Mind Over Ship (27 page)

Mary took a spa car home. A mud bath and a vim infusion did much to dispel the clouds. When she arrived at the Lin/Wong gigatower, later than usual, Fred was already in the lock, cycling into the null room. He must’ve just stepped out of the shower because the scuppers were tidying up in the bathroom, and his work clothes and wet towels were still on the floor.

Mary sat on the big double bed in the bedroom they never used. “So, did he leave me a message?”

There was one: “Hey there. I’m beat and going right to bed. Join me whenever. Love ya.”

Few deadlines are as flexible as “whenever,” and in fact, Mary didn’t feel like being cooped up all evening in that tiny room. So she stayed out till her usual bedtime. She dialed up her favorite pasta dinner but lost her appetite after a few bites. She drank two glasses of wine and let the slipper puppy trim and polish her toenails.

When she did cycle through, Fred was watching a vid. The bed was not perched in a treetop or parked on the Serengeti, but was just a narrow bed in a stunted room.

“Hey there,” he said as she stepped through the vid to the comfort station. She selected a flask of Lemon Flush and a liter of ’Lyte. Fred made space for her, and she snuggled under the covers. The vid was some kind of crime drama, and she tried to watch but couldn’t quite follow it. There was some kind of gurgling business going on in her belly, and the Flush had made it worse. It got so bad that at one point she threw off the covers and stumbled across the mattress to the comfort station. Her stomach felt like it was trying to turn inside out. She braced herself over the toilet and retched the entire half liter of Flush into the bowl. Fred came over to help support her. Next came her pasta dinner mixed with the Merlot. Finally, a thin gruel of gastric juices and bile, and she was empty. Her knees wobbled.

Mary washed her face and rinsed her mouth in the sink. Fred gave her a fresh towel and said, “So, what were you thinking about?”

At first she didn’t understand the question, but then she remembered. “Oh, you were right,” she said. “All I thought about was puking and breathing.”

“Yes, I could tell you were really into it. Here.” He opened a flask of ’Lyte. She took a couple of sips, but it came right back up, and the room began to spin.

“Come on, let’s get you out of here,” Fred said and half carried her to the lock. She did not object, and they cycled out together and went to the bathroom where the autodoc asked her to spit into the collector basin. But
instead of spitting she vomited into it. A minute later the autodoc delivered its diagnosis: poisoning.

“Visola poisoning,” Fred said, reading the display. “It says you’re toxic from all the expressive visola and Flush you’ve had in the last month. Your liver isn’t able to keep up with it all. You need to give the null room a rest.”

Mary said, “You won’t get any argument out of me.”

THEY TURNED DOWN the big bed for the first time. Neither of them could fall asleep, and they lay next to each other in companionable silence.

Finally, Fred said, “How do you feel now?”

“Much better.”

“I’m glad, and I apologize for dragging you in there every night.”

“You didn’t drag me. I wanted to go.”

“You don’t have to soft-peddle the situation, Mary. I know I’m totally inflexible about this whole nit thing, and now it’s made you sick. It’s my fault, and I apologize, and I want to make it up to you.”

Mary didn’t feel like having that whole discussion all over again. “Don’t worry about it, Fred. I can only imagine what you’re going through.” She draped her arm over his shoulder and felt his body tense up at her touch. So she let go of him and said, “I’m pretty tired, dear. Good night.”

“Good night.”

They still couldn’t fall asleep, however, and after lying in the darkness for a while, Fred sighed.

“What?” Mary said.

“Nothing. I’m sorry for making you ill.”

Mary propped herself up on her elbow. “Quit apologizing.”

“I’ll try.”

“Maybe this will help. You said you want to make it up to me. Here’s how you can. Go with me to see someone. And I don’t mean an auto-psyche in a null room. I mean a real relationship counselor. Will you do that for me?”

