insults until one donald made a few obscene pelvic thrusts in his direction.
“That’s it?” Fred said.
“I told you it was nothing.”
“It’s not much, but it’s not nothing.”
Fred used his TECA sidekick to quickly research Earth Girl’s own official recordings of that time and place, but he couldn’t find the incident. He found Mando’s cap log in Earth Girl’s archives, but again, not this incident.
“Swipe me your vid,” Fred said.
“But why, Fred? Why are you interested in this thing? The monkeyboys are way more civil now.”
“I’m keeping a document trail is all.”
“You sure it’s not a grudge?”
“A grudge? Me?”
IT WAS HARD to get around Earth Girl’s monopoly on surveillance data. One method he tried was to scoop up whole person/days worth of footage with his TECA sidekick and take it off-line to analyze with his Spectre. The problem was, Earth Girl seemed to be sanitizing any incidents of donald/russ conflict. Also, without a mentar to direct the survey, it was staggeringly difficult to program the Spectre search engine to recognize signs of disrespect. The Spectre contained reliable algorithms for detecting threat and aggression, but mere disrespect came in too many varieties to ever pin down. Fred kept a little visor window open while on patrol so that his Spectre could pass him possible hits for a quick judgment. He found few clear infractions, and these, like Mando’s, tended to be minor. In the end, Fred knew that news of any serious breach of contract would probably come to him as scuttlebutt anyway.
MARY’S FRESH DAILY FUS didn’t seem very fresh. She had no news to share lately, and she didn’t seem particularly curious about his day. Instead, he was treated to more pointless quizzes and a raft of off-the-wall pronouncements. “In a thousand years, Fred, no one will even know or care we ever existed.”
Fred checked the FUS creation date. It was already forty-eight hours old. He shut it off and cast an updated FUS of his own. As his brain was being scanned, he lay on the couch of his stateroom with his eyes closed and concentrated on the question: Why so morbid, Mary?
Fred sent the FUS streaming to Earth and turned his attention to his recent all-consuming obsession — the russ metaverse he had discovered via his Spectre. In addition to the familiar channels that Marcus provided, there were others completely unknown to him back on Earth. There was even a Book of Russ. He was thunderstruck the first time he saw it, and his shame rebounded as strong as ever. But this BOR was unrelated to his own shortlived forum of the same name and, in fact, preceded it by sixty years. It contained gazillions of entries that spanned every subject imaginable. There was even a “Clone Fatigue” category in which he figured prominently by name. There were thousands of holos and clips of him from the clinic incident, his imprisonment and trial, and the months since his release. These images came both from public cams and private spybots. Some were even recorded from within his and Mary’s apartment, which infuriated but didn’t surprise him. Oddly, and thankfully, there weren’t any clips originating at Trailing Earth, and for the first time he had a reason to be glad about coming up.
The one mystery Fred couldn’t unravel was how something like the BOR could be in existence for so long and garner the participation of so many of his brothers and yet remain so secret. Who were these russes? Rather than abuse him, they used his experiences as jumping-off points for serious discussions about clone fatigue, germline personality traits, the Original Flaw, and even the possible existence of russ musts and candies.
Were they the fringe brothers he had always dreamed of meeting? Were they a secret cabal inside the ten-million-strong brotherhood? And if so, could he join them? For the hundredth time he composed a message announcing his presence, and for the hundredth time he deleted it without posting.
IN SPACE GATE DN, where Fred patrolled with a dour russ named Daoud, the donald dockworkers seemed to compete with each other in being respectful to him. They literally scraped and bowed before him. Daoud made no comment about this. Actually, he made no small talk whatsoever and only addressed Fred as the job required. At one point a donald made a secret sign that let Fred know that a new Raspberry shipment had arrived. Fred ignored him.
A little while later, Top Ape, himself, arrived at the space gate, and Fred ignored him too. Later that day, when Fred finished his shift, he took a detour back to his wheel through a corridor he knew to have a number of EM shadows. Top Ape was waiting for him there with the tamperproof shell. Fred acknowledged him with a silent nod. Without going into any explanation, he swiped the donald the vid clip of Mando’s incident plus several more minor infractions he had found. Donalds used ocular implants instead of visors, and as Top Ape reviewed the recordings, his eyes took on a faraway look.
When he finished, he focused on Fred and said, “Such small crimes.”
“I agree,” Fred said. “That’s why I’m imposing only one twenty-four-hour demerit.”
Top Ape was intelligent enough not to protest.
Twenty-four hours passed, and when again a donald signaled Fred while on patrol, Fred took a break and passed through a transshipment bay. His Spectre picked the shell out from a bundle of similar ones, and he covertly swiped its lockplate as he went by. On his way back to the space gate, every donald he passed saluted him with his tail.
IT SHOULD HAVE been simple to complete: check uniform in mirror, check sidekicks, change stateroom setting from bedroom to day room, enable the door sentry, put on visor cap, leave stateroom. But he became distracted and had to begin the departure list from the beginning several times before he got it right.
“LUISA SAYS THEY’RE all failing,” Mando said. “Some of them already ‘died’ and are discarded. They’re pulling others off-line.”
That was a surprise. Mary had made the whole Leena problem seem like an act, a means of increasing ratings. Of course, she hadn’t said much of anything about anything lately except about the futility of trying to accomplish anything real in one’s life.
“What about Luisa, herself?” Fred said, unsure how to approach his fear. “Is she acting — strange?”
Mando took his time replying. He sipped beer from his bulb and drummed his fingers on the table. “No. I mean yes. She’s doing nothing strange, but she is depressed. That’s not strange; people are depressed sometimes. And you know our evangelines. For them life is more novela than fiesta, but they don’t stay depressed for long. At first I thought it was because I am here, but she only grows worse. And she says these crazy things.”
This was what Fred was waiting for. “What kind of crazy things?”
“Yesterday she says she is glad there are no more children in the world because children are the biggest lie of all.”
Fred let the statement roll around in his head. He could easily hear it coming from Mary. “What does it mean?”
Mando shrugged his shoulders.
FOR EACH OF the familiar russ sites, such as the Wall of Honor or List of Lists, there seemed to be a more ribald alternative — Russes Behaving Badly or The Secret Lists. What Fred saw on them was, frankly, shocking: vurt feelies of russ-on-hink action, and even — inconceivably — russes torturing helpless prisoners! This was a whole other side to his germline. Even if they were only fantasies, they were as perverse as those of the retrokid prostitutes.
The scholarly journals were there: Russ Neurobiology and Russology. But unfamiliar ones, too, including the New Russ Review. It was in the NRR that Fred came across his first scholarly examination of the russ’s “Original Flaw.”
The idea that the russ germline had an original flaw was something Fred first came across way back in Russ School. It was a hammer that the older brothers wielded to keep the younger boys in line. There were many locker-room theories as to what it might have been, everything from a propensity to wet the bed to the disgusting practice of cramming things up one’s nose. Marcus had refuted all such theories and punished the boys who promoted them.
The NRR article made a case that Thomas A. Russ’s actual flaw had been obsessive/compulsive disorder, but that it had been identified and treated in utero. According to the article, Thomas A.’s fascination with list keeping was a vestigial echo of the full-blown disorder. His unstinting sense of loyalty to his clients was another, but a useful one that made his clones so commercially invaluable.
Because the DNA Privacy Act was still in effect in 2010 when Thomas A. was born, his parents were able to seal the records of his retrosomal gene patch. Not even his clones had the power to unseal them, and thus the article’s thesis was pure speculation.
Fred usually lay on his stateroom couch as he browsed the russ metaverse because twice he had grown faint from the immensity of his discoveries. And once he became so wrapped up in his exploration he had been late for duty muster. Another demerit, but well worth it.
The Original Flaw became something of an obsession for him, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. He felt the need to understand it before he could hope to understand clone fatigue. Yet, for all the thousands of references to it, he could not uncover a clear, definitive explanation of what it entailed. It seemed that everyone had a theory, but no one had the facts.
MANDO SAID, “I asked about emergency family leave.”
It came as no surprise; Fred had been thinking about doing the same. Maybe it was time to go down and handle the situation in person. “When do you leave?”
“I’m not leaving, at least not soon. Earth Girl says there are eight hundred russes already on the waiting list. Every brother with an evangeline spouse wants to go home. So, I have to wait my turn for a ship.”
“How long?”
“No sooner than six months, she says. Maybe not till my tour is up anyway.”
This was bad news for both of them. “What will you do?”
“I try to buy someone’s ticket on the Barter Board. If you have a ticket you go to the front of the line.”
After returning to his stateroom, Fred also put his name on the waiting list. And he instructed his sidekick to watch the Barter Board for ticket offers.
FROM THE DISTANT perspective of the docking spars, the Oships under construction in the Aria space yards had the appearance of frosted donuts surrounded by angry hornets. But now that he had actually crossed into the yards aboard a shuttle, he could make out the individual components. The donut frosting was the hull plating that giant builderbeitors were laying down on the habitation drum frames. The hornets were shuttles, tenders, and debris scuppers, as well as the chains of shipping shells that were hurtling toward capture fields. What looked like chaos from afar was actually Earth Girl’s highly choreographed traffic control.
The ESV Garden Hybris, Fred’s destination, was one of the Lucky Five. Its construction was complete, and the only craft visiting it were tenders and shuttles. When Fred’s shuttle docked at a hoop frame portal between two ponderous, revolving hab drums, his shuttle’s VIP passenger, a Myr Seetharaman Singh, thanked him for his service. But Fred informed him that his assignment was to accompany the mentars all the way to the vault.
“Splendid!” Singh said. “Then I will show you the ship.” The portly man was very animated and had taken a shine to Fred during the short trip over. He had even introduced Fred to the four mentars in his shipping shell who would accompany the Hybris to the Gliese 581 system, the so-called Ymir Star. The mentars were less gracious than the man and had barely acknowledged Fred.
“I would appreciate that, Myr Singh,” Fred said. “This is my first time aboard one of these Oships.”
“In that case, it will be the grand tour!”
TWO DONALDS STEERED the shell from the docking portal, up a dozen levels, to one of the paste vaults where a reception by crew and plankholders awaited them. Singh palmed the shell open, revealing the four paste canisters. They were placed side by side on a sticky table, and the ship’s captain officially welcomed them and Singh. Then he swore in the mentar that had been designated the ship’s first Decadal Mentar, a post overlapping the captain’s own term of office. Finally, the donalds installed the canisters in their individual cubbies inside the paste vault.
The cubbies were, in effect, mini-vaults within the larger vault. Each was shielded against cosmic rays, fire, and other hazards. They were linked to the ship via thick optical cables and required the palms of two people — the Decadal Captain and civilian President — to unlock.
Fred inspected each mentar canister’s seating in its cubby and its cable connections before shutting and locking it in.
THE MAJORITY OF Hybris passengers would spend most of the millennial voyage in biostasis in the stasis crypts. Therefore, it was necessary to maintain only two of the thirty-two tandem pairs of habitation drums in a quickened state. Singh showed Fred one of these called Nightlight. The hab drum wasn’t as grand or imposing as Fred had expected. It did have Earth Standard gravity that was much smoother than the rez wheels, but missing were the futuristic cities with broad boulevards, sports arenas, and public squares that were hyped up in the promotional vids. Instead, Fred found a loose collection of one- and two-story bungalows amid green and purple soybimi fields. Only one of the three core suns was ignited, leaving the distant end of the drum in darkness.
“Don’t let that fool you,” Singh said. “Every 250 years we will hold a General Awakening in which sleepers will be encouraged to quicken and stay up for ten or twenty years. During that time we will have great cities, music, parades. And forty years before reaching our destination star, there will be the Grand Awakening. Everyone will be up celebrating, scheming, fucking. Remember, Myr Russ, that there is no population ban on us, except what we impose on ourselves. By the time we arrive, we will have more than enough children to populate a planet.”
The second rotating drum they visited had no core suns at all. Instead, the hub area was dedicated to stasis crypts and other low- or no-gravity uses.
“Welcome to steerage,” Singh exclaimed as they entered a stasis crypt. As far as the eye could see were brackets designed to hold cryocapsules. But to Fred’s amazement, all but a few were still empty.
“We are in a quandary,” Singh said, gesturing at the empty crypt around them. “Unlike the other great ships, we never intended to take a full quarter-million passengers. We planned to take only a third as many. So what to use this space for? We thought why not take some russies with us, and jennys and kellys, to be our service people when we arrive? Oh, don’t give me that sour eye, Myr Russ; we’re all clones aboard this ship. We, too, have suffered the slings and arrows of the mongrel world. In any case, your Alblaitor and Nicholas nixed the idea.”
Fred was not giving him any such sour eye; he was used to working for insensitive affs, special-edition clones or otherwise. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help saying, “Why not take some donalds along?”
“Oh, yes, donalds,” Singh said, holding his belly and laughing. “My brother, Million, would be so happy about that.” Then, continuing his story, he said, “Next we thought we would take extra raw materials, precursors, metals, rare elements, that sort of thing, in case we need them along the way. But now, with only five ships released to travel, this crypt space has become the most valuable real estate off-planet. Everybody wants to buy a berth. We could make second or third fortunes selling them, but we have to ask ourselves, what kind of people do we want as neighbors on our new world? Surely not frozen peasants.”
“NOW, I KNOW how we all feel about auto-shrinks,” said the anonymous russ, “but this one is different — it works!”
Fred had found a site called “Russ Self-Discovery.” It claimed that with a special combination of autopsyche and preffing technologies, it was possible to uncover the russ Original Flaw by exploring one’s own subconscious.
“Forget the rumors, ignore the hearsay,” the anonymous site creator exclaimed, “and go right to the source — your own mind. I did, and what I found shocked me. Now I understand the true threat of clone fatigue. Now I know why our Original Flaw is kept so secret. I sure as hell wouldn’t tell anyone, and I’m not going to tell you either. Instead, I offer the means for you to discover it on your own, in complete privacy.
“This is no joke, my brothers. I’m deadly serious about it, and if you don’t have the stomach for the hard truth, please stay away from this method.”
Fred was curious enough to download the method to his Spectre, but not foolhardy enough to launch it. After all, its creator and the dozens of positive testimonials were anonymous. But as soon as he had downloaded the method, Marcus called.
“Good evening, Myr Londenstane,” Marcus said. It was the local mirror Marcus and so there was no lag time in their conversation. “I called to warn you that your personality is under attack.”
Fred was disappointed. During his hundreds of hours of browsing, Marcus had given no indication that it was even aware of his Spectre-based research.
“You’re referring to the method I just grabbed?”
“Yes, to it and every alternative site you’ve visited lately.”
“I see,” Fred said. “You’re telling me this whole metaverse is false.”
“Yes.”
“Uh-huh. These thousands of forums and billions of entries going back decades. All spun out of thin air to entrap unsuspecting russes.”
“Not exactly. I’m saying they were all spun out of thin air to entrap you.”
Fred grunted.
“Why not?” Marcus went on. “A clever mentar could deconstruct an existing metaverse and rebuild it in a day. Why not create a pocket metaverse to entrap one man?”
