Mind Over Ship (28 page)

He waited until she nodded her head, and then he said, “My mission today is grave.”

“NO, MAX, NO!” Ellen shrieked, trying to shield herself with baby hands. The dachshund twisted its elongated body like a towel and sprayed water in all directions. Ellen squealed and grabbed him around the neck, but the little dog refused to drop the throw toy. He wriggled free and tore off across the lawn, with the pygmy giraffe in hot pursuit and Ellen in her wet sundress toddling behind.

Not far away, Georgine and a nuss lay on lawn loungers and watched. Georgine in a bikini and the nuss in a gold-and-yellow Capias uniform. The nuss got up and said, “I’ll just go for dry clothes.”

“Good idea,” Georgine said to her back. But then she saw Mary and Bishop Meewee coming down across the lawn and heading toward Ellen. Mary was walking, Meewee was floating, and his holo was washed out in the bright sun. “Oh, damn,” Georgine said, hopping to her feet to intercept them.

ELLEN LAY ON her back on the sloping lawn and hugged the wet dog. The intruders blotted out the sky with their big, serious heads. She glanced from one to the other, and fixing her gaze on Mary, said, “I thought I made my wishes in this matter clear.”

“You did,” Mary replied simply. “But this matter, by all accounts, is grave.”

Ellen turned her gaze from Mary to the ghost of Meewee. Meewee cleared his throat and said, “What a signal day to be gamboling on all fours with a duo of furry friends.”

Ellen lifted her arms, but before Mary could bend down to pick her up, the nuss nurse, who had joined them, snatched Ellen and balanced her on her capable hip. Now Ellen was nearly level with Meewee, and she said in an even voice, “What do you want, Myr Meewee?”

Just as evenly, Meewee replied, “Halcyon summer is winding down, as always, too soon. Don’t you agree?”

“Go away, Bishop. Please, just go away. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

The baby pointed her finger for the nurse to turn her. They turned toward the duck pond, turned their backs on the Meewee holo.

The dachshund Maxwell grew quiet to watch the increasingly tense encounter. But Jaffe the giraffe, reacting to the same cues, galloped about on its oversized legs in nervous agitation. It halted abruptly in front of Meewee’s holo and said, “Bad man go away!”

Mary silently dittoed the sentiment and added: And quit with the mumbo-jumbo!

But Meewee was immune to everyone’s wishes, and he said to the nurse’s gold-and-yellow backside, “Have you ever given a thought to the venerable art of bookbinding?”

Mary was about to apologize to Ellen for bringing this madman, when Ellen turned the nurse around and peered intensely at him. Ellen’s adult mouth fell open, and the blood drained from her face. Meewee continued in a perversely conversational tone. “I seem to recall in the back of my head that you have a library of antique books. If you’d like, I could demonstrate how they were originally bound.”

At this, Ellen all but swooned in the nurse’s arms.

“Hey, what’s going on?” the nurse said. “Ellen, are you all right?”

At that, the dachshund joined the fray. But with a less than clear understanding of holo images, the dog chose to confront the nurse instead of Meewee, and it barked furiously at her from a safe distance. “Maxwell, shut up!” the baby cried. “Shut up!” Color returned to her cheeks, and the little dog and giraffe cowered at Mary’s feet. Ellen peered at Meewee and said, “All right, Bishop Meewee, I’ll go along, but this had better be good.”

Meewee’s apparition vanished without a sig. Ellen looked around at everyone and said, “Why don’t we all go in and put on some clothes. It looks like we’re going for a ride.”

“Call it a picnic,” Ellen said from the front of the cart. The head nurse sat in the front seat with Ellen on her lap. If it was a picnic, it was a picnic without blanket or basket, and the pets had been left behind. The two evangelines sat in the rear, and Mary fretted over the time.

Don’t worry, Mary
, Lyra whispered in her ear.
I’ll make sure you leave in time for your appointment.

Thank you, Lyra.

The often-bumpy ride took them past rows of ever-ripening soybimi to an hourglass-shaped fish farm pond. Meewee, in the flesh, was waiting for them in his own cart. Ellen told the nurse to set her on her feet and for
everyone to stay in the cart. Using Meewee’s hand for support, she walked down the grassy bank, but Meewee had to carry her over the rocky apron to the water.

