Mind Over Ship

The new lab was a long, narrow room dominated by an enclosed compartment that ran its entire length. Set every few meters along the compartment side were glass portholes for looking inside. A brass plate over one porthole read, “Eleanor 3.3.” Meewee looked through this porthole, but it was dim inside the compartment, and Meewee wasn’t sure what he was looking at.

“It’s the mother vine,” Koyabe said. “She’s at the bottom of her sleep cycle, not a good time to harvest. We’ll wait till tomorrow.”

Meewee peered into the darkness behind the glass. “It’s a cloning machine? For Eleanor?”

Spacer Fred

Fred alternately floated or hung in his second-class sleeping pouch aboard the ISV Dauntless. There was gravity during most of the thirty-four-day trip, but it was weak, inconstant stuff that did not always pull from the same direction. Fred was listless; there was no routine to his day, and as he hung or floated, he had plenty of time for second-guessing his recent life decision. And this after only three days out.

“NO UNAUTHORIZED NANO products. No free-ranging mechs smaller than a wall crawler. No projectile weapons of any sort. No dermal fauna, spybots, spydots, nits, gnats, nust, or anything else smaller than a human hair.” The passenger relations officer delivered his droning litany by holo from the hermetically sealed crew section of the ship. “Believe me, they’ll find whatever you’re hiding, so now’s the time to cough it up. Punishment includes denial of entrance to Trailing Earth, the charge of interplanetary piracy, and confinement to quarantine quarters until return passage to Earth is arranged. Which can take months.”

Fred listened with about a fifth of the Dauntless passengers in the main multi-bay, the only room capable of accommodating so many at once. The rest of the outbound passengers were attending by holo from commissaries and sleeping pouches throughout the transport.

“The ship will be sealed bulkhead section by bulkhead section with passengers assigned to those sections sealed inside and subject to an active gas exchange purging procedure. You plus all your possessions will be treated. Until then and following this meeting, passengers should remain in their assigned sections and review decon protocol via the ship’s library. Decon procedures will be repeated on Day 7 of passage and, depending upon monitoring results, as many times thereafter as necessary.

“If you are arrested at Trailing Earth for contraband, you’ll have only yourself to blame.”

PASSENGERS SPENT A lot of time in skimpy paper gas togs. Russes and dorises, the only two iterant types on board, were not ordinarily attracted to each other, but under the circumstances there was a lot of checking each other out going on. For that matter, there were a lot of hinks to check out too, since the free-range portion of the passenger list greatly outnumbered the iterants. Fred was relieved to see he wasn’t the only russ enjoying the windfall of wild rumps, legs, and breasts to look at.

“WHAT’LL IT BE this time, Fred? Six months? Eight months?”

“Twelve months, actually, plus transit time.”

As Fred floated in his pouch, he replayed in memory their last uninhibited conversation. He had just returned home from a two-day soak in a Longyear rapid recovery tank for his radiation exposure, and Mary was being so nice to him that he felt guilty. After all, he had applied for duty at Trailing Earth while still in the tank without consulting her. He knew she wasn’t going to be happy about it when he told her, and he persuaded her to join him in the null room against autodoc advice.

“A whole year? Fred, what do you think I am, a piece of furniture you can just put into storage? Why didn’t you talk with me first?”

“You’d rather the little tuggers killed me? They trapped and burned me to show just how serious they are about this. They don’t care what you or I want.”

Mary let it drop and moved on to more practical matters: how dangerous was his mission? How illegal?

Not so bad, not so much.

THE HOMELAND COMMAND nits evacuated and expired as they were designed to do. It was the black- market micro-fauna that was hard to kill and quick to recover. As soon as Fred’s section of the ship had been purged, it became reinfected. During a supplemental gassing, Fred sat at a commissary table between two dorises. As a general rule, dorises weren’t big on chitchat. Mostly they enjoyed listening to other people talk, and they had distributed themselves in little clumps among the more numerous russes. Russes were notorious camp haranguers, and four hundred of them in paper suits created an amiable buzz of conversation. The two dorises sitting on either side of Fred probably expected him to strike up a conversation with russes seated nearby and do the same. This was something Fred wanted to do, in fact, but was afraid to try. So far, the russes aboard the Dauntless were treating him civilly, even ignoring him altogether. This was due to the false identity Marcus had provided him for the passage. At first Fred had balked: wasn’t it a tiny bit ironic to issue him a fake ID considering his identikit indictment? But Marcus had been persuasive: two thousand russes cooped up in a metal box for five weeks of purging was an open invitation for fraternal nastiness. Why make his trip any more unpleasant than it had to be?

Why indeed? Fred’s new name was Walter Mitty of Chicago, Illinois; he was married to a kelley named Rosemary Jace. Fred had pages and pages of cover story outlining the milestones of his supposed life, but even with so much free time on his hands, Fred couldn’t bring himself to memorize all the lies they contained. As a result, it was safer just to keep his big yap shut.

At his table, one of the dorises gave up on Fred and said to the other, “My other sisters and I took a seven- day Ca rib be an cruise once, but it was too much sitting on our hands and eating, eating, eating, and we were more than ready to come home.”

“That’s exactly how I feel right now!” said the other doris. “Except for the eating part.”

“I know! This morning I wanted to tidy up the forward lavatory. It’s so messy. But the deck scuppers wouldn’t let me. They threatened to call the captain!”

“I know what you mean! The scuppers here are such bossy machines!”

“I sure hope they’re not like that up there at Trailing Earth.”

HE TOLD HER, in case something bad happened to him, that Veronica called herself a TOTE now, not a TUG, but that as far as he could tell, the two charters were in cahoots.

FRED’S SECOND-CLASS cabin, where he began spending the bulk of his time either hanging or floating, had the dimensions of a hall closet, one meter square by two meters high. Together with his duffel bag he filled it up. But it had a door with a lock, and that was what mattered.

THE NULL ROOM was in its daytime setting during their famous last conversation. That is, instead of the bed that took up too much space, there was an armchair/coffee table arrangement that was commodious by comparison. So they were able to face each other in a relaxed atmosphere under palm trees on a tropical beach. They were being civil to each other, and they were saying the things that needed to be said. He told her, for instance, that if things worked out for him up there, then anything was possible, and she should consider joining him.

“Are you joking?” she said. “Become a spacer?”

“Why not? The new you might like it.”

“I don’t think so, Fred. I like it down here just fine.”

“All I ask is that you keep an open mind. Think of it as a compromise between the new us, a way to move forward. Besides, you yourself brag about how much income your Leena makes for you. You don’t actually have to be in any particular place for that to happen, do you? And if you aren’t actually employed by Applied People or Ellen