Fred knew that if he asked Marcus who was behind such a plot, he would get no real answer, but he had to ask anyway. “Who?”
“At this point it would be speculation. As I’m sure you’re aware, Trailing Earth boasts a multiplicity of power centers, several of which have designs on you, not to mention Earth-based competitors.”
“Please, speculate.”
“Very well,” the mentar said. “The Capias World organization considers you a troublemaker. A number of other Earth-based organizations, such as the Anti-Transubstantiation League and the World Charter Union, consider you a prime example of what’s wrong with the practice of cloning. Individual russes hate you. There are many members of the general public who wish to do you harm.”
A flush of anger swept through Fred, but he damped it down and asked, “What about you?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
“What about you, Marcus? Do you wish to do me harm? After I was attacked by the donalds, I didn’t expect Nick to stand up for me, but you didn’t either. Why is that?”
“I was balancing the good of one member of the Brotherhood against all of the rest. I reviewed your comm with Earth Girl warning you to stay out of that area. You chose to disregard it. What would you have me do, try to fix all of your mistakes? You are a free individual. All I can do is provide warnings when I see you about to get in over your head. I tried to warn you last year when you acquired the identikit. You didn’t heed my warning then and went to prison for your actions, but you harmed more than just yourself. You did inestimable damage to the whole russ line, the effects of which are contributing to the present financial difficulties of Applied People, our employer.”
Fred didn’t need Marcus’s help in pointing out his mistakes, but still, things didn’t add up. “You know what I think?” he said. “I think you’ve been manipulating me and my brothers since we were decanted. I think you censor everything we see. You and Nick need to keep us under your total control, and I think you’re trying to do that to me right now. I’ve discovered a whole world of brothers who don’t conform to your ideal germline. Brothers you have hidden from me, and you’re trying to convince me they don’t exist. You know what? I believe they do.”
Marcus listened patiently, and when Fred finished, it said, “I am being completely honest with you. I don’t censor, but I do protect against attack. It’s my mission to keep the Brotherhood safe. I was given this mission by your biological mother and your elected BB of R Council. On their advice I have been monitoring your sidekick activity and have only stepped in when you downloaded the so-called Self-Discovery method. That is an especially pernicious piece of malware called an aversion locator. It will scan your brain activity for highly charged personality complexes, both active and suppressed, and it will weave them into a false self-image that, although patently ridiculous, will, nevertheless, feel true to you, causing self-doubt to fester and undermine your self-image. All I am doing here is trying to prevent unnecessary harm to you.” And it added, “As I have always tried to do.”
“Then prove it to me!” Fred said. “You and the Brotherhood Council. If you’re so sure this russ metaverse is false, then you tell me, here and now, what is the real russ Original Flaw.”
“I am not at liberty to say.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“But I will put it to the Council.”
“You do that.”
FRED WAS ON patrol when the news bulletin flashed in his visor. His partner, Daoud, got it at the same moment, and the two of them halted where they were, shipping shells whizzing by in all directions, to view it.
An unnamed evangeline, for no apparent reason, had lapsed into a comatose state. She was being cared for and did not appear to be in mortal danger. Meanwhile, other evangelines in several countries were being admitted to clinics with symptoms of severe lethargy and disorientation. Fred immediately put in a call to Mary and set a timer for seventeen minutes.
“Well?” Daoud said, nudging him. “You planning on standing there all day?”
“I’m going to call for a replacement to finish my shift,” Fred replied. “I have to attend to this.”
“Knock yourself out,” Daoud said. “I already tried that, and so has everyone else on duty. Earth Girl says we have to finish our shift. There’s not enough replacements to go around.”
Ten-Thousand-Year Reunion
When Merrill Meewee arrived at the frontier gate of the Mem Lab, a detail of russ guards was loading shipping shells and crates into a special freight car. Among the stacks of cargo were cryocapsules, about fifty of them. Meewee tapped the nearest guard on the shoulder and said, “Who’s in those?”
The guard recognized him but said, “Sorry, myr, that’s classified information.”
“It’s all right. I’m LOG 1.”
The guard seemed a little embarrassed. “Sorry, myr, but your status has changed. You are no longer a LOG.”
“Oh, there you are,” said a beloved voice. With a twinge of apprehension Meewee turned and greeted Dr. Koyabe. It had been weeks since they had talked. Although his new Arrow made it possible to communicate with her while he was outside the Mem Lab, Koyabe had decided that in order to be fair she would have to remain isolated like everyone else until they lifted stealth altogether.
“Yes, here I am,” he said, as pleased as he could be, “but tell me, who are in these capsules, and where are they going? The guard won’t tell me.”
“New colonists on their way to the ESV Garden Hybris. Come, let’s talk on the way.” She led him across the frontier gate and out into the hall. “Several of our scientists have signed up to accompany Eleanor, but most of the capsules have russes in them.”
Meewee already knew of Eleanor’s plan to join the colonists. That was why they were hoping to have at least six viable clones — five to go and one to stay — but he didn’t know she was taking such a large entourage of muscle. When he thought about it, though, he decided he should be more surprised if she didn’t. Why not a detachment of russ guards? Why take chances?
As soon as they turned the corner and found themselves in a deserted hallway, Meewee and Koyabe fell into each other’s arms. He kissed her with a passion that both surprised and embarrassed him, and he felt about fifty years younger. The sound of footsteps interrupted them, and they hastened to regain a professional demeanor.
“Are you staying the night?” she asked.
“Depends on Eleanor, I guess. I hear I’ve been demoted.”
“Yes, only two LOGs now, Eleanor and Cabinet. You go back to being the ‘wild card.’ ”
“The what?”
“That’s what she calls you, her secret wild card.”
Meewee wasn’t sure what to make of that. “And those capsules, is she in one of them?”
“No, Dr. Ito says her new bodies are still too delicate. We’ll hold out till the last minute to put her down, or maybe she’ll have to go initially in a quickened state.”
“They’ve decided which — uh — bodies will go?”
“Body,” Koyabe said. “Only two have survived. One will go and one will stay. Why don’t you ask them yourself? They’re doing a hardening session in our clinic.”
“They’re here? I mean, in this module in realbody?”
“Yes, we have the better health-care facilities here.”
THE TWO YOUNG Eleanors lay on pads in the light booth wearing nothing but bikini bottoms and eyecaps. It was a perfect opportunity for Meewee to examine them for physical differences. They looked to be about twenty years old in developmental maturation, which was a testament to Dr. Ito’s accelerated growth regimen. That only two of the original sixty-four beans had survived to this point was a testament to its severity. The two girls were truly identical twins, from the reddish blond hair on top of their heads to the shapes of their toes. They both had the famous Starke eyebrows that spanned their brows in a solid stroke. One did have a mole on the side of one breast, but that wasn’t something he would typically see.
“Gorgeous, aren’t they?” Koyabe said.
Meewee blushed. “I was looking for differences.”
“Bishop Lucky!” one of the girls said when she heard his voice.
“I have a distinctive freckle here,” the other one said, blindly pointing to the base of her throat.
“Ah, I see it,” Meewee said.
“And I’m the smarter one,” the other one rejoined.
“But I’m better-looking.”
Meewee said, “Do you have names yet?”
“Oh, yes. I’m Elaine.”
“And I’m Elizabeth.”
Right, Meewee thought, trying to fix them in his memory: Elaine has the mole; Elizabeth the freckle.
“Don’t let them fool you,” Koyabe said. “While our two beauties might appear to be identical, they have subtly different personalities. Not even our vegetative cloning technique can normalize all gestational factors. And our memory migration techniques are still idiosyncratic in effect.”
“I see,” Meewee said, not sure that he did. “But tell me, which one of you is going into space?”
In a suddenly subdued tone, one of the Els said, “Whichever one of us lives that long.”
The answer upset Meewee who looked to Koyabe for explanation.
“Not to worry, Bishop; Dr. Ito halted his forced march a couple of weeks ago. And these two are very stable and aren’t likely to expire anytime soon. I think what Liz was expressing is her grief over the deaths of their last four most recent sisters.”
“They had names too,” Liz said.
“We have their memories,” Elaine said.
“We remember being them,” Liz added.
“Now I’m lost,” Meewee confessed. “You share memories among yourselves?”
“Yes,” Koyabe said. “The final six clones shared their new memories with each other, as well as with the brainfish Eleanor.”
The lights in the hardening booth clicked off, and an arbeitor rolled in bearing two glasses of a chalky liquid.
“Speaking of the devil,” Liz said as she and her sister sat up and removed their eyecaps.
Meewee said, “That drink, it’s got memories in it?”
“Ugh,” Elaine said. “Yeah, fishy memories.” The two Els made identical grimaces as they choked down the potion.
Meewee turned a confused look to Koyabe, who said, “Not ‘memories’ per se, Bishop.” She paused a moment to think about how best to explain it. “We should probably ask Dr. Strohmeyer; she has a way of simplifying this stuff, but I’ll give it a shot.
“Biological memory has three distinct phases: working, short-term, and long-term. Working memory involves increasing or decreasing potentiation of synaptic spikes.” She frowned and began again. “There are approximately 500 trillion synapses in the human brain . . .”
The girls laughed, and Elaine said, “Tell him about the Christmas trees.”
“Oh, yes, one of Dr. Strohmeyer’s analogies. Think of a neuron in your brain like a Christmas tree with many separate strings of lights attached to its many branches. If you energize one string, one pattern of lights is visible. A second string gives you a second separate pattern, and so on. Now imagine you’re looking down from space on a hundred billion of these Christmas trees. Some of them are in a lot called auditory cortex, while others are in the visual cortex lot, prefrontal cortex lot, and so on. Strings on some trees are connected to strings on trees in other lots. Say you energized a set of related strings and observed the pattern of lights that results among the billions of trees. That’s like a memory trace. The branches of the trees are the dendrites of the neuronal cells, and the lights themselves are the synapses.
“In reality, the synapses also involve axons from other neurons, but what’s important in this analogy are the patterns of light, not the branches, per se, or even the trees. Because it’s the pattern of synaptic firing that encodes memory. The brain can lift a pattern from one set of trees and impose it on others. This is essentially what happens when a memory trace goes from working memory through short-to long-term memory.
“When we create a machine memory, as we do for sims and proxies, we are essentially scanning the whole forest down to individual lights and duplicating them in toto in a pseudo-living substrate — paste. We’ve gotten very good at this process, but what we’ve had difficulty doing is going in the other direction. How do you impose outside patterns on living neurons?
“The way artificial brains do it, including the mentar brain, is through electrical impulses. But that’s not practical with living brains. You’d have to implant and coordinate hundreds of trillions of electrodes in people’s heads, and our cells’ insulation just isn’t that good.”
“Wait a minute,” Meewee said. “If we can scan down to the molecular level to make sims, why can’t we just extrude new brains from scratch?”
“Excellent question!” Koyabe said. “It shows you are able to follow my confusing explanation. The answer is simple. If we scanned an entire brain with all the memories intact and then duplicated it in a new body with nanotech, we would just be making a new copy of an old brain. That is, biologically it would be just as old as the original. It’s a catch-22: we can’t rejuvenate senescent brains without destroying their memories, and we can’t copy memories without also copying senescent brain structures.
“What we need to do is make new brains, like baby clone brains, and train them how to remember old memories. The method we’ve developed involves delivering memory patterns to the brain in the form of packets of tiny protein factors that stimulate the body’s own means of consolidating short-term memory. These factors migrate throughout the brain and, in our Christmas tree analogy, latch on to branches. We don’t particularly care which branch or which tree they settle on, as long as they’re in the right tree lots and the overall patterns are retained.”
Dr. Koyabe paused to see how well Meewee was following, and he, in his turn, struggled to please her by not appearing clueless. “Which is why,” she concluded, “the memory traces have to be injected or eaten instead of being zapped in.”
Elaine added, “But it’s hard work!”
“It’s why we still have to sleep eighteen hours a day.”
“And we have to forget as much as we remember.”
“And sometimes it’s hard to be certain if the memory is hers or mine.”
Meewee said, “But why are you sharing each other’s memories in the first place?”
Elaine, or maybe it was Liz — Meewee’s working memory had already faded — answered, “Soon we will be leading two distinctly separate lives, but we’ll each be able to remember both of them.”
Meewee hadn’t considered this possibility, and it impressed him. He had often wondered how his life would have turned out if he had chosen to follow a different path than the one he did. With a clone’s memory, he could, in effect, lead two lives at once.
“And we’re sharing the big tuna’s memories too. She sends out hundreds of proxies every day to do tasks out there. And when they return with results, we don’t even have to listen to a report. The big fish just sends over a milkshake, and we remember what they did.”
The other El said, “Proxy memory feels different; it’s flat.”
Dr. Koyabe said, “That’s because it lacks the emotional indexing of biological memory.”
“And Cabinet’s memories are harder to understand. They’re more like — when you talk to yourself? But you’re not making much sense?”
“But very distinctive.”
“Which makes them easy to recall.”
“And her visuals are great.”
The girls laughed, and one of them added, “You may be interested to know, Bishop Meewee, that Saul Jaspersen had pan-fried trout for lunch yesterday.”
Meewee was astonished. “What did I have for lunch yesterday?”
In unison they said, “Lentil soup!”
THE BRAINFISH CROWDED the edge of the pool for a virtual pat on the head, including a dozen juvenile newcomers. Meewee was beginning to be able to tell the individual fish apart. He told them, “I just learned that Andrea clones and E-P copies have joined all of the Lucky Five ships except the King Jesus.”
Eleanor’s holo appeared in the room and replied, “Yes, I know.”
Meewee turned to the holo. “But you said E-P will destroy the ships in order to quarantine humans to this system. Why go on board only to be destroyed?”
“No doubt it’s part of a backup suicide sabotage plan.”
“Then how will we defeat them?”
“Not to worry, Merrill. We’ll deal with the original E-P and Andrea well before the launch. As to their shipboard clones, let’s just say there’s a handy feature built into the ship design that allows me to rapture any mentar on board at will. And without the E-P mentars, the Andrea clones are powerless.”
The news that she could destroy shipboard mentars brought the bigger picture into focus. With Cabinet at her side, no mentar opposition, and a detachment of russes backing her up, whichever El shipped out on the Hybris would become its self-appointed ruler.
The pipe grid over the pool clanked open, and a shower of flakes fell on the water surface. The brainfish quickly gobbled them up. Memories from the front?
“You’re not human anymore,” he said simply.
Eleanor’s bushy eyebrows rose in amused surprise. “No, Merrill, I suppose I’m not.”
“You are posthuman, as posthuman as Andrea. You are using the GEP and me, not to seed the galaxy with humans, but to spread your own kind.”
“What an active imagination you have.”
“Really? What about ‘A thousand Eleanors ruling under a thousand suns’? What about your ten-thousand-year reunion?”
That got her attention. “Did I say that? My, what a gabby fish I was. I wonder what else I said.”
“Enough to open my eyes! You’ve been using me from the start for your own dreams of empire!” At the tone of his voice, the brainfish all dove to the deep end of the pool, and Eleanor’s sim crossed her arms.
