We had planned to take advantage of an exclusive juve clinic on the island to shed some age. My own age-of-choice was my mid-thirties, the age at which my body was still active enough to satisfy my desires, but mellow enough to sit through long hours of creative musing. El and I had decided on the three-day sifting regimen and had skipped our morning visola to give our bodies time to excrete their cellular gatekeepers. But at the last moment, El changed her mind. She decided she ought to grow a little older to better match her new authority. So I went to the clinic alone and soaked in the baths twice a day for three days. Billions of molecular-sized janitors flowed through my skin and permeated my muscles, cartilage, bones, and nerves, politely snip, snip, snipping protein cross-links and genetic anomalies and gently flushing away the sludge and detritus of age.
I returned to the bungalow on Wednesday, frisky and bored, and volunteered to prepare it for our regular weekly salon. I had to page through a backlog of thousands of recorded greetings from our friends and associates. More confetti for El’s appointment. The salon, itself, was a stampede. More people holoed down than our bungalow could accommodate. Its primitive holoserver was overwhelmed by so many simultaneous transmissions, our guests were superimposed over one another five or ten bodies deep, and the whole squirming mass of them flickered around the edges.
Despite the confusion, I quickly sensed that this was a farewell party—for Eleanor. Our friends assumed that she would be posted on the Moon or at Mars Station, since all Tri-D posts on Earth were already filled. At the same time, no one expected me to go with her—who would? Given people’s longevity, it could take decades—or centuries—for Eleanor to acquire enough seniority to be transferred back to Earth.
By the time the last guest signed off, we were exhausted. Eleanor got ready for bed, but I poured myself a glass of scotch and went out to sit on the beach.
Wet sand. The murmur of the surf. The chilly breeze. It was a lovely equatorial dawn. “Henry,” I said, “record this.”
Relax, Sam. I always record the best of everything.
In the distance, the island’s canopy dome shimmered like a veil of rain falling into a restless sea. Waves surged up the beach to melt away in the sand at my feet. There was a ripe, salty smell of fish and seaweed and whales and lost sailors moldering in the deep. The ocean, for all its restlessness, had proven to be a good delivery medium for nanotech weapons—NASTIEs—which could float around the globe indefinitely, like particularly rude messages in tiny bottles, until they washed up on the enemy’s shore. Cozumel’s defense canopy, more a sphere than a dome, extended through the water to the ocean floor, and deep into bedrock. A legacy of the Outrage in the 2060s.
“So tell me, Henry, how are you and Cabinet getting along?” I had taken his advice and bought him more neuro-chem paste.
Cabinet is a beautiful intelligence. I consider emulating it.
“In what way?”
I may want to trifurcate my personality bud.
“So that there’s three of you? Uh, what would that accomplish?”
Then I would be more like a human.
“You would? Is that good?”
I believe so. I have recently discovered that I have but one point of view, while you have several which you can alternate at will.
“It sounds like I bought you more paste than what’s good for you.”
On the contrary, Sam. I think I’m evolving.
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. I changed the subject. “So, how do you feel about moving off-planet?”
It’s all the same to me, Sam. Have bandwidth—will travel. You’re the one to be concerned about. Have you noticed how constipated you become at low-g?
“I’m sure there’s something for that.”
But what about your work? Can you be creative so far away?
“I can always holo to Chicago. As you say, have bandwidth—” I sipped my drink and watched the sun rise from the sea. Soon I saw El strolling up the beach in her robe. She knelt behind me and massaged my shoulders.
“I’ve been neglecting you,” she said, “and you’ve been wonderful. Can you forgive me?”
“There’s nothing to forgive. You’re a busy person. I knew that from the start.”
“Still, it must be hard.” She sat in the sand next to me and wrapped her arms around me. “It’s like a drug. I’m drunk with success. But I’ll get over it. I promise.”
“There’s no need. You should enjoy it.”
“You don’t want to move off-planet, do you?”
So much for small talk. I shrugged and said, “Maybe not forever, but I could probably use a change of scene. I seem to have grown a bit fusty here.”
She squeezed me and said, “Thank you, Sam. You’re wonderful. Where do men like you come from?”
“From Saturn. We’re saturnine.”
She laughed. “I don’t think we have any posts that far out yet. But there’s a new one at Trailing Earth. I suspect that’s where they’ll be sending me. Will that do?”
“I suppose,” I said, “but on one condition.”
“Name it.”
I hadn’t had anything in mind when I said that; it had just come out. Was there something else bothering me?
Henry chimed in, Tell her to have Cabinet show me how to trifurcate.
That certainly wasn’t it, but it did help me to articulate what I was feeling. “Only this,” I said. “I realize now that you’ve been preparing yourself for this moment for most of your life. Don’t lose sight of the fact that you’re in the big league now. Don’t get in over your head too soon.”
NO SOONER HAD we returned to our Connecticut town house than another shocker hit the media. Myr Mildred Rickert, Tri-Discipline Governor posted in mid-western USNA, was missing for three hours. Eleanor blanched when she heard the news. Governor Rickert had been a dominant force in world affairs for over fifty years, and her sudden disappearance was another seismic shift in the world’s power structure. Still, she was only missing.
“For three hours?” El said. “Come on, Sam, be realistic.”
Over the next twenty-four hours, Eleanor’s security chief discreetly haunted the high-security nets to feed us details and analyses as they emerged. A homcom slug, on wildside patrol, discovered Governor Rickert’s earthly remains in and about a Slipstream car in a low-security soybimi field outside the Indianapolis canopy. She was the apparent victim of a NASTIE. Her valet system, whose primary storage container was seized by the Homeland Command and placed under the most sanitary interrogation, reported that Rickert was aware of her infection when she entered the tube car beneath her Indianapolis residential tower. She ordered the valet to use her top-security privileges to route her car out of the city and jettison it from the tube system. So virulent was the attacking NASTIE and so stubborn Rickert’s visola-induced defenses, that in the heat of cellular battle her body burst open. Fortunately, it burst within the car and contaminated only two or three square kilometers of farmland. Rickert’s quick thinking and her reliable belt system had prevented a disaster within the Indianapolis canopy. The HomCom incinerated her scattered remains after the coroner declared Myr Rickert irretrievable.
And so a plum post in the heartland was up for grabs. Eleanor turned the living room into a war room. She sent her entire staff into action. As the appointee with the least amount of seniority, she had no reasonable expectation of winning that post, but she wasn’t going to lose it for lack of trying. She lined up every chit she’d ever collected in her several careers and lobbied for all she was worth. My own sense of dread increased by the hour.
“Look,” I said, trying to talk sense to her, “you don’t imagine that this is a coincidence, do you? Your nomination and then this? Someone is setting you up. Don’t you see?”