Mind Over Ship Page 3
As it happened, the moving van in question had contained ordinary house hold goods, not some more sensitive cargo, but that was beside the point. No one should get the impression that they could mess with the TUGs and get away with it.
Oliver pointed at the boy’s mug, and the frame expanded into a life-size hologram of the impromptu interview room. The room was actually a nitproof tent they had constructed in a very secure warehouse. They had delivered the boy to the tent in a nitproof bag. As far as the police were concerned, the boy fell off the grid in a public null room in Oak Park, halfway across the city. In the tent, the boy was lying on a tarp, and his legs were shackled in makeshift stocks.
Although the Persuasion Channel provided its amateur interviewers triple anonymity, Oliver walked through the holospace searching for any inadvertent clues that might give his charter away to the authorities. The only agent in the tent was a generic house hold arbeitor. It was busy painting the soles of the boy’s bare feet with an organic solvent that caused the skin to liquefy and slough off. The exposed nerve endings on the soles of his feet looked like the stubble of a white beard.
The boy was already crying and pleading, which made Oliver shake his head in wonder. The solvent didn’t actually hurt, and if the boy made this much fuss so soon, how would he hold up when the arbeitor broke out the hair dryer?
Oliver’s comlink buzzed. “Prinz Clinic called,” said a subordinate. “Veronica is out of recovery.”
“Thank you,” Oliver said, wiping away the holospace. “Get my car.”
A PHALANX OF three tuggers preceded Oliver TUG through the surgical wing of Prinz Clinic. Each of them stood over two meters tall and measured twice the girth of human standard. Clinic workers and machines hugged the walls to let them pass. The TUGs wore military-cut jumpsuits, and over their left shoulders floated the olive-and mustard-colored marble of their charter logo.
At the door to the private room, Oliver told his detail to wait in the hall while he went in alone. Although he must have known what to expect, seeing her for the first time was still unsettling. She looked the same as before, only smaller. Much smaller, a half of her previous mass. Her head was shaved, but it had the same jar-shape, with flattened nose and pronounced chin, that characterized their charter. She looked like a miniature version of herself.
Oliver TUG told the medtechs in the room to vacate, and they seemed only too glad to comply. Then he drew himself erect, looking even more imposing, and said in a gravelly voice, “Veronica TUG of the Iron Moiety, on behalf of the Supreme Council of Moieties of Charter TUG, I am compelled to deliver an official notice of reprimand. Your recent body mods run counter to TUG regulations, causing harm to yourself and serving as encouragement of aberrant behavior to others.” As he said this, he gave her a secret wink. “Furthermore,” he went on, “continuation in this manner will result in serious penalty, up to expulsion from the charter.”
Veronica seemed unperturbed by the solemn pronouncement. When Oliver stopped talking, she said, “Finished? Then come here and give us a hug.”
Oliver scowled, but he crossed the room and leaned over her bed to gently pat her shoulder. Still using his officious tone of voice, he said, “We’re all concerned about you, Veronica. Your moiety is both ashamed and worried. Won’t you even consider undoing this great harm?” As he spoke, he made a fist and pressed his knuckles against her shaved skull for a good bone-to-bone connection. Bad news, Vee, he said. All the latest mentar shoots have failed the isolation stress test.
All of them? she replied through her skull. He nodded, and she said, They raptured?
That’s what it looked like. We have to rethink this whole thing. We’re getting nowhere. We should call in a mentar specialist.
No! she said. No outsiders. We can’t risk exposure.
Well, this is becoming a very expensive waste of time. We’ve burned through nearly thirty personality buds with no results. Do you have any idea how much those things cost?
I know exactly how much they cost, but there is no alternative. We must have a stable mentar, one able to go months in total isolation. No, this is the only way. Start a new batch.
Are you sure?
Look at me. Do you think I would have put myself through this if I wasn’t? Start a new batch at once!
Oliver removed his fist from her head, leaving knuckle marks. He paced the small room for a while, then returned to lay his fist on her again. All right, but if this batch fails, we explore other options.