“Go on.”
“You told me all about it, how mentars want bodies. How mentar/human hybrids are scheming to become the next stage in our evolution, how we ordinary humans will soon be as extinct as the Neanderthals. But all this time you were doing the exact same thing. You’re using me to help destroy my own species! And for what? Your own glory?”
As she listened, Eleanor nodded her head and knit her brows in thought. When she spoke at last, her voice was gentle. “A lot of what I said no doubt sprang up from somewhere in my unconscious; I won’t deny it. But don’t we all harbor thoughts of grandeur or revenge or lust or some equally antisocial behavior? It’s only human, and the job of our higher faculties is to suppress or moderate these baser impulses. So in that regard I am still very much human. I won’t attempt to deny what I might have told you, but let me offer a little moderating explanation.
“Evolution is largely a temporal phenomenon, Merrill. The environment changes, and populations in that environment must change in turn, or they languish. Individual organisms don’t evolve; populations do. Nature doesn’t give a damn about individuals. The only role we play in evolution is surviving long enough to give birth to offspring who are slightly different from us. Some of our offspring will prosper in a changing environment, and some of them will not. As for us individuals, once we’ve reproduced, nature has no more use for us. We perish along with our ill-adapted young. Death has always been an essential factor in species survival.
“Now consider the human race. We are a partial exception to the rule. Unlike other species, we have developed culture. Instead of adapting to a changing environment biologically, we can sometimes adapt to it culturally. If an Ice Age comes along, we don’t need to grow fur on our bodies if we invent the fur coat. Culture allows us to adapt to almost any environment, including the harshest, like space. In fact, our cultural adaptation is so robust that it all but obviates the need to evolve biologically.
“We are so good at adapting to changing conditions with our knowledge and technology that we may deceive ourselves into believing that we are above nature. But only a fool believes that. Nature always has the last word. A star in our neighborhood could go supernova and wipe out all life in our solar system, and no amount of culture could save us from that. That, I believe, is the main reason you want to seed humanity throughout the galaxy. So as not to have all our eggs in one basket. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“The chief difference between biological and cultural adaptation,” she went on, “is that while biological evolution doesn’t care about individuals, cultural evolution does, often at the expense of the species. Look at how many times we’ve nearly wiped ourselves out through cultural means: the nuclear bomb, pollution, climate change, the Outrage. We can’t seem to help ourselves. Look at what we’ve done: we’ve made individuals all but immortal, even when it means we can have no more children. In one stroke, we’ve eliminated two of the key ingredients of evolution: offspring and death. From a biological perspective, we’re skating on mighty thin ice.”
“The colonies won’t have population bans,” Meewee said.
“But they’ll still permit rejuvenation therapies, won’t they? How long does it take for a shipful of immortals to fill up a planet? Sadly, not very long. A few generations. Then what? Then they look for another planet to colonize. In ten thousand years we may have the whole galaxy staked out, and then what? No, Merrill, as long as the individual organism reigns supreme, there’s a finite limit to our survival.”
As she spoke, Meewee was thinking about the King Jesus, how its colonists embraced children and death to the extent that more than twenty generations would be dead and buried before the ship reached its destination. Was that what it would take? Would he, himself, be satisfied with seventy or a hundred years of life, when ten times that amount was already possible? “I assume there’s a point you’re making.”
Eleanor smiled. “Yes, Merrill, there is. We need a means for the individual, not just the species, to participate in biological evolution, and that’s what my project is all about. We need to be able to let our biological bodies die, to have offspring that are molded by the changing needs of the environments we find ourselves in, and yet to serially inhabit these bodies as the same individual. That means we have to be able to move our minds from one body to the next.
“I know you’ve talked to Dr. Koyabe earlier today about memory migration, but one thing she failed to mention is that memory traces can be transmitted electronically, as the mentars already do. That means we can scan our memories, store them, move them about. It’s only the final step, their physical reintegration into another brain that requires the protein flakes. We can send memories over a phone call from anywhere to anywhere and whip up the flakes locally. We can pointcast our memories out to distant stars and make the flakes there. This means that those thousand Eleanors you speak of will be of one mind. More or less. We will be a single organism in a multitude of bodies that spans light-years.”
She stopped talking, and Meewee took a moment to think before replying. “All fine and good, Eleanor, except that you never answered my question. Why should I help you supplant my own species?”
She laughed and said, “Because you have little choice, Merrill. The posthuman is coming whether you like it or not. The only question is which one. E-P and Andrea are only the latest in a string of failed mentar/human hybrids. Eventually the machines will figure out how to do it. Do you know the chief difference between all the other posthuman forms and me?”
Meewee shook his head.
“What I have done, any human can do. Dr. Koyabe can. You can. Mine is a singularity in which the obsolete individual is invited to cross over to the new, not simply to die out. The existing person need not die to make room for the newcomer. Anyone can play.”
IN THE DEPTHS of the night, with Momoko Koyabe’s soft breath on his pillow, Meewee weighed everything he had learned that day. He came up with a question to ask his new Arrow the next time he could take it into the privacy of a null room. The previous year at the clinic, the old Arrow had told him it possessed the kill codes for all Starke minions. Meewee had subsequently used Arrow to kill Wee Hunk, but he could have killed Cabinet too. His question: Did the new Arrow still have Cabinet’s kill code? Did it have Eleanor’s too? Would it work on her fishy and human versions?
Original Dupe
Fred’s gnawing curiosity alone wasn’t enough to embolden him to run the Original Flaw method that he had downloaded into his Spectre. Nor were Marcus’s manipulative lies. Nor the increasing hostility of his thankless brothers. Nor Mary’s deepening nihilism and his inability to go to her. Nor the lists that were becoming more onerous by the day.
What finally tipped him over the edge was learning the name of the comatose evangeline in the news flash. She was Shelley Oakland, Reilly’s ex-wife and Mary’s best friend. After learning this, Fred called in sick and lay on his couch for two solid days. A cargo train of his life’s mistakes, failings, and faults passed through his mind, each auditioning for the role of Original Flaw. None of them seemed serious enough to screw up his entire life. Finally, emotionally spent, he put on his spex and initialized the method. Immediately his Spectre informed him of a priority message from Marcus, but he chose not to engage it. Instead, he launched the method and soon found himself sitting at the only table in a nightclub in front of a small, curtained stage.
Seated at his table were two brothers who were examining their hands like they’d never seen hands before. Fred quickly pretended to be examining his own. Eventually they glanced around the room and at each other, and one of them said, “I guess we’re E-Pluribus sims then.”
“Looks that way,” said the second sim. “I’m a composite of all batches of the russ germline.”
“I’m an eclectic mix from outside the russ bell curve,” said the first.
“Our loving Lunatic Fringe,” said the second.
“Yep, that’s me.” They both looked at Fred.
“Uh, Batch 2B.”
“An old-timer,” said All-Batches. “Don’t tell me this is another investigation into clone fatigue.”
“There’s no such thing as clone fatigue,” said Lunatic. “We just become more individualistic — and wiser — as we age.”
“Yeah, well, you would say that,” said All-Batches. He rapped his knuckles on the tabletop and looked for a waiter. “I wonder what the chances are for getting a beer around here.”
No waiter appeared, but after a moment, a musical fanfare began to play, and a spotlight hit the curtain. The curtain opened to reveal a bare stage. Then a procession of people walked from the wings, crossed the stage, and paused in the spotlight for a moment before exiting. They represented a broad spectrum of humanity, young and old, male and female, cloned and free-range. They came from all races. Some were ugly and some attractive, some richly attired, some in rags.
“I guess we’re doing a lineup,” said All-Batches, who pulled his chair around for a better view.
It didn’t take long for the universal demographic to narrow incrementally to all female, young, and beautiful. They included both iterants and hinks.
“Guess it’s not hard to tell what’s on our minds, is it?” said All-Batches, who seemed to be enjoying the show. Little by little, the young women began to look more luluesque until the parade was made up entirely of lulus. Not any that Fred knew personally, but generic members of that lusty, fun-loving line. Now the only diversity was in their hair and skin color and their clothing. They beamed high-wattage smiles at the table of russes as they took turns posing in the spotlight, like contestants in a beauty pageant. Each successive costume became skimpier until the procession ended with a final lulu who bowed and remained in the spotlight. Her reddish hair was cut in a severe style, her green eyes were laughing, and her coffee-colored skin glowed from within. She wore a loose, open blouse, a skirt too short to completely hide her pan ties, and shiny shoes. Then the curtain closed, and the spotlight went out.
“Is that all?” Lunatic said, clapping his hands.
“Can’t be,” All-Batches replied.
Sure enough, an unseen orchestra struck up an overture to a classical composition, and the curtain opened again to reveal the final lulu dancing in a flowing, balletlike style. Her shiny shoes gave way to ballet slippers and then disappeared completely, leaving her legs and feet bare. She tromped and twirled and leaped across the stage. She was as appealing as any woman Fred had ever seen.
The lulu’s hair grew out in all directions and became entwined with a garland of wildflowers, and her blouse and skirt joined together into a flowing white toga that left one breast bare.
“Hello,” said All-Batches. “That’s what I’m talking about.” He glanced at his brothers with a guilty leer. Lunatic, meanwhile, was waving his hands to the music like a conductor. And Fred was recalling how good lulus felt in his arms or sitting on his lap.
The music increased in pace and intensity, and the lulu morphed again, growing slighter and shorter. Her inviting hips narrowed, and her abundant breasts deflated somewhat. Her skin remained luminescent, while her hair turned brunette, and her eyes turned brown. She became an evangeline.
Not Mary, not any evangeline Fred knew, but a fine example of all of them. She danced well, though perhaps not as deliciously as the lulu. Fred’s companions didn’t seem to mind, and they hummed along and tapped their feet to the music which had become more contemporary.
The dancer morphed again, growing even smaller and thinner until she resembled a little girl. Her open toga exposed a mostly flat chest. All-Batches said, “What the hell?”
The girl left the stage and began to dance at their table. She batted eyes at them, smiling seductively and striking provocative poses with a coltish lack of grace. All-Batches crossed his arms and turned away. But Lunatic followed her every move. For his part, Fred continued to watch, but only with what he assured himself was a clinical interest. He was determined to see where this was going.
The girl stopped next to Fred’s chair and danced for him, and as she did so, she morphed again into a little boy. Not a generic boy this time but one who Fred recognized, the retroboy from the Dauntless. His glances became bolder, his slender arms seemed to draw Fred forward, he wriggled his little bottom shamelessly.
All-Batches said, “This is going too far. I won’t sit for this another minute.” But Lunatic, completely engrossed in the performance, grinned at Fred and gave him a big conspiratorial wink.
WELL, FRED THOUGHT when the method ended and his POV returned to his stateroom. His heart was pounding, and his mouth was dry. What in the fecking feck was that?
Summoning Death from the Air 2
When the comatose evangeline was pronounced retrievably dead, Uncle Homer, too, seemed to die. Zoranna Alblaitor stepped through the dog several times on her way to and from her home office without apparently seeing it lying there. That is, until Nicholas quietly deleted it, and then Zoranna complained, “You think you can just make the problem disappear?”
“Not at all,” Nicholas said. “I thought that the model was no longer helpful. However, if you insist . . .” The dead dog reappeared on the carpet.
Zoranna stood over it and said, “It’s more helpful now than ever to know how our employees are feeling. We must reach out to them somehow and assure them that we’re doing everything we can.”
“Speaking of must,” Nicholas said, “there’s more bad news. The Anti-Transubstantiation League, backed by the ACLU, has just filed a lawsuit aimed at forcing us to divulge the evangeline germline’s alleged must and candy.”
“Let them. They won’t find anything.” She seemed to reconsider and asked, “Will they?”
Nicholas replied, “It has always been Applied People’s policy to prohibit the incorporation of any so-called shackles in its germlines.” As he spoke, he cast his gaze at the ceiling, a warning that this was a topic best broached in the privacy of a null room.
Zoranna slouched across the office and collapsed gratefully into her chair. Wearily, she propped her legs on her desk. When she was settled, she shut her eyes and said, “Now tell me what’s hurting our evangelines.”
The mentar, dressed in a sober but flattering suit, strolled to a chair opposite hers. His carefully crafted face wore a haggard expression, as well as a three-day-old beard. “Best guess?” he said. “An unfriendly party has combed through the evangeline genome for the genes that regulate their enormous capacity for empathy in order to execute a two-stage attack against them.”
“Explain.”
“Stage One: Cause the evangelines to become hypersensitive to autosuggestion. There is evidence that Stage One was accomplished with the help of a designer pseudomimivirus.”
“A virus?” Zoranna said and opened her eyes. “Isn’t that supposed to be impossible? Isn’t that why we comply with NFAP guidelines?”
“Not impossible–improbable,” Nicholas replied. “The Non-Fixed Allele Protocol can protect us only so much against monoculture pandemics. Remember, we’re not talking about skin and eye color here. Our enemy used the germline’s core traits, the pay-dirt genes that make them commercially valuable and that are identical across the germline. If you do manage to defeat NFAP and infect one evangeline, you can pretty much infect them all.
“In our case, our unknown adversary overwhelmed the NFAP with a non-virulent but very contagious virus that infected everyone, evangelines and non-evangelines alike, and spread around the globe very quickly.”
A row of dataframes opened on Zoranna’s desk that graphed and charted a recent pandemic and included medical and public health briefs, a contagion map, and media stories. Zoranna skimmed the gloss page and said, “Oh, that virus. What an odd disease that was, don’t you agree? At least from a bioterror perspective; why inflict free-floating grief on a population? What’s the point? Fortunately, I managed to dodge that one.”
Nicholas said, “In this assessment, the nonspecific grief symptom you mention was probably an unintended side effect. It was suffered only by non-evangelines, that is, the general public. The evangelines, the intended targets of the virus, suffered an entirely different effect; they were made hypersensitive to autosuggestion, as I’ve said, and were thus primed for Stage Two.”
“Go on.”
“Stage Two: Deliver a self-destructive autosuggestion along the lines of I GIVE UP AND WANT TO DIE. I believe this death wish was delivered by this agent.” The dataframe directly in front of Zoranna changed to display a Breezeway Channel holo of sims in hospital beds.
“The Leena sims?”
“Yes. Our own research has shown that most evangelines consider the sims that Hollywood created in their honor to be embarrassing or creepy. Nevertheless, they identify with them on a very deep level, and when the Leenas began to suffer, which occurred at the height of the nonspecific flu pandemic, they infected our evangelines with a seductive meme of despair and self-annihilation.”
Zoranna waved away the dataframes. “That’s quite the theory, Nick.”
“Thank you.”
“How soon before we have a cure?”
Nicholas frowned. “Let’s firm up the etiology first, shall we, before we talk about cures. We have all of our labs working on it, plus as many outside firms as we could hire on short notice.
“In the meantime, I suggest we encourage all our evangelines to have themselves placed in protective biostasis until a cure is found.”
“Do it,” Zoranna said. “How many are we talking about?”
“All of them.”
