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David Marusek: Mind Over Ship

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David Marusek Mind Over Ship

Mind Over Ship: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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The year is 2135, and the international program to seed the galaxy with human colonies has stalled as greedy, immoral powerbrokers park their starships in Earth’s orbit and begin to convert them into space condos. Ellen Starke’s head, rescued from the fiery crash that killed her mother, struggles to regrow a new body in time to restore her dead mother’s financial empire. And Pre-Singularity AIs conspire to join the human race just as human clones, such as Mary Skarland and her sisters, want nothing more than to leave it. Welcome to , the sequel to Marusek’s stunning debut novel, , which called “ferociously smart, simultaneously horrific and funny.”

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Although the Persuasion Channel provided its amateur interviewers triple anonymity, Oliver walked through the holospace searching for any inadvertent clues that might give his charter away to the authorities. The only agent in the tent was a generic house hold arbeitor. It was busy painting the soles of the boy’s bare feet with an organic solvent that caused the skin to liquefy and slough off. The exposed nerve endings on the soles of his feet looked like the stubble of a white beard.

The boy was already crying and pleading, which made Oliver shake his head in wonder. The solvent didn’t actually hurt, and if the boy made this much fuss so soon, how would he hold up when the arbeitor broke out the hair dryer?

Oliver’s comlink buzzed. “Prinz Clinic called,” said a subordinate. “Veronica is out of recovery.”

“Thank you,” Oliver said, wiping away the holospace. “Get my car.”


A PHALANX OF three tuggers preceded Oliver TUG through the surgical wing of Prinz Clinic. Each of them stood over two meters tall and measured twice the girth of human standard. Clinic workers and machines hugged the walls to let them pass. The TUGs wore military-cut jumpsuits, and over their left shoulders floated the olive-and mustard-colored marble of their charter logo.

At the door to the private room, Oliver told his detail to wait in the hall while he went in alone. Although he 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. Bad news, Vee, he said. All the latest mentar shoots have failed the isolation stress test.

All of them? she replied through her skull. He nodded, and she said, They raptured?

That’s what it looked like. We have to rethink this whole thing. We’re getting nowhere. We should call in a mentar specialist.

No! she said. No outsiders. We can’t risk exposure.

Well, this is becoming a very expensive waste of time. We’ve burned through nearly thirty personality buds with no results. Do you have any idea how much those things cost?

I know exactly how much they cost, but there is no alternative. We must have a stable mentar, one able to go months in total isolation. No, this is the only way. Start a new batch.

Are you sure?

Look at me. Do you think I would have put myself through this if I wasn’t? Start a new batch at once!

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. All right, but if this batch fails, we explore other options.

She shrugged under his rude weight and changed the subject. Any word from Starke?

She’s agreed to meet with us but hasn’t set a date yet.

Stay on top of it. Oliver removed his fist again and chucked her under the chin. “You’re a maddeningly stubborn woman,” he said in his disapproving tone. He went to the door and added, “Disobedience to the Supreme Council cannot and will not be tolerated. That’s the first rule. Remember it.”

“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!

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