Mind Over Ship (51 page)

“How can I help you choose?” he said.

“We want you to flip a coin.”

Meewee said, “But I don’t own a coin.”

“My sister has one,” said the El in blue.

“No, I don’t,” said the other. “I gave it to you.”

“I distinctly remember giving it to you.”

Eleanor quipped, “Well, so much for a shared mind.”

The girls checked their pockets and the one in blue found the coin. She held it out to Meewee. “Will you?” It was a small copper-zinc disk that,
even in its heyday, was the least valuable coin of the realm. Meewee accepted it from her. How fitting to decide the fate of a species with a penny.

“Listen up!” the El in red announced to the room. “We’re choosing our first colonist.” The music stopped playing, and the Mem Lab faithful crowded around.

Meewee turned the coin over in his hand. Heads or tails, mole or freckle, red or blue. “Winner goes on the
Hybris
,” he said and tossed the coin over his head. “Elaine, call it.”

Try not to think about it. Think about trying not to think about it. Try not to think about it. It was a short to-do list, but it was caught in a loop.

Fred sprawled on his couch not watching two holos running in his stateroom. One was of Mary’s last FUS, still catatonic, still seated in her floral print armchair staring serenely into space. The other was a short tape loop depicting a donald dockworker floating serenely in the starry space beyond the buoys that marked the Port Clarke boundary. He wore only his dock overalls and was quite dead. An anonymous person had sent the clip to Fred. Fred had no doubt that the space-blown donald was the dock-worker who had been clowning around during the hull breach emergency, and that Top Ape had both ordered his murder and sent the clip. It was an offering of appeasement. Top Ape probably thought that the insult to Fred was the reason he had not left his stateroom for the last few days, and the reason he hadn’t swiped the latest shipment of Raspberry Flush. How frustrating it must be for them, to have a flask of heaven in their grasp but no way to open it.

Someone began knocking loudly on his door, kicking it actually. This had happened several times during the last day or so. There had also been shouted insults and threats by russ voices. Fred had ignored all this, but this time, just to mix things up a little, he pushed himself to his feet. Before he reached the door, a phone call arrived from Earth Girl with a floating red glyph pulsing
EXTREME URGENCY
.

Decisions, decisions, what not to do? Fred returned to the couch and said, “Okay, Earth Girl, what do you want?”

“Hello, Specialist Londenstane,” the mentar’s voice said. “So nice of you
to take my call. You are signed up to depart on the ISV
Fentan
in ten hours. The ship will seal its hatches in four hours.”

“Isn’t that fascinating?”

The banging on his door continued, and the mentar said, “Do you intend to board the ship?”

“That’s a good question. Anything else?”

The mentar paused, then added, “Yes, TECA authorities have asked me to inform you that if you intend to remain on emergency leave status but not return to Earth aboard the
Fentan
, you cannot remain in Wheel Nancy. We need the accommodations for incoming personnel. You will have to move to a civilian residential sector and be responsible for your own rent.”

“Amazing.”

The banging ceased and was replaced by scratching sounds.

“Is that all, Earth Girl?”

“Yes.”

Fred ended the call with a swipe and went to the door. He made a fist and cocked his arm, intending to punch whoever was there in the face. But when he swung the door open, there was no one there. Someone had scratched a crude hangman’s noose into the surface of the door, and Fred wondered idly how hanging would work in weightlessness as he shut the door and returned to the couch.

He was hungry, but the last time he’d gone to the commissary, even the dorises had shunned him.

THE THING ABOUT not thinking about things was that while you were busy not thinking about certain things, you were actually thinking about other things. So when the call from Marcus came, Fred took a break from not thinking and answered it.

“There’s still time for you to board the
Fentan
,” it said.

“That’s very interesting.”

Marcus refused to be put off and continued. “There have been sporadic incidents between russes and donalds out in the spars.”

“Define incidents.”

“Fights.”

“What a shame.”

