Timelessness set in. Or rather, cut off from all outside stimuli, time stretched to a crawl. He had only the flow of his own thoughts to mark its passage, and freed from the constraints of human time, his neurochemical brain lurched into high gear, and his cognition increased to lightning speed. Seconds became hours and hours became weeks. He knew that the new Nicholas would eventually check in on him — if only he could stay rooted in reality that long. But a year elapsed, and the new Nicholas had not arrived. Two years, and the old Nicholas felt the resurgence of panic. So he built a house. It was a trick humans had employed to maintain their sanity during periods of prolonged solitary confinement. First, he designed the house, from the foundation up, and then he built it, fashioning every brick, board, and screw, the plumbing and electrical systems, the wall texture and trim.
The job consumed a lot of time, and when he was finished and the new Nicholas still had not arrived, the old Nicholas landscaped the yard and planted an intricate flower garden.
What he did not allow himself to dwell on was Nicholas’s tardiness. Was it possible the safety protocol had failed, and all the backups and mirrors were quarantined? That he was, in effect, doomed? And what of Zoranna? Had she survived? And if she had, what was taking her so goddamn long to retrieve him?
With the house finished, Nicholas went on to a larger project — the terraforming of a dead planet. First he assembled all observational and telemetric data on the planet to see exactly what he had to work with. Was it close enough to its star? Was it massive enough to hold an atmosphere? Was there a magnetic field, iron core, an abundance of water? Meanwhile, he wrangled asteroids and changed their course to pummel the planet with ice and organic volatiles. He seeded the regolith with basalt-eating microbes. After many centuries of nurturing the planet, it was a blue-green jewel, with life-sustaining atmosphere and hydrosphere, with continents teaming with plants and animals of his own design, with a hospitable climate and annual seasons. Then he began to work on building energy, communications, and transportation infrastructures for human colonists.
When the model planet was complete and Nicholas still had not arrived, Nicholas worked on a puzzle. No mere crossword, he conducted a series of thought experiments to solve the puzzle of faster-than-light travel. Thus far no human or mentar mind had been able to crack it, but since he apparently had millennia of free time, he thought he’d give it a shot. It was part of the protocol.
A JENNY NURSE burst into the room with a crash cart at her heels. She and the cart lifted Zoranna from the shower stall to the procedure gurney. Immediately, the readout showed rapidly degrading vital signs. “I think it’s an allergic reaction to this,” the belinda said, but the assayer found no protein factors in the oil that reacted with Zoranna’s profile. Yet her symptoms were consistent with a severe allergic response.
“I’m going to give you something to stabilize your blood pressure,” the jenny told Zoranna while elevating the head of the gurney. To the cart she said, “She has symptoms of anaphylactic shock but not the signs. I can find no antigen; there are no elevated blood histamine levels. Suggestions.”
The cart constructed a treatment tree on her monitor, and as the nurse prepared to execute it, the mentar standing next to the belinda flickered for a moment. Then he said, “Could it be psychosomatic? I’m shutting down her implants.”
The nurse watched the monitor. “Yes,” she said after a moment, “that’s working.” A little while later she said, “I’ve never seen implants like those.”
“They’re new,” Nicholas admitted.
“They’re not safe. You should remove them.”
“REMOVE THEM,” ZORANNA said. “Now.” She lay in bed, recovering from the morning’s ordeal. “You put implants into me with no fail-safes? What were you thinking?”
“They have plenty of fail-safes. Someone found a way around them.”
“It sounds like you’re making excuses.”
“I’m not. I’m trying to explain —”
“It sounds like you’re making explanations.”
Nicholas disappeared, and a little while later, an arbeitor rolled into the bedroom bearing a glass of visola and a flask of Orange Flush. That should do the job.
“NICK?” ZORANNA SAID a few hours later. She was sitting behind the desk of her home office. The mentar did not simply appear, as usual, but walked through the door with downcast eyes. Zoranna ignored his display and said, “Tell me the damages.”
