must have known what to expect, seeing her for the first time was still unsettling. She looked the same as before, only smaller. Much smaller, a half of her previous mass. Her head was shaved, but it had the same jar-shape, with flattened nose and pronounced chin, that characterized their charter. She looked like a miniature version of herself.
Oliver TUG told the medtechs in the room to vacate, and they seemed only too glad to comply. Then he drew himself erect, looking even more imposing, and said in a gravelly voice, “Veronica TUG of the Iron Moiety, on behalf of the Supreme Council of Moieties of Charter TUG, I am compelled to deliver an official notice of reprimand. Your recent body mods run counter to TUG regulations, causing harm to yourself and serving as encouragement of aberrant behavior to others.” As he said this, he gave her a secret wink. “Furthermore,” he went on, “continuation in this manner will result in serious penalty, up to expulsion from the charter.”
Veronica seemed unperturbed by the solemn pronouncement. When Oliver stopped talking, she said, “Finished? Then come here and give us a hug.”
Oliver scowled, but he crossed the room and leaned over her bed to gently pat her shoulder. Still using his officious tone of voice, he said, “We’re all concerned about you, Veronica. Your moiety is both ashamed and worried. Won’t you even consider undoing this great harm?” As he spoke, he made a fist and pressed his knuckles against her shaved skull for a good bone-to-bone connection.
Oliver removed his fist from her head, leaving knuckle marks. He paced the small room for a while, then returned to lay his fist on her again.
She shrugged under his rude weight and changed the subject.
“Wait,” she called after him. “Don’t you want to see my tail?”
Skipping Stones for the GEP
It was a perfect morning for skipping stones, warm and sunny. Meewee left his Heliostream office and told his calendar to hold all calls. But by the time he took a lift up to the surface and exited the reception building, storm clouds had moved in, and a few late-season snowflakes were falling. But the cart was waiting for him, and he was wearing a smart jumpsuit with an integrated heater, so he went anyway.
Meewee rode out to one of the hundreds of hourglass-shaped fish farming ponds that dotted the ten- thousand-acre campus of Starke Enterprises, and by the time he reached it, the sun had come out again. He parked the cart and searched the banks for throwing stones, without much hope of finding any. The Starke ponds were lined with crushed basalt: blocky stones that were good for smashing the heads of snakes but abysmal for skipping.
Merrill Meewee knew his stones. As a boy in Kenya, skipping stones was his favorite free-time activity. There had been an abundance of saucer-shaped missiles on the banks of his father’s own fishpond. Fat, river-smoothed disks, they skipped ten, twelve, sixteen times before slipping beneath the surface with a watery plop. His father, a man of little wealth but great forbearance, was not pleased with his boy’s solitary pastime, but he never ordered him to stop. Instead, he asked the boy how many stones he thought the pond could hold. I don’t know, Meewee remembered answering. A hundred thousand?
Oh, such a big number! And how many stones do you suppose you’ve thrown already?
Merrill, who was an excellent student, calculated the number of stones he might have tossed in an hour and how many free hours were left each day after school and chores, how many afternoons in how many years since he first discovered the sport. I would estimate 14,850, he informed his father with a certain amount of swagger.
His father was impressed. So many? And all of them have gone to the bottom?
Of course they’ve gone to the bottom, he had said, embarrassed by his father’s apparent ignorance. They’re stones. They’re heavier than water.
And heavier than fishes?
Of course heavier than fishes.
Good, good, his father concluded, patting him on the head. Keep at it, son, and soon I won’t have to work so hard.
Father?
It’s true. When you fill up my pond with your stones, I won’t need nets and plungers to harvest the fish. I’ll simply wade in up to my ankles and pick them like squash.
It was a lesson in diplomacy, as much as aquaculture, and it stayed with him all these years.
There was a splash, and Meewee looked up in time to catch a flash of fin gliding across the surface of the larger bulb of the hourglass pond. The larger bulb was for the general population, while the smaller one joined to it by a gated neck was used as a nursery and harvesting corral. The fish were a transgenic species called panasonics. In Meewee’s opinion, they weren’t a pretty animal, what with pop-eyes, slimy skin, and a protruding lower jaw lined with needlelike teeth. But they were robust, easy to farm, and, kilo for kilo, one of the most nutritious natural foods that ordinary people could still afford. They yielded heavy fillets of orangish-red flesh that was high in the omega oils not found in other freshwater varieties. And grilled with lemon pepper or served with dill sauce — oh!
Oh, to the devil with the stones, he thought, abandoning his quest for skip-worthy stones and settling for a pocketful of gravel. He spent the next hour pitching gravel into the pond, not even trying to skip them because they always sank after the first bounce. Meewee had a strong throwing arm, but it was too short to get much distance. Nevertheless, despite everything, Meewee lost himself in the activity.
His reverie was interrupted by a message from his calendar.
“I thought I told you to hold my calls,” he said with a huff of annoyance. “This had better be important.”
The calendar wisely made no reply.
Meewee sighed and brushed his dirty hands on his scarlet and vermilion jumpsuit. “Proceed.”
“That news could have waited until I returned to the office.” He turned and began to climb the rocky apron to the grassy bank. “Anything else?”
“Today? The launch is today?”
“What time is it now?”
