Mind Over Ship

Illinois, working for Panagra as a farm mechtech assistant. Alcohol, a wandering wife, petty crime — I guess you could say I was a pretty average joe. Then one day — a Tuesday, I seem to recall — in early 2099, Jesus opened a direct line to my heart and sent me a vision. What I saw literally knocked me on my rear. Dozens of men and women — I somehow knew they were husbands and wives — and their cherub-cheeked little children were digging in the ground with spades and flinging the dirt high over their heads. What’s all this about? I couldn’t figure it out. Then the Lord raised me up so I could see, and what I saw was the dirt they were flinging overhead was landing on a little island floating in the sky, and the Lord said, ‘Elder, build me a New Earth and take my people there.’

“Well, that seemed clear enough until I realized I didn’t know how to build a New Earth, or where I was supposed to build it. But the vision shook me to my core, and my faith was strong. So I began to form a community around me. We came down here and began this town for the purpose of preparing ourselves to go, trusting that the Lord would get back to us when we were ready. I won’t say our faith never wavered; after all, we were hard at it for over twenty years. Many of our people lost faith and moved back to their former lives. It looked like the whole community might be abandoned, and then one morning — behold! — there you were, you and Starke, on the news, peddling lifeboats to new worlds.

“Now I understand you’ve had a bit of a setback at the GEP, that evil men are doing what evil men always do, but they are no match for Jesus, so we will continue our departure as planned, trusting in the Savior’s blood to set things right.”

MEEWEE FLEW FROM the constitutional theocracy of the King Jesus compound to the demo cratic republics of the Garden Kiev and Garden Chernobyl, the first and twentieth Oships in the launch order. He arrived at the Kristaz Biogenic Processing and Storage Facility outside Kiev and toured the warehouse filled with ceiling-high stacks of gleaming titanium-chrome cryocapsules. There was enough space in this one warehouse alone for twenty-five thousand processed colonists. Meewee’s guides were none other than the presidents of the two Oships.

“He’s because palace coup,” Meewee said, struggling to make sense in his primitive Ukrainian. “Directing board voting.”

“You may speak in Russian if that helps,” the Kiev president said.

“Yes, thank you. It was a conspiracy between Saul Jaspersen and Million Singh.”

“Is that so?” one of the presidents said. “In any case, we should be able to lift this lot in the next month, making room for the next batch.” The president waved his arm to take in several racks of capsules.

Meewee clenched his teeth. “You don’t understand, Myr President. The Kiev and Chernobyl have been canceled. You can’t lift any more colonists.”

“Nonsense,” said the Chernobyl president. “When the cryocapsule transports arrive at Trailing Earth, will they turn them away?”

“They will! That’s what I’m trying to tell you. They’ll turn them away. Not only that, they will soon be shipping back the hundreds of thousands of capsules already there. You must not lift any more. It’s pointless. In fact, you must quicken all of these people in this warehouse and send them home to make room for the returnees.”

His plea only seemed to annoy his hosts, who continued the tour until an assistant bustled in. “The ceremony begins,” he announced and turned around to bustle out.

Ceremony? What ceremony?

THIRTY MEN AND women with newly shaved heads and wearing silvery paper overalls were surrounded by a sea of anxious friends and family members who had come to see them off.

The Chernobyl president addressed them from the stage while Meewee stood in the wings clutching the Kiev president’s sleeve. “You can’t process new colonists! Not now! It’s unconscionable!”

“Courage,” the president said, removing Meewee’s hand from his sleeve. “The only criminals are those on your board who presume to back out of the deal this late in the journey. We have every confidence that you will unmask them and undo the damage.”

On the stage, the president announced a special guest, and he waved for Meewee to join him. Meewee went to the lectern, intent on breaking up the ceremony, but the applause was so heartfelt and sustained that he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he gave an impromptu little speech. “Thank you, Myren Presidents, and thank you, dear colonists. How much I admire your courage. How much I envy you your grand adventure.” He went on for four or five minutes, not even aware of what he was saying or in what language he was saying it, pulling sentiments from a large stock of them he kept in the back of his head for such occasions.

Afterward, he mingled with colonists and families, exchanging hugs and kisses, toasting them with thimblesful of vodka. When the farewell ceremony concluded and teary-eyed families were escorted from the auditorium, the colonists lay down on pallets that ferried them to the HALVENE tanks for pre-profusion cell sifting.

IN SINGAPORE, MEEWEE met many more Oship leaders with varying degrees of confidence in his restorative abilities. Of the 150 Oships under construction in the Aria yards of Trailing Earth, fully ninety-nine had sold enough planks to form provisional governments and to draft their constitutions; fifty were advanced enough to be placed in the launch schedule, and a dozen had been assigned their destination star system. All this effort, all these dreams would not die easily, and Meewee was treated to public displays of outrage, anger, and despair. But Meewee’s own outrage and despair was plain for all to see, and the plankholders were unable to use him as a scapegoat. Before long they received him again as the movement’s spiritual father.

One bump along the way came when someone tapped Meewee on the shoulder, and he came face-to-face with Million Singh.

“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed Singh upon seeing Meewee’s expression. “You look like you’ve seen a demon, Bishop. Never fear, I will not eat you. Not like my dear ur-brother, Million, who is at the root of all this unpleasantness.”

Meewee suddenly realized who this was. It wasn’t Million Singh, but his identical clone, Seetharaman Singh. He was a colonist aboard the Garden Hybris, the ninth ship in the launch order. Seetharaman introduced Meewee to the Hybris delegates, and Meewee recognized them, or rather their famous originals, from media stories.

“I am a replacement organ repository gone bad,” Seetharaman explained affably. “They pithed my cerebral cortex in vatero, but they missed, and I was decanted with half a brain intact.” The notion caused him another fit of laughter. “And so my important brother was forced to raise me and start another clone for his organ bank. And here is Dr. Taksayer, a vanity clone of the former leader. And Darrell and Earl Einstein, not the geniuses everyone had hoped for, but the best bridge players in the universe. And this is Beckham Delolli, the reluctant stand-in and body double. We are a ship full of accidents and rejects, Bishop, whose originals are only too happy to buy us off with a new planet far, far away.”

“Except that your brother, Million, has betrayed us all!” Meewee said, feeling good to be able to vent some of his own misery.

“Which is why we’re going to litigate my brother and all those other criminals (and you, too, no offense) into the ground. They can’t mess with us without bloodying their own noses because we are their own noses! Ha, ha, ha!”

MEEWEE HAD NEVER witnessed so much misplaced optimism as he did among the plankholders. Maybe their outrage had been easier to bear than the groundless faith they pinned on him. What could he do? Eleanor, herself, with Cabinet’s assistance, had drafted the contracts that the colonists all signed, and she never did anything without foolproof escape clauses. The GEP was wholly within its rights to withdraw from its land swap at any point up to the launch simply by instructing the escrow service to release the land titles and return them to their original owners.

During his lonely trans-Pacific flight home, Meewee thought about how for a dozen years he had believed Eleanor could do anything. For a dozen years their successes seemed effortless. Of course, it was all her success. He had little to contribute aside from his ability to work with ordinary people. That was what she saw in him, what