From the cart they were small figures, and the nurse opened up a frame in front of her for a close-up. Georgine and Mary leaned over her shoulder to watch.

Ellen was standing on the rocky shore. Meewee picked up a stone and flung it into the water. Suddenly hundreds of fish rose to the surface. They raked the water with their dorsal fins and tails for a very vigorous ten seconds. The women could hear the rippling all the way from the cart. Then the fish submerged, and baby Ellen fell on her bottom. She sat looking out across the crazed surface of the water for a long time. Meewee crouched next to her and neither of them spoke for many minutes. Then they were both speaking at once.

“What in the world?” the nuss said. Which was what Mary and Georgine wanted to know.

Meewee stood up and stretched his legs before leaning over to pick up Ellen. He carried her across the rocks, but when he put her down on the grass she couldn’t walk, so he carried her all the way to her cart.

MEEWEE RODE BACK with them. He sat in the front with Mary. Ellen and the nurse sat in the back with Georgine. There wasn’t a syllable of conversation during the ride back to the Manse. Lyra was waiting with nuss reinforcements on the drive. Two jay security men stood on opposite ends of the porch steps.

The nusses put Ellen into her stroller, and Ellen steered it up the steps, with the others climbing up behind. At the top she turned the stroller around and, when Meewee came level with her, said, “That’s far enough!”

Meewee and the others stopped in their tracks.

“I don’t know how you pulled off that little stunt,” she continued in a grown-up voice. “I wouldn’t think it even possible. But don’t imagine for one second you had me fooled.”

“It was not a stunt,” Meewee said mildly.

“Shut up!” Ellen cried, kicking her legs in fury. “It was a
cruel
stunt. I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt, Myr Meewee, because you
were
her employee, and I understand you still grieve for her, but your sources have sold you a lie. And I cannot let this despicable charade go unpunished. Lyra!”

Her mentar, already standing on the porch, took a step forward.

“Lyra, I want you to drain every fishpond on this property.”

“No!” cried Meewee.

“Drain them and do likewise on
all
Starke properties. Drain every feckin’ last one of them. Start at Starke Enterprises headquarters, where Myr Meewee resides. And don’t bother harvesting the fish. Let them rot in place. Is that clear?”

“Yes, I am to drain all Starke-owned fish farm ponds, starting with the Starke Enterprises campus, and leave the fish to rot in place.”

“Good. And you—” She turned back to Meewee, who was ashen with horror. “I’m finished with you, myr. You’re fired, terminated, relieved of all office and duties, effective immediately. Clear out at once or be cleared out. Now get out of my sight forever.”

Meewee was clearly not expecting this turn of events. “You don’t understand,” he insisted.

“I understand your maniacal devotion to your GEP dream, but I never imagined you’d go to these lengths to try to manipulate me. For your information, your spiteful attempt to trick me only confirms my decision to sell Heliostream. Now go away or I’ll have you escorted out.”

It took Meewee several long moments to turn and trudge down the steps. Ellen addressed the evangelines next. “My friends usually try to look out for me and not force me into awkward or painful situations. I’m not feeling very friendly toward you right now, and I’m not sure I want you around.”

Her stroller promptly did a 180 and rolled into the house, with all of the clucking nusses close behind. No doubt, there would be an after-hour celebration in their quarters tonight.

When the evangelines were alone with Lyra on the porch, Mary said, “That was no picnic.”

Georgine took her arm. “Come on, we need a drink.”

“Actually,” Lyra said, “Mary needs to leave soon to make her appointment.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Georgine said, escorting Mary up the steps. “You won the auction. Good luck with that.”

“But what about all this?” Mary said.

“This? This will blow over.”

When Fred arrived at their apartment, he had only a half hour to clean up and change. An arbeitor waited in the foyer and caught the things he tossed from his pockets: a couple of medallions and tokens, an omnitool, a pocket billy—his walking-around things. He kept the NanoJiffy purchase and took it with him to the bathroom.

