Mind Over Ship (34 page)

“No skulls?” he asked.

“Minimal skulls,” Strohmeyer replied. “The synaptic tissue is so plastic that it actually heats up and expands during the transfer. This way, there are no deadly pressure spikes.”

“Eleanor walked me through a necropsy of one of her panasonics. The human cells form a crust over the fish brain. Is it the same with these?”

“Yes, except that with these, the human/fish ratio is reversed. Each of these brainfish contains human midbrain and cortex tissue that masses about one-third of an adult human.”

There was a mechanical click, and a snowstorm of greenish flakes began to fall on the water from a system of overhead pipes. The fish abandoned Meewee and thrashed in the water in a feeding frenzy.

“Don’t bump your heads, guys,” Meewee said. He dried his hand on his pant leg before realizing it was only virtually wet. “If each of these brainfish has a third of a brain,” he asked Strohmeyer, “why do you need so many of them? Wouldn’t three brainfish do?”

“Theoretically.”

“Then why so many?”

“Well, there are redundancy and backup needs, and we set a few aside as controls, but I suppose the real reason is to give Myr Starke’s mind room to expand.”

“But how will you stuff all of that into the head of a single clone?”

“Who says that’s what we’re doing?”

“Eleanor told me they’re for temporary storage?”

The scientist had nothing to say to that.

WITH THE MEM Lab still at a high stealth level, Meewee dealt with plankholder business through Cabinet. He cast a proxy to attend a GEP board meeting where he was offered a free hand with the Lucky Five Oships if he agreed to drop his Trade Board appeal. With the appeal clouding the picture, Jaspersen and Singh were having difficulty attracting investors to their space condo project.

“They’ll have to do better than that,” Meewee said to his proxy when it reported back.

“That’s what I told them,” his proxy said.

“I’d settle for nothing less than the ninety-nine ships already chartered.”

“My words exactly.”

“Otherwise, let the appeal drag on.”

_____

A WEEK OR ten days after Meewee arrived, Dr. Koyabe informed him that the zoo module had docked with theirs and asked if he wanted to meet Arrow. She took him there in realbody. The visiting module did indeed sound and smell like a zoo. Dogs, toads, ants, bees—Starke’s scientists were trying them all out as possible vessels for human consciousness.

“We’ve had good results with birds,” she said as they passed rows of cages. “Crows, finches, and jays especially. But birds are too smart to begin with. Their hyperstriatum region is exceptionally well developed, and it tends to dominate the human cortex part. You end up with flying pests too clever for their own good.

“Ah, here we are.” They passed into a separate room, one devoid of animal cages. Lining the walls were kiosk-sized metal cabinets. “Incubators for our microbiota,” Koyabe said, leading him to the last one. Someone had stuck a piece of cloth tape to the door with the word “Arrow,” in marker pen. Koyabe opened a holocube that showed its main compartment. Inside was a heap of wet-looking scraps of brown paperlike material that was shot through with glistening yellow strands. A duller yellow crust covered the walls and partitions of the compartment.

“That’s Arrow?” Meewee said. “That looks like—like mold.”

“Tree mold,” Koyabe said. Her shoulder brushed his as they leaned over the holocube.

Meewee looked again. “You store human minds in mold?”

“No, no. This is from an earlier series of experiments when we were trying to discover an improved substrate for mentar brains. Hello, Arrow, it’s Momoko Koyabe. I’m here with Bishop Meewee to collect some spores. Do you think you could oblige us with a sample?”

Meewee said, “If I remember my college biology, mold has no nervous system whatsoever.”

“Correct, Merrill. We wanted to come up with nonneural cognitive networks. This strain is a variant of the slime mold,
Physarum polycephalum,
which has formidable powers of replication and organization. We got pretty far with it, but as you know from working with your Arrow, we were never able to completely crack the sentience threshold.”

Inside the holocube, little puffs of brown began to fill the space and were sucked out through vacuum ports.

“That’s enough, Arrow. That should do. Thank you.” Koyabe swiped away the holocube, and a moment later, a glass vial dropped into a
basket on the side of the incubator. She held it up to the light, then labeled it with a marker. “I’ll get this started and have it put into something portable for you when you leave. Your old Arrow unit will be able to migrate to it.”

THE PANASONIC UPLOADING was 87 percent complete. They were mopping up fish that had scattered from the main schools. Meanwhile, thirty-four beans had developed into embryos and were still viable.

SEVERAL WEEKS INTO Meewee’s stay, Dr. Strohmeyer requested his assistance in the fish lab. Koyabe brought him by vurt to a storage room full of racks and shelves of laboratory instruments. Strohmeyer was sitting at a desk in the corner poring over a large dataframe.

“Ah, thank you for coming, Bishop Meewee. Perhaps you can shed some light on a problem we’re having. Downloading a person’s engrams and transferring them to an auxiliary brain is only half the battle. The cognitive reintegration of these engrams and the resurgence of personality are just as critical, and to be honest, we’ve had spotty success along those lines. By now we’ve got most of Myr Starke into the system, but I’m not entirely sure we can get her out.

“Anyway, Cabinet said to consult with you since you’re the only person to have actually coached Eleanor through the process.”

Meewee was flattered. “I’m no scientist, Dr. Strohmeyer, merely a farmer’s son. I don’t know that I actually did anything to help.”

“You’re too modest,” Koyabe said, touching his arm.

“Give a listen anyway,” Strohmeyer said, “and see if this sounds right.”

She played snippets of Eleanor’s voice: “Four little brass bells make a happy harmony,” and “Make mine a double,” and “I did not have sex with that woman.”