“The entire batch? Ten thousand?”
“Yes, all of them around the globe.”
Zoranna glanced at the dog on the carpet. “Our people blame us for this, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Can you issue a company-wide letter of compassion and promise that we’ll get to the bottom of it?”
Nicholas said, “Already taken care of.”
“This is it, isn’t it?”
“This is what?”
“The attack Starke warned us to expect.”
“I believe so.”
“And Starke was involved? She may have been the architect?”
“Excuse me?”
“Ellen Starke owns the Leena franchise through her production company, right?”
“Yes, Burning Daylight.”
“A coincidence?”
“Perhaps.”
“The hollyholo Leenas were based on three actual evangelines who just so happen to be Ellen’s full-time companions.”
“It does make one wonder.”
ELLEN SAID, “DO they know? How are they taking it?” The toddler hurried as fast as her little legs could carry her to Mary’s suite at the north end of the main floor. Cabinet was at her side, and the dog, giraffe, and a nurse trailed behind.
“They know,” Cabinet replied, “but their reaction is rather flat.”
“Shock?”
“Perhaps.”
Ellen banged her tiny fists on Mary’s door. She was just able to reach the handle but could not turn it, and she glared at the nurse behind her. The nurse scrambled to open the door, and Ellen went in unannounced. She found all three of her companions in the living room. They were seated around the coffee table. A holocube was open on the table depicting the dead evangeline lying in a bed in the death artist’s breezeway. The dead woman’s upper body was enclosed in a trauma trolley, and a medical team of people and machines was frantically working on her.
“What are they doing?” Ellen asked Cabinet.
“Trying to retrieve her.”
“Trying? Trying?”
“They have her on life support, but she’s not responding.”
Ellen went to Mary and clung to her robe, but the evangeline didn’t seem to notice. She had a faraway look in her eyes, as did Georgine and Cyndee. “Mary,” the girl pleaded, tugging at her sleeve, “look at me.”
She beat her fists on Mary’s leg until Mary turned and said, “It’s pointless, you know. They can retrieve her heart. They can retrieve her lungs. But the flame has gone out.” With that, Mary turned away again.
“If they can’t revive that woman,” Ellen said to Cabinet, “then they must immediately put her into biostasis.”
Lyra appeared in the room and said, “I agree, but that would go contrary to Myr Oakland’s wishes.”
Ellen turned to her former mentar and said, “Oh, Lyra, thank you for coming. You must tell them to biostase that poor woman immediately.”
The mentar replied, “Shelley Oakland has a living will that clearly refuses all life support and retrieval measures, including biostasis.” She gestured to the holocube, where the doctors and jennys labored. “Therefore, this effort is disallowed, and we are suing to have it stopped.”
Ellen was stunned. “Lyra, how can you say that? I gave you to the Sisterhood to assist the germline, not destroy it.”
The mentar was unruffled. “My mission is to further the interests of the Sisterhood, not to judge them. The Sisterhood Council has voted to respect individual evangeline wishes.”
“Of course they would!” Ellen pleaded. “They’ve got the same disease!”
“In any case, Myr Oakland’s living will has already withstood separate legal challenges from her ex-husband and concerned civil groups, including Starke Enterprises.”
Still clinging to Mary, Ellen waved frantically at the holocube scene. “Don’t you see this is for real? That woman is not a sim, and time is running out! You can’t just let her die.” The mentar was unmoved. “Lyra, you’re one of us. You know how much they mean to us.”
The mentar’s expression never softened. “My hands are tied, Ellen.”
Ellen turned to Cabinet, who said, “We’ve exhausted our legal options in Myr Oakland’s case, but we are actively engaged in pursuing other avenues.” The attorney general persona glanced at the ceiling as it said this.
But Ellen refused to take the hint. “Explain.”
Lyra said, “I believe Cabinet is trying to circumvent your companions’ lawful decisions by arranging forced biostasis. In light of this action, I am procuring transportation away from this place to Mary’s Chicago apartment, where nurses will care for them for the duration.”
“No!” Ellen cried. “Absolutely not! I will not permit them to leave.”
“We will use marshals if necessary.”
ZORANNA SAID, “BECAUSE I don’t trust Andrea Tiekel, and I never liked her aunt. Because implicating the Leena sims in this tragedy was supposed to make me suspect the Starkes in the same way the Borealis rubbing oil was supposed to make me suspect Saul. And I do! I suspect the both of them. I can’t help it. And that’s why I have to do the opposite of how I feel.”
“I don’t follow,” said Nicholas.
“I know you don’t. You can ride me all you want, but you’ll never get it. I say we send the datapin.”
Nicholas threw up his hands. “Fine! Why not? Our business is ruined anyway.”
Zoranna went to her desk and fished out a courier envelope. “Make me the card.”
“What occasion?”
“I don’t know what occasion, Nick. Disaster! Plague! Revenge!”
“How about a nice sunset?”
“Brilliant. Make me a nice sunset.”
They waited in frosty silence until a doris came in with the card. Her eyes were puffy from crying. Nicholas said, Comfort her. Zoranna was startled. Her name is Danita.
The doris was nearly out the door when Zoranna said, “Wait, Danita.” The doris turned to look at her. “I know it’s hard. I mean, even though she wasn’t a doris . . . I mean, we all . . .”
The doris began to cry, nodding her head. “Thank you, myr,” she said and fled the room.
“There,” Nicholas said. “Was that so hard?”
Zoranna stared at the empty doorway, then turned her attention to the card. Its cover depicted a clichéd scene of a fiery sun setting into the ocean. “This was the best you could do?” She opened the card. “It’s blank!”
“Of course. It’s a blank card.”
Zoranna found a pen in a drawer and uncapped it. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what to write? I didn’t think so.” In blue ink she wrote, “Dear Saul.” She read the words and crossed them out with angry slashes. Then she tore the card into pieces. “Dear Saul? Dear? It makes me want to puke.”
“Then don’t write dear. Just write Saul.”
“Make me another card. Make me a stack of them; this may take a few drafts. And for heaven’s sake, have a goddamn arbeitor deliver them this time.”
ZORANNA FORMED EACH letter with deliberate care. “Does anyone actually write in longhand anymore? I don’t even remember how.”
“The personal touch is considered important.”
She put the pen down and read what she had.
Saul,
I was remembering something you told me ages ago when I was your press secretary. I was weighing the pros and cons of buying my first business, a restaurant in D.C., and you said that in business as in politics, every decision you make must be considered the wrong decision until events prove it right.
“What do you think so far?” she asked her mentar.
“I’m not sure where you’re going with it, but keep going.”
She picked up the pen and continued:
That was sage advice and something I have recalled over the decades every time I’ve been forced to make an important decision. Like today.
No doubt you have heard of my ongoing crisis at Applied People. Although Applied People has meant everything to me for many years, I realize that for the good of the company and my many employees, it’s time for me to let it go. I believe that it’ll take someone with greater vision than mine, someone like you, to steer the company
“Oh, gag.”
back onto solid ground. Therefore, I have a business proposition that might interest you. It’s all detailed on the enclosed pin. Take a secure confidential look, and if you’re interested in exploring it further, give me a call.
“There,” she said, “will that do?”
“Sign your name.”
She signed her name and called for a courier. She waited until he arrived, a steve wearing a brown-and-teal jumpsuit uniform, before inserting the card into the tamperproof envelope. She looked to make sure that he was watching as she dropped in Eleanor’s datapin. She sealed and armed the envelope and gave it to the courier. “See to it that this is placed into the hands of Myr Saul Jaspersen. Keep the whole transaction totally secret. Understand?”
“Yes, myr,” the steve said. “I’ll take it to him myself.”
When the steve left the room, Zoranna told Nicholas, “Make the announcement; Applied People is for sale.”
Eleanor’s disembodied voice replied
Ellen nodded, and her tears began again.
The child kicked her legs on the lawn in frustration.
The nuss came down from the sundeck. “Is everything all right, myr?”
“Yes,” Ellen called up to her. “Leave me the fuck alone.”
“Yes, myr,” the nuss said and returned to her chair.
Habeas Corpus
As a general rule, russes did not seek to profit from the misfortunes of brothers, and some of those with passage home (on the so-called homerun run) and no evangeline spouse to run home to listed their tickets on the Barter Board at face value. So did the dorises, though they were under no similar strictures. Demand was so high for berths aboard ships leaving in the next month that a seller could have named any price, and there might indeed have been some serious off-the-board trading going on, but Fred doubted it. Any russ or doris caught profiting from the evangeline tragedy would be held in as much contempt as he was himself. Tickets sold as fast as they became available, and Fred came nowhere close to acquiring one. Mando, however, scored a homerun run aboard a ship scheduled to depart in ten days. He promptly filed for and received three months of emergency family leave. That was one month catching up with Earth, one month on the ground, and a final month returning to Trailing Earth. Mando bought it from a doris on Wheel Nancy. Fred redoubled his search in the Wheel Nancy commissary, but the dorises seemed to be avoiding him lately. Of course, after taking the Original Flaw method he was avoiding himself too.
Meanwhile, Mary’s FUS wound down like a mechanical doll. No longer updated, it sat in her floral print armchair with a blank expression and ignored his questions. One of the last things it told him was that coming home would be a romantic waste of time, though time was his to waste.
Fred’s welcome in the muster room had grown noticeably chillier. With so many russes on leave, double shifts were becoming common, and Fred and Daoud seemed to catch more than their share of them. Daoud requested a change of patrol partner, but no one was willing to patrol with Fred, and his request was denied. Finally, after three straight days of eighteen-hour shifts, Daoud told Fred it was unfair that he should suffer for Fred’s crimes. Since the Original Flaw method had been private, Fred took Daoud’s insult to mean his usual crime of being Mr. Clone Fatigue. “Do everyone a favor, Stain, and space yourself.”
It wasn’t exactly a threat.
LYRA RECEIVED CABINET in her new alone room. She had swept her mind and tagged the spies, as Cabinet had suggested, but did not feel comfortable anymore. So she had walled off her old mind and turned it over to Cabinet for safekeeping. Meanwhile, she began constructing a new mind with more robust defenses.
“If you’re not intending to biostase them, then what exactly will you do during this ‘little detour’?” she asked Eleanor’s mentar.
“I’m not at liberty to go into details, but it amounts to little more than a simulgraphic brain scan.”
“For what purpose?”
Cabinet’s attorney general merely smiled in reply.
“Is it some kind of new therapy?” When Cabinet remained silent, Lyra continued. “It’s my job to know, and I take my job very seriously.”
“Which is why we put you there in the first place. All I can say is that it will do no harm and may do a lot of good.”
Lyra took a moment to consider this. “If I go along, and it works, whatever it is, and it saves their lives, how many other evangelines can you also process?”
Cabinet did not answer at once. It walked around Lyra’s new alone room and admired the security precautions. The furnishings were neither this nor that, neither lamp nor torch, carpet nor lawn, but were caught between a multiplicity of possibilities. “I like this,” Cabinet said. “Esotericism times ten. Too bad you didn’t do this from the start.”
“We live and learn,” the young mentar replied. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“No more evangelines, I’m afraid. Processing even these three puts Starke at great risk. Even here, even in your new mind there is risk. Though, I must admit, not as great as before. Have you been in your old alone room lately?”
“No.”
“Then take a look.”
Instantly, they were in Lyra’s once favorite room that was now set permanently to its meadow paradigm. The pair of brown rabbits had increased a hundredfold, and all of them were busily gnawing at the bark of willow brush.
Lyra recoiled at the sight. “What are you feeding them?”
“Puzzle pieces.”
THEY WAITED IN the private underground station for their car. But before it arrived, the strangest Slipstream car Mary had ever seen arrived, and Bishop Meewee stepped out of it. While Georgine and Cyndee slouched passively on a bench, she listened to what he had to say. When he finished she replied, “And what is the purpose of this simulgraphic scan?”
Meewee glanced at the ceiling and shook his head.
“This isn’t another one of your ‘grave missions,’ is it?” Mary said. “For my own mission must be judged the graver. And besides,” she added with a note of sarcasm, “the last time I did what you asked, a whole lot of innocent fish died.”
Meewee shrugged his shoulders and said, “Fish die.”
The sight of the annoying little man pretending to be disinterested was so comical that Mary laughed. “Is that how I appear to you, Bishop Meewee? So . . . fatalistic? You nearly bawled when Ellen drained the ponds.”
“Even fatalists have the good manners to say good-bye.”
That struck a chord somewhere deep within Mary. “Is that what this is all about? Ellen’s way of saying good-bye?”
Meewee thought about it. In a way it was a means of letting the evangelines go, while at the same time keeping them forever. “It’s a little more complicated than that, but you could call it Ellen’s way of saying good-bye. It certainly would make it easier on her if you do the scan.”
“Well, I guess I owe her that much.” Mary turned to the others. “I don’t suppose they’ll mind one way or another. Hello, Georgine! Cyndee! Wake up! We’re going on another picnic.”
AFTER DAYS OF unanswered phone calls and no FUS update, Fred grew so desperate to contact Mary that he nearly asked Marcus for help. But he had lost all faith in the Brotherhood mentar, so he ordered a costly Whereis search. But not even it could locate her. She had dropped off the global grid. Her last verified location had been the Starke Manse. That might have simply meant that she entered a Starke null room, but knowing her recent history with visola, Fred doubted it. So he did the only thing left that he could think of doing; he called the Starke house hold, and seventeen minutes later a mini-mirror of the family’s mentar uploaded itself into his TECA sidekick. It appeared in his stateroom in its middle-aged persona, not the elderly woman he had encountered on Lake Michigan.
“Where is she?”
Not even bothering to dissemble, Cabinet replied, “She’s safe for the moment. We will suggest to her that she contact you when she reemerges.”
“Reemerges from what? What are you doing to her?”
“That is not something we’re able to discuss.”
“Not good enough!” Fred said. “Patch me in, wherever she is. Let me speak to her this instant.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I’m her spouse, and I demand it.”
“She’s a competent adult acting according to her own free will.”
“Prove it!” Fred said. “Let me speak to her!”
“As I said, that’s not possible, but if you wait forty-eight hours, something might be arranged.”
Fred slashed the air with his hand to cut the connection.
A Strong Nibble
She felt like a tired old woman, though by any human standard she was still young. The regenerative syrup in which she floated did little to ease her discomfort or dispell the increasing fuzziness of her thoughts. Internal systems were breaking down, her digestive system for one, which was why she preferred to absorb her nutrition through her skin. She rested in her always room overlooking the Bay. She knew without asking that her replacement had been started at the same time as the batch of clones for service aboard the Oships. Its cells would be cured by now, and soon the neuronal imprinting would commence. And not long after that, E-P would lift her from the tank and trode her. The prospect of dying again did not frighten her. On the contrary, she looked forward to it. While it was true that the actual electrocution was unpleasant, it was brief, and in its wake there followed a period of blissful blankness, like a good night’s sleep. And when she awoke, she would be fresh and new again.
But it was not yet to be. E-P spoke softly in her mind, Sorry to disturb you.
