Mind Over Ship

by David Marusek

  Veronica didn’t push the matter and instead waited for her to speak first. Eventually, the instructor made a fist and offered it. Veronica pressed her own pygmy knuckles against the instructor’s, and the instructor said, Have you given this enough thought?

  Of course, Veronica replied, hoping she showed more confidence than she felt. He’s young and rebellious. He’ll grow out of it. Reset the maneuver and try again.

  She withdrew her fist, but the instructor did not. Her row of knuckles hung in the air until, reluctantly, Veronica returned her own. Was there something else, Captain?

  Yes, sir, there was. If you think I’m only referring to that little tantrum in there, you should review the recordings I flagged for you. He defies my every instruction. All he wants to do is fly. He won’t hear about propulsion dynamics, life support, biostasis, or mechanical fabrication. All of the critical skills are “boring,” except perhaps for celestial navigation, and that only so he can find more planets and stars to crash into.

  Veronica pressed her reply a little harder, Then by all means, Captain, teach him how to find more planets and stars to crash into!

  In Their Place

  When she awoke to a misty dawn, she forgot for a giddy moment where she was or what she was supposed to be. She lay enfolded in ethereal wings of dazzling blue feathers. She snuggled in them for warmth and realized she could flex them and that they were her own. She lay on a mat made of split reeds. Downy feathers covered her breasts and concealed the painful bruises where Fred had carelessly pecked at her. She felt with the tip of her talon and counted eighteen bruises, including those on her throat and cheeks.

  Fred lay next to her. He was also winged — fletched in golden brown. The feathers covering his back were bloodstained where she had clawed him in her passion.

  Mary leaned over and, minding her beak, kissed his finely feathered cheek.

  He grunted.

  “I’m getting up.”

  He grunted again.

  Mary stood on the edge of their platform and looked down. She could not see the ground through the tangle of undergrowth. The entire space was awash in green from the forest canopy above.

  She jumped and, only as an afterthought, spread her arms. Her wings caught the air, snapping fully vurt, and she clumsily, much too fast, glided to an awkward landing. She came to rest next to the giant trunk of their tree. When she approached the tree, the hatch outline lit up.

  As soon as Mary entered the tiny lock, all her feathery raiment fell away and vanished, and she was an ordinary nude woman. All the bruises were gone too, and with them their discomfort. Such a game! At the outer hatch, she gathered her wits and made a mad sprint to the bathroom, where the gel shower was already pelting in anticipation, and she leaped into the stall and frantically scrubbed the simsock mastic from her body. The trick, when leaving the null lock wearing vurt mastic, was to try to remove it before the nits had a chance to recolonize you. Otherwise, as they burrowed through your skin, they invariably dragged bits of mastic with them, and although the nits were supposed to be hypoallergenic, the simsock certainly wasn’t.

  When Mary was finished and toweling herself off, the autodoc on the wall dispensed her a paper thimble of salve to apply to her wrists and ankles, and though it made her hair greasy, to the spot on the crown of her head.

  “WAIT!” MARY SAID, scratching her ankle. “What did I just say? I said take the tray with you.”

  “Yes, myr,” the nuss said. The young Capias woman crossed the room and lifted the tray of dirty plates and glasses. But Ellen told her to put it back.

  “Let the ’beitors clean it up, Mary. I’m not paying this nuss to wait on you like your own personal maid.”

  Mary flushed with embarrassment.

  “For that matter,” Ellen went on, turning her gaze to include Georgine, “I’m tired of the overall unfriendly tone around here lately. It’s starting to grate on my nerves. I don’t like it.”

  Labor Relations

  That morning, the municipal morgue crew was assigned to Roaming Mop Up Duty. Riding to the first call-out of the shift with the ROMUD crew in the omnibus, Fred went out of his way to be friendly. But the johns seemed unsure how to act around a russ in johnboy overalls. And the ROMUD crew leader, another john, was even a little hostile.

