Mind Over Ship (33 page)

“This is a public path,” one of the russes declared. Sweat glistened on his forehead and soaked his shirt. “We have the right to go through.”

But the three men refused to give way, and one of them raised open palms in a placating gesture. “This is our Friday community tradition. It helps foster neighborhood harmony.”

“What about our harmony?” demanded the russ.

“Why don’t you go back to your sections and start block parties yourselves?”

“Swimming harmony!” insisted the russ. “We don’t care about your freakin’ neighborhood.”

“Watch the mouth,
dittohead
,” said one of the other gatekeepers.

Dittohead, one of the most offensive slurs against iterants. There was a moment of dead silence, and then the dorises started grumbling, and a handful of russes moved to position themselves along the banner. Fred didn’t like the signs; things were about to slip out of control. In the corridor beyond, the local residents watched uneasily. A lot of noses were about to get bent.

Before that happened, a russ next to Fred raised his voice. “Time out. Time out,” he said. “Let’s think about this, friends.” He spoke with slightly accented English, and his face was roundish even for a russ. “It’s a small thing.”

“What’s a small thing, brother?” said a russ at the banner. “Them blocking the way or us going through them?”

The peacemaker pointed at the banner. “They only want one hour during the whole week. That is no problem.”

But the other russes were having none of that. “What’s wrong with you, brother? No stomach for it?” “You a mongrel-lover, brother? You a hink-hole-fecker?”

The russ flushed a deep red and the dorises backed away from him.
Things grew deathly still in the corridor. “Oh, hell,” Fred said, pushing himself to the banner. “The brother is right. There’s better ways to deal with this than brawling. I mean, what are we—jerrys?”

That brought a laugh and helped ease the tension. The dorises piped up and called for a truce. The garrulous russes backed off, and some of the residents started calling, “Join us. Join us.” They passed bulbs of beer along the corridor and one of them removed the banner.

Some of the swimmers stayed, but Fred and others started swimming back the way they had come. When they encountered more swimmers, they shouted, “Roadblock ahead.”

The peacemaking russ caught up with Fred and swam at his side. “Thank you for the assist back there,” he said. “I was about to lose it all over.” He saluted with his webbed hand. “Armando Mendez, but you can call me Mando.”

Fred almost gave him his real name, but he caught himself, and for a moment blanked out on his cover name—Clifford? Higgins? He filled his lapse by saying, “Good to meet you, Mando. No need to thank me; we’re all getting a little cabin fever on this boat.” Walter, that was it. “Name’s Walt.” They shook webbed hands.

THEY WERE TETHERED to two dorises in one of the lounges, and Mando told them about his life. He was from the state of Yucatán, and he and his evangeline wife, Luisa, had recently moved to Cozumel and purchased a two-seat submarine to enjoy the underwater national park there. That, in fact, was why Luisa had agreed to let him sign up for a stint at Trailing Earth. A one-year contract paid not only a signing bonus but a hardship differential equal to three times the usual russ wage. Meanwhile, Luisa had a new job, her first job in ages, as well as dividends from the Sisterhood on the Leena earnings. “Overdue loans, the boat payments, deferred rejuve—when I return we will be debt-free for the first time in our marriage! It will be a new beginning.”

The dorises clucked and bobbed their heads. No doubt they, too, had special plans for their contract windfalls. And it made Fred wonder about the rest of his fellow russes aboard the
Dauntless
. Why were they all heading to do duty that other russes were lining up to flee? Were they motivated by the extra earnings? Russes were frugal men, allergic to debt and good at managing their personal finances. It was true that the last ten years hadn’t been easy on russ/evangeline couples. It cost a lot to live, and one income just didn’t cut it. His and Mary’s standard of living had fallen steadily every year. He had only
to recall their lousy apartment at APRT 7. And he recalled something else too, something Mary had flung at him during their devastating argument on the morning of the Roosevelt Clinic debacle, that russes espoused to ’leens were on average five years older than the russ mean. Deferred body maintenance, skipping expensive rejuvenation treatments, that was the kind of loan he and his brothers tended to take out. Fred rubbed his jaw. After his time in prison, he was even older, pushing forty, in fact. Mary, from the look of her, had rejuved while he was inside and taken five years off her age.

Fred looked closely at Mando’s face, looking for wrinkles and crow’s feet, but his Indian blood, round features, and the facial edema of low-g hid them. Fred glanced around at the other russes in the lounge. Now that he was looking for it, yes, this did seem like an older crowd of brothers. Was it possible that they all were espoused to ’leens? That with their high Trailing Earth wages and their wives’ Leena dividends they were finally going to be able to catch up with their germline? And if so, what did that say about his chances of fitting in and getting along at Trailing Earth? Might they cut him a little slack?

“Walt. Hello, Walt.” Fred turned back to Mando who said, “I asked what about you? Are you married?”

The two dorises were watching him. “Oh, yes,” he replied, “to a ’leen, just like you, name of Rosemary.” He went on to tell them all about his and Rosemary’s life in Chicago; he had memorized his cover story last night and everything was fresh in his mind. He even ad-libbed a little. The dorises were well entertained.

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.

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.