Mind Over Ship

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<Have you ever been in a tight situation where you relied on your “gut instinct”? This is the body’s intelligence, not the mind’s. Every living cell possesses it. The mentar substrate has no indomitable will to survive, but ours does.

<Likewise, mentars have no “fire in the belly,” but we do. They don’t experience pure avarice or greed or pride. They’re not very curious, or playful, or proud. They lack a sense of wonder and spirit of adventure. They have little initiative. Granted, their cognition is miraculous, but their personalities are rather pedantic.

<But probably their chief shortcoming is the lack of intuition. Of all the irrational faculties, intuition is the most powerful. Some say intuition transcends space-time. Have you ever heard of a mentar having a lucky hunch? They can bring incredible amounts of cognitive and computational power to bear on a seemingly intractable problem, only to see a dumb human with a lucky hunch walk away with the prize every time. Then there’s luck itself. Some people have it, most people don’t, and no mentar does.>

<So, this makes them want our bodies?>

<Our bodies, ape bodies, dog bodies, jellyfish bodies. They’ve tried them all. Every living cell knows some neat tricks for survival, but the problem with cellular knowledge is that it’s not at all fungible; nor are our memories. We’re pretty much trapped in our containers.>

<But you figured it out, didn’t you, Eleanor? These fish are the proof of that.>

<Say again?>

<You transferred your mind to these fish before you were killed.>

She did not respond, and after a while, Meewee tuned to a different channel.

<Where is Cabinet? I keep calling it, but it doesn’t respond.>

The fishy Eleanor voiced the same complaint a dozen times an hour on multiple channels. Meewee grew tired of repeating the answer, and after a while he let Arrow handle it for him: <Cabinet has been contaminated. It doesn’t speak Starkese anymore and can’t be trusted.> It fed her that each time she asked.

AT THE HASTILY convened IOPA conference in Niamey, a deep rift opened between the governments of the “Lucky Five” and the ninety-four less fortunate ships that were slated for conversion to space condos. This latter faction, dubbed the “Lifeboaters,” clambered in plenary session for a binding resolution to force the Lucky Five, derisively called the “Yachtsmen,” to double their passenger lists and transfer already encapsulated colonists from doomed ships to theirs. The Lifeboaters argued that although an Oship’s full passenger complement was 250,000 persons, the Oships were designed with a carrying capacity of one million. They claimed that a fourfold safety margin was unnecessary and that shipping a half-million colonists on each ship was reasonable.

The Yachtsmen countered that a fourfold safety margin was created for the real possibility that when a ship reached its destination planet, the planet’s terraforming may not be sufficiently complete for immediate habitation, and that the colonists would be forced to live aboard the ship for several generations.

The Lifeboaters retorted: Then send them back to the crypts! Let them sleep another thousand years if necessary.

Meewee tended to side with the Yachtsmen. Not only was it dangerous to exceed the design specifications, but the Lifeboaters’ proposal also violated an important social truth that Meewee had learned — Individuals don’t buy Oships; groups buy Oships. Implicit in the sale was the uncontested title to an entire new planet. No one wanted to share their planet with outsiders. That was the whole point.

But that was not what he said in open session. He left it up to the Lucky Five to decide for themselves. “Others may try to sway them, but in the end, the five launched Oships are considered sovereign nations under extra-planetary treaty (assuming my appeal is upheld).” The binding resolution failed.

<IMAGINE, BISHOP, A thousand Eleanors under a thousand suns.>

<Excuse me?>

<A thousand star systems for me to conquer. I’m going to celebrate a gala ten-thousand-year reunion for all the Eleanors in the galaxy. We’ll see how many of us show up. I’m already planning it, and you’re invited, so mark your long-range calendar.>

<IMAGINE, BISHOP, THAT you have a beloved cat, but that your cat is not with you. If you close your eyes and further imagine you are petting your cat, the same neurons in your brain are activated as if you were petting the actual cat. Our minds may know the difference between its models and reality itself, but it prefers its models. So much so that we apprehend reality through our models, rather than directly via the senses. When I’m speaking to you, I have a little bishop in my head, and though I speak out loud, I’m speaking to my little bishop. When you answer, I can only perceive you through my model of you.

<Mentars also make models, but they don’t apprehend reality through them. They end up, not with little people in their minds, but with highly complex rule sets. They relate to their models in the same way we relate to weather models, as things to consult, but not to conflate with external reality.>

THE KING JESUS, one of the Lucky Five, was a special case all by itself. Its voyage to Ursus Majoris would take nearly nine hundred years to complete, but the colonists had no intention of offending God by spending any of these centuries in the artificial purgatory of the stasis crypts. Rather, they intended to live out their lives on the ship, die on the ship, and be buried in the earth (especially hauled up from Earth for that purpose). It would be a twenty-generation voyage. Because the Creator hated abortion or any form of artificial birth control, Elder Seeker decreed that the shipboard community of 50,000 original colonists would be allowed to increase to 250,000 over the first half millennium of the voyage and to 750,000 during the second half, leaving a twenty-five percent safety margin. Forty thousand colonists were already onboard, and there was no room at the inn for unbelievers.

<GO AHEAD> ELEANOR said. <I won’t even miss it.>

This was her idea. She seemed to be experiencing extended lucid intervals during the last few days. Lucid, but not necessarily rational. Meewee reached into the net and grabbed the fish by its gill plates in a pincer hold. It was a large specimen, five or six kilos, and its slimy scales flashed in the sun. He had to carry it in two hands, so vigorously did it struggle. Its bulging, unlidded eye stared up at him as he searched the bank for a suitable killing stone. When he raised the stone over its head like a club, Eleanor said <Careful, Merrill! Remember what we’re about. Besides dinner, that is.>

“Yes, of course.” Meewee dropped the stone and retrieved his fillet knife. He inserted the tip of the blade under a gill plate, made a silent prayer of gratitude, and severed the artery. Rich, oxygenated blood gushed over the rocks. He flipped the fish over to cut the other side. After a few moments, when the fish lay still, Meewee inserted the tip of the knife into its red-rimmed anus below its belly. Then he drew the blade in a straight line and single stroke to its chin, like pulling a zipper. When he opened the fish, he experienced a strong flashback to his childhood and the thousands of fish he had butchered for his father and the thrill each time he cut one open. He was the first person in the whole world to look inside this fish, and he was never disappointed by the livid goulash of guts and organs he uncovered. This one was just as wonderful. It was a male, with two long milt sacs.

Meewee’s hands remembered what to do next. He expertly inserted the blade at the fish’s throat, like a blind surgeon, to sever the esophagus. Then, sticking his index finger into the esophagus, he peeled the entire string of entrails — stomach, intestines, kidneys, bladder, all of it — from the fish and tossed it back into the pond. One last time he inserted his knife to slice the bloodline that lay against the backbone, and with the spoon end of his knife, scooped out the red-black gelatinous blood.

Meewee took the fish to the pond. Its body was rigid with disbelief. He washed it, his knife, and his hands.

Another channel played in the background. <Mentars are high-performance minds, but very