On the way through the bedroom, he told the closet to make him a semi-casual ensemble for the appointment. In the bathroom, he opened the NanoJiffy bag and spilled its contents onto the counter: a tube of Detox-O Cleanser and a home wipe-down kit. He reached under the collar of his johnboy for the rip tab and tore the jumpsuit off him in one pull. He stepped out of his underwear. When he broke the Detox-O seal, a flurry of consumer protection warnings popped up in the mirror. He waved them all away and, taking a deep breath, squeezed a bead of cleanser on his forearm. The stripping agent soaked into his skin on contact and spread like a rope burn all up and down his body. Fred set the mirror timer for the recommended five-minute duration, but the cleanser began to bite so fiercely everywhere that he was hard-pressed to last that long. When the timer finally chimed, Fred hopped into the shower stall and scrubbed the cleanser off under numbing cold water. He gradually increased the water pressure until he couldn’t feel anything anymore.

WHEN FRED STOOD again before the mirror, his skin was brilliant pink, the result of a full body chemical burn. He was cleaner than clean. He opened his second purchase, the home wipe-down kit. He lifted his knee to rest his foot on the vanity counter, exposing his poor lobster-red genitals. He unfolded the towelette and wiped down his scrotum. Then he lowered his foot to the floor and let out his breath.

Fred rolled up the towelette and inserted it into the kit’s results tube. He screwed on the lid, checked the seal, and rapped the tube against the edge of the counter to break the glass vials inside. While the tube was analyzing the wipe-down sample, the autodoc dispensed Fred a soothing skin lotion. When he turned again to the mirror, his results were up.

The enlarged map of the towelette filled the mirror. It was covered in tiny colored glyphs that linked to a legend along the side. Fred was still hosting on his scrotum over thirty distinct kinds of bots, even after the most thorough scrubbing he could tolerate. The cumulative census total
continued to rise: 13,000, 18,000. Each bot, if he could pin down its owner, was an invasion of his constitutional privacy and a misdemeanor offense. The difficulty, of course, was in pinning anyone down.

The count topped out at 52,000. Fred donned his freshly extruded clothes and tucked the results tube in a pocket. He thought his results might make a dandy show-and-tell for the relationship session. “Looky here, I have 50,000 spydots on my balls alone.”

In the foyer, the arbeitor handed him back his walking-around things, which he arranged in his pockets. The pocket billy gave him pause. Take a pocket billy to a relationship session? What would that say? So, he tossed it back to the arbeitor, pulled his trusty Campaigner 3000 on his head, and set off.

Meewee hurried back to the Starke Enterprises campus, not to oversee the packing of his apartment or office, but to take a cart out to the nearest fishpond. Sure enough, two aslams, in their gold-and-yellow overalls, were shutting down the pumps and leaving behind a basalt and muck-lined crater of writhing panasonics.

Meewee stood at the top of the bank and took in the carnage.

he cried, and a thousand desperate howls answered him. Meewee wanted to dash into the muck and try to save one or two of her tiny brains, but an armed guard, a jay, was watching him. Meewee turned around and returned to his cart, but he found no relief there—Cabinet was waiting for him. How he hated the old hag and her juiceless wit. “Well, well,” she said when he climbed into the cart, “seems like I’m always escorting you off the premises, your excellency. Maybe this time it’ll stick.”

Meewee pretended to ignore her and told the cart to shut off its holoemitters. But the cart informed him that his user privileges had been revoked.

“Don’t worry, Meewee,” Cabinet said. “I’ll let it take you back. I don’t want to hold up your departure.”

“No, thanks,” Meewee said and climbed out. “It’s a fine day for a walk.” He set off down the path without another word. But he hadn’t gotten ten paces when he thought of a perfect rejoinder, and when he turned to deliver it, he noticed that the mentar’s persona had not moved. It seemed frozen in
place, like a statue. He returned to look at it closer. Its wrinkled old face seemed caught between two expressions. Meewee sucked in his breath—he’d seen this before. Wee Hunk, during their final showdown at the clinic, had frozen up just like this. As Meewee examined the glitching holo, it vanished, startling him.