  Their first call-out was to the McLaughlin Traffic Well, the site of an early-morning wrecker attack. The traffic well was a modest one, four square blocks in area and twenty munilevels high. It contained a pair of multilane up-and-down spirals that served a half-dozen intersecting skyway traffic lanes. The floor of the well was a ped plaza crosslink that was suspended between two gigatowers. It was littered with about twenty fallen vehicles. The bus had broken in two. Its wheels, doors, seats, and passenger crash pods were scattered about the plaza among wrecked limousines and cars.

  Wrecker gangs had hacked the city’s traffic control system to cause a series of midair collisions in the well. Stricken vehicles hit more vehicles on their way down, starting a chain reaction of multilevel carnage. The wreckers waited at the bottom of the well with scavenging mechs for cutting up and carting away the debris, especially the good bits: titanium fan blades, Rolls-Royce motors, control subems. By the time Fred’s morgue crew arrived, the wreckers were long gone, the police and HomCom had secured the well, and crash cart ambulances were attending to the injured, of which there were few. Falling twenty munilevels was perfectly survivable, and even the bus’s disintegration was a designed-in safety measure to protect the passenger crash pods. The only casualties of the bus crash — the only fatalities in the entire attack — were two plaza pedestrians crushed under the bus and found by triage spiders. As soon as the ROMUD crew removed the remains, the HomCom could release the site to a brigade of street-cleaning scuppers that was waiting behind the barricades.

  THE SECOND CALL-OUT was much more hazardous. It involved a rare four-stage NASTIE and required the ROMUD crew to suit up before entering the hot zone, which comprised the upper floors of the residential gigatower Port Hallow. Apparently, the microscopic nanobot had drifted into the arcology through a central sunshaft and migrated into an interior apartment before going active. By the time the bloomjumpers arrived and managed to quench it, the bot had grown a millionfold, dissolved parts of ten apartments on three floors, and penetrated many other neighboring ones to prospect for resources.

  When the morgue crew arrived, the bloomjumpers were still there in force mopping up hot spots with their grease guns and preparing the pearl for removal. Fred, who was a certified bloomjumper, himself, who probably had a higher HomCom rating than any russ at the scene, was drawn to the pearl, which lay in the fire-gutted former living room of what had recently been a luxury apartment. The pearl was a killing machine that the opportunistic NASTIE had begun to fabricate, based on the raw materials it found in its environment. Residential towers were especially resource-rich environments, chock-full of useful elements for impromptu weapons, everything from organic carpeting to the rare metals used in electronic and paste-based appliances, as well as plumbing and wiring, artificial stone, and thousands of other useful things. Not to mention biological material, brains and nerves especially, for hard-to-jigger control systems. Feeding on this material, the bloom had grown exponentially in size, from the original dust-particlelike NASTIE to, judging from the broken shards of its scab, a nanoforge filling half the room.

  But the bloomjumpers had arrived, quenched the bloom, and shattered its scab before it was finished making the pearl. So, it was impossible for Fred to tell exactly what the pearl was intended to become. It was as large as a vehicle, had a boxy frame and ceramic skin. It might’ve passed for an arcade omnikiosk or public toilet stall. But no matter what it would have become, one thing was certain, it would have been a deadly weapon of mass destruction, dispatched over sixty years earlier by an enemy who no longer existed.

  As Fred studied the pearl from a safe distance — the scab shards were still too hot to approach — two russ b
loomjumpers, still in their green gummysuits, joined him. When they saw his face through his helmet glass, they appeared shocked. Just then, the crew boss john yelled from the floor above for Fred to get back to work. So Fred turned from his brothers to follow a tree-root-thick tendril from the scab through a hole in the wall to the next apartment. There, other members of the ROMUD crew were bagging anything with animal protein in it. The prospecting tendril had branched out to all parts of the room and covered everything in spun filaments like cotton candy. The table and chairs, the lamps and bookcases — everything was cocooned, mined, and dissolved, and the good bits passed along the tendrils to the scab.