She shrugged under his rude weight and changed the subject. Any word from Starke?
She’s agreed to meet with us but hasn’t set a date yet.
Stay on top of it. Oliver removed his fist again and chucked her under the chin. “You’re a maddeningly stubborn woman,” he said in his disapproving tone. He went to the door and added, “Disobedience to the Supreme Council cannot and will not be tolerated. That’s the first rule. Remember it.”
“Wait,” she called after him. “Don’t you want to see my tail?”
Skipping Stones for the GEP
It was a perfect morning for skipping stones, warm and sunny. Meewee left his Heliostream office and told his calendar to hold all calls. But by the time he took a lift up to the surface and exited the reception building, storm clouds had moved in, and a few late-season snowflakes were falling. But the cart was waiting for him, and he was wearing a smart jumpsuit with an integrated heater, so he went anyway.
Meewee rode out to one of the hundreds of hourglass-shaped fish farming ponds that dotted the ten-thousand-acre campus of Starke Enterprises, and by the time he reached it, the sun had come out again. He parked the cart and searched the banks for throwing stones, without much hope of finding any. The Starke ponds were lined with crushed basalt: blocky stones that were good for smashing the heads of snakes but abysmal for skipping.
Merrill Meewee knew his stones. As a boy in Kenya, skipping stones was his favorite free-time activity. There had been an abundance of saucer-shaped missiles on the banks of his father’s own fishpond. Fat, river-smoothed disks, they skipped ten, twelve, sixteen times before slipping beneath the surface with a watery plop. His father, a man of little wealth but great forbearance, was not pleased with his boy’s solitary pastime, but he never ordered him to stop. Instead, he asked the boy how many stones he thought the pond could hold. I don’t know, Meewee remembered answering. A hundred thousand?
Oh, such a big number! And how many stones do you suppose you’ve thrown already?
Merrill, who was an excellent student, calculated the number of stones he might have tossed in an hour and how many free hours were left each day after school and chores, how many afternoons in how many years since he first discovered the sport. I would estimate 14,850, he informed his father with a certain amount of swagger.
His father was impressed. So many? And all of them have gone to the bottom?
Of course they’ve gone to the bottom, he had said, embarrassed by his father’s apparent ignorance. They’re stones. They’re heavier than water.
And heavier than fishes?
Of course heavier than fishes.
Good, good, his father concluded, patting him on the head. Keep at it, son, and soon I won’t have to work so hard.
Father?
It’s true. When you fill up my pond with your stones, I won’t need nets and plungers to harvest the fish. I’ll simply wade in up to my ankles and pick them like squash.
It was a lesson in diplomacy, as much as aquaculture, and it stayed with him all these years.
There was a splash, and Meewee looked up in time to catch a flash of fin gliding across the surface of the larger bulb of the hourglass pond. The larger bulb was for the general population, while the smaller one joined to it by a gated neck was used as a nursery and harvesting corral. The fish were a transgenic species called panasonics. In Meewee’s opinion, they weren’t a pretty animal, what with pop-eyes, slimy skin, and a protruding lower jaw lined with needlelike teeth. But they were
robust, easy to farm, and, kilo for kilo, one of the most nutritious natural foods that ordinary people could still afford. They yielded heavy fillets of orangish-red flesh that was high in the omega oils not found in other freshwater varieties. And grilled with lemon pepper or served with dill sauce — oh!
Oh, to the devil with the stones, he thought, abandoning his quest for skip-worthy stones and settling for a pocketful of gravel. He spent the next hour pitching gravel into the pond, not even trying to skip them because they always sank after the first bounce. Meewee had a strong throwing arm, but it was too short to get much distance. Nevertheless, despite everything, Meewee lost himself in the activity.
His reverie was interrupted by a message from his calendar.
“I thought I told you to hold my calls,” he said with a huff of annoyance. “This had better be important.”
The calendar wisely made no reply.