Meewee saw Strohmeyer’s problem. It was gibberish in English, which was the only language she heard, but it didn’t make much sense in Starkese either. From the look on Koyabe’s lovely face, Meewee could tell that she was confused by the messages in both languages.

and

and

“Oh, that,” Meewee said. “Are you getting this on multiple channels?”

“Yes,” replied Strohmeyer. “Every brainfish is transmitting dozens of them, and all of it nonsense.”

“When I first started coaching Eleanor,” Meewee said, with a nod to Koyabe, “I thought she was nothing more than a jumbled collection of random memories and opinions. This is normal and may last for weeks.”

“What should we do, if anything?”

“Engage her. Ask questions. Challenge her answers.” He thought about all the time he’d spent on the banks of the fishponds. “And startle her.”

“Startle her?”

“Splash the water. Throw rocks.”

MEEWEE MADE ARRANGEMENTS to leave. Everything at the Mem Lab seemed to be under control, the natpac action had been discontinued when they achieved a 97 percent upload total. Fishy Eleanor was slowly gathering her wits. Twenty-nine surviving Eleanor fetuses had passed the developmental landmarks of the first trimester in record time. Oddly, the closer to success the Mem Lab got, the more depressed the staff seemed to become. They were even becoming frosty toward Meewee in the commissary.

SOMETIME DURING THE night, Meewee was awakened by the shaking of his bed. His first thought was—Momoko. He smelled her perfume. He turned over and found that she was awake.

“Sorry, did I wake you?” she said. “Lab Rat had a question that couldn’t wait.”

“It’s all right,” he said, with his cheek pressed against her simply perfect breast.

“Oh, this reminds me,” she said, “a decision for LOG 1. You have here a facility with over six hundred dedicated employees scattered throughout an archipelago of modules who have had no contact with their loved ones and the outside world for 465 days. This is hard on everyone, it is true, but unavoidable under the circumstances. At least that’s my judgment. Cabinet says it can safely import people’s mail, but I disagree. Since you have the final say, we thought we’d bring the matter to you.”

Over a year in total isolation. Meewee never ceased to be amazed at the degree of loyalty that Eleanor evoked from her people. “What harm could there be in letting people receive mail?” he asked.

“Let them receive mail, and the next thing you know, they’ll want to send mail, and then they’ll be clamoring to go home on leave.”

“I see.” Meewee thought about the people he had met at the lab. “How brave you all are.”

“Eh,” she said dismissively.

“If I hadn’t come when I did, how long would you have stayed here in total isolation?”

“Three years. Then protocol would have lowered stealth enough to listen and eventually make discreet inquiries. Four years max.”

“Astonishing. Such dedication must take its toll.”

“Maybe,” she said and planted a kiss on his lips. “It makes us all a little bit crazy.”

Port Clarke camera feeds were available to the
Dauntless
long before its arrival at L5, and Fred spent a lot of time during the final week of his voyage studying the port layout from various angles. The shipyards encompassed vast volumes of space and were demarcated by a porous lattice of buoys. The yards were interspersed with asteroid corrals and ore-processing units. Within the shell of space yards sat Trailing Earth, an accretion of habplats and fabplats around a central core. The core, called the Powell Canal, was a traffic thoroughfare five kilometers in diameter and a hundred kilometers in length that completely transected the colony. Finally, a fence of spars and flex-jointed booms ringed the port. Megaton freighters docked to the spars outside the yards, and their cargo was distributed within the port via cargo trains and small, nimble craft.

ON THE EVENING of the thirty-fourth day since departing the port at Mezzoluna, the ISV
Dauntless
entered Port Clarke. It crossed the mouth of the Powell Canal on a heading to the hub of a large wheel at the far end of the port that served as the passenger-receiving terminal. It took them several hours to complete docking, and Fred and Mando joined the four thousand passengers milling about in weightless agitation.

“Say again?” Fred shouted. Although Mando clung to handholds right next to him, the din outside the main hatch was deafening. Passengers,
desperate to get off the claustrophobic transport, seemed to have lost all sense of courtesy, as well as their space legs, and there was much jostling for place. The total weightlessness made things that much worse.

Mando shouted in reply, “I said as soon as we get situated in the rez, we should get together and look around.”

Floating not far away were the two retrokids. They were dressed in miniature HomCom blacksuits, complete with visor cap and faux standstill wands. When the boy caught Fred’s eye, he snapped a salute. Fred pretended not to see. “Listen, Mando,” he shouted. “There’s something I need to tell you.” He had been dreading this moment, but he had no choice in the matter. The temporary cover ID that Marcus had provided him would expire the moment he entered the space station. “My name’s not Walter.”

Mando pointed at his ear and shook his head.

“I said I’m not Walter Mitty!”

The queue surged ahead a few meters and stopped again. Someone far ahead of them shouted something unintelligible, and hundreds of voices gave three cheers. The logjam broke all at once, and the passengers scrambled for the hatchway. Fred and Mando became separated, and Mando yelled, “See you at the rez!” as he vanished into the crowd.

Fred reached the docking seal where ship met station. If ever there was a threshold, this was it. As he pulled himself across, he had a sick feeling of making the worst mistake of his life, which was saying a lot.

In the receiving area of the Terminal Wheel hub, passengers pulled themselves and their luggage along handhold arrays and through scanways and document inspection stations. Then they queued up for the spokeway lifts. The cars took them out to the wheel rim. The farther they traveled from the hub, the heavier they became until they arrived at an Earth Standard one-g. Anticipating wobbly legs, a fleet of carts awaited the newcomers to take them to TECA exam rooms where additional scans took place. Fred managed to keep his legs under him, and he submitted to pricks and swabs, radiation and sniffers. When he felt about as tested as a man could be, he was ushered into the final station.