he was looking for it, yes, this did seem like an older crowd of brothers. Was it possible that they all were espoused to ’leens? That with their high Trailing Earth wages and their wives’ Leena dividends they were finally going to be able to catch up with their germline? And if so, what did that say about his chances of fitting in and getting along at Trailing Earth? Might they cut him a little slack?
“Walt. Hello, Walt.” Fred turned back to Mando who said, “I asked what about you? Are you married?”
The two dorises were watching him. “Oh, yes,” he replied, “to a ’leen, just like you, name of Rosemary.” He went on to tell them all about his and Rosemary’s life in Chicago; he had memorized his cover story last night and everything was fresh in his mind. He even ad-libbed a little. The dorises were well entertained.
WHILE SOME MARKED their voyage in ship days, and others in distance covered, Fred tended to think of their progress in light-minutes. They were already 6.25 light-minutes from Earth, which made normal phone conversations impractical.
Whenever Mary called from work, she usually tried to do so from her private suite, seated in her favorite armchair with the cherry blossom print upholstery. She was usually relaxed and had a frosty drink in her hand. This time she was standing in some residential room, no drink, and was at wit’s end. The door behind her was ajar, and there were distant shrieks of a not very happy person in the background.
“Hi! Sorry,” she said, shutting the door. “We seem to be in constant crisis mode around here lately. Right now she’s trying to terminate Dr. Rouselle, and we’re fighting that. But I know you don’t want to hear about my work, so I’ll leave it at that.”
Fred and all but the most foolhardy passengers had confined themselves to their pouches for the last seventy-two hours. The ship was making a hard braking maneuver that increased the gravity to three times Earth standard. He listened to Mary and stored up comments to make when it was his turn to talk.
“Otherwise, nothing new around here since yesterday, except that I miss you even more than ever, Fred. It’s worse than when you were in prison.
“What else? Oh, a few more of the Leenas have crashed or whatever. Now Clarity thinks maybe they
At the word “over,” Mary’s holo image froze, and Fred lurched into speech. “I miss you too, Mary, more than I can say.” He told her about his day, but since ship days tended to blur into each other, he may have been repeating himself. When he could think of nothing more to say, he said, “Over.”
For the 6.25 minutes to Earth and an equal length of time to return, plus whatever time it took her to listen to him and compose a reply, Fred watched news and sports.
FRED AND MANDO attended amateur talent night in the main lounge. They shared a table with two dorises, never the same two, who were getting the tenth or twelfth retelling of the life of Walt and Rosemary. The braking maneuver had eased up, and the floors and seats were sticky to compensate for the weak gravity. With the sticky surfaces, it was still possible to actually sit at a table and to walk with clumsy, lurching steps.
Fred saw the children coming from half the room away. Dressed in matching blue and white town togs, they were playing tag in the teeming lounge. It had never been hard to pick children out of a crowd, and everyone’s eyes followed them. Fred had to wonder what children were doing on a transport to Trailing Earth. Where were their parents?
The running girl tripped and went sailing through the space between the tables, startling a man right out of his seat. She flew straight into Fred’s hands. All he had to do was reach over and pluck her from the air like a football. To her it was all a big joke.
Fred turned the laughing girl right side up and planted her on her sticky-sneakered feet. He was about to make a typical adult remark, like “No flying allowed,” but at the last moment, something about her made him think she wasn’t a real girl at all. Maybe it was the firm feel of her body or the adultlike glint in her eye. She was a retrogirl. And in order to let Mando and the dorises know that he wasn’t fooled by her appearance, Fred changed what he was about to say to, “I didn’t know they had trapeze acts at Trailing Earth.” It didn’t make much sense, but it was the best he could come up with on the fly.
The girl’s eyes went wide. “There’s a circus there?”
“No, I just —”
“What circus?” demanded the little boy, who had caught up with his friend.
“There is no circus,” Fred said. “I was just wondering out loud what kind of job up there requires the special skills of small adults like yourselves. Crawling into tight spaces, I imagine.”
The boy laughed out loud. “How well you imagine, Myr Russ. Really tight spaces they are.” He winked at Fred, and slapped the girl on the back and said, “You’re it!” They dashed away, leaving Fred red-faced with embarrassment.
Leaf Mold
The vine chamber had its own embedded crew of agribeitor caretakers. Meewee walked along the length of the chamber, from porthole to porthole, watching the ’beitors inside follow the mother vine from its root trunk to the shoots at the end where the new wheels were ripening. The wheels were large disks, like weird squash, with a hard yellow rind and eight thick, orange knobs evenly spaced around the rim.
Some of the wheels lay flat on the floor beside the vine, and even to Meewee’s untrained eye appeared soft and discolored, clearly past their prime. The ’beitors cut these from the vine and carted them away for disposal.
Then the ’beitors inspected the fresher wheels. Those judged immature were left to ripen undisturbed. Those judged to be at their peak of maturity were snipped and transported to the transfer drawers.
Another Mem Lab scientist, Dr. Ito, was in charge of the nursery. He retrieved the wheels from the drawer one at a time and placed them on an examination table. Meewee levitated himself to peer over his shoulder. Each of the eight orange knobs around the rim contained a “bean,” which the scientist tested for viability.
“Eight wheels times eight beans per wheel,” he told Meewee, “gives us sixty-four tries. But this one is deformed, and this one is a runt.” He pierced the defective knobs with a metal pick, pithing them. Altogether, he destroyed five beans, which left them with fifty-nine possible Eleanor clones.
Dr. Ito transferred the wheels to a separate gestation chamber where he placed each in a separate womb, covered it with slurry, and sealed and placed it on a rack. “Now we let them bake for a while,” he said.
EVEN AT THREE million engrams per hour, the migration was taking longer than first estimated. It turned out that the TXH lice were an especially virulent strain of pest that needed only an hour to turn a full-sized panasonic fish into mush and bone. But with a little creative herding, accomplished with submersibles and bubbles, Captain Benson was able to disperse the fish and slow the infestation. Dr. Strohmeyer was optimistic about the quality of the engrams she was downloading, and her brainfish were incorporating them as fast as they could.
In the Command Post, the staff had cobbled together a new secure godseye and abandoned the Stardust dance floor. The sea of yellow dots was shrinking each hour, and Dr. Koyabe was optimistic. She came and went, overseeing her forces, but periodically she checked in on Meewee and made sure he was getting enough food and rest. Day, night, Meewee lost all track of time. Time was the number of engrams yet to be uploaded.
A RUSS GUARD showed him the way to the men’s shower room. There, Meewee met several more russes in various stages of undress. They looked all the same. Iterants, normal iterants, displayed a certain amount of variation, like brothers from the same parents, but these were more like identical twins. Fixed allele cloning techniques were outlawed for commercial iterants. Did Applied People know about this private, unlawful collection of its popular germline?
“So, how many of you russies make up the garrison?” he asked his escort.
“Oh, a couple hundred.”