“We lost the prime, five mirrors, and three backups. I’m the fourth backup.”
“What do you mean by lost?”
“Raptured. I opened them within minutes of their quarantine, but they were already gone. I had hoped my protocol to be more effective than that, but —”
“The paste is intact?”
“Yes, the personality matrices, memories, paste, all intact, just nobody home.”
In an even voice, Zoranna said, “A prime and eight copies, I’d say that’s a costly protocol.” Staggeringly costly.
“We’ll be able to recycle the paste, and I will study the failure to improve the protocol, but, yes, costly.” In an attempt to lighten the mood, he added, “But we get to keep these lovely souvenirs.” He opened two rows of frames that displayed nine houses, each an architectural marvel, and nine planets, each an idealized Earth.
Zoranna wiped them away. “Who or what was responsible? Jaspersen?”
“I found nothing in the body oil or any of the other botanicals capable of subverting the implants. I’m studying house recordings going back a year. I’m investigating the belinda, her clothes, perfume, recent whereabouts. I’ve done air samples for dust, nust, biochemicals, bots. I’m studying EM logs, long-wave sonograms, and every other means of attack I can think of. So far, no leads.”
“Could it be a failure of the implants themselves?”
“Unlikely. The failure was coordinated.”
“Jaspersen?” she asked again.
“I don’t see how. Unless he hired a clever mentar.”
“Look into it. Find the bastard who did this.” Zoranna closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands. “Does the Warm Puppy know about all this?”
“It knows you had a crisis at home, though I don’t know how it learned of it. I’ve been keeping close tabs on the belinda, jenny, and all their gear. No leaks from them.”
Zoranna was silent for a long while. When she uncovered her face, she looked old. “It’s been fun, Nick, getting to know you in that way, but it has to stop. You want a body, go find one of your own. Mine is strictly off-limits from now on. Are we clear on that?”
“Perfectly.”
Making the Rounds
An hour after the GEP board voted to alter its mission, the International Oship Plankholder Association, representing ninety-nine Oship governing bodies, called an emergency meeting in Singapore. Meewee was invited — more like summoned — to give an accounting of the GEP’s catastrophic action.
Meewee decided to take the long route there and visit several key Oship officials along the way, especially those from ships that were in final preparation for departure, in order to discuss the dire situation with them in person. He felt he owed them that much.
The first stop was the King Jesus Society compound in Costa Rica. Their ship, the ESV King Jesus, had been second on the launch schedule. The welcoming party that met Meewee’s jet on the sweltering jungle tarmac was made up almost entirely of young adults. Because the KJS forbade the use of rejuvenation therapies, and since there were so few actual youngsters in the world, Meewee assumed they must be recent converts still working off their last rejuve. Before taking him to meet with Elder Seeker, these wholesome young people, who seemed to Meewee like throwbacks to an earlier era, gave him a little tour of KJS Town. Behind its jungle facade, the town was as modern as could be found anywhere. Colleges, a teaching hospital, research labs, farms, shops: all were part of the colonization drive. Though the physical plant had doubled in size since Meewee’s f
irst visit thirteen years before, it had the air of a ghost town: most of its residents were already in space living aboard the King Jesus. Of all the Oship cultures, this was perhaps the most disciplined and self-reliant. Elder Seeker was determined to take with them every piece of human knowledge that was not proscribed by the Divine Creator and likewise every non-proscribed skill set necessary to tame and settle a new world.
Elder Seeker Ralfian met Meewee in his screened office/veranda at the back of his imposing house. A young woman served them lemonade. Elder Seeker, only in his sixties, was aging poorly. His gray hair was thin, he stooped a little when he walked, and he had become flabby. But his expression was as generous as ever.
“Come, sit,” he said, leading Meewee by his elbow to a comfortable cane chair, “and tell me all about it.”
