The “Slime Minstrel” was laid out in a trough behind Kitty’s space. Three meters in length, the minstrel was a blubbery hill of translucent blue protoplasm. It was one of the few buskers that performed without a paypost. Spectators threw credit tokens directly at it. Tokens that had pierced its outer membrane could be seen slowly migrating through its gelatinous mass to a collection gut. Depending on what people donated—and how the spirit moved it—the minstrel would sing. It had six blow holes arranged along its spine, connected to inner bellows and bladders. It could trumpet or roar, serenade with a chorus of sweet voices, or spray foul juices, or do all at once. People said that the Slime Minstrel was once a young man, a Shakespearean player, whose augmentations had gotten out of hand.
Satisfied with his look at Kitty’s competitors, Samson told Hubert to bring the bee down closer. Now his little scape contained only Kitty on her tiny stage and her small audience. Her audience was roaring with laughter, and Samson didn’t understand why. This was her new act that she’d been rehearsing for weeks, and it was meant to be precious, not funny. She was on the last verse of the candy-shop song and was tap dancing in accompaniment when she made a furious kick, and the audience howled. Now Samson saw the problem; a homcom slug had crawled up her leg and clung to her calf above her shoe. It should have fallen away after it sampled her, but its lo-index noetics told it to hang on until she stood still. Samson shuddered. He was no fan of homcom slugs.
Kitty threw open her arms and sang and tapped the final measure, then bowed from the waist, her veil of springy curls cascading around her. There was mild applause and a few swipes at her paypost. The moment she stopped moving, the little black slug dropped off and crawled away to continue its patrol. Her audience clapped again, then drifted away as well.
Samson said, “My poor baby.” Kitty straightened up but continued to hide her face in her curls. “How much did she earn?”
Hubert said, “Less than one ten-thousandth.”
“So little? That’s insulting! That’s criminal. My poor baby.” Kitty stepped off her stage, unlocked it, and gave it a little kick in its tender spot. It collapsed and folded and folded again until it was the size of a deck of cards, which she dropped into her pocket. She collapsed her paypost as well and carried it over to Denny’s bench. The moment she vacated her space, another act set up in it. It was a trio of pink unicorns—mama, papa, and baby—who warbled show tunes in harmony.
Samson jabbed his bony finger into the scape. “See this aff here?” He pointed to a young woman in a shear sunsuit departing the scene surrounded by four jerry bodyguards. “She was watching Kitty’s act, and I saw her make a swipe. How much did she give?”
“Nothing,” said Hubert. “She made a dry swipe.”
“Jeeze!” cried Samson. “Cripes almighty, I detest that. The people with the most to give! Selfish, greedy affs—I hate them.”
Meanwhile, the bee followed Kitty to the bench where Denny had been hogging space with his large body. He scooched up to make a place for her. She sat and leaned against him wearily, and he flagged down a passing vending arbeitor.
Samson said, “Don’t let that boy eat up their train fare.”
The arbeitor stopped in front of them and squeezed out a half meter of steamy, cheesy pizza tube, two cold drinks, and towelettes. Kitty listlessly swiped payment while Denny broke the pizza tube into two fairly equal pieces and offered one to her. But she refused with a shake of her head. Denny said something to her, to which she hunched her shoulders.
“Get in closer,” said Samson. “I want to hear what they’re saying.”
The bee advanced until Kitty’s pretty little head filled his holoscape. Sweat glistened on her forehead, and her cheeks were flushed. She snapped open her drink and wrapped her lips around the straw.
“I love this,” Denny said. “Do you think I can come tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” she replied listlessly. “We’ll ask Sam. Maybe he’ll let you come. I’ll teach you a routine. We’ll buy you a license.”
Denny guffawed. “No, Kit, I mean, can I come watch, like today?”
“I could teach you to juggle or something.”
“Get out of here.”
Without warning, Kitty made a lightning backhanded swat at the public bee, but the bee dodged it effortlessly. She looked directly at the bee, directly at Samson it seemed, and said, “Desist, you creep. I invoke my right to privacy.”
