NASTIE had begun to fabricate, based on the raw materials it found in its environment. Residential towers were especially resource-rich environments, chock-full of useful elements for impromptu weapons, everything from organic carpeting to the rare metals used in electronic and paste-based appliances, as well as plumbing and wiring, artificial stone, and thousands of other useful things. Not to mention biological material, brains and nerves especially, for hard-to-jigger control systems. Feeding on this material, the bloom had grown exponentially in size, from the original dust-particlelike NASTIE to, judging from the broken shards of its scab, a nanoforge filling half the room.
But the bloomjumpers had arrived, quenched the bloom, and shattered its scab before it was finished making the pearl. So, it was impossible for Fred to tell exactly what the pearl was intended to become. It was as large as a vehicle, had a boxy frame and ceramic skin. It might’ve passed for an arcade omnikiosk or public toilet stall. But no matter what it would have become, one thing was certain, it would have been a deadly weapon of mass destruction, dispatched over sixty years earlier by an enemy who no longer existed.
As Fred studied the pearl from a safe distance — the scab shards were still too hot to approach — two russ bloomjumpers, still in their green gummysuits, joined him. When they saw his face through his helmet glass, they appeared shocked. Just then, the crew boss john yelled from the floor above for Fred to get back to work. So Fred turned from his brothers to follow a tree-root-thick tendril from the scab through a hole in the wall to the next apartment. There, other members of the ROMUD crew were bagging anything with animal protein in it. The prospecting tendril had branched out to all parts of the room and covered everything in spun filaments like cotton candy. The table and chairs, the lamps and bookcases — everything was cocooned, mined, and dissolved, and the good bits passed along the tendrils to the scab.
Prospector tendrils continued on to other rooms and floors. Ragged-edged scraps of carpeting from the apartment above hung from holes in the ceiling. The entire room was filled with cobwebs of gossamer filaments. They gave the room a foggy look, and the bloomjumping anti-nano had frozen them in place. As Fred moved across the room, the filaments shattered like glass needles and fell tinkling to the floor. Fred tried to follow the tunnels that his coworker johns had already punched through, but he was a larger caliber man, and though he hunched over, he cut a wider swath.
Fred made his noisy way to the corner of the room — it looked like a bedroom from the arrangement of furniture lumps — where a john was bagging a suggestively shaped cocoon lying on what must have been a bed. It might’ve been a large pet or a small person. The ROMUD job was to collect them and let others sort them out. Fred said, “Excuse me, Myr John, but what’s its bio-hash number?”
The john answered without looking up from his task, “A12.”
“Thanks, friend.”
When Fred tuned his visor to the A12 filter, the cocoon that the john was bagging appeared to be stained a deep magenta. And the filament fog surrounding it was tinted pink. Fred picked up a heavy-duty vacuum wand and began to suck up these protein-rich pink clouds all the way to the tendril roots. There he attacked the roots themselves. Wherever they were spotted red, he chopped out sections and bagged them.
Fred was working up a sweat in his hazmat suit, and he took a break to let his ventilation system catch up. So he was motionless when he heard a tinkling sound above him. He looked up in time to dodge a marble-topped bathroom vanity that came crashing down through the filament fog. It slammed into the floor next to him and flew to pieces.
Fred looked through a hole in the ceiling into the apartment above. There were russes in various uniforms — bloomjumper, hommer, cop — leaning over the edge to look down at him.
“Oops,” said one of them. “Heads up, Johnny.”
Unavailable
“But I insist!” Meewee said. “I
“I’m sorry, Myr Meewee, but Ellen’s instructions are clear: she does not wish to meet with you, not now or in the foreseeable future. Anything you wish to communicate to her you may give to me.”
Actually, he couldn’t, at least not by the rules outlined by her predecessor, Wee Hunk.
“You seem like a very helpful mentar,” Meewee said, trying to control his frustration, “but there are some things that would be lost in translation.”
“Try me,” the earnest young woman said, beaming with helpfulness. “I suppose I should inform you that on Ellen’s orders, Cabinet is teaching me the Starke Enterprises business with a view of my taking over its management. So, I am privy to the family business, and Ellen says for you to bring business as well as personal matters to me.”
Meewee’s assertiveness wilted in the glow of her efficiency. He hung his head and followed her through the Manse to her office. They sat in facing chairs, and she said, “Now, tell me, Myr Meewee, how I can help you.”
“I received a memo a little while ago saying that Starke Enterprises is to be broken up and the pieces, including Heliostream, put on the market.”
“Yes,” Lyra said merrily. “I sent you that memo myself.”
Meewee wondered how the eager young mentar could equate managing Starke business with liquidating it. But he didn’t pursue it, and said instead, “A memo? The corporate fire sale of the century, including the division I’ve run for the past ten years, being sold to the highest bidder, and you notify me via memo?”
The young woman didn’t budge. “You ran Heliostream? Ellen thinks otherwise. In her opinion, you are the director in title only; you’ve never actually run Heliostream, or anything else that we’re aware of. Cabinet ran Starke Enterprises, including Heliostream, and we thought that under the circumstances a memo was sufficient.”
Meewee was growing more discouraged by the minute. The mentar stood up and began to move toward the door. “Was there anything else, Myr Meewee? I’ll be sure to tell Ellen that you visited.”
“Yes, there is something else. The memo didn’t say who the intended buyer is. Is it Andrea Tiekel?”
“There are several interested parties, but, yes, Tiekel has put forth the most interesting offer so far.”
In the foyer, before leaving the Manse, Meewee turned to the mentar in one final, hopeless attempt at influencing Ellen. “Please tell her that this is a grave mistake. Tell her she’s putting her mother’s legacy in jeopardy.”
“Oh, about that,” the mentar said. “Ellen says that won’t work on her anymore; she wants to take a pass on the whole legacy thing.”
In the Neighborhood
It was a short hop from the Starke Manse outside Bloomington back to the Starke Enterprises campus near the Kentucky border, but the trip lasted long enough for Meewee to be consumed with delayed fury over his shabby treatment at the hands of Ellen’s mentar. What good was his case against the GEP at the Trade Board if Ellen sold Heliostream? Even if he won he would lose. It was no mean feat to commit a company to provide energy to a project for the next five centuries. It was not something another for-profit corporation was likely to do or, if it did, to be held accountable for. Meanwhile, Eleanor’s many voices continued to babble on in the background:
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Fascinating, as usual, but not the sort of counsel Meewee was craving at that moment. What he needed was a plan, and by the time his car entered the station of Starke Enterprises, he had conceived and rejected several of