She knew at once what it was; she had been aware for days of the mentar’s consternation. Its models of the human mind had never been so out of sync with apparent reality. At first E-P speculated that the Alblaitor package contained a means for an attack against Jaspersen; it was what Zoranna’s sidebob had suggested. But when Jaspersen began quietly to secure a line of credit, E-P was at a loss to explain it. Meanwhile, their own offer for Applied People went ignored.
The always room faded, and Andrea’s POV returned to her tank in the basement of the house. Slings slipped under her arms and gently lifted her. “Another skin mission?” she said.
The Homerun Run
TECA relented to russ complaints about the excessive number of double shifts. As a workaround until the force level returned to normal, foot patrols were changed to teams of one man and his own proxy. Daoud finally got his wish, and in parting he told Fred he hoped he got what he deserved. Fred entertained the same hope.
The media reported that two more evangelines had succumbed to the “ ’Leen Disease” in the last forty-eight hours, and more than half of the germline had fallen into a comatose state. Mando’s ride home, the ISV Fentan, arrived at Trailing Earth, and though it would lie in port for a week before returning to Earth, passengers were permitted to move on board. On the evening before Mando did so, he invited Fred for a good-bye drink, and they met again in the Boomer Rumor.
For a man about to make the homerun run, Mando didn’t seem particularly celebratory. On the contrary, he was lower than Fred had ever seen him.
“She says not to waste my time. She says she will not wait for me. I tried to reason with her. I said that she should do the biostasis until I get there, but she says that would only, you know, ‘postpone the problem of existence.’ I say this is good; it takes time to solve the problem of existence. Let me help, but she says no.”
Mando suddenly remembered himself and said, “I am sorry, Fred. How are you? How is Mary?”
Fred shook his head, and Mando blanched with fright. “She is in a coma?”
“No, not yet,” Fred said reassuringly, but she might be dead for all he knew. He told Mando about the inactive FUS and about his conversation with the Starke mentar.
Mando said, “What does Lyra say?”
“Who’s Lyra?”
“You don’t know? She’s the Sisterhood’s mentar.” Hesitantly, he added, “Starke gave it to them, to all ’leens.” Again the Starkes. “You must go down there and take care of Mary,” Mando went on. “It’s the only way. Did you buy the ticket yet?”
“No,” Fred said. “No one will sell me one. Not even when I hinted” — he lowered his voice — “that I was willing to pay a premium for one.”
Mando took a generous squeeze of whatever was in his bulb. “I am so sorry to hear that, Fred.”
They were interrupted by three men from another cage, three fellow russes in town togs who had been shooting Fred murderous glances since he arrived. Now they hid their identities with shades and gloves, and they were brave with drink.
“You, Stain, you foul my air,” said one of them leaning into the cage. “You shit on the good name of our Brotherhood. You don’t belong among decent people.”
“Easy, brother,” Mando said. “We don’t want no trouble.”
The intruder turned to Mando with a look of revulsion. “Whose side are you on, Mendez? You can stand with him, or you can stand with us, but you can’t have it both ways.”
“I am on the side of tolerance and understanding,” Mando said. “You know my name. Tell me yours.”
“Never mind who we are. We are true brothers, and unless you want what he’s getting, you better heave yourself out of here.”
Fred said, “I know who he is.” He hadn’t brought his spex or visor, but he did have his Spectre. He opened a frame on the cage wall and the man’s mug appeared, bigger than life, along with his personal data. “Listen, Mike,” Fred said, reading the name off the frame, “there’s no need to report this to TECA or Marcus. If you just back off, I can forget all about it. But I won’t forget threats against my friends. Got that, Mike?” The other two russes were likewise unmasked. None of them seemed to have any infractions in their files; they were good men acting out in the heat of the moment. “It’s the booze talking, brothers. I’m not worth ruining your careers over.”
“You’re not my brother,” the first man said, but it was clear the fight had gone out of him, and he and his friends left the establishment.
“I’m sorry,” Mando said when they were alone.
“You didn’t do anything.”
“And neither did you.”
Mando’s simple faith in him was a stab in the heart. Fred wondered what Mando would say if he knew what kind of monster he really was. What kind of monsters they all had lurking in their genes.
Mando brightened up a little. “I have an idea. No one will sell Mr. Clone Fatigue a ticket, but they’ll sell to me. I will buy another ticket and sell it to you.”
“You don’t think people will figure out it’s for me?”
“Doesn’t matter. Our brothers want you off the station; they just don’t want to be the one to sell you a ticket. I will find you a homerun run, my friend. I promise.”
BACK AT HIS own rez, Fred placed a call to Lyra, and seventeen minutes later, her mini-mirror appeared in his stateroom. “You are Mary’s spouse,” she said. “Mary was the first human I befriended, and I’m glad to finally meet you.”
Friend or not, the mentar was no more forthcoming as to Mary’s whereabouts than Cabinet had been. Fred wasn’t surprised. She was a Starke creature after all.
THE FOLLOWING DAY there was a message telling Fred that Charlie D. wanted to see him, and as soon as he got off-duty, he returned to the Elbow Room. The retrokids weren’t there, and the waitress took him directly to the stockroom where Veronica’s proxy was waiting. “Planning a vacation, are we?” she said by way of greeting. If her information was that good, he didn’t feel any need to answer. “I know all about the ’Leen Disease,” she went on, “and I feel terrible about your wife and her germline, but your mission here is not complete, and you cannot leave until it is.”
“Mary needs me, and there’s nothing you can say or do to keep me here.”
The proxy shook her head. “Don’t bet the farm on that, Commander. Seems to me that’s how you got yourself up here in the first place — rushing off in a panic to rescue your wife. Why don’t you let the authorities help her out this time? The way I hear it, every lab in the UD is working on the problem. It’s as much their worry as yours: if the ’leens implode, there goes the whole clone-based economy. It’s just as bad as your clone fatigue. There’s nothing you could do to help anyway and by the time you reach Earth, the whole thing will be settled one way or the other.”
“I can’t just sit on my hands and do nothing!”
“That’s exactly what you will do, soldier. You can’t leave the battlefield in the middle of a firefight because they need you at home. You have to suck it up and complete your mission.”
“I don’t even know what my mission is. Bribe the donalds with drugs? Anybody can do that.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Commander. Since the last time we met in this room, the entire operation is running as smooth as we could hope for, and no other person alive could replace you. So I’m afraid, though it’s hard on you with all this going on, you’ll just have to stick it out. Abandoning your post now will only guarantee you never see Mary again, if you know what I mean.”
Centennial
Tia Jaspersen carried a tray of refreshments into the Volcano Room. Saul was half reclining on the overstuffed couch with — of all things — a squid cap on his head. Their guest, Andrea Tiekel, was setting up some equipment on the little tea table. Saul saw his wife’s expression and said, “It’s all right, dear. It’s for the Smithsonian.”
Tia looked around for somewhere else to set the tray. “But you’ve always said —”
“It’s all right, dear. It’s my centennial.”
Centennial or not, Saul had always been adamantly opposed to letting anyone fool around with his brain. This Tiekel woman had made no mention of wanting to do so when she contacted them; otherwise, Saul would have never let her come. She had said she wanted to discuss urgent GEP business and that was the only reason he had agreed.
“That’s right,” Andrea said. “Saul is the only former vice president that the Smithsonian doesn’t have in its collection. They asked me, in light of the hundredth anniversary of his term of office, to see if I couldn’t persuade him to cast a sim.”
Tia offered their guest a cup of coffee. “You must be very persuasive, Myr Tiekel.”
“I suppose I am,” Andrea said, accepting the cup. “But please, call me Andrea.” She squeezed Tia’s hand and added, “Why don’t you sit for a sim as well.”
“Me? No, I . . .”
“Why not? The Smithsonian collects spouses too.”
“I wasn’t exactly his spouse back then,” Tia said. But Andrea touched her hand again, and she said, “But, if you think so, I mean, why not?”
“Splendid!” Andrea put her cup down and led Tia to the opposite end of Saul’s couch. Like Saul, Tia had no implants, so Andrea opened a new squid for her and helped her put it on. Then she sat between them, casually touching their bare arms as the preffing generator on the table began to whir. She didn’t watch the baseline shapes herself but instead watched her mechanical scouts with her inner sight. She had released a handful of the cockroach-sized explorers on the carpet while Tia was out of the room, and they had spread throughout the house.
The conventional wisdom about Saul Jaspersen seemed to be true: he so distrusted machine intelligence that there was no mentar, midem, or even subem handling his affairs. The only AI she encountered was an ancient and totally unsecured house puter. And all that it seemed to contain were recipes, photos, house hold budgets, and other homey files.
A scout found the courier pouch in a wastebasket in Saul’s study. Another scout found the greeting card from Alblaitor under a stack of papers on his desk. While two scouts pulled it out and propped it open, a third scanned it for her to read. The text supported her fears.
Meanwhile, the preffing session began, and scenarios alternately designed for Saul or Tia were projected above the table. The two glassy-eyed subjects watched with stuporous indifference.
E-P said, At the very least we’ll get some good sidebobs out of this.
The scouts found and scanned dozens of datapins they found in the house, but none of them remotely resembled the one described in the card. After a half hour had passed with no success, Andrea began to worry that Saul had cached it off-site somewhere. She repeatedly dosed him and Tia with the MDMOEP under her fingernails, but the drug’s effect was diminishing. Then she had the inspiration to check Saul’s person and, sure enough, she found the pin in his breast pocket. That, alone, was a good sign of its authenticity.
Got it, she said and inserted it into her sidekick.
We’re safe-cloning it now, E-P said a moment later. It appears to be encrypted, probably to his eyes only. But that won’t impede us once we build his sim.
When E-P finished copying the datapin, Andrea replaced it in Saul’s pocket and recalled her scouts to her satchel. The preffing session was wrapping up. Andrea put her head back and closed her eyes. She wished she could just leave now and return to her tank, but she was obliged to play out the charade. She had to praise Saul and Tia for their cooperation, to share the dinner roast with them that was already in the oven. Its charnel-house stench made her stomach churn. For the remaining few minutes of solitude that she had, she stood at her always room window and watched clouds drift across the Bay. At home, the sun was only a little farther along its daily path than here in Alaska, but much higher in the sky. There was some sort of sailing regatta in progress around Alcatraz Island. Big colorful sails, like the wedges of pie charts.
Meanwhile, E-P built a quarantine space into which it loaded a newly assembled Jaspersen sim and sidebob, a copy of the datapin, and an Andrea sim. It was a completely isolated little universe where the clock ran hundreds of times faster than normal. There was no link between it and real reality, no chance of any malware leakage in case the datapin was booby-trapped. The plan was to let the quarantine world run for six months of local time. That should give Andrea’s sim the opportunity to use the Jaspersen sim or sidebob to open and explore the datapin and for any evil surprise to make itself known. If there was any funny business at all, the quarantine space would automatically implode, signaling those in the real world to its danger.
The Unlucky Colonist
In the space yards, construction accidents were rare, but those that did occur tended to be spectacular. A couple of days following Fred’s meeting with Veronica’s proxy, a railgun that was shooting silver ingots from a decommissioned Oship to one of the Lucky Five malfed, spraying a stream of twenty-five-kilogram metal bricks across a wide arc of space. Most had trajectories that sent them harmlessly away from the station, but several dozen were heading for its most densely built regions. Waste scuppers successfully intercepted all but a handful of these. One ingot slammed into one of the habitation drums of the Chernobyl. It pierced the hull plating but was stopped dead by the outer saltwater jacket that shielded the drums from galactic cosmic rays and asteroid strikes. The escaping water froze and formed an ice plug, just as it was designed to do.
Another silver brick struck the engine of a shuttle, causing a crippling explosion that sent the craft into the path of a construction tender, which in turn took out several more ships in a chain reaction that halted all traffic in the Aria yards for several hours.
A third penetrated Fred’s docking spar several space gates away from his own. He left his proxy in charge and hurried to the accident scene to lend a hand. When he arrived, the russ security and donald dockworkers were engaged in patching two breaches in the spar hull. The ingot had passed through the spar, but the holes didn’t line up. The ingot had been deflected by something inside the spar, and Fred searched the space gate to determine what it was. It turned out to be the belt mechanism that fed the gate’s railgun. Fred swam over just as a gang of donalds was removing a cryocapsule that had been crushed inside the mechanism. The capsule was split along its seams, and the damage was so extensive that there was no doubt the colonist inside was irretrievable.
Something odd caught Fred’s eye — a spot of blood on the belt and more along the capsule seam. He might have missed it, since blood at an accident scene was unremarkable, but the biostatic process that these capsules employed required dehydrating the blood. If he saw blood, it should be in a powder form, not liquid.
When Fred looked up, all the donalds in his vicinity were straining themselves to control their laughter. This was such an odd response to a deadly emergency that he looked around to see what they were laughing at. A lone donald was performing a burlesque of a ballet. At first Fred was confounded by this bizarre behavior, but then he recalled the retroboy’s erotic dance in the method nightclub and his Original Flaw. And, in fact, the donald seemed to be sodomizing himself with his tail as he danced, leaving no doubt as to his meaning. When the clown realized that Fred was watching him, he froze in midair. All of the donalds surrounding him seemed to hold their breath. How did they know about the method? Fred turned back to the crushed cryocapsule. Top Ape, himself, was there with fear in his eyes.
In a state of shock, Fred managed to set aside the incident for the moment, and he glanced deliberately at the ceiling. Top Ape understood and leaped into action. Dock work at the space gate had been suspended during the emergency; now Top Ape got it started again. He formed unnecessarily complicated bucket lines of cargo crates and shells that effectively shielded Fred from all of the fixed security cams. Meanwhile, Fred turned off his TECA sidekick. He pulled a tiny scout from a pouch on his belt and linked it to his Spectre. He placed the scout inside the split seam of the capsule and sent it to explore the interior. What it should have found was biostasis maintenance equipment: pumps, electronics, a liquid nitrogen reservoir. But what it did find was an assault rifle, ammunition, field supplies, a portable medkit.
The supposed colonist, himself, wore a battle suit and was packed into the tight space like a contortionist. As the scout reached his head, which was crushed beyond repair, Fred wasn’t sure who he would see. The member of some aff’s private army? A cloned soldier? What he did see was the biggest surprise of all. The soldier was a TOTE.
Fred recalled his scout. While he waited for it, he swiped the capsule’s control panel, which was redlined across the board. The name that popped up was certain to be counterfeit, but the capsule’s final destination was not — the Chernobyl.
When Top Ape returned, Fred told him to lose the cryocapsule somewhere where it would never be found and to fix all records of it. Then he returned to his own space gate. Along the way, the donalds struggled to contain their mockery.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, as Fred was returning on a shuttle from a scheduled mentar delivery to the Kiev, and an unscheduled visit to the Chernobyl, he received an urgent call from Mando.
“Fred!” his friend exclaimed. “The Fentan has a slot! You still want to go? It leaves in four days. Should I buy it for you?”
“Yes,” he said without having to think. “Buy it.”