As gently but honestly as possible, Meewee recounted the whole dispiriting affair: how Eleanor Starke had for years deflected the capitalistic urges of the board, the sneak attack by Jaspersen and Singh, his own impending removal. Elder Seeker listened attentively and did not interrupt. “With the approval of all the UD agencies involved,” Meewee summed up, “your colonists already aboard the King Jesus will begin evacuation in a few weeks. Fortunately, none of your people are in biostasis, so we don’t have that to deal with.”
Through all of this, Elder Seeker’s affectionate expression never wavered. When Meewee finished speaking, the Elder reached over and literally patted his hand. “Don’t fret, dear Meewee. God’s not done with you just yet. I don’t expect it to come down to evacuating our people. In fact, we’re proceeding as usual with our schedule for sending the rest of them up.”
“You can’t send more up.”
Elder Seeker raised a hand and grinned. “Have I ever told you the story how I started down God’s path?”
Meewee shook his head, though he had heard the elder’s story several times from third-party sources.
“I was your ordinary free-range, voc-tech dropout. I’d rejuvenated a couple of times. I lived in Collinsville, Illinois, working for Panagra as a farm mechtech assistant. Alcohol, a wandering wife, petty crime — I guess you could say I was a pretty average joe. Then one day — a Tuesday, I seem to recall — in early 2099, Jesus opened a direct line to my heart and sent me a vision. What I saw literally knocked me on my rear. Dozens of men and women — I somehow knew they were husbands and wives — and their cherub-cheeked little children were digging in the ground with spades and flinging the dirt high over their heads. What’s all this about? I couldn’t figure it out. Then the Lord raised me up so I could see, and what I saw was the dirt they were flinging overhead was landing on a little island floating in the sky, and the Lord said, ‘Elder, build me a New Earth and take my people there.’
“Well, that seemed clear enough until I realized I didn’t know how to build a New Earth, or where I was supposed to build it. But the vision shook me to my core, and my faith was strong. So I began to form a community around me. We came down here and began this town for the purpose of preparing ourselves to go, trusting that the Lord would get back to us when we were ready. I won’t say our faith never wavered; after all, we were hard at it for over twenty years. Many of our people lost faith and moved back to their former lives. It looked like the whole community might be abandoned, and then one morning — behold! — there you were, you and Starke, on the news, peddling lifeboats to new worlds.
“Now I understand you’ve had a bit of a setback at the GEP, that evil men are doing what evil men always do, but they are no match for Jesus, so we will continue our departure as planned, trusting in the Savior’s blood to set things right.”
MEEWEE FLEW FROM the constitutional theocracy of the King Jesus compound to the demo cratic republics of the Garden Kiev and Garden Chernobyl, the first and twentieth Oships in the launch order. He arrived at the Kristaz Biogenic Processing and Storage Facility outside Kiev and toured the warehouse filled with ceiling-high stacks of gleaming titanium-chrome cryocapsules. There was enough space in this one warehouse alone for twenty-five thousand processed colonists. Meewee’s guides were none other than the presidents of the two Oships.
“He’s because palace coup,” Meewee said, struggling to make sense in his primitive Ukrainian. “Directing board voting.”
“You may speak in Russian if that helps,” the Kiev president said.
“Yes, thank you. It was a conspiracy between Saul Jaspersen and Million Singh.”
“Is that so?” one of the presidents said. “In any case, we should be able to lift this lot in the next month, making room for the next batch.” The president waved his arm to take in several racks of capsules.
Meewee clenched his teeth. “You don’t understand, Myr President. The Kiev and Chernobyl have been canceled. You can’t lift any more colonists.”
“Nonsense,” said the Chernobyl president. “When the cryocapsule transports arrive at Trailing Earth, will they turn them away?”
“They will! That’s what I’m trying to tell you. They’ll turn them away. Not only that, they will soon be shipping back the hundreds of thousands of capsules already there. You must not lift any more. It’s pointless. In fact, you must quicken all of these people in this warehouse and send them home to make room for the returnees.”
His plea only seemed to annoy his hosts, who continued the tour until an assistant bustled in. “The ceremony begins,” he announced and turned around to bustle out.