The scene zoomed out as the bee rose to hover outside her privacy zone. Samson shut his eyes against the vertigo. He wished he could be there to comfort his darling Kitty, to shame the stingy affs, to prime the pump by swiping her paypost himself, all the little things he so loved to do. After a while, he opened his eyes and was surprised to find himself sitting in Kitty’s bedroom.
“Hubert?”
“Here, Sam.” The voice came from the wardrobe where he kept Hubert’s container. Little by little, it all came back to him. They weren’t at the park anymore. He would never visit the park again. He got up and opened the bedroom door a crack. The hallway and stairwell were quiet. “Onward,” he said.
2.2
“That about covers it,” Eleanor Starke said. “Let’s move on to new business.”
The regularly scheduled board meeting of the Garden Earth Project was entering its third hour without a break. This was of no inconvenience to the ten members who had sent proxies to attend in their place. The only two members attending in realbody, Alblaitor and Meewee, fidgeted in their seats. Eleanor Starke, who was returning from space, chaired the meeting via holopresence. Her image sat at the head of the table. Behind her stood her Cabinet’s chief of staff, and behind it, a window wall overlooking the serrated landscape of the Starke Enterprises Southern Indiana headquarters. Except for the reception building, in which they met, the Starke facilities were located underground, leaving the ten-thousand acre campus free for tilt-slab soybimi cultivation.
“Merrill,” Eleanor said, “we’ll move your report to the end, if you don’t mind. I want to hear about Adam’s breakthrough discovery first.”
Merrill Meewee nodded; agenda order meant little at a Starke meeting. He glotted to his mentar, Arrow, Send in more coffee. And ask Zoranna if she wants anything.
Meewee attended in realbody because he was a Starke employee in the Heliostream Division and was able to come up from his office. He wore his trademark outfit: vermilion overalls with purple piping and a scarlet yoke, perhaps inspired by the ecclesiastic garments he used to wear a lifetime ago.
Zoranna Alblaitor was present in realbody because she had been conducting business in Illinois and had dropped in to visit. Or to snoop, Meewee suspected.
“I’d hardly call it a breakthrough, Eleanor,” Adam Gest’s proxy said. “More like the results of patient plodding.” The proxy was a projection of Gest’s head, shoulders, and right arm that he had made specifically for this meeting before going to bed last night at Trailing Earth. Like the other proxies, it floated serenely over its empty chair at the table.
“Call it whatever you want,” Eleanor chided him, “just show it to us. Let’s wrap this up.”
“Gladly,” said Gest-by-proxy. “Let’s start with our Oship at rest.” A model of the project’s recently completed Oship, the ESV Garden Kiev, appeared above the table. It was a double hoop of hab drums, like two giant donuts stacked together. The drums spun ponderously on a lattice superstructure, one hoop clockwise, the other counter. In reality, each hab drum was large enough to contain a small city and its surrounding countryside, and each of the hoops contained sixty-four such drums. Generous living space for a million people.
Meewee watched and listened closely. He felt it essential that he understand all aspects of the project, even though the engineering details usually went over his head.
“Now bring it to 0.267 light speed,” the Gest proxy continued.
The model’s hab drums ceased rotating—gravity would now be supplied by acceleration—and a radial wire fra
me appeared inside the donut holes to represent the electromagnetic propulsion target—the torus. The model seemed to be moving through a star field.
“It’ll take two hundred years of constant particle bombardment by Heliostream lasers to attain this relativistic speed,” the proxy explained. “The problem is that in two hundred years we’re bound to come up with numerous improvements for translating photons to propulsion. Until now we’ve been unsure how to incorporate design updates in an active torus generator while the Oship is receding in excess of a quarter light speed. Our so-called breakthrough came when we realized—”
“Eleanor?” Meewee said, interrupting the proxy. Eleanor was gone. Her holo had vanished. The proxies looked around at each other.
“Hey, Cabinet,” said the Jaspersen proxy. Cabinet was missing too.
They waited awhile longer, but Eleanor’s image did not return, and the proxy of Trina Warbeloo, the Garden Earth board secretary, said, “It’s undoubtedly a comm glitch. Eleanor, can you hear me?”