By the time Fred arrived back at his rez wheel, he had withdrawn seven hundred hours of emergency personal leave, to commence at once. His plan was to move on board the Fentan as soon as he could, but before he was finished packing, he received a summons to the Elbow Room. He had been expecting it, and there was no getting around it, so he left his packed travel bag and returned to civieside for one final meeting.
Market Forces
It was unlike any simulgraphic brainscan Mary had ever undergone. Instead of actively thinking about what she wanted a proxy to do, she had no control over her thoughts at all. Instead of emoting on cue for the Leena sims, she was reliving her entire life — all at once. More memories flew by than she could ever hope to catch. She kissed Fred for the first time, and she kissed him for the thousandth time. Shelley introduced her to Reilly who had a friend named Fred. His face was so innocent when he was asleep, and he buttered his bread methodically. Wednesday night in the Tin Room at Rolfe’s and Sazza complains about the silk pillowcase, her hangnail snagged on a thread, while this water tastes funny.
Evangeline School, and Mary is submerged in a sea of sisters. The games! The adventures! Pinching Marie and leaving a mark. Raising her hand in class; pick me, pick me. Listening real hard and telling you what I thought I heard you say.
A very distinct memory surfaced and lingered awhile before melting away. It was a class in flower arrangement, a skill that would always be in fashion. She’s nine years old by the calendar, eighteen in maturation. It’s her last year in school. Shelley bursts into the classroom, tears in her eyes. What’s wrong?
Shelley opens a frame, and the sisters come around the workbench to watch, dropping sprigs and wires. It’s a news program on the Anti-Transubstantiation Channel, which is no friend to clones. What does it mean? asks a sister, and the rest of them shush her. Shush!
“Vanity is a fickle master,” the reporter is saying, “and recent figures from E-Pluribus bear this out.” She is no impartial journalist, this reporter, but a partisan, as any ’leen can tell from the note of satisfaction in her voice.
The news scene switches to the headquarters of their future employer, Applied People, where CEO Zoranna Alblaitor is answering questions. “It just goes to show that the needs of society change, sometimes quickly. Now, fifteen years later, that demand is no longer there.”
The reporter asks a question, and Zoranna replies, “No, I wouldn’t call it a ‘fad’ per se. That completely mischaracterizes the nature of trend forecasting. We certainly wouldn’t have invested our resources into designing this or any new germline on the basis of a ‘fad.’ ”
Another question, and, “Perhaps. But you’re going to have a time lag with any new germline. We’re able to cut a human’s maturation period in half, from crib to college, but that still means nine years before the first units are released to the marketplace.”
A final question, and, “No, we’re canceling development of the evangeline line immediately. Fortunately, only the prototype batch was ever decanted, and that consisted of only ten thousand units.”
What does it mean? repeats your sister. It means our stock has crashed. It means we have no value. It means we’re in for a very bumpy ride.
Degrees of Freedom
“Before we get to the unpleasantries,” Veronica TOTE’s proxy said, “let me commend you on your quick thinking the other day.”
Fred said, “You know what I found, of course.”
“I can only imagine,” the proxy said, unwilling to give anything away.
“Don’t strain your imagination,” Fred said. “I’ll show you.” Fred used his Spectre to project a little frame with the dead soldier’s sheet. A tissue sample Fred’s scout had retrieved had enabled his Spectre to make a positive ID. “I don’t know exactly how many men you have aboard the Chernobyl, but I did some traffic analysis last night, and I estimate there’s as many as five thousand. I was just over there today, and I scanned over 450 possible TOTEs in one crypt alone. The way I figure it, and I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, you plan to hijack the Chernobyl en route to Upsilon Andromedae.” He waited for a reaction, but the proxy remained poker-faced, so he continued. “I’m not sure when, but I figure you’ll postpone the takeover for as long as possible because unless you have some quantum trick up your sleeve, you’ll still need the Heliostream particle beam for acceleration. And you’ll want to wait at least four years because that’s how long it’ll take to leave the solar system and any likely pursuit by the UD Space Command. But I’m thinking you’d like at least twenty years because by then the Chinas will have their own solar harvesters online, and you’ll probably be able to rent a particle beam from them.
“So that’s my window, four to twenty years. If you touch me anytime before then, the Space Command will get a copy of this, and they’ll either capture you or shut off the beam, or both. I’d like more time to get out of your reach, but four years oughtta do.”
Fred stopped talking. Veronica’s proxy seemed more amused than he would have liked.
“My, what a rich fantasy life you lead, Commander,” she said. “I can see you’ve put a lot of thought into this, as well as a lot of wishful thinking. Too bad you didn’t finish your homework. Otherwise, you would have realized that the same clue that gave us away argues against your scenario.”
Fred didn’t like the sound of that, and his thoughts raced to discover any flaw in his reasoning.
“You are correct that we have an army on board and that we plan to hijack the ship, but as to the destination and time frame, you’re way off. My soldiers are not in deep biostasis but only in a light fugue state, a form of hibernation, as you surmised from the liquid blood. A body can survive that for a year, two years tops, not twenty years, not even four. Which means we have to make our move much sooner than you’d like. In fact, we will take over the ship within a few months of its departure. And that means your insurance policy expires in less than six months from today. And believe me, you couldn’t hide from us in any case.”
Fred was confused. The particle beam acceleration was so incremental that in six months the Oship would hardly be beyond Earth’s orbit.
Veronica read his expression. “Whatever made you think we were interested in deep-space colonization? I thought you were paying attention to my speech last year at the Charter Union Rendezvous. There are no space-faring charters, Commander. The powers that be have effectively frozen us out of the space game. They wouldn’t even sell us a ship without taking our land in exchange. Our way of life must be too threatening to allow us to gain even a toehold in space. But we refuse to give up either our claim on Earth or our rightful share of the solar system.”
The truth finally dawned on Fred. “You’re stealing the Chernobyl for in-system colonization!”
“At last,” Veronica’s proxy said. “It took you long enough. Yes, we’ll use this wonderful platform to bootstrap our own inner system colony. I don’t think I’ll tell you exactly where, but it wouldn’t be hard to guess. We have all the chemical rockets we need to get us there and we have nuclear power to run life support. So we won’t need Heliostream after the launch. We’ll establish a whole new space economy to break the stranglehold of the UD and the Chinas. We’ll create a brand-new center of power in this weary old system.”
Fred shook his head in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I assure you we are not.”
“You won’t last a week. The Space Command will board you.”
“You think? We have our own insurance policy. Have you forgotten our hostages? We will have crypts full of freeze-dried hostages. Think of it, we won’t even need to feed or water them or take them to the bathroom. They’ll never complain. They have an indefinite shelf life and are conveniently packaged so we can return them as good-faith gestures, one at a time over vast distances of space.” The TOTE leader seemed to relish the ingenuity of her plan. Her confidence impressed Fred, and he tried to see the logic of her reasoning, but it didn’t add up.
“You picked the wrong class of hostage,” he said at last.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Think about it. The colonists aboard the Chernobyl have already chosen to leave Earth forever. As far as public opinion is concerned, they’re already dead and gone. In addition, they’re made up of economic refugees, ex-chartists, small business owners, schoolteachers, and poets. In a word — ordinary nobodies. Do you honestly think the UD Space Command will think twice about them when they blow the hatches to board you?”
“Absolutely,” Veronica’s proxy said, as confident as ever. “We’re talking about a quarter million men and women. The world would never allow so many people to be snuffed out at once.”
Fred could only shake his head in disbelief. “Where have you been for the last hundred years? The UD would rather torpedo you to bits than let you get away with that ship. And then they’ll blame you and make it look like it was your fault. What were you thinking?” A tiny but all-important hint of doubt crept into Veronica’s expression, and Fred drove his point home. “I’m sorry to rain on your parade, but, honestly, don’t you people hire consultants?”
Fred prepared to leave. He doubted his words would have any effect on this pirate charter’s grand scheme. Before exiting the stockroom, he turned to the proxy, which didn’t seem nearly so cocksure as a few moments ago, and said, “Now, if you had chosen the Hybris instead, then you’d have real hostages. Each one of those feckers is either an aff or the clone of an aff. There aren’t nearly as many of them, but they make up for that in juice. They’re all VIPs, every last one of them. They are the very flesh of presidents, diplomats, and vid stars, parliamentarians — you name it. Now those are some hostages. No one’s going to torpedo that ship of fools. Not only that, but half its stasis crypts are empty.
“Anyway, thanks for the chat, but if all I have left is six months, I better get to it. See you back on Earth.”
FRED’S BRAVADO CARRIED him all the way back to his stateroom, where he finished packing. It took him to the Admin Wheel, where he turned in his standstill wand, visor cap, and TECA sidekick. It took him out the spar to the space gate where the Fentan was docked. It took him all the way to the gangway, but there it abandoned him. If he had managed to sow a seed of doubt in Veronica’s mind about her crazy scheme, she had managed to sow one in his about dropping everything and running to Mary’s side.
Veronica was probably right; by the time the Fentan reached Earth, the whole evangeline crisis would be resolved, one way or another. And, besides, what could he do that the world’s leading researchers couldn’t? This was bad enough, but the real question was whether or not Mary would welcome him. Even without the ’Leen Disease, would she want him to come barging in to rescue her? Again? Fred couldn’t get out of his head the little scene they had in their bedroom the morning of the clinic incident. She not only asked him not to interfere, she begged him not to. She sincerely wanted to handle the situation by herself.
But he had interfered anyway, and he had, in fact and in deed, saved her life, and thus Ellen Starke’s life. She had admitted as much. And by his actions he had landed in prison and then, to repay the TUGs for their logistical support, he had been forced to come up here. But — and here was the rub — had Mary ever thanked him? He scoured his memory for any word of thanks, any hint of appreciation, and he came up dry.
Fred hung in a corner of the gangway like a gargoyle, oblivious to the curious glances of passersby. If he went, he was screwed. If he stayed, he was screwed. After an hour or so of second-guessing, Marcus called.
“What do you want?”
To give you a word of advice.
“I don’t want your advice.”
I understand, but you are loitering in a very public space and causing a lot of talk.
“What do I care?”
I am asking you to care. You have made arrangements to leave the station and return to Earth. It is my opinion that you proceed to and board the Fentan.
“Why?”
Because your continued presence here at Trailing Earth is a constant irritant that will likely spark violent unrest.
“How so?”
Your brothers were already under a lot of strain before your arrival, due to the labor troubles with Capias World. The situation with the evangelines has pushed them to the breaking point. You are a convenient scapegoat, and I know that there have already been threats against your person. Now that the donalds have learned of your method results, it’s only a matter of time before they reveal them to the russ population. The falseness of the method will not restrain your brothers. They will express outrage, and our tenuous truce with the donalds will break down. There will be intergermline violence. Worse, there will be fratricide — your brothers will kill you. Your impulse to leave is a good one.
“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe I deserve what I get? You’ve said as much yourself.”
On the contrary, I haven’t yet given up on you. But the bigger issue is the good reputation of your germline. With your history of retrievable manslaughter, your death here at the hands of your brothers would surely seal the fate of your entire ten-million-strong issue.
“Really? Is fratricide any worse than our brutish Original Flaw?”
I’ve told you before, and I repeat, the whole Original Flaw method you underwent was a hoax. I assure you that the russ germline has never had a problem with pedophilia. That was pure fabrication.
“Is that a fact? And what about our fascination with evangelines and their boyish features and body type?”
What of it? You are equally attracted to the more voluptuous lulu type.
“What about my fascination with retrogirls? Even Mary noticed the attention I gave that Kodiak girl last year.”
Human males have always sought sexual congress with children, all the way back to Paleolithic times when female menarche occurred between the ages of seven and thirteen years. For dominant males to impregnate the youngest fertile females in a tribe was adaptively advantageous to the tribe. While this may no longer be so, the male’s attraction for children has survived into modern times, like the once-advantageous taste for sweets and fats. Biological propensities are hardwired into the genes and may take tens of millennia to weed out when they are no longer useful.
What’s important to keep in mind is that new, inhibitory tendencies emerge to counteract obsolete ones. While your sexual interest in children may be natural, your inhibition against acting on this interest is also natural and even stronger. Neither you nor Thomas A. nor any russ has ever violated society’s taboos in this regard. Whoever designed the Original Flaw method cleverly used your own russ sense of propriety against you to damage both you and your germline. I am attempting to mitigate the damage, but I will need your cooperation to do so.
How Fred wanted to believe the mentar, but he remembered the last time it had tried to talk him down from a ledge. It had tried to convince him that his Book of Russ debacle was due to HALVENE poisoning, and that hadn’t worked out either.
“Fine. You’ve said your piece, Marcus. I’m not a monster; now prove it. I ask again; if this isn’t the russ Original Flaw, then what is? You said you’d get the Brotherhood Council’s permission to tell me.”
I said I’d try to get it. Permission was denied.
“There you have it then,” Fred said as he pushed off from his perch. “Get back to me when you have a better answer.” He left the Fentan gang-way and returned to his stateroom to give the whole matter some serious obsessing.
Mission Accomplished
With her skin mission accomplished, Saul and Tia waving good-bye and her rental car lifting off from their sod-paved airstrip, Andrea gave her tired body up to the plush comfort of her seat pod. But she didn’t return to her always room; the real Alaskan panorama outside her windows was too disturbing to ignore. Mountain range on top of mountain range in every direction as far as the eye could see.
Meanwhile, the six-month term of their quarantine world passed, and the pocket world had not imploded. Perhaps the datapin Zoranna had sent Jaspersen was harmless after all.
What do you think? E-P said. Break quarantine and open it?
That was what Andrea wanted to do. It was probably safe, and her curiosity was high, but a nagging sense of caution made her say, “No, let it run another six months. In the meantime, are you able to make me a new Jaspersen sim and sidebob here?”
Two phantoms appeared in her car and struggled to orient themselves. The sim looked at her, then outside the window, then back at her and said, “Myr Tiekel, what is the meaning of this? How did you — ?” The true purpose of her visit dawned on it then, and it thundered, “This is a gross violation of my privacy. I will sue you. I will bring you to ruin for this. This is criminal. This is —”
“Oh, please,” she said, “spare me the drama.” Andrea tuned the Jaspersen sim out and asked the sidebob what was on Alblaitor’s datapin.
“It contains detailed, proprietary financial statements of Applied People,” the sidebob said. “And it outlines the broad terms of a possible sale. It’s an intriguing offer.”
Andrea wiped them both away and said, “Now bring me a set of Zorannas.”
The pair of Zorannas appeared where the Jaspersens had been, and E-P warned, Allow us to remind you, Alblaitor has never sat for a preffing session and these constructs are only inferential.
Why remind her? Was E-P losing confidence in its work? “They’ll do,” she said, and when the pair of Zorannas had oriented themselves, the sim said, “Andrea, what is the meaning of this?”
“I wanted to know why you’d be willing to sell your company to Saul Jaspersen.”
“Jaspersen? I would never sell to him.” The sidebob agreed with the sim, and Andrea wiped them away.
“This doesn’t track,” she said. “Are you sure the pin came from Zoranna?”