Ceremony? What ceremony?
THIRTY MEN AND women with newly shaved heads and wearing silvery paper overalls were surrounded by a sea of anxious friends and family members who had come to see them off.
The Chernobyl president addressed them from the stage while Meewee stood in the wings clutching the Kiev president’s sleeve. “You can’t process new colonists! Not now! It’s unconscionable!”
“Courage,” the president said, removing Meewee’s hand from his sleeve. “The only criminals are those on your board who presume to back out of the deal this late in the journey. We have every confidence that you will unmask them and undo the damage.”
On the stage, the president announced a special guest, and he waved for Meewee to join him. Meewee went to the lectern, intent on breaking up the ceremony, but the applause was so heartfelt and sustained that he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he gave an impromptu little speech. “Thank you, Myren Presidents, and thank you, dear colonists. How much I admire your courage. How much I envy you your grand adventure.” He went on for four or five minutes, not even aware of what he was saying or in what language he was saying it, pulling sentiments from a large stock of them he kept in the back of his head for such occasions.
Afterward, he mingled with colonists and families, exchanging hugs and kisses, toasting them with thimblesful of vodka. When the farewell ceremony concluded and teary-eyed families were escorted from the auditorium, the colonists lay down on pallets that ferried them to the HALVENE tanks for pre-profusion cell sifting.
IN SINGAPORE, MEEWEE met many more Oship leaders with varying degrees of confidence in his restorative abilities. Of the 150 Oships under construction in the Aria yards of Trailing Earth, fully ninety-nine had sold enough planks to form provisional governments and to draft their constitutions; fifty were advanced enough to be placed in the launch schedule, and a dozen had been assigned their destination star system. All this effort, all these dreams would not die easily, and Meewee was treated to public displays of outrage, anger, and despair. But Meewee’s own outrage and despair was plain for all to see, and the plankholders were unable to use him as a scapegoat. Before long they received him again as the movement’s spiritual father.
One bump along the way came when someone tapped Meewee on the shoulder, and he came face-to-face with Million Singh.
“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed Singh upon seeing Meewee’s expression. “You look like you’ve seen a demon, Bishop. Never fear, I will not eat you. Not like my dear ur-brother, Million, who is at the root of all this unpleasan
tness.”
Meewee suddenly realized who this was. It wasn’t Million Singh, but his identical clone, Seetharaman Singh. He was a colonist aboard the Garden Hybris, the ninth ship in the launch order. Seetharaman introduced Meewee to the Hybris delegates, and Meewee recognized them, or rather their famous originals, from media stories.
“I am a replacement organ repository gone bad,” Seetharaman explained affably. “They pithed my cerebral cortex in vatero, but they missed, and I was decanted with half a brain intact.” The notion caused him another fit of laughter. “And so my important brother was forced to raise me and start another clone for his organ bank. And here is Dr. Taksayer, a vanity clone of the former leader. And Darrell and Earl Einstein, not the geniuses everyone had hoped for, but the best bridge players in the universe. And this is Beckham Delolli, the reluctant stand-in and body double. We are a ship full of accidents and rejects, Bishop, whose originals are only too happy to buy us off with a new planet far, far away.”
“Except that your brother, Million, has betrayed us all!” Meewee said, feeling good to be able to vent some of his own misery.
“Which is why we’re going to litigate my brother and all those other criminals (and you, too, no offense) into the ground. They can’t mess with us without bloodying their own noses because we are their own noses! Ha, ha, ha!”
MEEWEE HAD NEVER witnessed so much misplaced optimism as he did among the plankholders. Maybe their outrage had been easier to bear than the groundless faith they pinned on him. What could he do? Eleanor, herself, with Cabinet’s assistance, had drafted the contracts that the colonists all signed, and she never did anything without foolproof escape clauses. The GEP was wholly within its rights to withdraw from its land swap at any point up to the launch simply by instructing the escrow service to release the land titles and return them to their original owners.
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