“I move we take a break while it’s being fixed,” Zoranna said and rose from the table. Merrill, she glotted to Meewee, Nick reports big trouble. I’m getting out of here.
Just then, Eleanor Starke’s image was reestablished. Its scape was roughly cropped, revealing a vignette of her and her surroundings aboard her yacht. She was pressing a hand against the fuselage window and speaking to someone unseen.
When she noticed the board members, she turned to them and lowered her hand. “I have an emergent situation here. I’ll rejoin you when I can.” With that, her holospace shrank to a dot, morphed into the Starke Enterprises sig, and faded away.
“Wait, Eleanor! What sort of situation?” Jaspersen’s proxy demanded. “Eleanor!” Jaspersen’s proxy was a head shot only, no shoulders, not even a neck, and it looked like a bobbing toy balloon.
“Arrow,” Meewee commanded his mentar, “show us Eleanor’s ship.”
The large Oship model was replaced by a live image captured by Heliostream satellites of Eleanor’s yacht tumbling in a fiery arc over the Pacific.
“No!” Meewee said. “That’s not possible.”
“Merrill, compose yourself,” snapped Jaspersen’s proxy. “Adam, do something.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Gest’s proxy replied, but everyone knew what Jaspersen meant. It was Gest’s company, Aria Yachts, that had designed and built Starke’s Songbird. The Gest proxy vanished and was replaced by a holo of Adam Gest, himself, in his bathrobe. He studied the stricken ship and said, “Listen, everyone, it’s going to be all right. Even with total avionics failure, Eleanor’s yacht has a passive fail-safe system. It simply cannot crash.”
Oh my God, Zoranna said to Meewee. Nick says he’s lying.
Gest plotted the Songbird’s trajectory, and unless the yacht’s fail-safe system kicked in soon, it would strike Earth in the western foothills of the Andes. The other proxies were being replaced, as their owners in time zones around the globe were alerted to the crisis.
“This can’t be happening,” said Trina Warbeloo in a bathing suit.
“No one can kill Eleanor,” said Jaspersen, sitting up in bed. “Though many have tried.”
He knows something, Zoranna said. He’s in on it.
In on what? Meewee shot back.
They lost their visual feed, and a globe with a tiny ship icon replaced it. As the members watched in grim silence, the icon representing the Songbird fell in an unbroken arc and disappeared in central Bolivia. Minutes crawled by, and the board members continued to watch the spot on the globe.
Finally, Jaspersen said, “What about rescue attempts?”
Zoranna said, “Teams have been dispatched.”
“What about Cabinet?” Andie Tiekel said. “Cabinet, are you there?”
No response.
“This is a black black day,” Jaspersen said. The others stared openly at him. “What?” he said.
Warbeloo said, “I move we adjourn for one hour. I’m sure we all have much to attend to.”
The motion was seconded and carried, and one by one the holoscapes closed, leaving Zoranna and Meewee alone in the conference room. “I don’t believe it,” Meewee said. “It didn’t happen.”
“Believe it,” Zoranna said as she came around the table on her way to the door.
“Where are you going, Zoe?”
“Home.”
“Now?”
Zoranna paused next to the door. “Oh, Merrill, don’t be so dense. I love Eleanor as much as you, but face it—no one of her stature has died since Stalin. I don’t believe her death was an accident, and neither did anyone else here. And until we know who killed her and why, I’d prefer to stay safely tucked away in my little fortress by the sea. I suggest you go somewhere safe yourself, Merrill, and watch your back.”
Meewee stayed on in the boardroom alone with his mentar, Arrow. Before long, pictures of the crash scene started coming through from the local witness and media bees, and Arrow displayed them for him. The Starke Songbird had gouged a trench in a soccer field. The damage was impressive. The medevac teams arrived—jennys and jerrys—and they sent the bees away. Meewee realized he hadn’t had the chance to give Eleanor and the board his report. His report was about plans for the launch ceremony. The Garden Kiev was scheduled to launch from Trailing Earth in three months. Meewee was in charge of the festivities. It was going to be an occasion to celebrate the project’s first triumph.
