Mind Over Ship (4 page)

Andrea lingered over this image, then turned to Zoranna and said, “As you wish, I will tell you. There’s a near certainty that Fred Londenstane will be found—innocent.”

With a brave face, Zoranna said, “But that’s good news!” Her sidebob, however, cried,
We’re ruined!

“Actually,” Andrea went on, “it’s not good news, at least not for your business. It would be far better if he received a life sentence and was locked away forever. Out of sight, out of mind. But instead he’ll be constantly in the public eye, a permanent reminder of his clone fatigue and a gadfly upon your whole organization.”

There’s no such thing as clone fatigue!
raged the sidebob.
It’s a myth, an urban legend. It’s not real, and we have the science to prove it
. Calmly, Zoranna said, “That’s a cynical statement, Andrea, considering we’re talking about a living human being here, but I see your point. Tell me, how can you be so sure of the verdict? I mean, I thought that as soon as E-Pluribus releases jury sims to the court you have no further contact with them.”

“That’s true, we don’t. But don’t forget, we still have the original sims in our database. If we expose them to the same testimony as presented in court, we can determine how they’re likely to respond to it. In any case, I’ve made my offer. I don’t expect an immediate reply. I’ll leave it on the table for now, but the per-share amount will drop appreciably with time. Now, if you’ll excuse us.” She rose to leave.

Zoranna also rose. “Thank you for dropping by,” she said, but her sidebob was curled up in a trembling ball of nerves.

THAT QUITE WORE me out,
Andrea said, once again in her warm, dark, syrupy tank.

Yes, we see that
, E-P replied.
You’ll have a rest break before our next meeting, but tell us, any insights to share?

Were you able to move any furniture into Nicholas’s realm?

No, his security was too alert. Why do you ask?

There’s something odd about their relationship. Not your usual human/mentar sponsorship.

We’ll look into it. Anything else?

Andrea reached out and touched the glassine side of her tank, caressing its smooth surface with bony fingers.
Yes, one more impression. She’s a sensuous person. Tell me, what brand of body oil or skin cream does she prefer?

Borealis Botanicals
. After a moment, E-P said,
Yes, a fine vehicle. We’ll look into that as well. Now rest, dear.

One more thing. I feel my time is near.

The mentar paused a moment, and then it said,
We’ll place the order
.

Thank you.

The order rumbled throughout the underground facility, rousting subunits by the score from the chilly slumber of standby status. Subems diagnosed both themselves and their component machines. Motors whirred, pressures rose, and instruments self-aligned to nano-tolerances. Several million jiffies later, the controlling midem declared the laboratory fully operational.

At once, all three stitching chambers prepped themselves with skeletal scaffolding blanks. Their print heads chittered to life. First they laid down the bones, building them from organic feedstock, 4096 molecules per stitch, a thousand stitches per second. Then they dressed the finished skeletons with organs, printing them in place. They knit muscle fibers, entrails, circulatory lines, nerves. They constructed hearts already containing the blood they would soon pump.

Seventy hours later, the stitchers went off-line, the chamber doors opened, and the print run was removed, still cold, to the bonding bay. The bay was a small space where the raw bodies could continue their internal assembly undisturbed for another forty-eight hours. Then medbeitors wheeled the bodies into the “delivery” room where they were jolted to life.

Only two of the Andreas passed inspection. The third exhibited a faulty nervous system and was handed off for sanitary disposal. The lab midem sent a fulfillment notice up the chain.

Oliver TUG browsed the Thievery Gallery of the Persuasion Channel for their new interviewee. The rows of postage-stamp mug shots were no help: one brutalized face looked much like another, and there were so
many
of them. Oliver searched manually by dates and key words and after a few passes found the kid. The banner over his mug read, “WRECKER,” and the Ransom/Reward link below read, “He stole from us, and we want it back.” The thief, himself, looked to be about twelve years old, but he was a retroboy. He was a member of a gang that had caused a TUG moving and storage van to crash and then stole its contents before the traffic police
arrived. At least, the TUGs assumed this retroboy was a wrecker. They had scant evidence, the boy hadn’t actually copped to anything yet, and no one had offered to ransom him.

As it happened, the moving van in question had contained ordinary house hold goods, not some more sensitive cargo, but that was beside the point. No one should get the impression that they could mess with the TUGs and get away with it.

Oliver pointed at the boy’s mug, and the frame expanded into a life-size hologram of the impromptu interview room. The room was actually a nitproof tent they had constructed in a very secure warehouse. They had delivered the boy to the tent in a nitproof bag. As far as the police were concerned, the boy fell off the grid in a public null room in Oak Park, halfway across the city. In the tent, the boy was lying on a tarp, and his legs were shackled in makeshift stocks.

Although the Persuasion Channel provided its amateur interviewers triple anonymity, Oliver walked through the holospace searching for any inadvertent clues that might give his charter away to the authorities. The only agent in the tent was a generic house hold arbeitor. It was busy painting the soles of the boy’s bare feet with an organic solvent that caused the skin to liquefy and slough off. The exposed nerve endings on the soles of his feet looked like the stubble of a white beard.

The boy was already crying and pleading, which made Oliver shake his head in wonder. The solvent didn’t actually hurt, and if the boy made this much fuss so soon, how would he hold up when the arbeitor broke out the hair dryer?

Oliver’s comlink buzzed. “Prinz Clinic called,” said a subordinate. “Veronica is out of recovery.”

“Thank you,” Oliver said, wiping away the holospace. “Get my car.”

A PHALANX OF three tuggers preceded Oliver TUG through the surgical wing of Prinz Clinic. Each of them stood over two meters tall and measured twice the girth of human standard. Clinic workers and machines hugged the walls to let them pass. The TUGs wore military-cut jumpsuits, and over their left shoulders floated the olive-and mustard-colored marble of their charter logo.

