Heaven (8 page)

Of course,
Sam thought.
The lesser evil is always preferable, for in that manner do we minimize the total evil
.

Which is itself an evolutionary principle
, he suddenly realized. He fought to quell the flush of false pride that the discovery engendered. The Lifesoul-Giver must
have provided him with the insight.

Its truth was too compelling for it to be otherwise.

Plans? Rubbish. The trouble with plans is that something unexpected always happens. So then you have to be able to throw away
the plan and improvise. Ready, fire, aim—that’s my motto. Look where it got me.

The Little Book of Prudence

S
econd-Best Sailor awoke and wished he hadn’t. He felt as though he had been chased by a gulpmouth, ingested, digested, and
excreted. He tasted as if he had been, too. And his body, currently mottled in irregular patches, ached all over.

It was a familiar feeling. He had overcelebrated as usual, swapping sailors’ tales in the bar at Wild Weed Wasted and eating
too many algae sticks. But he was entitled to a bit of fun, wasn’t he? The trading had been profitable beyond his wildest
dreams.

As the world came into focus, he began to notice more than just his aching cartilage. The boat was rocking slightly in its
moorings—there must be a squall outside. Or maybe a big cruiseliner was about to leave port. Whatever it was, right now he
didn’t give a squirt. He rummaged through the cupboards for some medication but found none. He must have used it all up in
Coldcoast Docks. Make a mental note to get some more before setting sail . . .

Mental note!
He struggled to remember whether he had performed some essential duties, and failed. He set off through the boat, looking
for Fat Apprentice, and found him in the cargo hold, scraping barnacles off the walls.

“Did ya send an eel like I told ya?”

Physically Fat Apprentice was scraping the walls, but mentally he was somewhere else entirely. He was trying to work out how
to distinguish knowledge from opinion, and it took him a moment to realize that his captain was talking to him.

“An eel, I said! Did ya send one?”

Fat Apprentice believed in delivering more than he was asked to, a habit he had developed as a child. It had gotten him into
trouble with his fellows on many occasions. “Better, Cap’n. The post office had some silver marlon, freshly fed and ready
to go. They cost a bit more, but at least one copy ought to be there in three days. I hope that was right; it seemed real
urgent. I would’ve asked ya, but I couldn’t find y’anywhere.”

Second-Best Sailor had been touring the bars, and was probably unconscious by the time his apprentice went looking for him.
And he doubted that his crew member had made much of an effort to find him. The sooner Fat Apprentice discharged his duties,
the sooner he could hit the brightlife himself.

“Ya got copies made like I told ya? Silver marlon c’n get eaten by predators, y’know, Fatboy, even if the zygoblasts
are
quick as wormshit. Eels’re more cautious, hug the crevices. They ain’t so overconfident as marlon.”

“You told me to get the ’Thal datablet about the approaching fleet to the reefwives as quickly as possible, Cap’n. So I sent
five marlon, each with one copy.”

Second-Best Sailor did a quick mental calculation. Eels were safer, but best for nonurgent mail. The chances were about eight
out of nine that at least two marlon would get through, and only one out of eighty-one that none would. Fat Apprentice had
made a good choice.

He wondered if he had made an equally good choice when he’d entrusted a piece of his wife to the Neanderthals as instructed.
He guessed it had been a clever way to place an obligation on them. Now they were more likely to empathize with the intentions
of the reefwives of Crooked Atoll, as expressed through their husbands, and that gave the mariners—especially
him
—a trading advantage. He was sure they’d keep her safe, and after all, it was only a
piece
. And he still had a second wifepiece, so he wouldn’t lack female company and consolation on the return voyage.

He kept telling himself this, but it saddened him to lose even a piece of his wife. It was a kind of betrayal. He felt like
a monarch who had married off his favorite daughter to a rival for political gain. Still, it was the reefwives themselves
that had told him to lend her to the Neanderthal traders, and he certainly wasn’t going to disobey
them
. He wondered whether he had correctly guessed their intentions.

He doubted it.

She was a deep one, the reefmind.

In the end, four copies of the Neanderthal datablet got through to Crooked Atoll, and the first took only two days. One marlon
had been netted by fish hunters while taking a shortcut across Season’s-End Bay, and the message that it carried had gone
into the cooking pool unnoticed. The rest straggled in a day later.