2.3
Today it was all El and Ellie. They rode in twin seat podules in their private yacht. They traveled alone. They wore matching jumpsuits. And although the mother had been born two centuries before the daughter was decanted, today they were sisters, women of thirty or so, their mutual age of choice.
Ellen sat on the starboard side where the giant blue face of Earth hung outside her window. It loomed, eclipsing the stars. She felt the first bumps of atmosphere, which meant at least another four hours till touchdown. She was bored.
Eleanor, her mother, claimed to know the cure for boredom. It was called work. Because work, according to Eleanor, was play. Indeed, at this moment it looked as though Ellen’s mother was playing house. She had a dozen dolls arranged in tiers in her podule. She barked questions and orders at them. She floated dollhouse furniture, tiny tables and chrome hoops, in the air before her.
These weren’t really dolls, but miniature holos and proxies of her colleagues, employees, and mentar. And it wasn’t dollhouse furniture, but scale models of their solar harvesters and Oships. A breakfast holoconference—or maybe a dozen overlapping meetings. It was work after all. Ellen sighed. She supposed she, too, had work to do. “Wee Hunk,” she said to her own mentar, “call Clarity and see if she wants to work. Wait, what’s her local time?”
Ellen and her business partner, Clarity, owned a small but influential production company for the daily novellas called Burning Daylight Productions. Recently, they had bought up a prematurely obsolete hollyholo character, Renaldo (the Dangerous), and were trying to retool it.
“Well?” Ellen said. “Is she available?”
Ellen’s mentar, Wee Hunk, appeared to be sitting idly before her as a miniature man in a tiny, floating armchair. The mentar wore a tiger-stripe robe and leopard-spot slippers and pretended to be reading a paper book. He marked his place with a finger and looked at her. He said, “Clarity’s valet says she’s currently unavailable,” and went back to his book.
“Wee Hunk, this is important.”
“I have no doubt.”
“No, really. I won’t have time later. I’ll tell you what. Cast a proxy of me and send it to her.” Ellen prepared herself to be cast. She closed her eyes, took a couple of relaxing breaths, and concentrated on the topic of discussion—Renaldo (the Dangerous) and how she and Clarity could fix it. Ellen opened her eyes expecting to see a proxy ready for her inspection, but no such proxy appeared. For that matter, Wee Hunk had disappeared too. Just then, their yacht hit an atmospheric bump, and the earthscape dipped bel
ow her window. Vernier thrusters fired to restore the ship’s attitude. Ellen wasn’t alarmed. Reentry was often rocky, but the yacht was controlled by dedicated tandem pilot submentars—avionics subems—so there was little chance of anything serious going wrong.
The seat podules began to rotate to their upright position—that probably meant they were in store for more heavy weather. Then the cabin lights failed, and her mother’s doll-like holos flickered out all at once. Ellen was pressed against her right armrest, and when she looked out her window, Earth was rolling in and out of sight. The yacht was spinning. The verniers fired in staccato bursts to counteract, and again the craft righted itself. The main engines ignited then, pushing Ellen against her seatback. The engines made an odd pocky noise as they burned. Still, Ellen wasn’t frightened. Over the years, she’d experienced a lot of rough rides, but these yachts always knew what to do. She looked over at Eleanor. Her mother was trying to tell her something, but the cabin noise was too loud. “What is she saying?” she asked her truant mentar, annoyed that she even had to ask. “Wee Hunk! Answer me!”
At last Ellen felt an icy stab of fear, not because of the turbulence, but because of her mentar’s silence. She realized she was off-line. It was a feeling she never liked and never got used to. She turned again to her mother. Eleanor sat calmly in her podule, pressing her left hand flat against her windowpane. At first Ellen had no idea what she was doing, but then it occurred to her that Eleanor might be communicating with Cabinet through her palm array. Eleanor’s wily Cabinet would find some way to bounce a makeshift signal to her. Ellen decided to try to reach Wee Hunk that way, but before she could, the cabin lights returned and the ride smoothed out. The shipsvoice announced, “In the interest of safety, please rest your head against your seatback.”
Ellen laughed with relief. “Well, ship, what was that all about?” They were flying over an ocean now, the Pacific she guessed. Things seemed to have straightened themselves out—as they always did.
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