Meewee sighed and brushed his dirty hands on his scarlet and vermilion jumpsuit. “Proceed.”
Aria flight control at Mezzoluna reports that due to local conditions launch of advance ships has been moved forward.
“That news could have waited until I returned to the office.” He turned and began to climb the rocky apron to the grassy bank. “Anything else?”
New launch time is 14:50 today.
“Today? The launch is today?”
Yes, at 14:50 local time.
“What time is it now?”
14:45.
Meewee swore and began to jog up the bank to the cart, but he knew he would never make it back to the office in five minutes. “Arrow,” he said, addressing his mentar, “you’ll have to project the launch here.”
The cart at the top of the bank lurched forward half a meter in order to turn away from the sun. Then a patch of eastern sky above Meewee’s head darkened until it was pitch-black and spangled with stars. A voice was counting down the seconds, and Meewee craned his neck to stare at the far reaches of space projected above him. He couldn’t distinguish the launch facility from the starry background. The view was from the Aria space yards at Mezzoluna several tens of thousands of kilometers from the actual blast site. At the end of the countdown there was a beat, and then the star field disappeared in a blossoming ball of nuclear fire. Meewee shut his eyes and turned away, dazzled. When he could see again he searched the star field. “Well?” he said. “Was it successful?”
Arrow said, Shipboard telemetry won’t resume for several minutes.
Of course not, even robotic ships needed time to recover from a nuclear blast. These ships carried a complete set of repair bots and nanofabs to constantly rebuild themselves during their centuries-long journey. They were designed to arrive at their destination star systems at least two hundred years before their assigned Oships. They would spend the time gained preparing the way for the colonists: scouting target planets, performing terraforming tasks, laying infrastructure, constructing cities so that when the Oships arrived and the colonists were roused from their millennial slumber, whole, viable new worlds awaited them, ready to inhabit.
A new, faint star appeared in the holoscape above Meewee. “Is that — ?” he said, and another appeared, and a third and fourth. The robotic ships that had come through the atomic boost were firing their main chemical rockets, to correct their course and to boost their speed even more.
Aria launch control counted the ships as they reported in. Six, seven, fourteen ships. Twenty, twenty-eight, fifty, seventy-six. Meewee cheered, literally jumping up and down on the bank of the fishpond. Seventy-six out of a possible two hundred advance ships reported in. It was more than he had been told to expect. The launch was a solid success!
“Arrow, name the Oships they belong to.”
The Garden Chernobyl — ten advance ships under way. The Garden Hybris — eight. The Garden Kiev — twenty-four advance ships.
The Kiev — excellent! thought Meewee. The Kiev was the first Oship in the launch order. Its departure was only months away.
The King Jesus — nineteen advance ships under way, Arrow continued. The Garden of Hope — fifteen.
Excellent, excellent, excellent — it was all excellent. It was superlative. Meewee felt like celebrating. If only Wee Hunk were still around. How he missed the annoying little caveman. Meewee turned his pocket inside out and flung the last bits of gravel into the pond. The splashes made a gurgling sound that resembled a word, someone saying, “Galloway,” or maybe “Go away.” Meewee often heard words in running water, in the wind, in squeaky hinges.
“I’m going, I’m going,” he replied merrily and climbed the rest of the way to the cart.
An Unwelcome Offer
No sooner had Meewee returned to his office than Lyra called and asked him to join Ellen Starke in an ongoing meeting at the Starke Manse. Lyra was Ellen Starke’s new mentar, the replacement for Wee Hunk, her former mentar. Meewee had not yet found the courage to inform Ellen that it was Arrow who had killed Wee Hunk or that it was he, Meewee, who had ordered Arrow to do so. But now was not the time. This was a time for celebrating their successful launch.