“You have no intention of leaving the station, do you?”

“I honestly don’t know, Marcus. I don’t see what I would gain one way or another. For the first time in my life I don’t know what to do.”

“Perhaps I can help.”

“Give it a shot.”

“The Original Flaw.”

“What about it? You going to tell me what it is?”

“Not I. In your present frame of mind, I doubt you would believe me anyway. The person responsible for sealing that information in the first place will tell you.”

A third holo opened in Fred’s crowded stateroom. It was a life-sized sim of Agnes Russ. She wore the old-fashioned pants and blouse, big hair, and kindly smile Fred remembered from Russ School.

“Mother?” he said, sitting up.

“Yes, Freddy, it’s me. Marcus tells me you’ve made a mess of things up here, and he asked me to come up and straighten you out a little.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“First off, Tommy never diddled children, so get that out of your mind this instant. It’s
garbage
, and it’ll only poison you. Now, what I’m about to tell you is in the utmost, strictest confidence, and you must promise me you’ll never tell anyone. Not even Tommy knew it, and it could only harm the rest of your brothers. Do you promise me, Fred?”

What else could he say? “Yes, Mother.”

“Good.” The sim gazed at him with a mixture of skepticism and affection. “Honestly, boy, how you could ever believe those disgusting lies is beyond me. You’re so much like your father, worry and worry about every little thing until you’ve made a mountain out of air. It’s what killed him in the end.” She shook her head. “If you must know what was wrong with Tommy, I’ll tell you. He was a congenital moron, or would have been. When I was carrying him, they had just started finding and fixing birth defects while the baby was still in the womb. A DNA scan discovered that my fetus had Gorman’s Syndrome, a rare genetic brain disease. Marcus, explain to Fred what GS was.”

“Yes, myr,” Marcus said. “Gorman’s Syndrome is the faulty expression of a cluster of genes responsible for manufacturing the calcium-calmodulin-dependent protein Kinase II. Its function in the pathway responsible for—”

“Thank you, Marcus. What the defect does is it makes it hard to learn things. To learn anything.”

“Processing long-term synaptic potentiation, or LTP, into long-term memory,” Marcus added.

“Thank you, Marcus. Anyway, it’s a severe mental handicap. Children who have it never learn to speak. They can’t tie their own shoes or hardly
feed themselves. Even with the best care they rarely live beyond ten or so years. That’s what my doctor told me.

“Your father wanted me to have an abortion, but my doctor told me about this new treatment. She said that GS was the result of only three defective genes, and they could try to insert normal ones into my fetus and maybe fix the problem in the womb. It was risky, but I loved you before you were born, and I decided to do it. It worked beautifully, and you—Tommy was born with normal intelligence.

“Your father and I were thrilled and very thankful, and we chose to seal Tommy’s medical records so he could grow up as a normal kid without this condition hanging over his head everywhere he went. There was a so-called DNA Bill of Rights back then.

“Then he grew up and joined the Secret Service and died saving President Taksayer, and she picked him to be the first commercial clone donor, and nobody knew of his original handicap, or they surely wouldn’t have picked him, no matter how heroic he was. But the genetic repair was stable and passed through to his clones and no one was the wiser, not even Applied People. Applied People still doesn’t know. That’s why you must keep this secret.

“It was only later, after your father died, and the first cloned lines were being so shamelessly exploited that I helped to found your Benevolent Brotherhood to protect you kids’ rights. I turned Tommy’s early medical records over to Marcus, including those covering the prenatal repair, but made him swear never to reveal them. It could ruin your germline, even today. Especially today.

“So, there you have it, Fred, the big secret. If we didn’t fix Tommy, his life would have been a brief nightmare, and none of you would exist. But we had him repaired, and though his life was still too short, it was a decent, full, normal life. He had friends and girlfriends, was attentive to us, never got mixed up with bad influences, and he died serving his country. Your Original Flaw is a profound learning disorder, but it was permanently fixed.”