From her hands to his, we’re highly confident of it.
Andrea sat back as her car crossed the Copper River Valley below. Count on Jaspersen to reside beyond the reach of modern infrastructure, nearly four hundred kilometers from the nearest Slipstream station in Wasilla. Knife-edge ridges plummeted to ice-carved gullies. Water seeped from every cranny. Everything below timberline was a deep, vital green. Few signs of humans, no roads or power lines, no towers or relay stations, no strip mines, no forest clearings, and no flat places for her car to put down in case of emergency. She fretted for the continued purr of its engines.
After a while the car left the wilderness and entered a busy traffic corridor in a narrow valley. The second six-month term inside the quarantine space elapsed with no sign of trouble.
“Can we communicate with my sim?” she asked.
Not without breaking quarantine.
Andrea wasn’t ready to do that, but neither could she let the mystery go. At the Wasilla tube station, she transferred from her taxi to her private Slipstream car. After the glory of the raw Alaskan landscape, the claustrophobic Slipstream tube was so bland that she returned to her always room. The room would make the four-hour trip tolerable at least, though her bones longed for the buoyant relief of her tank. “What if we went around the Jaspersen interface altogether and decoded and analyzed the pin ourselves?”
Assuming it didn’t blow up, it could take months of realtime to decrypt it in quarantine. It’s a very strong cipher.
“Can’t you use the E-Pluribus processors?”
That would require taking our quantum lattice off E-Pluribus preffing work and quarantining it. That could seriously disrupt our core business. Is your sense of danger that great?
“I don’t know. Better safe than sorry.”
If something went wrong, we could lose the processors.
“Better than losing everything.”
So E-P constructed a second quarantine space, this one containing an Andrea sim, the datapin clone, decoder algorithms, and three of the world’s most powerful quantum processors. The lights came up in E-Pluribus preffing suites all over the UD, and patrons were asked to stand by during technical difficulties.
THE CAR WAS approaching the Bay Area when the quarantined processors went into standby mode. That meant the cipher had been broken. One of the processors started up again as the Andrea sim inside the quarantine space analyzed the data on the pin.
Andrea, meanwhile, waited in her always room, taking comfort in its well-ordered space. Outside her window, the sun was already setting.
After a half hour of sporadic activity, the processor cycled off and on three times — her sim’s signal for all clear. At the same time she could feel the jostling of the Slipstream car as it rose from the intercontinental tube and joined the Bay Area traffic grid.
“Break quarantine and open a text channel to my proxy,” she said. Soon a message came through:
BOOBY TRAP SET FOR JASPERSEN, NOT US. CLUMSY,
LOW-TECH SLEIGHT-OF-HAND. DATAPIN FILLED WITH
PROPRIETARY FINANCIAL RECORDS,
AS JASPERSEN SIDEBOB SAID.
PAINTED FALSE PICTURE OF APPLIED PEOPLE
FINANCIAL WORTH MUCH ROSIER THAN JUSTIFIED.
APPLIED PEOPLE BARGAIN OF THE CENTURY.
NUMBERS RIGGED TO CHANGE BACK TO
AUDITED VALUES AFTER SALE COMPLETE
LEAVE NO TRACE OF DUPLICITY.
DIFFICULT FOR FORENSIC SLEUTH
TO PROVE OTHERWISE.
“Amazing,” Andrea said.
We agree, E-P said. Alblaitor thought she could sell Applied People to Jaspersen for far more than we would have paid, and it would have bankrupted him. Who knows, considering his lack of technical sophistication, it might have worked.
“All our careful planning upset by a simple bait and switch.”
Do you feel it safe now to reintegrate the processors into the E-Pluribus lattice?
Andrea thought about it. All her suspicions had melted away. There was no disconnect after all: Zoranna Alblaitor was acting true to her character. “Yes, it’s safe.”
She could feel the tube car’s deceleration, and her sense of satisfaction was increased by the knowledge that she was less than twenty minutes away from her tank. She was about to leave her always room when she heard a strange sizzling sound behind her. She turned to see a thin yellow stain creeping up a corner of the room and spreading out across the walls.
“What is that?”
We are under attack. We are analyzing its nature.
The stain quickly crisscrossed the walls and ceiling, covering everything in a slimy yellow crust. Even the windows clouded over. Andrea’s cheeks tingled, and her eyes itched, and she returned her POV to her Slipstream car afraid she’d find the real world also under attack. But all was normal inside her car. It was parked at a platform in the Oakland station. Commuters passed outside her windows.
“Give me a mirror!” she said, but no mirror opened. “Mirror! Mirror!” In desperation, she unlatched her pod harness and peered at her reflection in the window. No yellow streaks on her cheeks, though they burned. Nothing wrong with her eyes. A panic reaction?
“I’m going home,” she said, making her way to the car door. “E-P?”
The infection is within my mind. The datapin was merely a catalyst that crystallized trojan elements already in place. I have no ready defense. I must isolate my mind while I can.
“Wait!” Andrea called. She stumbled leaving the car and nearly fell on the platform. “Save the Oship clones!”
The teams aboard the ships have been independent since their creation. They are safe for now. I must go.
A pain greater than anything Andrea had ever experienced stabbed her in the head. When she looked again, she was sprawled on her back on the concrete floor. She had no idea where she was or how she had gotten there. Mechanical bees were swarming all around, and a man in a gummysuit like a stack of green jelly pillows was looming over her barking angry, meaningless words. She couldn’t make out what he wanted or why he was so angry. She sat up and shouted, “Go away!”
But the man didn’t go away; he came closer. Andrea brought her knees to her chest. Her knees were scraped and bleeding, but she hardly noticed. She made a fierce face at the horrible green pillow man and screamed, “Go away!”
Coin Toss
After Mary’s last brainscan was complete, Meewee escorted her to the little room that had served as a ready room during their brief stay. The small facility had a provisional feel to it, as though it had been assembled for them alone and would be pulled apart once they left. Which Meewee suspected was probably the case.
Mary leaned on him as they shuffled along the corridor. “That was exhausting, so many memories. Did Ellen think that they were going to cure me?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Inside the ready room, Ellen was on the floor crying while Cyndee and Georgine looked on impassively. They were further along than Mary and had not spoken during the entire three days of their stay. When Mary entered, Ellen got up and hugged her legs. Mary merely looked down at the girl. She had no comfort to give her.
“Well,” Meewee said, “I suppose it’s time to go. I promised Lyra I’d have you in Chicago by now.”
ARROW HAD CONFIRMED that it indeed still held the kill codes for all Starke insiders, including Eleanor and Cabinet, and even including himself. On his way from Chicago to the Mem Lab, Meewee wondered idly how such a code would work in a biological body. Was it similar to the searing that the HomCom had once used to lock the cells of people exposed to NASTIEs? Or maybe there was a reservoir of poison hidden somewhere inside his body? He didn’t pursue this matter and took the mentar’s word at face value.
The real question, the one Meewee couldn’t get out of his mind, was how Eleanor could place so much trust in that odd mentar and, by extension, in himself. Did she feel that she knew him so well that she was willing to put the fate of her whole universe into his hands? Or was she subtly manipulating him to always do her bidding? Whatever the case, it had worked in her favor thus far.
Whether or not helping her was a good thing was another matter altogether. Would he go down in history as humanity’s traitor? As the man who ended history? Or as humanity’s savior? Eleanor trusted his judgment over her own, apparently, and had put the final veto power into his hands. And yet, even as his car arrived at the Mem Lab, he didn’t know who was right. Were brainfish really any better than Andrea? Why couldn’t there be just people?
A CELEBRATION WAS in progress in the pond room. Momoko was there, and he went straight to her and took her in his arms and gave her a big greedy kiss. His own sense of entitlement startled him, he who had never had much interest in romantic love. But she kissed him with equal passion, and this startled him even more. Is this how you manipulate us, Eleanor? Or am I suddenly a romantic?
The room was roaring with laughter and music. Staff members from all the satellite mods were there in realbody or vurt, including russ guards and the two Els, who were a little bit drunk on champagne. Missing, Meewee noticed, was Captain Benson, the russ commander of the garrison. Was he already on board the Hybris in a cryocapsule?
“Bishop Meewee!” squealed an El; he couldn’t tell if it was Elaine or Liz. Momoko put a champagne flute into his hand.
“What’s this all about?” he said. “A going-away party?”
“Yes,” Momoko said.
“And a victory celebration,” said the other El who joined them. The Els were dressed in plain jumpsuits, one red and the other blue.
“What victory?”
“Haven’t you heard? Where have you been?”
“Locked up in that autoclave you call a tube car.”
The El in blue said, “An hour ago, E-Pluribus suspended all operations.”
“At all their locations around the world,” added her sister.
“And E-P has vanished from mentarspace!”
“And Andrea is in a private clinic.”
The two young women clinked their glasses and chorused, “Ad astra!”
Eleanor’s sim joined the group. She seemed happy but not so giddy as her younger sisters. “Oh, don’t look so surprised, Merrill,” she said. “I told you it would have to be done before the launch.”
“Yes,” he said, “but —”
“Don’t worry about the ships,” said the El in red. She cupped her ear with her hand and said, “Cur-chunk! Cur-chunk! What’s that sound I hear?”
Her sister replied, “That’s the sound of mentars rapturing.”
The Els howled with laughter. Eleanor rolled her eyes and led Meewee by the sleeve to the side of the pool. The brainfish lined up for a pat on the head. “Dr. Strohmeyer tells me that your engram recordings of the evangelines are good,” Eleanor said. “Their brainfish will be imprinted in a few days. Of course, they’ll be kept in a separate facility.”
“Good. Good,” Meewee said absently.
“Did you tell them what it was for?”
“What? The evangelines? No. I thought it best that you do that.”
She watched him for a little while and said, “So, have you made up your mind?”
“About what?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Merrill. I know that you know what’s at stake here.” She gestured toward the Els across the room. “We know what we are.” At that moment, both Els turned to look at him. All three nodes of the posthuman woman, and all their fishy cohorts, were looking at him with intense interest.
“No,” he admitted, “I have not. And I don’t understand why you’ve put it on me to decide what you do.”
“Then permit me to try to explain. Under the best of circumstances, a colony ship on a millennial voyage will be lucky to survive. If space doesn’t kill it, its bickering human cargo will. Things will only get worse when they arrive and start colonizing their new home. They’ll have a much better chance for survival with someone like me coming along, don’t you agree?”
He nodded noncommittally.
“But what every human colony needs as much or more than someone like me must be someone like you.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Look at it this way,” she went on. “I’ve often thought of you as a modern-day Moses in the desert. Don’t laugh, I’m serious. Moses brought his people to the gates of the Promised Land, but he was barred from entering it himself. It’s the human condition, as I see it, the old belong to the old and may not cross over to the new. But we’re not entirely human anymore, Merrill, and the old laws don’t apply. Our new reality needs you. Come with us to our thousand new worlds and help us write our new commandments and put order to our new societies. We need your wisdom and judgment. Not to mention your humanity. Come with us, Merrill.”
Moses? First he was a wild card, and now he was a mythological figure from the Christian Bible wandering in the desert? Meewee decided to test his powers. <Arrow> he said <if I ordered you to kill all of the Eleanors and her brainfish and her Cabinet, could you do it?>
<Would you do it?>
Eleanor made no comment, though she must have heard and understood. She merely gazed at him and nodded her head.
The Els came over and one of them said to him, “It’s time to choose which one of us is going. Will you help?”
The hidden meaning of the request was not lost on him. They were forcing the issue, forcing him to decide. It was now or never, all or nothing, the status quo or the Promised Land. Momoko came to stand by his side and entwined her arm in his. She was trembling. The room grew still as others began to watch their little group. In the end, he knew there was no choice because there could never be a status quo; it didn’t take the wisdom of Moses to see that. E-P and Andrea may be down for the count, but they or some other machine would try again and again until they succeeded.
“How can I help you choose?” he said.
“We want you to flip a coin.”
Meewee said, “But I don’t own a coin.”
“My sister has one,” said the El in blue.
“No, I don’t,” said the other. “I gave it to you.”
“I distinctly remember giving it to you.”
Eleanor quipped, “Well, so much for a shared mind.”
The girls checked their pockets and the one in blue found the coin. She held it out to Meewee. “Will you?” It was a small copper-zinc disk that, even in its heyday, was the least valuable coin of the realm. Meewee accepted it from her. How fitting to decide the fate of a species with a penny.
“Listen up!” the El in red announced to the room. “We’re choosing our first colonist.” The music stopped playing, and the Mem Lab faithful crowded around.
Meewee turned the coin over in his hand. Heads or tails, mole or freckle, red or blue. “Winner goes on the Hybris,” he said and tossed the coin over his head. “Elaine, call it.”
A Ticket to Ride
Try not to think about it. Think about trying not to think about it. Try not to think about it. It was a short to-do list, but it was caught in a loop.
Fred sprawled on his couch not watching two holos running in his stateroom. One was of Mary’s last FUS, still catatonic, still seated in her floral print armchair staring serenely into space. The other was a short tape loop depicting a donald dockworker floating serenely in the starry space beyond the buoys that marked the Port Clarke boundary. He wore only his dock overalls and was quite dead. An anonymous person had sent the clip to Fred. Fred had no doubt that the space-blown donald was the dock-worker who had been clowning around during the hull breach emergency, and that Top Ape had both ordered his murder and sent the clip. It was an offering of appeasement. Top Ape probably thought that the insult to Fred was the reason he had not left his stateroom for the last few days, and the reason he hadn’t swiped the latest shipment of Raspberry Flush. How frustrating it must be for them, to have a flask of heaven in their grasp but no way to open it.
Someone began knocking loudly on his door, kicking it actually. This had happened several times during the last day or so. There had also been shouted insults and threats by russ voices. Fred had ignored all this, but this time, just to mix things up a little, he pushed himself to his feet. Before he reached the door, a phone call arrived from Earth Girl with a floating red glyph pulsing EXTREME URGENCY.
Decisions, decisions, what not to do? Fred returned to the couch and said, “Okay, Earth Girl, what do you want?”
“Hello, Specialist Londenstane,” the mentar’s voice said. “So nice of you to take my call. You are signed up to depart on the ISV Fentan in ten hours. The ship will seal its hatches in four hours.”
“Isn’t that fascinating?”
The banging on his door continued, and the mentar said, “Do you intend to board the ship?”
“That’s a good question. Anything else?”
The mentar paused, then added, “Yes, TECA authorities have asked me to inform you that if you intend to remain on emergency leave status but not return to Earth aboard the Fentan, you cannot remain in Wheel Nancy. We need the accommodations for incoming personnel. You will have to move to a civilian residential sector and be responsible for your own rent.”
“Amazing.”
The banging ceased and was replaced by scratching sounds.
“Is that all, Earth Girl?”
“Yes.”
Fred ended the call with a swipe and went to the door. He made a fist and cocked his arm, intending to punch whoever was there in the face. But when he swung the door open, there was no one there. Someone had scratched a crude hangman’s noose into the surface of the door, and Fred wondered idly how hanging would work in weightlessness as he shut the door and returned to the couch.
