Mind Over Ship (32 page)

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?”

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.