“By all means!” he exclaimed to the mentar. “Tell Ellen I’ll be right there.” He sat in his favorite chair and told Arrow to take him to the Manse. A moment later he was sitting opposite Ellen’s desk in the Map Room. The room was brightly lit by a single window that stretched the entire length of the wall. Ellen Starke’s persona sat behind her desk. She appeared to be the same young woman she had been before the space yacht crash that had taken her mother’s life. In a chair next to Meewee sat the holo of another young woman, Andrea Tiekel, who had replaced her aunt, Andie Tiekel, on the GEP board. Andie Tiekel and Eleanor Starke had been murdered only days apart.
Bracketing Ellen’s desk were the personas of the mentars Cabinet and Lyra.
“It was a complete success!” Meewee announced, pumping the air with his fist. He turned to the corner of the room, where he knew the realbody Ellen would be sitting with her evangeline companion. And though he couldn’t see her, he gave her a triumphant thumbs-up.
“Over here, Bishop,” Ellen said. Her holo persona at the desk waited for him to turn back to her. “What was a complete success?”
“Why, the launch of the first advance ships. We’re on our way!” Ellen gave him a look of incomprehension. “The advance ships for the Oships,” he explained. “Aria had to push up the atomic boost to today. I thought that was why you summoned me.” Meewee’s elation began to leak away. “Why did you summon me?”
“We have received an unexpected offer from Myr Tiekel here. Since you are titular head of Heliostream, I thought you’d want to sit in on this meeting.”
Titular head? Meewee didn’t like the sound of that. He turned to the Tiekel woman. “Hello, Andrea. What offer?”
Andrea smiled disarmingly. “Don’t worry, your excellency, my offer will have little effect on your position at Heliostream. And, by the way, congratulations on the successful launch. I think that’s marvelous.”
Being told not to worry always made Meewee worry. He shot a questioning glance at Ellen, who said, “Andrea wants to buy Heliostream.”
“Excuse me?”
“Heliostream,” Andrea said. “I’m in the process of retooling my investment portfolio. Except for E-Pluribus, Auntie’s investments are, frankly, a bit outdated. A space-based energy company like Heliostream would make an ideal core holding.”
Alarmed, Meewee said to Ellen, “Why don’t you sell her our fish farms instead? The aquaculture sector is just as important as energy.” But these were only the surface words. Embedded in them was a hidden statement in another language.
Ellen made no sign of understanding him in either language. Since her crash, she had repeatedly refused to speak the secret family metalanguage with him. Sometimes he wondered if she even remembered it.
Meewee turned to Cabinet, who was standing on one side of Ellen’s desk, and challenged its ID in Starkese.
The mentar, once Eleanor Starke’s power house, did not answer his ID challenge. It hadn’t done so since it had been forced to pass through probate after Eleanor’s death. Therefore, for all intents and purposes, it was an outsider and not to be trusted with family security. For about the thousandth time, Meewee questioned his decision not to kill the mentar when he had had the chance. But not even Wee Hunk had been sure at the time whether Cabinet had been contaminated or not. And besides, some family mentar had been necessary to manage Eleanor’s far-flung empire until Ellen could take charge of it. Cabinet had seemed capable of doing that at least.
Meewee didn’t even bother challenging the young mentar Lyra. It had never given any indication of knowing Starkese at all. That meant that neither Starke mentar was completely trustworthy.
Andrea, watching him with a puzzled expression, said, “While aquaculture is indeed an important industry, Bishop Meewee, I am more inclined toward energy at this time.”
Meewee threw off all attempts at appealing to Ellen in Starkese. He leaned over the desk and said, “You can’t sell Heliostream. It’s out of the question. Heliostream is more than an energy utility. It’s the contractual linchpin of the entire Garden Earth Consortium. If you sell it, you give away control of the whole GEP!”
Before Ellen could reply, Andrea said, “I repeat; there’s no need to worry about that, excellency. When I buy Heliostream, I’ll allow you to remain in your position as CEO, and you can continue to represent it on the board. I have no intention of abandoning the GEP mission. On the contrary, I’m on your side. I, too, believe it essential that we humans spread our species throughout the galaxy. In that we are allies.”