Mind Over Ship

had crumbled underfoot like a cookie. He stumbled but was unhurt. A few spectators paused to look at him, but no one offered assistance, except for one woman who called out, “Filter 21,” and tapped the frame of her spex.

Meewee extricated his foot from the flooring and stood a moment examining it. “Arrow, give me filter 21.” Suddenly the ruined flooring glowed deep orange. He looked around; the vacant, cordoned-off spots of terminal floor had an orangish tinge in their centers. His shoe and pant leg were stained orange. It looked like orange meant trouble.

Sure enough, when he looked up, he was surrounded by bloomjumpers arrayed in full hazmat gummysuits. “Don’t move, Myr Meewee,” one of them ordered.

THE NANOBOT ATTACK was benign. Decontamination meant sitting in a tiny plastic solo gas tent for an hour. Meanwhile, the bloomjumpers cleaned the tube station and extinguished the hot spots on the floor, including the one Meewee had broken through.

An hour was plenty of time for Meewee to ponder his situation.

<Arrow> he asked his mentar in Starkese <were you aware of the condition of the floor?>

<Yes.>

Regrettably, that was the answer Meewee had expected.

<If you were aware of the potential danger to me, why didn’t you warn me? >

<Because you never asked me to issue you warnings.>

Naturally. <Well, let’s change that. From now on you must warn me of dangers. You must protect me. Can you do that?>

<Yes.>

He settled back in his chair and considered whether or not to attend the board meeting by proxy, something he hated doing. Right outside his decon tent, it seemed, a woman said <What time is it? >

Meewee couldn’t see who had spoken. “Tell her the time,” he said to Arrow.

“Tell who the time?”

“Hello?” Meewee said, but the woman must have been speaking to someone else and moved on. “It’s late,” he replied to no one.

THEY WERE ALREADY seated around the conference table by holo or proxy. “Good afternoon, good afternoon,” Meewee said, bustling around to the head of the table. “Sorry for my tardiness. No excuses. I was caught in a slow elevator. The dog ate my homework.”

Meewee sat and looked around the table at relaxed, happy faces, a rare sight in this room, and for a brief moment he thought it was in appreciation of his humor. But he found the real cause sitting in Jerry Chapwoman’s former chair: a rotund man with a neat little mustache and shiny black hair. The stranger lounged in the chair with his large hands clasped over his generous belly, and his expression was nothing less than merry.

“No need for apology, Merrill,” Trina Warbeloo said. “Million has been entertaining us with stories about colleagues of his on the subcontinent.”

Meewee recognized the man from his dossier. “It’s good to finally meet you, Myr Singh,” he said. On paper, at least, the man looked like he might be an acceptable replacement for Chapwoman.

“Please, call me Million.” Singh rolled forward in his seat — he was attending from his office in Mumbai — and offered Meewee a holo salute. “And the pleasure is all mine, Bishop Meewee. I am a very big admirer of yours and the noble work you have done for Birthplace International. And, of course, I am a believer in extra-solar colonization, which is why I leaped like a tiger at the opportunity to purchase Exotic Fields. It was truly a chance of a lifetime.”

Meewee was struck by the earnestness of this declaration. “Then I suppose we had better move on to the final interview,” he said and opened the meeting. There were three items of new business: Singh’s interview and possible installment, routine labor contract renewals, and Jaspersen’s perennial attempt to pervert the GEP’s mission.

They had all reviewed Singh’s resume, and there was very little discussion of his eligibility. Most of the grilling came from Jaspersen’s balloon-head proxy, who attempted to uncover some questionable lapse or scandal in his long, successful career. But Singh breezily answered all questions and deflected all conceivable criticism, and Jaspersen shut up in sour resignation. During the last few weeks, Meewee had done his own investigation of the man with Zoranna and Nicholas’s help. Whoever took Chapwoman’s seat had the potential to hand Jaspersen’s faction a devastating supermajority. But the deeper they had looked, the better Singh appeared. His devotion to the GEP’s mission was no hollow boast. A decade earlier, Singh had traded two hundred acres of land for passage aboard ESV Garden Hybris for his own newly decanted clone and his clone’s future house hold.

In the final analysis, it would be difficult for either faction to deny Singh a place at the board, for his newly acquired company, Exotic Fields, was the designer and sole provider of the generators for the Oship propulsion torus. It was this fact, above all, that reassured Meewee of his loyalty, because if Jaspersen got his way and turned the Oships into Lagrangian space condos without propulsion toruses, Exotic Fields would lose ninety percent of its GEP business.

Singh’s holo withdrew while they voted. Only Jaspersen voted against him, and Meewee cheerfully declared him a board member. He called him back to the meeting and installed him with little ceremony. “Welcome aboard,” he said when Singh’s membership was official. “You may want to sit out the rest of the meeting until you’ve had a chance to inform yourself of the issues.”

Singh nodded and leaned back in his chair looking very pleased with himself.

Item 2: labor contracts. Warbeloo motioned for renewal, and Tiekel seconded. Meewee said, “Seeing no discussion, I —”

“Not so fast,” Jaspersen’s proxy said. “Just because I lack hands doesn’t mean I’m not waving them.” He seemed amused by his own wit. “Actually, I have lots of discussion about this one.” He turned to Zoranna and said, “No offense, Alblaitor, but one would think that after five decades of supplying labor to space-based industry, you’d finally get around to designing a germline optimized for space conditions. But you haven’t. Your spacers are merely terrestrial types with no special adaptations. You are entirely too anthropomorphically conservative.”

Zoranna was clearly surprised by the accusation, but she brushed it aside. “My people undergo extensive training before they are shipped out.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, and you know it. I’m talking about morphology. True spacers should be smaller than human normal, have denser bones, resistance to radiation damage, superior microgravity balance — the list goes on.”

“What you’re talking about are trans-humans,” Zoranna said coolly. “Applied People tried that with their penelope line. It failed miserably. You accuse me of being too conservative, but it’s the general public that’s conservative. Most people don’t approve of modifying the human body that much.”

“The penelope line was forty years ago!” Jaspersen retorted. “Public attitudes change. And even if they don’t, so what? Spacers by definition live in space. Who cares what people in Indiana and Iowa think about them?”

Zoranna shook her head in stoic forbearance. “In any case, it’s a moot point, Saul.”

“It’s not a moot point,” Jaspersen insisted. “There are other labor vendors, Capias World for instance, who have people designed specifically for space. Adam here is trying some of them out right now. Aren’t you, Adam?”

Gest, who was attending via proxy this time and experienced no transmission lag, nodded his handsome head. “He’s right, Zoranna. Capias World has released three new spacefaring germlines. We’re giving them a limited field test in my Aria yards. I must say, they’re terrific. In fact, as soon as my contracts with Applied People are up, I’m going all Capias World.”

Zoranna’s whole demeanor changed. Her eyes narrowed to slits as Nicholas fed calculations into her ear. “I am sorry to hear that, Adam,” she said. “But what you do at Aria Yachts is your own business and has no bearing