When he was finally permitted to go up, the Annette Beijing hollyholo was waiting to speak to him. “G’morning, Boggo,” she said, flashing him her world-famous smile. “My, aren’t you looking handsome this morning.”
“Thanks,” he said, beaming with pleasure. She was always complimenting him like that, and though it was probably only part of her programming, it still thrilled the hell out of him. “Looking good yourself, Nettie,” he said, “which, in your case, is an understatement.”
“Thanks. Well, I have visitors to greet,” she said. “You have yourself a bodacious day. Oh, and don’t forget about your meeting with HR tomorrow.” She turned and sashayed away. She was so beautiful, from the rear as well as the front. Bogdan mentally pinned a tail on her.
BOGDAN’S OWN REAR was the first in line for the fitting booths. Once the visceral response probe had been inserted, linking his body’s every sensation to the E-Pluribus superluminary computer, he hitched up his jumpsuit and went to his first upreffing assignment. He fervently hoped it would be another visit to the Oship with that weird little Birthplace guy, Meewee. But his first assignment took place in an auditorium full of daily hires, with whom he was subjected to an hour of probable news: mud slides in Bogota, a horrific soccer stadium stampede in Sudan, world leaders being knocked off by their own bodyguards, and more of the same. His next assignment was equally dreary, a consensus vid about an asteroid hitting the Earth and how, years before it hit, scientists used a rust-producing bacteria to gobble up oxygen out of the atmosphere, reducing global oxygen levels to fifteen percent, a concentration high enough for life but too low for open flames, effectively making the planet fireproof.
Boring.
Finally, his last assignment before lunch took him to a solo booth where, sure enough, the lights dimmed and the emitters hummed, and Bogdan found himself back on the Oship ESV Garden Charter. He was in an urban hab drum this time, sitting at a long table on a raised dais in front of a stadium crowd of tens of thousands. Beyond them he could see the spires and roofs of a great city stretching all the way to the bulkhead of the drum. At his table sat dozens of young men and women, all wearing the crisp uniforms of the jump pilot corps. Bogdan looked at his sleeve and saw that he, too, was a jump pilot. When he looked to his left, he discovered that he was seated right next to—Annette Beijing! A teenaged Annette who was also dressed as a pilot. She smiled at him.
There was a lectern in front of the table, and a man was speaking to the vast audience. It was the little Meewee guy in his green and red overalls. “During the next few months of the General Awakening,” he was saying, “more of our citizens will leave the cryovaults and be quickened than at any other time during our thousand-year voyage—well over two hundred thousand, or eighty percent of our great ship’s population. All sixty-four hab drums are being pressurized and activated to accommodate them. Now that we have reached our new home system, we must prepare for planetfall. The next twelve months will be a time of joyous activity as we make ready to take possession of our new planet.”
Amid sustained applause, Meewee pointed at the sky and said, “I give you Planet Lisa!” The crowd gasped. Bogdan looked straight up and was astounded by the sight. The hull of the hab drum was becoming transparent, a window to space. And there, directly overhead, a shiny blue-green planet was coming into view. It was endowed with brilliant oceans under whorls of white clouds. There were three major land masses visible, and ice-capped polar regions. Except for the unfamiliar shapes of the continents, it could have been Earth, old pre-industrial Earth.
“Stunning, isn’t it?” the teen-aged Annette said to him. “Our new home.”
“Planet Lisa,” Bogdan whispered.
“Have you picked out your thousand acres yet?”
“Um, no. Have you?”
“Almost. I’ve split mine up into three or four parcels. Five hundred acres of coastline on Kalina Island there.” She raised a slender arm and pointed to the edge of the world. “Look quick,” she said, “night is falling. And over there, below the Bay of Renewal, there’s a city called Capa. I have a hundred acres near there. As for the rest, I don’t know. Someplace in the mountains? In the agribelt? I just don’t know. What about you?” She searched his face with her green eyes and continued. “And to think, I’ve received all this: the millennial voyage, a thousand acres on a pristine planet, an exciting career, unlimited rejuvenation—a life!—all in exchange for one lousy acre on a dying planet.”
“Tell me about it,” Bogdan said. “My acre came from a superfund site polluted with toxic industrial waste.”
The crowd cheered, and Bogdan and Annette looked up again at Planet Lisa. On the western coast of a dark continent, the lights of a metropolis were coming on.
“That’s New Seattle,” Annette said. “The builder mechs are testing its energy grid.”
Just yesterday (though it was six hundred years ago in ship time) Captain Suzette had explained to him how robotic advance ships would reach their destination several centuries before the Oship to construct the planet’s infrastructure.
“And now the event you’ve all been waiting for,” the little man at the lectern said. The vast audience thrummed with anticipation. “In three months, the brave jump pilots seated behind me will begin to ferry colonists down to the surface. Naturally, everyone wants to be on the historic first landing. Who those lucky people will be depends upon the launch order of the jumpships—which we will now determine.”
The crowd went wild as a young man pushed a cart across the dais with what looked like a cage hopper filled with little balls. Audience members rose from their seats and screamed as Meewee rotated the hopper with a hand crank. A group of girls near the front, all of them stunningly gorgeous, chanted, “Bog-dan, Bog-dan, Bog-dan.”
Annette smirked. “I envy the pilot who gets the first launch. She, or he, will have all the lovers she can handle.”
The first ball dropped out and rolled to the end of the slot. Meewee picked it up and turned it in his hand. “The first ship to Lisa will be piloted by—”
Bogdan, who had been awake and active nonstop for twenty-nine hours, closed his eyes. The eight-hour Alert! tablet that he had taken ran out all at once, and he fell asleep where he sat. A few minutes later, his chair nudged him awake, but it was too late; the Oship scenario had ended. He swallowed another Alert! and trudged off to lunch.
3.5
Meewee slept most of the morning. The lump under his skin, his new brainlette, didn’t bother him when he scratched it. In midafternoon he left his executive suite at Starke Enterprises headquarters for the last time and made the short trip to Starke Manse. An arbeitor with Wee Hunk perched atop it was waiting for him in the family’s private Slipstream station.
“Top o’the afternoon to you, Bishop,” the tiny mentar said, greeting him like an old friend. “I trust your leave-taking from Cabinet territory was civil.”
“Civil enough, though Cabinet saw fit to send a security team to escort me to the tube. As though I intended to steal the linen or something.”
“And did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Steal the linen.”
Meewee took the question for a tasteless joke and did not answer. The arbeitor grabbed up his luggage, and he followed it to the lifts. It was only when they were riding up to the ground floor that he realized that he and Wee Hunk had been conducting two conversations at once. The banter about Cabinet was only the surface one. Beneath it was a more serious one—Wee Hunk had just updated him about Ellen’s condition—still critical—and asked if he’d had any more direct encounters with Cabinet.