“It’s quite striking,” Fred said, “but it looks like something for—you know—New Year’s Eve. Not an evening at Rolfe’s with the gang.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know. How should I know?”
“You’re probably right.” Mary reset the mannequin to cocktail face and experimented with colors. Meanwhile, one of the slugs had entered the bathroom and was heading for Fred across the tile floor. Fred stood still for it to latch on to his ankle. There was a slight prick as it sampled him. It immediately dropped off, as he knew it would. One taste of the HALVENE and the little ribbon of biotech was satisfied that he posed no threat to society.
When the slug crept toward Mary, however, she dropped her nightgown on it and retreated to the gel stall. Fred shook his head and freed the slug from her clothing. “Honestly, Mary,” he said, “you’re begging for trouble. What’s got into you?”
“Funny you should ask,” she said and turned on the mist, drowning out all conversation.
The slug, undeterred, crept up the glass door to the stall’s slugway near the ceiling. Like it or not, the slug would have its taste. Fred, meanwhile, decided he’d better use the face dresser before Mary finished her shower. He sat under the boxy appliance and said, “Fred’s party setting.” He didn’t need to use a mannequin; he had only three faces—house, work, and party—and he never altered them. He lowered the dresser and buried his head in its soft, warm folds. It quickly washed, shaved, toned, and made up his face, while at the same time hydrating his skin and trimming his hair. Fred bit down for a peppermint ultrasound mouth scrub.
When Fred removed the dresser, his own pint-sized figure was posing in the mirror. It wore alternating styles and colors of leisure suits.
“That one,” he said, picking a jaunty, plum-colored crepe jumpsuit that would match Mary’s getup. The little Fred in the mirror took a step forward, grinned, and turned on its heel.
To my cloned brothers: we are one handsome son of a bitch.
2.13
In the bead car next to Bogdan, a man was scrunched up against the window, fast asleep. Bogdan, too, was being lulled by the gentle swaying of the speeding train, when there was a click, and his neighbor’s car unhitched and hurtled itself down a side tunnel. A moment later, another car dropped from an injection ramp and snapped into place next to him. His new neighbor, across two sheets of unbreakable glassine, was a woman with see-through skin. She was drumming her fingers on the armrest of her seat, and Bogdan became hypnotized by her tendons and muscles sliding over each other. When the woman noticed him staring, she seemed offended, though with a see-through face it was hard to tell. In any case, she opaqued her window.
Bogdan didn’t care. He was lost in a daydream. Although his session in the Aria Ranger ended before he and the weird sim reached the inhabited core of Trailing Earth, his next assignment was just as outstanding. The sim, in his green and red overalls, reappeared and said, “Hello again, Bogdan. Care to visit the future?”
Bogdan had looked around. They were alone in an E-Pluribus auditorium, not in a spaceship.
“Yah sure, why not?”
“Splendid. Now imagine this. Four hundred years have elapsed. You’re a plankholder aboard an Oship on its way to a new home system. Let’s go visit the bridge.”
A moment later they were standing in a room the size of a soccer field. There were dozens of young people in cool uniforms attending to a forest of flat monitors and control panels. In the center of the colossal room floated a giant scale model of an Oship.
“Here’s the decade captain,” the Meewee sim said as a young woman approached them. She was stunningly beautiful. As beautiful as Annette Beijing, if that was possible. She stopped in front of them, placed her hands on her shapely hips, and examined Bogdan from head to toe.
“Ah, Merrill,” she said, “you have a knack for picking the finest crew. Won’t you please introduce us.”
“Gladly,” the Meewee sim said. “Captain Suzette, I’m pleased to introduce Plankholder Bogdan Kodiak, one of our most promising young jump pilot cadets.”
“Welcome to the bridge of the ESV Garden Charter, Cadet Kodiak,” the captain said. “Merrill has asked me to give you a tour, and I thought we’d start right here in the command center. That sound acceptable?”
“Perfectly,” Bogdan said, his voice threatening to crack.
“Excellent.”
The Meewee sim said, “Well, Bogdan, I’ll leave you in the capable hands of our good captain. Till next time—” The sim dissolved into twinkling stars and disappeared.
“That’s a fine man,” Captain Suzette said, looking wistfully at the spot Meewee had occupied. “I hope you realize how lucky you are that he’s taken a shine to you.” She motioned for Bogdan to join her in front of the mammoth holo Oship. “Let’s begin with ship propulsion. I suppose you know about the Oship torus.”
The model Oship towered over him like a ten-story building. “Certainly,” Bogdan said, straining to remember what Meewee had said about it in the earlier session. “Uh, a magnetic trap for particle beams from a solar harvester.”
The gorgeous captain glanced at him admiringly. “Well put,” she said. “Let’s start with the harvesters. Back home in the system surrounding Sol—” She made gestures as she spoke, and the Oship model shrank to a pinpoint in an upper corner of the huge scape, making way in the center for a large dazzling star. Bogdan shielded his eyes against its intensity.
“Here, let me dampen that,” the captain said and twirled her finger. Dampened, the sun resembled a ball of squirming pink noodles. Girdling its northern hemisphere was a loose ring of black specks.
“Those are Heliostream harvesters,” Captain Suzette continued. “They’re as far out as Mercury orbit but above Sol’s equatorial plane. And of course, to be able to see the harvesters at all in this scape, I’ve had to scale them up to the size of Jupiter.”
“Of course,” Bogdan said.
“All right, let’s sketch in the rest of the system.” She pointed her finger here and there, and planets and habplat and fabplat colonies appeared, including a blue-and-white-mottled marble representing Earth.
“The harvesters capture the raw energies of Sol and transfer them to where they can be useful. Ready?” She snapped her fingers, and a thick spiderweb of colored threads shot out in all directions from the ring of solar harvesters. Most of them terminated at Earth. “The white ones are microwave beams which are converted to electricity, the red ones are laser, the yellow ones are streams of hydrogen plasma, and the green one there—do you know what that is?”
The green thread she indicated led directly to the tiny Oship in the upper corner. “That would be our particle mass beam,” Bogdan said.
“Excellent!” the captain said merrily. She waved her hands to close the Sol system and return the Oship model to its original imposing size. “Which leads us to our torus, which is, as you have already pointed out, a fortified electromagnetic force field that converts particle beams striking it into motive force.” As she spoke, a wire diagram, like the lines of latitude and longitude on a globe, appeared in the donut hole of the Oship. In the exact center, the lines bulged forward, like a finger poking a rubber sheet. “For the last four hundred years,” the captain continued, “Heliostream has been directing a narrow beam of charged photonic particles at Planet 2013LS in the Ursae Majoris system. That’s our destination. We have positioned the torus of our ship on the beam so as to ride it.” She pointed at the center of the donut hole. “That convexity you see in our torus is the particle beam striking it. Most of its energy is being converted into propulsion—we’ve attained 0.367 light speed—while a fraction is bled off to supply ship’s power. And, of course, the beam doubles as an ultra-broad communication band between us and Earth.”