Mind Over Ship Read online

  As luck would have it, she managed to engage a solo booth, and she popped up in the courtscape in her reserved spot on the bench directly behind the defense table. Other spectators appeared on either side of her. The judge appeared behind the bench and the prosecuting attorney at his table. Although the judge and prosecutor had conducted the bulk of the trial by proxy, they marked the importance of the final day by appearing in person by holopresence. By contrast, Fred’s defense counsel, Myr Talbot, appeared by proxy as usual. His proxy swiveled around and greeted Mary with a nod, but Mary was too upset to acknowledge it. Was it asking too much for Talbot to appear in person to deliver his closing argument? To send his proxy at so critical a time was unconscionable, bordering on malpractice, and she was no longer able to hide her disgust with the man.

  At the outset of the trial, Mary had begged Fred to allow the Starke Cabinet’s attorney general to defend him, but Fred wouldn’t hear of it. He wouldn’t even let her mention the Starke name in his presence, let alone accept the largesse of its legal representation. Mary then insisted on hiring their own attorney. With what? he had asked. Not with Starke funds she assured him. With their own income from her own Leena. Where did the Leena come from? he asked, and he answered his own question — from Starke. Fred chose to go with an attorney provided by Applied People and the Benevolent Brotherhood of Russes — the incompetent Myr Talbot.

  Talbot’s first act had been to help pick a ruinous jury. He had recommended that Fred agree to an E-Pluribus jury, which in itself was not unreasonable. The court calendar was perennially backlogged and to insist on a jury of living, realbody people for a trial of this class would require a wait of seven or eight years. With little chance of bail, Fred would sit out those years in prison. An E-Pluribus jury, on the other hand, could be impaneled at once.

  Selecting the E-Pluribus jury had started out well. Fifteen Everypersons appeared in the jury box, their quicksilver surfaces throwing rainbow flashes of color throughout the courtscape. At a word from the judge, they all began to flicker, morphing momentarily into random individuals from the vast pool of 1.2 billion potential juror sims in the E-Pluribus database. Young, old, rich, poor, the whole spectrum of society flashed by. Moreover, these sims had been cast prior to the date of Fred’s alleged crimes and stored inert in isolation, so there was no possibility of contamination by hearsay or the media.

  The judge rapped his gavel, and like a game of musical chairs, the morphing came to an abrupt halt. Fifteen candidate sims blinked and looked around, confused by their sudden existence. Remarkably, there were seven iterants among them, including an evangeline and a russ! And the non-iterant candidates were mostly free-rangers, that part of society least hostile to clones. A more favorable jury could not be imagined, but it wasn’t to be. The attorneys exercised their allotted challenges, and one after another of the jurors morphed again and again, dipping into the limitless demographic pool.

  When all challenges were exhausted and the final jury and alternates were impaneled, it was the polar opposite of the first. The evangeline and russ were long gone, which Mary had expected. (Excluding them amounted to a racist belief that clones were not individuals!) Worse, the other five clones had been replaced as well, two with affs, which was bad enough, and the rest with chartists. Chartists! Chartists despised iterants, falsely accused them of stealing their jobs. It was far from an impartial jury made up of Fred’s peers!

  Talbot’s incompetence continued to manifest throughout every phase of the trial. Mary pleaded with Fred, but stubborn Fred insisted on going without any Starke assistance. And so, five months later, they arrived at this final day of the trial, facing what amounted to life behind real bars.

  When Fred appeared at the defense table in his prison jumpsuit, Mary put on her bravest face so that when he turned around he’d see at least one friend in the courtroom.

  Oh, but he looked haggard. Hadn’t he slept at all? He smiled at her with grim tenderness, which broke her heart all over again.

  Then his attention was distracted by someone behind Mary. The judge rapped his gavel and the bailiff ordered all to rise for the jury. Mary rose, and the jury sims — stored during trial recess on the court’s own secure quantum lattice — filed into the jury box. Mary glanced around to see who had caught Fred’s eye. It was Reilly Dell. Reilly avoided Mary’s look, and the courtroom was asked to be seated.