  Prospector tendrils continued on to other rooms and floors. Ragged-edged scraps of carpeting from the apartment above hung from holes in the ceiling. The entire room was filled with cobwebs of gossamer filaments. They gave the room a foggy look, and the bloomjumping anti-nano had frozen them in place. As Fred moved across the room, the filaments shattered like glass needles and fell tinkling to the floor. Fred tried to follow the tunnels that his coworker johns had already punched through, but he was a larger caliber man, and though he hunched over, he cut a wider swath.

  Fred made his noisy way to the corner of the room — it looked like a bedroom from the arrangement of furniture lumps — where a john was bagging a suggestively shaped cocoon lying on what must have been a bed. It might’ve been a large pet or a small person. The ROMUD job was to collect them and let others sort them out. Fred said, “Excuse me, Myr John, but what’s its bio-hash number?”

  The john answered without looking up from his task, “A12.”

  “Thanks, friend.”

  When Fred tuned his visor to the A12 filter, the cocoon that the john was bagging appeared to be stained a deep magenta. And the filament fog surrounding it was tinted pink. Fred picked up a heavy-duty vacuum wand and began to suck up these protein-rich pink clouds all the way to the tendril roots. There he attacked the roots themselves. Wherever they were spotted red, he chopped out sections and bagged them.

  Fred was working up a sweat in his hazmat suit, and he took a break to let his ventilation system catch up. So he was motionless when he heard a tinkling sound above him. He looked up in time to dodge a marble-topped bathroom vanity that came crashing down through the filament fog. It slammed into the floor next to him and flew to pieces.

  Fred looked through a hole in the ceiling into the apartment above. There were russes in various uniforms — bloomjumper, hommer, cop — leaning over the edge to look down at him.

  “Oops,” said one of them. “Heads up, Johnny.”

  Unavailable

  “But I insist!” Meewee said. “I must see her.” Ellen’s young mentar blocked the foyer door with her insubstantial body, and it took all of Meewee’s considerable sense of decorum not to simply walk through her. That and the fact that he could see two of the Capias security men — called jays — standing guard in the next room.

  “I’m sorry, Myr Meewee, but Ellen’s instructions are clear: she does not wish to meet with you, not now or in the foreseeable future. Anything you wish to communicate to her you may give to me.”

  Actually, he couldn’t, at least not by the rules outlined by her predecessor, Wee Hunk.

  “You seem like a very helpful mentar,” Meewee said, trying to control his frustration, “but there are some things that would be lost in translation.”

  “Try me,” the earnest young woman said, beaming with helpfulness. “I suppose I should inform you that on Ellen’s orders, Cabinet is teaching me the Starke Enterprises business with a view of my taking over its management. So, I am privy to the family business, and Ellen says for you to bring business as well as personal matters to me.”

  Meewee’s assertiveness wilted in the glow of her efficiency. He hung his head and followed her through the Manse to her office. They sat in facing chairs, and she said, “Now, tell me, Myr Meewee, how I can help you.”

  “I received a memo a little while ago saying that Starke Enterprises is to be broken up and the pieces, including Heliostream, put on the market.”

  “Yes,” Lyra said merrily. “I sent you that memo myself.”

  Meewee wondered how the eager young mentar could equate managing Starke business with liquidating it. But he didn’t pursue it, and said instead, “A memo? The corporate fire sale of the century, including the division I’ve run for the past ten years, being sold to the highest bidder, and you notify me via memo?”

  The young woman didn’t budge. “You ran Heliostream? Ellen thinks otherwise. In her opinion, you are the director in title only; you’ve never actually run Heliostream, or anything else that we’re aware of. Cabinet ran Starke Enterprises, including Heliostream, and we thought that under the circumstances a memo was sufficient.”

  Meewee was growing more discouraged by the minute. The mentar stood up and began to move toward the door. “Was there anything else, Myr Meewee? I’ll be sure to tell Ellen that you visited.”

  “Yes, there is something else. The memo didn’t say who the intended buyer is. Is it Andrea Tiekel?”