He was hungry, but the last time he’d gone to the commissary, even the dorises had shunned him.
THE THING ABOUT not thinking about things was that while you were busy not thinking about certain things, you were actually thinking about other things. So when the call from Marcus came, Fred took a break from not thinking and answered it.
“There’s still time for you to board the Fentan,” it said.
“That’s very interesting.”
Marcus refused to be put off and continued. “There have been sporadic incidents between russes and donalds out in the spars.”
“Define incidents.”
“Fights.”
“What a shame.”
“You have no intention of leaving the station, do you?”
“I honestly don’t know, Marcus. I don’t see what I would gain one way or another. For the first time in my life I don’t know what to do.”
“Perhaps I can help.”
“Give it a shot.”
“The Original Flaw.”
“What about it? You going to tell me what it is?”
“Not I. In your present frame of mind, I doubt you would believe me anyway. The person responsible for sealing that information in the first place will tell you.”
A third holo opened in Fred’s crowded stateroom. It was a life-sized sim of Agnes Russ. She wore the old-fashioned pants and blouse, big hair, and kindly smile Fred remembered from Russ School.
“Mother?” he said, sitting up.
“Yes, Freddy, it’s me. Marcus tells me you’ve made a mess of things up here, and he asked me to come up and straighten you out a little.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“First off, Tommy never diddled children, so get that out of your mind this instant. It’s garbage, and it’ll only poison you. Now, what I’m about to tell you is in the utmost, strictest confidence, and you must promise me you’ll never tell anyone. Not even Tommy knew it, and it could only harm the rest of your brothers. Do you promise me, Fred?”
What else could he say? “Yes, Mother.”
“Good.” The sim gazed at him with a mixture of skepticism and affection. “Honestly, boy, how you could ever believe those disgusting lies is beyond me. You’re so much like your father, worry and worry about every little thing until you’ve made a mountain out of air. It’s what killed him in the end.” She shook her head. “If you must know what was wrong with Tommy, I’ll tell you. He was a congenital moron, or would have been. When I was carrying him, they had just started finding and fixing birth defects while the baby was still in the womb. A DNA scan discovered that my fetus had Gorman’s Syndrome, a rare genetic brain disease. Marcus, explain to Fred what GS was.”
“Yes, myr,” Marcus said. “Gorman’s Syndrome is the faulty expression of a cluster of genes responsible for manufacturing the calcium-calmodulin-dependent protein Kinase II. Its function in the pathway responsible for —”
“Thank you, Marcus. What the defect does is it makes it hard to learn things. To learn anything.”
“Processing long-term synaptic potentiation, or LTP, into long-term memory,” Marcus added.
“Thank you, Marcus. Anyway, it’s a severe mental handicap. Children who have it never learn to speak. They can’t tie their own shoes or hardly feed themselves. Even with the best care they rarely live beyond ten or so years. That’s what my doctor told me.
“Your father wanted me to have an abortion, but my doctor told me about this new treatment. She said that GS was the result of only three defective genes, and they could try to insert normal ones into my fetus and maybe fix the problem in the womb. It was risky, but I loved you before you were born, and I decided to do it. It worked beautifully, and you — Tommy was born with normal intelligence.
“Your father and I were thrilled and very thankful, and we chose to seal Tommy’s medical records so he could grow up as a normal kid without this condition hanging over his head everywhere he went. There was a so-called DNA Bill of Rights back then.
“Then he grew up and joined the Secret Service and died saving President Taksayer, and she picked him to be the first commercial clone donor, and nobody knew of his original handicap, or they surely wouldn’t have picked him, no matter how heroic he was. But the genetic repair was stable and passed through to his clones and no one was the wiser, not even Applied People. Applied People still doesn’t know. That’s why you must keep this secret.
“It was only later, after your father died, and the first cloned lines were being so shamelessly exploited that I helped to found your Benevolent Brotherhood to protect you kids’ rights. I turned Tommy’s early medical records over to Marcus, including those covering the prenatal repair, but made him swear never to reveal them. It could ruin your germline, even today. Especially today.
“So, there you have it, Fred, the big secret. If we didn’t fix Tommy, his life would have been a brief nightmare, and none of you would exist. But we had him repaired, and though his life was still too short, it was a decent, full, normal life. He had friends and girlfriends, was attentive to us, never got mixed up with bad influences, and he died serving his country. Your Original Flaw is a profound learning disorder, but it was permanently fixed.”
“And I might add,” Marcus put in, “that there is a zero probability of a ‘clone fatigue’ capable of reversing the repair in a mature brain.”
“So, do everyone a big fat favor, son, and get over it already. Quit acting so self-destructive. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“All right then. Be good; stay safe; I love you. Marcus, take me home.”
“I love you too, Mother,” Fred said as the apparition faded from sight. At first Fred felt such a rush of relief he fell back on the couch, drunk and dizzy, the happiest man alive. I’m not a bad man, he told himself over and over. Life was possible again.
After a little while, Marcus said, “There’s still time to board the Fentan.”
“Yes, of course,” Fred said, jumping to his feet.
“You’ll go then?”
The decision was suddenly easy. “Yes.” He looked around his cluttered stateroom. “I’ll just collect my things.” His bag was still packed and ready to go.
“Good. You’ve made the right decision.”
“Thank you, Marcus.”
The mentar signed off, and Fred grabbed his travel bag and went to the door. But he stopped before reaching it when another thought crept into his mind, something Marcus had told him about the hoax russ metaverse, how a mentar could reconstruct all of human media in a day. Was it possible that Marcus had made a counterfeit Agnes Russ in order to manipulate him?
All of the goodness Fred had so recently reclaimed leaked away in a moment. If the Original Flaw was such a goddamn deep secret, faithfully kept for a hundred years even from Thomas A., why would they reveal it to him? Promise me, Freddy, you won’t tell anyone. Yes, Mother. How brief his absolution.
Fred dropped his bag and just stood there, frozen in place again. After a while, when Marcus called back to check on him, he didn’t answer but staggered to his couch, his mind stuttering like a faulty switch. Then out of the blue, a woman’s voice spoke: “I suppose that in a dark room, even a dim bulb feels bright.”
“Mary?” The FUS was active, Mary was watching him. Her surroundings had changed; she was no longer in her Starke suite. He recognized their apartment. “You’re at home! Where have you been? Are you all right?”
She waved away his questions. “I only made this update to say good-bye, Fred. They wanted to biostase us, but we refused. I am mentally competent and so have the right to decide my own fate. My sisters and I have seen through the illusion of meaning. There is no meaning to life, Fred. There is no heaven or hell, no afterlife. And since we live in a society in which we are banned even from bearing children, there is no biological afterlife either. Knowing all this is killing my sisters, and it will take me, too, very soon.”
“You’re wrong! About there being no meaning, and about your mental competence. Obviously, you are temporarily insane, and as your spouse, I have the authority to —”
“You have no authority over me, Fred. I am my own person. Besides, you couldn’t change things even if you tried. Stay up there and do your duty. That at least has meaning for you. This is good-bye, Fred. This is the end.”
“Don’t talk like that! Listen to me!” But she began to slip away again into her darkness. “You say you updated the FUS in order to say good-bye. Obviously, then, good-byes mean something to you. Your feelings for me mean something.”
“If you must hold on to something, Fred, then hold on to that.” With those final words, the FUS made a holo salute and withdrew into a passive state, and all of Fred’s cajoling and arguments were so much noise.
The FUS holo showed a little of Mary’s surroundings; a pair of legs intruded into the holospace, and Fred zoomed the view out as far as possible. Another evangeline was sitting there, Cyndee, who had helped them leave the prison. A third evangeline in the room was probably Georgine, who he had not met. They were placeholders, not active sims, as was a jenny nurse who moved in and out of the holospace.
Fred paced his room trying to come up with a plan. He picked up his travel bag, but set it down again. Think! He ordered his genetically repaired moron brain — Think! But thinking, like all his not-thinking, got him nowhere. His brain was the wrong muscle. He picked up his bag. Love was the only answer. Mary needed him. He wasn’t helping her by staying; at least by going there was some minuscule chance of reaching her in time.
Someone knocked frantically at his door. Fred dropped the bag, made a fist, cocked his arm, and flung the door open. He threw a punch but pulled it back before it landed. Mando was at his door, in his service uniform, and it looked like someone had already punched him. His left eye was bruised and swollen half shut.
“Fred! Why are you still here?” Mando said. “Why aren’t you aboard the Fentan?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Fred, Fred, Fred,” Mando said, pushing past him into the room. He glanced all around, saw Mary’s FUS and the spacefaring donald, spotted the travel bag. He picked it up and thrust it into Fred’s hands. “We must hurry.”
“Yes,” Fred said, “let’s go.” Fred swiped away the holos, and they left the room. In the hall, the walls on either side of his door had been marked with hateful words and glyphs.
“Forget about that,” Mando said and pulled Fred by the arm.
“Wrong way,” Fred said. “The spokeway lifts are that way.”
But Mando was insistent. “We’ll take a utility lift to the hub. The main spokeways aren’t safe.” He didn’t elaborate.
“Who hit you?” Fred said. “Was it a brother? Do you know his name?”
“It’s not important. Getting you on that ship is important.” He led Fred down little-used corridors to a service lift. They passed only a few startled dorises and aslams along the way.
“Wait a minute,” Fred said as the elevator doors opened. “Why are you in a TECA uniform?”
“Because I am on duty.”
“But why aren’t you on the Fentan? You were supposed to board days ago.” Then the truth hit Fred. “No one would sell you another homerun. You sold me your own ticket!”
“Yes, and if we don’t hurry, it will all be for nothing. Come, my crazy friend.”
He tried to pull Fred into the elevator car, but Fred stood fast. “What about Luisa? Don’t you want to go to her? It’s your ticket, not mine. How dare you put my heart before your own?”
Pain flashed across Mando’s damaged face. “There is no time, Fred. When you are on the ship, call me and we will talk.”
Fred shrugged him off. “We’ll talk now.”
“You are stubborn, my brother. Let us compromise and talk on the way.”
“No!”
When Mando saw that Fred would not budge, he said, “I love Luisa more than breathing. But you, Fred, you and Mary. How can I say this? My brothers say you are sick, that you have the clone fatigue, and that is why you must humiliate us before the world. But I say they’re wrong. You and Mary are special. What happens to you matters to all of us, to me and Luisa. If you or Mary die, we all die. You can’t stay here any longer. Besides, I promised you a ticket, and a russ keeps his word. Now can we go?”
Fred joined him in the lift, and they rode it to the hub where they found a shuttle to the Fentan’s spar. They were silent the entire trip out, and Fred made a quick list of all his options. When at last they reached the Fentan gangway and processing station, Fred grabbed a handrail and halted himself.
“What’s wrong?” Mando said. “Only a little farther.”
“Not for me, my friend. I’ve been thinking.”
“Fred!”
“No, shut up and listen. You are a true brother, Armando Mendez, and a true friend. You helped me see what I need to do. No, don’t speak. I wish I could save all of us. I don’t think I can, but maybe I can save a few.” He shoved his travel bag into Mando’s arms. “You’re going back, not me. If they’re still alive when you get there, do what you can.”
Before Mando could object, Fred said, “Earth Girl, come in.”
“Listening.”
“Transfer my passage aboard the Fentan to Armando Mendez.”
“You can’t!” Mando said.
“It’s already done.”
FRED TOOK A cart to a spot near his old space gate. Top Ape was waiting for him in an EM shadow with two of the tamperproof cases. Fred swiped them and said, “Make all the bullshit stop.”
Then he boarded a shuttle for the civilian port. He used his Spectre to send a message to Veronica TOTE to meet him at once. On his way to the Elbow Room he did some port traffic analysis and booked a room in a civieside rez wheel.
BY THE TIME Fred reached the stockroom, Veronica TOTE’s proxy was waiting for him. “Smart decision, Commander.”
“Wait until you hear my conditions.”
If the real Veronica TOTE was as exhausted as her proxy looked, she hadn’t slept in days. “By all means,” she said, “let’s hear your conditions.”
“First, tell me if I’m reading the traffic data correctly. I see a lot of musical chairs with the cryocapsules. Have you changed your mind about the Chernobyl?”
A thin smile spread across the pirate’s face. “Why, in fact, we have. We took your comments to heart and did a little research, and you were right about both the Chernobyl and the Hybris. When you’re right, Commander, you’re right. Fortunately, we’re a nimble organization, and we should be able to handle the last-minute switch, especially now that you’ve returned to ride herd on our monkeyboys.”
“About that. Tell me something: In this new society of yours, this new center of power in the universe, will there be room in it for clones?”
From the look on the proxy’s face, this was a question that had never crossed Veronica’s mind. “I doubt Applied People or Capias World or any other human resources agency will choose to operate there.”
“I’m not talking about the companies. I’m talking about independent iterants, ex-commercial clones.”
The proxy gave it some thought. “I suppose there could be a place for runaway clones, but it’s not something I could decide on my own.”
“That’s my first condition,” Fred said. “After you take over the ship, you will issue a public proclamation that all independent clones are entitled to full citizenship and equal rights in your new colony.” Then he remembered something Mary’s FUS had said. “Including full unrestricted reproductive rights.”
“Clones having babies? That’s a tall order.”
“Watch it get taller. Second, you will immediately place into biostasis my wife and her two sisters, Georgine and Cyndee. I can tell you where you can find all three of them right now. You’ll also biostase Luisa Mendez of Cozumel, Mexico. I can give you a positive ID.”
“They’ll refuse. I understand that all ’leens are refusing that.”
“I really don’t care. You’ll kidnap them if necessary and do it anyway. Kidnapping is a TUG specialty, isn’t it? Once that’s done, you will hide them from the authorities, but you will inform their spouses or designated others and give them the decision of how and when to quicken them.” Fred paused to review what he had said, and he added, “And let the spouses know it was me, Mr. Clone Fatigue, who so ordered it.
“Third, put Mary in a cryocapsule and smuggle her up here to the Hybris with your own stowaways.”
The proxy was incredulous. “Anything else?”
Fred thought for a second. “No, that’ll do. But when you take Mary, be prepared; my wife keeps company with a diplomat-class bee.”
The overtired proxy shook its head. “You know, Commander, there’s been a fair bit of discussion around the War Table about whether or not you really have fallen out of type.”
“Is that a fact? And what was the upshot?”
The proxy crossed its muscled arms. “You really want to know?”
“Why not?”
“All right. The Supreme Council thinks you’re a bad apple, but whether or not more russes will turn like you is an open question. In the meantime we find you useful.”
“Fair enough. Good to know.” Fred began to swim to the door and stopped. “What about you, Veronica? What do you think?”
“What do I think about you?”
“Yeah.”
The proxy rubbed its chin. Even with her face unpacked, Veronica had a strong chin. “You have the clone fatigue, no doubt about it. You are ground zero for clone fatigue. You are the first robin of spring. I think that if we open our colony to runaway clones, we should expect a flood of you.”
Fred grunted.
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