WHILE SOME MARKED their voyage in ship days, and others in distance covered, Fred tended to think of their progress in light-minutes. They were already 6.25 light-minutes from Earth, which made normal phone conversations impractical.
Whenever Mary called from work, she usually tried to do so from her private suite, seated in her favorite armchair with the cherry blossom print upholstery. She was usually relaxed and had a frosty drink in her hand. This time she was standing in some residential room, no drink, and was at wit’s end. The door behind her was ajar, and there were distant shrieks of a not very happy person in the background.
“Hi! Sorry,” she said, shutting the door. “We seem to be in constant crisis mode around here lately. Right now she’s trying to terminate Dr. Rouselle, and we’re fighting that. But I know you don’t want to hear about my work, so I’ll leave it at that.”
Fred and all but the most foolhardy passengers had confined themselves to their pouches for the last seventy-two hours. The ship was making a hard braking maneuver that increased the gravity to three times Earth standard. He listened to Mary and stored up comments to make when it was his turn to talk.
“Otherwise, nothing new around here since yesterday, except that I miss you even more than ever, Fred. It’s worse than when you were in prison.
“What else? Oh, a few more of the Leenas have crashed or whatever. Now Clarity thinks maybe they are acting. One thing’s for sure, every major story mat wants their own Lingering Leena character, so they’re in high demand. But I asked Clarity to coma-proof my own unit, and she said she’d try. Over.”
At the word “over,” Mary’s holo image froze, and Fred lurched into speech. “I miss you too, Mary, more than I can say.” He told her about his day, but since ship days tended to blur into each other, he may have been repeating himself. When he could think of nothing more to say, he said, “Over.”
For the 6.25 minutes to Earth and an equal length of time to return, plus whatever time it took her to listen to him and compose a reply, Fred watched news and sports.
FRED AND MANDO attended amateur talent night in the main lounge. They shared a table with two dorises, never the same two, who were getting the tenth or twelfth retelling of the life of Walt and Rosemary. The braking maneuver had eased up, and the floors and seats were sticky to compensate for the weak gravity. With the sticky surfaces, it was still possible to actually sit at a table and to walk with clumsy, lurching steps.
Fred saw the children coming from half the room away. Dressed in matching blue and white town togs, they were playing tag in the teeming lounge. It had never been hard to pick children out of a crowd, and everyone’s eyes followed them. Fred had to wonder what children were doing on a transport to Trailing Earth. Where were their parents?
The running girl tripped and went sailing through the space between the tables, startling a man right out of his seat. She flew straight into Fred’s hands. All he had to do was reach over and pluck her from the air like a football. To her it was all a big joke.
Fred turned the laughing girl right side up and planted her on her sticky-sneakered feet. He was about to make a typical adult remark, like “No flying allowed,” but at the last moment, something about her made him think she wasn’t a real girl at all. Maybe it was the firm feel of her body or the adultlike glint in her eye. She was a retrogirl. And in order to let Mando and the dorises know that he wasn’t fooled by her appearance, Fred changed what he was about to say to, “I didn’t know they had trapeze acts at Trailing Earth.” It didn’t make much sense, but it was the best he could come up with on the fly.
The girl’s eyes went wide. “There’s a circus there?”
“No, I just —”
“What circus?” demanded the little boy, who had caught up with his friend.
“There is no circus,” Fred said. “I was just wondering out loud what kind of job up there requires the special skills of small adults like yourselves. Crawling into tight spaces, I imagine.”
The boy laughed out loud. “How well you imagine, Myr Russ. Really tight spaces they are.” He winked at Fred, and slapped the girl on the back and said, “You’re it!” They dashed away, leaving Fred red-faced with embarrassment.
Leaf Mold
The vine chamber had its own embedded crew of agribeitor caretakers. Meewee walked along the length of the chamber, from porthole to porthole, watching the ’beitors inside follow the mother vine from its root trunk to the shoots at the end where the new wheels were ripening. The wheels were large disks, like weird squash, with a hard yellow rind and eight thick, orange knobs evenly spaced around the rim.
Some of the wheels lay flat on the floor beside the vine, and even to Meewee’s untrained eye appeared soft and discolored, clearly past their prime. The ’beitors cut these from the vine and carted them away for disposal.
Then the ’beitors inspected the fresher wheels. Those judged immature were left to ripen undisturbed. Those judged to be at their peak of maturity were snipped and transported to the transfer drawers.
Another Mem Lab scientist, Dr. Ito, was in charge of the nursery. He retrieved the wheels from the drawer one at a time and placed them on an examination table. Meewee levitated himself to peer over his shoulder. Each of the eight orange knobs around the rim contained a “bean,” which the scientist tested for viability.
“Eight wheels times eight beans per wheel,” he told Meewee, “gives us sixty-four tries. But this one is deformed, and this one is a runt.” He pierced the defective knobs with a metal pick, pithing them. Altogether, he destroyed five beans, which left them with fifty-nine possible Eleanor clones.
Dr. Ito transferred the wheels to a separate gestation chamber where he placed each in a separate womb, covered it with slurry, and sealed and placed it on a rack. “Now we let them bake for a while,” he said.
EVEN AT THREE million engrams per hour, the migration was taking longer than first estimated. It turned out that the TXH lice were an especially virulent strain of pest that needed only an hour to turn a full-sized panasonic fish into mush and bone. But with a little creative herding, accomplished with submersibles and bubbles, Captain Benson was able to disperse the fish and slow the infestation. Dr. Strohmeyer was optimistic about the quality of the engrams she was downloading, and her brainfish were incorporating them as fast as they could.
In the Command Post, the staff had cobbled together a new secure godseye and abandoned the Stardust dance floor. The sea of yellow dots was shrinking each hour, and Dr. Koyabe was optimistic. She came and went, overseeing her forces, but periodically she checked in on Meewee and made sure he was getting enough food and rest. Day, night, Meewee lost all track of time. Time was the number of engrams yet to be uploaded.
A RUSS GUARD showed him the way to the men’s shower room. There, Meewee met several more russes in various stages of undress. They looked all the same. Iterants, normal iterants, displayed a certain amount of variation, like brothers from the same parents, but these were more like identical twins. Fixed allele cloning techniques were outlawed for commercial iterants. Did Applied People know about this private, unlawful collection of its popular germline?
“So, how many of you russies make up the garrison?” he asked his escort.
“Oh, a couple hundred.”
Somewhere, in some lab module, Meewee was sure there was a mother vine with a brass plaque that read, “Russ.”
SLOWLY, SO AS not to alarm them, Meewee lowered his open hand to the water. Two large, bulging foreheads broke the surface for a pat. More joined them, and soon the whole school was competing for his attention. Their heads were soft.
“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.
“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 hundre
d 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.”
Meet the Donalds
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.
Mind Over Ship Page 24