  So the trial, so the closing arguments. The prosecutor trumpeted the vicious nature of Fred’s slaughter of duly sworn officers of a health-care facility. He emphasized Fred’s contempt of the law, to this day refusing to name the source of his false identikit. He enumerated the ways society was harmed by Fred’s egregious crimes. In response, Myr Talbot-by-proxy failed to remind the jury of Fred’s overriding motive for his crimes — to save his wife’s life. He did not contradict the prosecutor’s assertion that Fred’s victims were all “duly sworn” officers of the clinic — the pikes were a rogue element whose presence had never been adequately explained during the proceedings. Talbot-by-proxy did not challenge any number of inconsistencies and contradictions that even Mary, who was not trained in the law, had noted during the course of the trial. All was surely lost.

  The judge instructed the jury and then sequestered it in a deliberation space. Fred’s holopresence from the Utah prison was abruptly severed, and the courtscape went to standby.

  Before leaving the shelter of the court house lobby, Mary lowered the veil of her new hat. With veil in place and head held high, she marched resolutely out the doors and down the court house steps. Immediately, about a thousand media bees mobbed her. The tiny mechs with whirring acetate wings formed a wall to block her way. Little framed faces shouted the same question at her: How do you feel the trial went?

  But Mary didn’t answer. Without even slowing down, she marched into the wall shouting, “Desist! Desist!” and the wall gave way.

  At the bottom of the steps, the Starke limo waited at the curb. Mary jumped in and the heavy door shut itself against the horde. The windows opaqued. Mary removed her hat and leaned back into the ultra-soft seat cushions. She closed her eyes and caught her breath.

  After a while, when the car didn’t leap into the air to make its way home, she opened her eyes and said, “We’re not moving.”

  Lyra appeared in the seat opposite her and said, “We’ve been advised to remain in place and stand by.”

  “What for?”

  “The bailiff reports that the jury has already voted and returned a verdict.”

  Mary’s heart fluttered. “So soon? Five months of trial and ten minutes of deliberation? What does it mean?”

  The mentar said, “I have no experience in these matters.”

  “Ask Cabinet or someone who knows. But first ask the bailiff if they want us to come back in.”

  “Yes, they’re about to reconvene to read the verdict. The bailiff is calling us.”

  Mary suffered another trip through the media gauntlet, through courthouse security, and dashed back to her booth. Fred and the attorneys were already in place. Myr Talbot was there, by holopresence this time, looking baffled. Fred, damn him, slumped in his chair, resigned to his fate.

  The judge appeared, and all rose again for the jury. The jury members each glanced at Fred as they filed in, which every court drama Mary had ever watched said was a good sign. When the judge asked for the verdict, the foreperson cleared her throat and said, “In the first count, irretrievable manslaughter in the first degree, we find the defendant . . . not guilty.”

  A collective gasp filled the scape. Fred, confused, asked Talbot to repeat what the juror had said. The judge rapped for order, and the foreperson went down the charge sheet, delivering a litany of “not guilties.” The judge polled each juror independently to verify the verdict. The result: Fred was exonerated on all counts. The judge ordered him freed.

  Fred was in shock. He turned to face Mary, but she was no better prepared for this turn of events. Before either of them could recover
, Fred was vanished back to Utah. Myr Talbot, looking befuddled, turned to her and said, “He’s free, but it’ll take a few hours for him to be discharged from the prison.”

  GEORGINE SAID, “DON’T worry about a thing, Mary. We’ve got everything under control.” Rather than return to the Manse, Mary’s car had headed straight to the Bloomington Slipstream station where a Starke tube limo awaited her. It was a long, sleek Marbech Tourister, designed to accommodate ten fussy passengers during pancontinental trips. Soon she was hurtling beneath the plains states inside a blast bubble of compressed air to the federal penitentiary outside Provo. She was furious with herself for having been so sure of Fred’s ultimate conviction that she had failed to make any plans at all for his improbable release. As she traveled, she and Georgine conspired to hammer together a “transition plan.”

  “Are you sure you can spare both Cyndee and me?”

  “No problem,” Georgine said. “Ellen understands the situation and gives her blessing. She hasn’t mentioned you-know-who all day, and Dr. Lamprey is our cheerleader.”