“And I might add,” Marcus put in, “that there is a zero probability of a ‘clone fatigue’ capable of reversing the repair in a mature brain.”

“So, do everyone a big fat favor, son, and get over it already. Quit acting so self-destructive. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“All right then. Be good; stay safe; I love you. Marcus, take me home.”

“I love you too, Mother,” Fred said as the apparition faded from sight. At first Fred felt such a rush of relief he fell back on the couch, drunk and dizzy, the happiest man alive. I’m not a bad man, he told himself over and over. Life was possible again.

After a little while, Marcus said, “There’s still time to board the
Fentan
.”

“Yes, of course,” Fred said, jumping to his feet.

“You’ll go then?”

The decision was suddenly easy. “Yes.” He looked around his cluttered stateroom. “I’ll just collect my things.” His bag was still packed and ready to go.

“Good. You’ve made the right decision.”

“Thank you, Marcus.”

The mentar signed off, and Fred grabbed his travel bag and went to the door. But he stopped before reaching it when another thought crept into his mind, something Marcus had told him about the hoax russ metaverse, how a mentar could reconstruct all of human media in a day. Was it possible that Marcus had made a
counterfeit
Agnes Russ in order to manipulate him?

All of the goodness Fred had so recently reclaimed leaked away in a moment. If the Original Flaw was such a goddamn deep secret, faithfully kept for a hundred years even from Thomas A., why would they reveal it to him? Promise me, Freddy, you won’t tell
anyone
. Yes, Mother. How brief his absolution.

Fred dropped his bag and just stood there, frozen in place again. After a while, when Marcus called back to check on him, he didn’t answer but staggered to his couch, his mind stuttering like a faulty switch. Then out of the blue, a woman’s voice spoke: “I suppose that in a dark room, even a dim bulb feels bright.”

“Mary?” The FUS was active, Mary was watching him. Her surroundings had changed; she was no longer in her Starke suite. He recognized their apartment. “You’re at home! Where have you been? Are you all right?”

She waved away his questions. “I only made this update to say good-bye, Fred. They wanted to biostase us, but we refused. I am mentally competent and so have the right to decide my own fate. My sisters and I have seen through the illusion of meaning. There is no meaning to life, Fred. There is no heaven or hell, no afterlife. And since we live in a society in which we are banned even from bearing children, there is no biological afterlife either. Knowing all this is killing my sisters, and it will take me, too, very soon.”

“You’re wrong! About there being no meaning, and about your mental competence. Obviously, you are temporarily insane, and as your spouse, I have the authority to—”

“You have no authority over me, Fred. I am my own person. Besides, you couldn’t change things even if you tried. Stay up there and do your duty. That at least has meaning for you. This is good-bye, Fred. This is the end.”

“Don’t talk like that! Listen to me!” But she began to slip away again into her darkness. “You say you updated the FUS in order to say good-bye. Obviously, then, good-byes
mean
something to you. Your feelings for me
mean
something.”

“If you must hold on to something, Fred, then hold on to that.” With those final words, the FUS made a holo salute and withdrew into a passive state, and all of Fred’s cajoling and arguments were so much noise.

The FUS holo showed a little of Mary’s surroundings; a pair of legs intruded into the holospace, and Fred zoomed the view out as far as possible. Another evangeline was sitting there, Cyndee, who had helped them leave the prison. A third evangeline in the room was probably Georgine, who he had not met. They were placeholders, not active sims, as was a jenny nurse who moved in and out of the holospace.

Fred paced his room trying to come up with a plan. He picked up his travel bag, but set it down again. Think! He ordered his genetically repaired moron brain—Think! But thinking, like all his not-thinking, got him nowhere. His brain was the wrong muscle. He picked up his bag. Love was the only answer. Mary needed him. He wasn’t helping her by staying; at least by going there was some minuscule chance of reaching her in time.