At the door to the private room, Oliver told his detail to wait in the hall while he went in alone. Although he must have known what to expect, seeing her for the first time was still unsettling. She looked the same as before, only smaller. Much smaller, a half of her previous mass. Her head was shaved, but
it had the same jar-shape, with flattened nose and pronounced chin, that characterized their charter. She looked like a miniature version of herself.

Oliver TUG told the medtechs in the room to vacate, and they seemed only too glad to comply. Then he drew himself erect, looking even more imposing, and said in a gravelly voice, “Veronica TUG of the Iron Moiety, on behalf of the Supreme Council of Moieties of Charter TUG, I am compelled to deliver an official notice of reprimand. Your recent body mods run counter to TUG regulations, causing harm to yourself and serving as encouragement of aberrant behavior to others.” As he said this, he gave her a secret wink. “Furthermore,” he went on, “continuation in this manner will result in serious penalty, up to expulsion from the charter.”

Veronica seemed unperturbed by the solemn pronouncement. When Oliver stopped talking, she said, “Finished? Then come here and give us a hug.”

Oliver scowled, but he crossed the room and leaned over her bed to gently pat her shoulder. Still using his officious tone of voice, he said, “We’re all concerned about you, Veronica. Your moiety is both ashamed and worried. Won’t you even consider undoing this great harm?” As he spoke, he made a fist and pressed his knuckles against her shaved skull for a good bone-to-bone connection.
Bad news, Vee,
he said.
All the latest mentar shoots have failed the isolation stress test.

All of them?
she replied through her skull. He nodded, and she said,
They raptured?

That’s what it looked like. We have to rethink this whole thing. We’re getting nowhere. We should call in a mentar specialist.

No!
she said.
No outsiders. We can’t risk exposure
.

Well, this is becoming a very expensive waste of time. We’ve burned through nearly thirty personality buds with no results. Do you have any idea how much those things cost?

I know
exactly
how much they cost, but there is no alternative. We must have a stable mentar, one able to go months in total isolation. No, this is the only way. Start a new batch.

Are you sure?

Look at me. Do you think I would have put myself through this if I wasn’t? Start a new batch at once!

Oliver removed his fist from her head, leaving knuckle marks. He paced the small room for a while, then returned to lay his fist on her again.
All right, but if this batch fails, we explore other options.

She shrugged under his rude weight and changed the subject.
Any word from Starke?

She’s agreed to meet with us but hasn’t set a date yet.

Stay on top of it
. Oliver removed his fist again and chucked her under the chin. “You’re a maddeningly stubborn woman,” he said in his disapproving tone. He went to the door and added, “Disobedience to the Supreme Council cannot and will not be tolerated. That’s the first rule. Remember it.”

“Wait,” she called after him. “Don’t you want to see my tail?”

It was a perfect morning for skipping stones, warm and sunny. Meewee left his Heliostream office and told his calendar to hold all calls. But by the time he took a lift up to the surface and exited the reception building, storm clouds had moved in, and a few late-season snowflakes were falling. But the cart was waiting for him, and he was wearing a smart jumpsuit with an integrated heater, so he went anyway.

Meewee rode out to one of the hundreds of hourglass-shaped fish farming ponds that dotted the ten-thousand-acre campus of Starke Enterprises, and by the time he reached it, the sun had come out again. He parked the cart and searched the banks for throwing stones, without much hope of finding any. The Starke ponds were lined with crushed basalt: blocky stones that were good for smashing the heads of snakes but abysmal for skipping.

Merrill Meewee knew his stones. As a boy in Kenya, skipping stones was his favorite free-time activity. There had been an abundance of saucer-shaped missiles on the banks of his father’s own fishpond. Fat, river-smoothed disks, they skipped ten, twelve, sixteen times before slipping beneath the surface with a watery plop. His father, a man of little wealth but great forbearance, was not pleased with his boy’s solitary pastime, but he never ordered him to stop. Instead, he asked the boy how many stones he thought the pond could hold. I don’t know, Meewee remembered answering. A hundred thousand?

Oh, such a big number! And how many stones do you suppose you’ve thrown already?

Merrill, who was an excellent student, calculated the number of stones
he might have tossed in an hour and how many free hours were left each day after school and chores, how many afternoons in how many years since he first discovered the sport. I would estimate 14,850, he informed his father with a certain amount of swagger.

His father was impressed. So many? And all of them have gone to the bottom?

Of course they’ve gone to the bottom, he had said, embarrassed by his father’s apparent ignorance. They’re stones. They’re heavier than water.

And heavier than fishes?

Of course heavier than fishes.

Good, good, his father concluded, patting him on the head. Keep at it, son, and soon I won’t have to work so hard.

Father?

It’s true. When you fill up my pond with your stones, I won’t need nets and plungers to harvest the fish. I’ll simply wade in up to my ankles and pick them like squash.

It was a lesson in diplomacy, as much as aquaculture, and it stayed with him all these years.

There was a splash, and Meewee looked up in time to catch a flash of fin gliding across the surface of the larger bulb of the hourglass pond. The larger bulb was for the general population, while the smaller one joined to it by a gated neck was used as a nursery and harvesting corral. The fish were a transgenic species called panasonics. In Meewee’s opinion, they weren’t a pretty animal, what with pop-eyes, slimy skin, and a protruding lower jaw lined with needlelike teeth. But they were robust, easy to farm, and, kilo for kilo, one of the most nutritious natural foods that ordinary people could still afford. They yielded heavy fillets of orangish-red flesh that was high in the omega oils not found in other freshwater varieties. And grilled with lemon pepper or served with dill sauce—oh!