  “Lyra, can you make all the costumes in time?”

  “Yes,” said the mentar. “Yours will be waiting for you, Mary. I’ve instructed the car how to pick it up.”

  “And my bee? Can you send Blue Bee with Cyndee and Larry?”

  “We already did. They’re already in the tube and should arrive shortly after you.”

  “And afterward? I don’t think Fred will want to come to the Manse.”

  “We’ll arrange something,” Georgine said. “Don’t worry about a thing, Mary. Just go and bring Fred home.”

  Space Condos

  In the birthing suite, the two replacement Andreas were being passively exercised through electrocortical stimulation. Their higher minds idled like engines. Soon, E-P assured Andrea, soon.

  MEEWEE ENTERED THE grand conference room on the ground floor of the reception building of the Starke Enterprises campus where the “Gang of Three” — Jaspersen, Gest, and Fagan — were already present by holopresence. At least, Gest and Fagan were. Jaspersen was attending by proxy, or so it would seem. Everyone knew that Jaspersen didn’t trust proxies and never used them, but he liked to impersonate them. It didn’t really make much sense — impersonating a proxy of oneself. What practical advantage could you gain? But Jaspersen had done so for nearly a century, ever since his famous proxy meltdown when he was USNA Vice President. In any case, all that was visible of him was his bald head. No shoulders or hands, not even a neck. Floating over his seat, Jaspersen gave the impression of being an animated toy balloon.

  “What’s the matter? No hello for me, your holiness?”

  “Hello, Myr Jaspersen,” Meewee said. “Nice of your proxy to join us.”

  Jaspersen cackled his appreciation. The very sight of him, or his improbable proxy, strained Meewee’s tolerance to its breaking point. Jaspersen was a singularly ugly toy balloon, with a lumpy skull; a too-large, always-leering mouth; and insolent, droopy eyelids. He was a disturbing caricature of a man. He was what a demon might look like without makeup.

  Adam Gest, on the other hand, was preternaturally handsome. The owner of Aria Yachts and the shipyards at Mezzoluna and Trailing Earth, where the Oships were being constructed, Gest had deep, dark eyes and long lashes, curly brown hair, pearly teeth, and a pretty mouth that was forever set in a smile. If anyone had the wherewithal to sabotage Eleanor’s space yacht, it was Gest, whose company had built it. Several times in the last few months, Meewee had had to curb an impulse to sic Arrow on the man and his business. Surely, the evidence of Eleanor’s destruction was buried somewhere in Gest’s files. But Arrow was a tricky investigator to control; in uncovering Gest’s complicity, it was liable to inadvertently cripple the GEP shipyards, or cause some other world-class disaster. Still, he yearned to someday confront Gest’s pretty face with an arrest warrant.

  The third villain was Byron Fagan — Dr. Fagan — the owner of the bastion of aff mollycoddling, Roosevelt Clinic, where Fagan’s zombied mentar, Concierge, had almost succeeded in murdering Eleanor’s daughter. Fagan was a tall man, towering a good meter over Meewee. He was pleasant enough, until you contradicted him. Then he treated you like an errant employee. Meewee felt physically affronted by the man, even via holopresence.

  The rest of the board members projected into place, either by proxy or holopresence: Trina Warbeloo, board secretary; Zoranna Alblaitor, Andrea Tiekel, and the others. Only twelve of the thirteen votes were represented. Jerry Chapwoman had recently resigned and the board was still interviewing replacement candidates. Meanwhile, Meewee represented both Heliostream and Starke Enterprises and had two votes. Cabinet took up its usual observer position at the foot of the table but didn’t say anything.

  After Andrea’s recent bid to purchase Heliostream, Meewee wasn’t so sure where her loyalties lay. He watched her for clues. She did seem unusually chummy with the Gang of Three, but she greeted Meewee warmly as well.