The Gray Bee waited with its team under the portico of the Chicago Museum of Arts and Commerce until suitable patrons climbed the broad entrance steps. The team rode into the museum under hat brims and lapels. Once past security, they abandoned their mules and reassembled in the lobby. A beetle and wasp, hugging the ceiling, flew to the main exhibition hall, where they would hide themselves and wait. Meanwhile, Gray Bee led another wasp and beetle through the twentieth-century galleries. There, the Samson Harger painting of drips and drabs filled one whole wall.

The composition of the large canvas was dominated by four diagonal slashes of black paint that were swallowed up under dozens of layers of riotous color spatter. While the wasp took up a defensive position, Gray Bee and the beetle crawled from the ceiling to the picture frame. The bee disabled the frame security feelers for the beetle to move to the canvas itself. Camouflaged by the spatter, the tiny mech crisscrossed the large canvas laying down a bead trail of clear gel. When its carapace was empty, Gray Bee helped it leave the canvas, and together with their wasp, they backtracked to the museum lobby.

The wasp and beetle rode patrons out the exit. When they were clear, Gray Bee signaled the other mechs waiting in the main hall. Hundreds of museum visitors milled about the grand space under towering displays of resurrected monsters of prehistory. There were cockroaches the size of alligators, a blue whale made of shaped water, a disassembled tyrannosaurus rex, and Asian elephants.

At Gray Bee’s signal, the beetle launched itself from a spot above a security cam and glided across the hall spewing from its carapace a trail of yellow smoke. At once, evacuation alarms sounded throughout the rambling museum building, and pressure barriers snapped into place around individual works of art. Museum arbeitors began herding patrons to the exits, and flying scuppers chased the beetle. Before it could be captured, its wasp escort destroyed it, incinerating it with a blast of laser fire. Then the chase was on for the wasp. The nimble mech was not so easy a prey: it could shoot back. It led the scuppers in a dogfight through the galleries. Eventually the scuppers knocked it down and surrounded it, but before it could be taken, it destroyed itself in a small fireball of weapons plasma.

With the mission accomplished, Gray Bee rode out under a convenient
hat. Ninety minutes later, after all the excitement had died down, order was restored, and human curators went through the galleries. They dropped pressure barriers and inspected the artworks for damage. It was another hour before they reached the Harger painting, and when the barrier fell, it appeared that the painting was untouched. But then, a tiny spatter of cadmium red near the center of the canvas peeled off and fluttered to the floor where it disintegrated into a smudge of pigment. Another spatter peeled off, and another, until whole layers of color cascaded to the carpet in speckled heaps.

Andrea ordered a light lunch at St. Gaby’s on Union Square. She shared her booth with a half-dozen shopping bags, the spoils of a leisurely morning browsing the district’s exclusive showrooms. She was pleasantly exhausted—her new body still lacked an entire day’s worth of stamina—and E-P was solicitous of her health. E-P did not raise any objections to these excursions, even though it knew exactly what she wanted before she did and could have produced everything with their house hold extruder. This was what it routinely did for hundreds of millions of consumers through its E-Pluribus “Just What I Wanted” shopping service. Ask for a new pair of shoes, and moments later they drop into the receiving bin in your closet. Not any shoes but shoes to die for, within your budget, and complementary to your wardrobe. Just what you wanted.

Sometimes Andrea wondered why E-P never offered to shop for her. On her bad days she suspected that it was because she was an experimental appendage of the mentar, that it was gathering data on her, and that she could be terminated anytime when she no longer proved useful. But today wasn’t one of those days. Today Andrea was new. Real people, each representing a whole other preffing universe, passed by her booth. Handsome men made fleeting, inviting eye contact. The coffee was outstanding, and lunch never tasted so good, not even in her tank.

When Andrea finished, she wasn’t ready to leave, so she ordered dessert and retreated inside her head to the Starke house to see what Lyra was up to. There were currently 110 persons at the Manse, including Ellen, her companions, and Dr. Rouselle. There were 508 employees at the Enterprises
headquarters, including Meewee. Lyra knew who everyone was, where they were, and what they were doing. Such trust to place in a mentar and then not teach it how to protect itself.

