Mind Over Ship (26 page)

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.”

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, Merrill,” 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 <
Danger
.>

Meewee stopped in midstride.
>

<
You asked me to warn you of impending threats.
>

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.

<
Shall I protect you?
>

“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.

“But I didn’t come here to discuss the GEP,” she was saying. She placed
her satchel on the small table. When Meewee looked up, they were sitting side by side on the settee. “I came to show you this.” She opened a frame and displayed a letter with an officious letterhead.

Try as he might, Meewee was unable to read the document. The text kept skittering away as he tried to focus on it, and he said, “What does it say?”

“It’s a letter from the Mandela Prize Foundation. They are requesting a fresh sim of you for their upcoming Freedom Trail exhibit. It’s a very high honor.”

Ah, an honor. He thought so. Meewee was so weary of honors and prizes and awards. He had been honored so often for his humanitarian work he was afraid of falling victim to false pride, and he had long ago begun refusing them. “I’m not worthy,” he said.

“Of course you are,” Andrea replied. “Your work at Birthplace, and UDESCO, WHO, and other important organizations has done so much to alleviate human suffering. You, of all people, are worthy.”

That wasn’t what he had meant. He was having difficulty putting his thoughts into words. What he had meant was that the person who works for recognition devalues the work he does, that awards are first and foremost political instruments, that altruism’s true name is always Anonymous, and so much more, but every time he tried to speak, his thoughts slithered away. “No,” he managed to say. “No honors.”

“You are too modest,” Andrea said, her expression sparkling with sun-rays of angelic grace. She removed one of her smooth, cottony gloves. “Perhaps you will reconsider.”

<
Danger!
> someone said. Meewee looked around for the speaker. <
Shall I protect you?
>

Andrea’s cool fingertips touched the flesh of his wrist, and he sat back, reeling with love.

“Because, while it’s true that it’s an honor to be asked for a sim by the Mandela Foundation,” she went on, “it’s something of a duty as well. Think of it as your duty to the world.”

Duty, he thought. Duty.

“With your busy schedule,” she continued as she removed a small apparatus from her satchel, “I knew I’d never convince you to come into one of our preffing suites, so I did the next best thing; I brought the suite here.”

It was a cam/emitter on tripod legs. She set it on the table in front of him. A small holoscape opened above it, and Andrea put on a pair of shades. Simple shapes appeared in the holo: rotating cubes, dancing hearts, expanding diamonds.

“This is just to set your baseline,” she explained. “You remember this part. All you have to do is relax and watch them. You can do that, Bishop. You can relax and watch.”

Relax and watch, he thought. The shapes were so fascinating, it would have been hard not to watch them. Stars exploding! Rectangles squatting into parallelograms. Arrows pointing. Arrows spinning. Lots of arrows.
Arrow.
he managed to say.

Immediately, an alarm rumbled through the room, and a calm but insistent voice repeated, “Fire alert. Please evacuate. Fire alert. Please evacuate.” The office door opened, and an arbeitor entered to escort them to safety. Meewee tried to stand up, but Andrea touched his wrist again, and he swooned back into the soft cushions of the settee.

Andrea sent the arbeitor away and said, “Ignore the noise, Bishop. It means nothing. We will continue with the preffing.” In the holo, the shapes gave way to scenes. A city arcade appeared, alive with pedestrians, commotion, vehicles. Everything about it was amazing.

But there were popping sounds above his head, and a pelting shower of fire suppressant slurry filled the room, coating everything in a thick layer of red mud. The holo flickered out, and Andrea jumped up in surprise. She quickly folded her apparatus and stuffed it into the satchel. Her summer dress clung to her body, and her hair was pressed against her skull. She quickly grabbed her hat and pulled it over her head. She shot Meewee a calculating look and left him there—a little red man on a red settee in a red office.

<
BE THEY PHARAOHS or freeholders, barons or farmers, landowners are and always have been the most capable, most intrepid, and most assertive members of civilized society.
>

Meewee scoured the bank for an arsenal of large rocks. <
Eleanor
> he said <
I have some troubling news.
>

She droned on <
Is it any wonder, therefore, that I set up the GEP to transport only landowners to the stars? What better colonists? What better subjects for my new panoply of civilizations?
>

<
Shut up!
> Meewee shouted. <
Just shut up for a goddamn moment and listen to me
.> Meewee had not taken the time to change before coming
down to the pond, and bits of his rust-colored coating flaked off each time he bent over to claim another rock.

<
Really, Merrill, I see no need for vulgarity.
>

Meewee hurled a barrage of rocks into the pond. <
Shut up!
> His rocks made impressive geysers of turgid water. <
Shut up!
>

<
Stop that!
>

<
Then listen to me! Andrea Tiekel came to my office just now. She did something to me. I don’t know what. There was something funny about her skull. At least, I think there was. Ellen agreed to sell Heliostream to her! You asked me if E-P went through probate. Arrow says it did not. And now your daughter is selling Heliostream to E-P and Andrea. If I don’t do something soon, there will be no landowners to the stars, no panoply of civilizations
.> Meewee punctuated his tirade with a rock that took both arms to toss. <
And I don’t know what to do!
>

There was a long silence as Meewee caught his breath. Then Eleanor-by-fish spoke. <
Where’s Cabinet?
>

<
I’ve already told you!
> Meewee flung his hands over his head. <
A million times! Cabinet was contaminated! And I didn’t kill it like I should have.
>

<
I wasn’t asking you
> Eleanor said mildly. <
I was asking Arrow
.>

<
Searching
> Arrow said.

There was something new in Eleanor’s voice. New but familiar. <
While Arrow searches
> she went on <
I think you had better bring my daughter to me for a little face time.
>

<
That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you
> Meewee complained. <
Ellen won’t see me or even take my calls. I’d never be able to bring her here.
>

What was familiar was the natural authority of her voice. <
You are a resourceful man, Merrill. I’m sure you’ll think up a way.
>

It wasn’t just Ellen snapping at her. She had deserved that; she knew she had taken the nuss thing too far. She wasn’t a bossy person by nature, but she had been feeling out of sorts lately. Georgine had the right attitude. She said that Ellen’s increasing independence was a good thing. It showed that they were doing their job well, and that it was time to transition into a more adult relationship with her. They were companions, after all, and not foster parents.