  After the board worked through old business, the first item of new business was a motion by Jaspersen: “I move that we add eight little words to our mission statement, to read: ‘The GEP shall resettle humans outside Sol System in exchange for enforceable title and user rights to real estate on Earth, and to pursue space-based for-profit industries.’ ”

  Fagan seconded, and Meewee, as board chair, reluctantly opened the floor for discussion. Jaspersen jumped in immediately. “Before you bitch and moan about how this will distract us from our primary mission,” Jaspersen’s balloon told him, “let me assure you that the opposite is true. As I’m sure you’re aware, the Chinas have recently announced their own extensive Near-Earth colonization and solar harvester programs. They got fed up with waiting for us to license them our technology. Practically speaking, it’ll take them ten years or so to catch up. That gives us a decade-long window of opportunity to actually see some profit from all our hard work over the last dozen years. Let me remind you, Eleanor Starke always promised us some fair return for our participation. And believe me, there’s a pent-up demand for high-quality inner-system space habitation systems. With the revenue we generate, we will double or triple our shipbuilding capacity. Thus, the extra-system colonization, which is all you ever think about, your highness, would not be harmed in the least by our enterprise. We might actually increase it.”

  Meewee shook his head and said, “You are the last person I would expect to be quoting the murdered and absent Myr Starke to me.”

  But Jaspersen’s proxy ignored him and addressed the others around the table. “Adam will now show us how it works.”

  Everyone turned to Gest, whose response from his office at Mezzoluna involved a round-trip transmission lag of about a second. Yet before he could answer, Meewee said, “You can’t change bylaws, let alone the consortium mission statement, on a procedural vote. You all know that. You need a supermajority.”

  But when Gest lurched into speech, everyone around the table hushed Meewee. “Thank you, Saul,” Gest began. At the same moment, a scale model of an Oship appeared floating over the conference table. “Here’s one of our colony ships. In fact, I see that it’s the Chernobyl.” The ship’s name was stenciled in Roman as well as Cyrillic script on the revolving habitation drums. “Its structure is basically a tandem hoop frame with thirty-two hab drums strung on each hoop. Except for stabilizing rockets, it has no propulsion of its own. Instead, an electromagnetic torus centered in the hub acts as a target for particle beams supplied to it by Heliostream.” As Gest spoke from Mezzoluna, the model over their heads began to change. The ordinarily invisible torus target in the ship’s donut hole glowed red. “Most of the energy the torus intercepts is turned into motive force, the rest is used for life support. Our first refinement would be to tune the torus for micro wave reception instead of particle beam.” The torus glow changed from red to green. “What’s more, only the outer, sunward ship in a roll of Oships needs to have a torus field at all, which will lead to a great cost savings.” As he sp
oke, more Oships appeared and stacked up against the first like a roll of candy. Their hab drums were all steadily rolling, generating gravity for their inhabitants. From the hoop frames there blossomed solar collectors and dishes and targets of one sort or another. They looked like sprouting leaves and flowers. The evolving model was mesmerizing.

  “The typical parked space arcology will house ten to fifteen million persons,” Gest went on. “We already have in hand tentative orders for over a hundred arcologies.”

  Half a light-second away, Adam Gest paused to look around the table at the individual board members, stopping at Meewee. “About now,” he said, “someone is bound to ask, But what about resources? Won’t we be robbing our extra-solar ships to do this additional work? My answer is no. As for raw materials, we already have an exceptionally rich stockpile of nickel/iron asteroids at Trailing Earth, and many more en route from the Kuiper Belt. Chapwoman Extrusion, which Trina has purchased, will be able to supply us the extra construction extruders. My yards are infinitely expandable, and increasing the number of my construction ’beitors will prove to be no problem. We’ll have to talk to whoever buys Chapwoman’s Exotic Fields about retuning the toruses. And the last time I checked, Heliostream is able to supply us with all the micro wave energy we could possibly need. Thus, we already have the extra capacity in place.”

  When Gest seemed finished speaking, Zoranna Alblaitor, who had been waiting impatiently, spoke up. “Gest has covered material, facilities, and energy, but what about labor? Applied People would have to start whole new batch lots of jacks and johns to meet the increased demand. We’re talking years of maturation and training, and then what? When the Chinas come online, and demand for our space habitats drop, what do I do with all the surplus iterants?”