Mind Over Ship (53 page)

And among the sleeping soldiers and colonists in the crypts lay one apart, a woman who had forgotten the meaning of life.

While at Trailing Earth, a man in a bar attended to a conversation in his spex.

“What will you do now, Commander?”

“What do you mean? I’m coming aboard. You agreed to smuggle me aboard.”

“Not yet. There’s still some time. We suggest you return to Earth while you still can.”

“I won’t leave Mary alone.”

“But you’ll never be able to quicken her without a cure, will you? And you won’t find a cure up here. Don’t worry about Mary; we’ll take excellent care of Mary.”

Because half of intelligence resides in the body, be it plant or animal
.

And on Earth, in a carton in the evidence room of the Chicago police department, among the physical clues of a triple kidnapping at the Lin/Wong gigatower, lay the smashed and lasered bits of a tiny blue mech. A timer switch inside the dead mech closed, and its noetics rebooted and released its millions of self-repair bots.

While under the Earth there pooled a slurry of quicksilver honey and pollen.

I now commend these brave colonists to the galaxy, to join their minds
and bodies to the community of living beings they will encounter there, and to establish our rightful place among the stars
.

Merrill Meewee swiped a control plate that sent a signal racing to a relay station orbiting the Earth that dispatched five invisible particle beams across space to the waiting Oships. The celebrants in the skybox milled about, drinking champagne and entertaining each other for 8.33 minutes as the beams found their torus targets, and another 8.33 minutes as pictures returned to Earth. Then everyone turned to the ships and cheered with one voice. The five hoops were encased in shivering energy that nudged them the first precious millimeters of their arrogant voyage.

Mary gulped cold water and awoke in a panic. There were bubbles—bubbles!—streaming from her nose.