MARY WAS SITTING in her favorite floral-print armchair in her Manse suite living room. She was surrounded by a dozen holocubes floating in the air. One of them showed the death artist’s breezeway where the Leena still lay in a comalike trance. Jennys and evangelines attended to her. Most of the rest of the cubes displayed search hits: two-or three-second clips of other Leenas making Dark Reiki spirals with their fingers. Lately, there were hundreds of hits per hour.

One of Mary’s holocubes was following Georgine as she carried a lawn chair across the Manse grounds. “Oh, and Mary,” Georgine said, “that person we talked about? She’s someone the Sisterhood uses and recs. She insists on realbody/real-time meetings, and because of that she’s booked up solid for the next six months. But I see there’s an auction going on for a late cancellation slot at 3:30 this afternoon. The auction closes in twenty minutes. Interested?”

Mary said yes, and the holocube switched to the auction. Although the high bid for the last-minute appointment was fairly steep by normal evangeline standards, it was nothing special for Mary, and although she would never ordinarily take advantage of her wealth, these were extraordinary circumstances, and she raised the high bid by an intimidating amount.

Only then did she stop to consult with Fred.
It’s not convenient
, he said when she reached him at his latest call-out site.
We’re in the middle of a big sloppy mess.

Mary could hear a lot of shouting and turmoil in the background. “We’re lucky to get her, Fred.”

I know. I know. It’s just
—Fred paused and changed his mind.
You know what? If I’m a john, I sure as hell ought to be able to take sick leave like a john. Where should I meet you?

WITH THE AFTERNOON appointment set, Mary changed into her bikini to enjoy the noontime sun out on the lawn with Georgine. On her way out of the suite, she swiped all of the holocubes off, except for the breezeway with the Languishing Leena. This one she placed in the center of the coffee table. Then she threw on a robe, grabbed her shades, and headed for the
door. But before she could leave, a phone call arrived from Bishop Meewee. “Tell him I’m unavailable,” she instructed Lyra.

“He says it’s of the
utmost
urgency.”

“
Everything
is of the utmost urgency with that man.” Mary returned to the living room, and Lyra put the call through.

Meewee appeared in Mary’s living room as a full-sized holo. “Mary Skarland, my favorite person,” he said, making a holo salute. “Thank you so much for seeing me.”

“It’s my pleasure,” Mary replied. “We don’t see each other often enough. What can I do for you?”

Meewee opened his mouth to speak but seemed to be having difficulty getting started. He walked once around the coffee table and stopped to stare for a long moment at the ailing Leena. Then he made a second circumambulation before finally halting directly in front of Mary and saying with starch in his voice, “Mary, I need to see Ellen. Today. Right now.”

Assertiveness did not become the man, in Mary’s opinion, and she replied, “You know I don’t run Ellen’s calendar, Myr Meewee. Lyra does. I’m sure you’ve already approached her about it, and she’s turned you down, but, honestly, she’s the
only
one who can grant you access. Not me.”

“You underestimate your influence around here,” Meewee replied.

But Mary couldn’t be swayed. “Ellen is going through a lot right now, and we’re finally making some progress. I would hate to see her lose ground. I don’t mean to be hurtful, Myr Meewee, but Ellen told me in no uncertain terms that she does not want to see you. Period! But I suppose I could pass her a message if you had one.”

“Thank you, but a message won’t do.” Meewee stared down at Mary’s small, sandaled feet for a long moment, then looked up into her eyes. “Mary Skarland, I would like you to remember that day, not so long ago, when you stood before me, your arm bleeding, your clothes torn and stained. You were clutching a rolled-up bag containing the dying head of Ellen Starke. Do you remember that day?”

Mary flinched. Remember that day? If only she could forget it.

“That was the first day we met, Mary. I brought Dr. Rouselle and the portable tank to the clinic, remember? It cost me the life of a friend to accomplish that. You were a hero that day, there’s no denying it. But you didn’t save Ellen’s life by yourself, did you? That’s why I claim the privilege to speak to you like this, though I can see it pains you. Would you say, Mary, that on that day at the clinic your mission was grave?”