  “There are several interested parties, but, yes, Tiekel has put forth the most interesting offer so far.”

  In the foyer, before leaving the Manse, Meewee turned to the mentar in one final, hopeless attempt at influencing Ellen. “Please tell her that this is a grave mistake. Tell her she’s putting her mother’s legacy in jeopardy.”

  “Oh, about that,” the mentar said. “Ellen says that won’t work on her anymore; she wants to take a pass on the whole legacy thing.”

  In the Neighborhood

  It was a short hop from the Starke Manse outside Bloomington back to the Starke Enterprises campus near the Kentucky border, but the trip lasted long enough for Meewee to be consumed with delayed fury over his shabby treatment at the hands of Ellen’s mentar. What good was his case against the GEP at the Trade Board if Ellen sold Heliostream? Even if he won he would lose. It was no mean feat to commit a company to provide energy to a project for the next five centuries. It was not something another for-profit corporation was likely to do or, if it did, to be held accountable for. Meanwhile, Eleanor’s many voices continued to babble on in the background:

  <. . . the little people in our heads act like transceiver nodes. By some as yet unexplained quantum trick that living cells know how to do but mentars do not, the per sis tent little bishop/neural pattern in my brain cells can, when under duress, transfer my thoughts directly to the per sis tent little Eleanor pattern in yours. From one perspective, you could say that we incarnate our significant others in the flesh of our own brains, and that they communicate with each other across space-time.>

  Fascinating, as usual, but not the sort of counsel Meewee was craving at that moment. What he needed was a plan, and by the time his car entered the station of Starke Enterprises, he had conceived and rejected several of them. The most promising involved the creation of a nonprofit company made up of Oship governments that would buy up and operate Heliostream. But something like that would only make sense if he was first successful in thwarting Jaspersen and Singh’s coup. Otherwise, there would be no Oship governments.

  It occurred to him that he needed to have a serious discussion with Andrea Tiekel. Perhaps she wasn’t the threat he had made her out to be. She had voted with him, after all. It was probably wrong to prejudge her motives. In fact, perhaps her acquisition of Heliostream was a good thing, if she meant what she had said about supporting his mission. Ellen surely was no champion of extra-solar colonization, and Eleanor’s fish trick hadn’t amounted to much. Who could say, maybe Andrea would turn out to be an ally after all.

  So it was a pleasant surprise, when he reached his office deep in the belly of the underground arcology, to be told that Tiekel was at the campus gate asking for him.

  His desktop holocube showed a ground car with the top down, an audacious contraption bordering on the foolhardy. Andrea sat in the backseat and wore a wide-brimmed straw hat. “Hello, Merri
ll,” she said gaily. “I was in the neighborhood, and I thought we should meet.”

  “I was just thinking the same!” he replied. He paced his small office until she arrived and went out to greet her. What a sight she was in her light summer dress, with bare legs, sun-kissed shoulders, and white cotton gloves. Her hair was a wind-tossed mess. She had a physical presence that her boardroom holograms failed to deliver, and just looking at her in his outer office reminded him what delightful creatures women could be. But as he approached her, Arrow said

  Meewee stopped in midstride.

 

  Meewee looked around him. In her summer clothes, Andrea didn’t appear threatening. And if she had just come in from the wild outdoors, security would have scanned her for weapons of all kinds and sizes.

  Now she closed the distance between them, moving toward him with a winning smile.

 

  “Merrill Meewee,” Andrea said, close enough to smell her perfume, “at last we meet in realbody.”

  Fields, that was what she smelled like. He drank in a deep breath. Honey clover with crushed mint, and beneath that a cool earthy loam.

  Meewee blinked and was a little surprised to find himself and Andrea in his office with the door shut. Andrea was leading him by the arm to the office settee in the corner. Fresh-mown sweet alfalfa at his father’s farm, sweat-soaked afternoons of satisfying manual labor in the sun. Andrea was surely an ally who could be trusted to do the good work.