Mind Over Ship

no flying mechs whatsoever. Tiny mechs tend to gum up the air generation systems and are banned. So are spybots, and you know what else? The nitwork is also prohibited. There are no nits in space.”

THE LUMBERING REPAIR ’beitors lowered the tunnel section and noisily removed themselves from the lane. Fred’s visitors slipped away, and he moved immediately to a radiation shadow. His visor totted up his exposure levels and ordered him to report to the CITP autodoc. Fred could feel the hot, half-cooked nits under his skin. It might be interesting to visit a land without nits.

As if he had any choice.

PART 3

The Day Before the Roosevelt Clinic Incident

Fred said, “Your house meet is here?” He had walked right past her thinking she was a park statue. Fred went back along the path to look at the retrogirl Kitty. Even up close it was hard to dispel the illusion. She wore the costume of a ballerina, with white tights and tutu, white slippers and ribbons, and a white tiara crowning her head. Her hair, skin, and nails were also white. Even the irises of her eyes were white. She was an alabaster statue, arms arched gracefully over her head, one leg bent slightly at the knee, most of her weight supported on her toes. Her trembling calf muscles broke the illusion, and Fred knew how much strength it took to hold such a pose. How could a child’s body have that much strength? She was the most enchanting thing he’d ever seen.

Dinner and Dancing

Sometime during the night, Meewee was awakened by the shaking of his bed. His first thought was — Earthquake! He opened his eyes to unfamiliar predawn walls. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember where he was, and this alarmed his half-asleep brain. The bed shook again. Not an earthquake but a gentle swaying, like the old-fashioned railway cars he’d traveled in as a boy.

Then he remembered where he was, in a guest cubby at the Mem Lab. Someone had told him — Director Koyabe? — that the lab was a collection of modules — large vehicles actually — that were constantly changing their locations deep underground.

Though he knew more or less where he was, he had no idea how long he’d been there. Weeks probably. It had been nonstop action since he’d arrived in his unusual tube car.

The car’s door had opened to a ceramic room. In his years of visiting the despotic regimes of tenuous nations, Meewee had encountered many similar rooms. They were called “frontier gates,” and were designed to frisk any visitor or cargo for hidden threat. Threats could then be neutralized by poison gas, fire, radiation, bullets, or whatever. When Meewee stepped from the car into the room, the doors shut and bolted behind him, and he spent a few uncomfortable minutes alone in the lethal room. Finally, the woman’s voice said, “We have confirmed your identity and LOG status. Please stand by, and an officer will escort you to my office.”

A moment later, a russ officer entered through a heavily armored hatchway. Though his uniform was new to Meewee, the russ, himself, seemed oddly familiar. Meewee followed him along corridors filled with onlookers in lab togs. These people loitered in doorways and intersections and either stared at him openly or welcomed him with enthusiastic greetings. The russ officer explained to Meewee that he was their first visitor since they went dark 432 days before, and that everyone was dying to hear his news.

By the time they reached their destination, a tiny office at the end of a corridor, Meewee had figured out the russ’s meaning. Eleanor’s yacht crash had occurred 432 days ago; this facility had been locked down and completely cut off from the world since then. At the office door, Meewee turned to his impromptu welcoming committee of lab workers and exclaimed, “She lives! Eleanor is alive!” He was answered by a wild cheer.

A woman came out of the office and said, “Which was it, the fish or the honeybees?”

“The fish,” Meewee said. “I don’t know anything about honeybees.”

“Come in, come in, and tell me everything.” She was a handsome woman, Asian, and no taller than he. She shook his hand with a firm grip. “I’m Dr. Koyabe, principal investigator and director of this facility, and you’ve just settled a major bet. Unfortunately, I was on the losing side.” Before closing her door, she spoke to those still in the corridor. “Don’t you have work to do? Go. Go.”

The director’s office was small, and towering crates of ugoo, food precursors, and other supplies made it smaller. Koyabe urged Meewee to make himself comfortable, but this was no time for comfort, and Meewee was anxious to issue his orders, but he paused to first make an ID challenge in Starkese.

She answered it and went on <You may address me in Starkese, Bishop Meewee, but for your information, I am the only person here who speaks it. And since we’re currently in Stealth Level 4, which is tighter than a null room, you can speak freely without it.>

“Your stealth status is the first thing to change,” Meewee replied in English. “Lift it to a level at which Cabinet and Arrow may communicate with you.”

Koyabe spoke to the room. “You hear that, Lab Rat?” To Meewee she added, “That’s our mentar.” She cocked her head while listening to its reply, and then went around to her desk. “Go ahead,” she said, and her mood sobered as Meewee recounted recent events. “I think,” she said to Meewee when he finished, “we had better go straight to the Command Post.”

They left the office, and Meewee followed her along the route he had arrived — the facility didn’t seem all that large — to an armored door. As Koyabe palmed the doorplate, she mused, “The fish, you say?”

THE “COMMAND POST” might have been another small office except that there was no desk. About a dozen chairs were arranged around the room facing the blank walls. Only one chair was occupied; a russ was working at an open wall frame. At first Meewee thought it was the same officer who had escorted him from the reception room, but he greeted Meewee as though for the first time.

Koyabe said, “Captain Benson is commander of the garrison here. Captain, this is LOG 1. On his authority I am placing the facility on red alert. Assemble a response team. Cabinet is LOG 2.”

Much happened at once. Dataframes and control panels opened along three walls, and lab workers streamed into the room to staff them. Cabinet soon appeared in the center of the room next to Meewee, and the lab workers stared at her and Meewee before returning their attention to their frames.

“You don’t recognize me, Cabinet, do you?” Koyabe said after she and Cabinet had exchanged ID challenges. <And yet you speak the family tongue. That is a problem.>

Meewee hastened to say <Cabinet was compromised in the attack on Eleanor and subsequently destroyed. This is a backup from the year 2097.>

<Ah, that would explain it then> Koyabe said, still a little unsure. She turned to the captain and said, “Captain Benson, where’s my godseye?”

The russ captain was laboring at a framed map of the South Pacific. He answered her without turning. “The Starke network is too corrupted to use.”

“Then lurk me up a public view.”

At once, Meewee and the others in the middle of the room were standing on the Stardust dance floor, a virtual ribbon of hardwood that circled the globe high above the equator. Couples and triads were waltzing in the airless space while others dined at tables along the edges. “Don’t worry,” Koyabe said as she led Meewee and