Divergence

“And you’re keeping it,” said Miriam. “Good for you, Edward. Now, let me introduce you to a friend of ours. He would like to go to Earth, too.”

She looked towards the robot. The robot swivelled its badly dented face to look around the table.

“Hi,” it said, “my name is Constantine.”

Maurice set the Fair Exchange process in motion and gazed around at the crew of the Uninvited as they ate their breakfast. Willi, a young man with a big beaming smile, forked yellow flakes of fish into the quivering, drooling mouth of the redheaded woman sitting by him.

“What’s the matter with her?” asked Maurice.

“Cerebral palsy,” said the young man. “She has her good days and her bad days—don’t you, Carol?”

The redheaded woman made a noise in her throat. Her hand banged up and down against the arm of the padded chair in which she sat.

“You’d think there was a cure for all those illnesses,” Saskia said wonderingly.

“Saskia!” exclaimed Judy. “Don’t be so rude!”

“It’s okay,” Miriam said, and then more petulantly, “medical care seems to have stopped developing in the mid- twenty-first century.”

“Just when the Watcher came to prominence,” added Constantine the robot. Everyone stared at the stump of Miriam’s missing arm.

“How did you all meet?” asked Maurice.

“We were being taken on a cruise out to the stars by Social Care,” said Willi. “We got caught in a region of Dark Plants and were rescued by a ship using FE. They offered us the choice of returning to Earth or of adopting FE ourselves. We chose FE.”

“But why?” asked Judy.

“Because we were tired of being looked after,” Miriam interrupted, a note of anger in her voice. “We thought it would be nice to take care of ourselves instead.”

“But what if something happens to you?”

“Then something happens to us,” Miriam said firmly, and that line of conversation was ended.

“Circumstances uploaded,” Maurice said, glancing at his console. “FE is commencing.” He looked at Saskia, expecting her to say something sarcastic. To his pleasant surprise she didn’t seem to have noticed. She was listening carefully to Miss Rose. The old woman had hardly said a word since her emergence from the autodoc.

“Who, who’d…?” she began in a hoarse whisper.

“Easy, Miss Rose, take your time.”

The contrast with the former Saskia could not be more marked: relaxed and warm in her white blouse, her little silver earrings sparkling.

“What was that, Miss Rose?”

“Who’d have thought it?” said Miss Rose in a thin whisper. “We’re all equal in the eyes of FE.”

“What do you mean, Miss Rose?” asked Saskia, squeezing her cold parchment hand.

“I mean him, ” said Miss Rose, a shaking hand pointing to Edward. “The dummy. Leave him on his own and he’d give the shirt off his back to the first person who asked for it. He’d be ripped off by every Tom, Dick, and Harry who came by. But put him on a ship with FE and he is the equal of anyone. Just like that lot sitting over there—the cripples.”

Saskia tried to hush the old woman. None of the Uninvited seemed to mind, however. One or two of them even seemed amused.

“That’s the thing, though,” continued Miss Rose, placing one finger on the table. “Even the stupid can’t be ripped off when all transactions go through FE.”