The Neanderthal starship’s data reinforced and complemented what the reefwives already suspected from other sources. It also
required them to dismantle the “future” half of their existing timechunk, which had been seriously wrong in several respects—in
particular, its guesses about the content of the Neanderthal datablet and the effect of its reception upon the reefmind. A
new extrapolation inserted itself smoothly and automatically as more accurate information was fed into the network of shared
neurons, and it was as if the false perceptions had never existed. The reefmind was completely unaware that this subconscious
revisionism was going on at all times. In effect, the currently active timechunk was a constantly updated contingency plan,
seamlessly joined to a genuine historical record. It gave the reefwives a two-week head start before the invasion was due
to begin, though they did not think of things quite that way. By now their timechunk contained an extrapolation of their actions
over the succeeding two weeks, so as far as they were concerned, what they were about to initiate had already happened. To
them, past, present, and future were meaningless distinctions: Time was a fixed block of events. But the contents of that
block were ever-changing.

They knew this because they remembered previous timechunks, as they remembered
everything
. But it was in the nature of the reefwives’ perceptions that the only timechunks that could pass into long-term memory were
those that had been fully realized by actual events—the left-hand sides, so to speak, of earlier timechunks, regrouped in
consecutive pairs and arranged in temporal order. A “live” timechunk still subject to revision was held in a different region
of the collective brain.

The replanting of the lemon trees was about half finished, and Second-Best Sailor had slipped on his sailor suit to go ’bovedecks
and supervise the placement of the new roots, where mistakes were most likely. Stun was heaping compost into deep tubs set
in the foredeck and ready to receive the grafted rootstock, currently lying on the dockside, swathed in rolls of dampened
cloth. May had taken an ansible from the invisible belt at her waist and was talking animatedly to Ship about the latest news.

“Ya needs to tamp the compost firmer ’round the edges,” the mariner observed. “Otherwise the lemons’ll suffer from foot rot
if we hit too many fog banks ’round the tip of Cape Destruction.”

The Neanderthal woman smiled. She could sense that he was nervous, and not just about his precious fruit trees, so she did
her best to reassure him instead of pointing out that she knew a lot more garden-lore than he. Anyway, on this particular
item he was right: The compost did need tamping. She had been about to do just that when he had clambered out from the ’tweendecks
well.

She watched, intrigued, as the water slid off his suit. It didn’t trickle in random rivulets, as she would have expected—it
was more like a sock being pulled off a foot. When the mariner had first emerged, head vertical, tentacles trailing beneath
him, he had been encased in a thin shell of water, which seemed stuck to the suit. Then the water peeled back from top to
bottom, as if the suit itself had decided to remove it.

It made a perfectly normal puddle on the dock.

She picked up a soil hammer and began to firm up the compost while Second-Best Sailor watched over her shoulder.

“Soon’s ya finish the gardenin’, Stun, I’ll be slippin’ port,” he said. “Like to stay longer—nice places here—but it’s important
that we get back before late-season air currents set in; otherwise we’ll be weeks late and miss the meteor shower that’ll
trigger the next fertilization window.” He leaned closer and said in a hushed voice, “I been practicin’ for that with the
other bit o’ my wife, ya understand. The one I didn’t lend to you ’Thals. Reckon as how I might acquire some sons, if any
survive their time in the plankton. Not that I’d
know
, y’appreciate, but it’d be nice all the same, if you catch my drift.”

Stun straightened her back and tossed the soil hammer aside. She glanced at May, who had finished talking with Will on board
Ship and seemed agitated. “The intruders are definitely coming this way. Their infleet transmissions say that they bring a
memeplex of peace and goodwill, which is distinctly disturbing.” Her eyes narrowed.

A psychic shiver ran up Stun’s spinal cord. “You can never be sure with memeplexes,” she said. “They are reproductive. For
good or evil, they multiply. Assuming they take hold at all. Most do not . . . but the few that do make up for all the failures.”

“According to Cosmic Unity’s records, its memeplex has proved itself a fount of goodness on more than ten thousand worlds.”

“According to
their
records, yes . . .” Stun could
feel
May’s skepticism. It matched her own. “And what does Ship say, Will?”

“Ship reckons that the total number of affected worlds is 14,236, provided you count plasmoid stars and magnetotorus trails
as worlds. Plus seventeen more, currently in the process of conversion to true believers. Information on converted worlds
is remarkably scarce, almost as if it has been subjected to self-censorship. They are all closed worlds—no trading, few reasons
for anyone outside Cosmic Unity to visit them. What information there is about them is benign, possibly unbelievably so. ‘Banal’
is a better word.

“Hardly any ansible transmissions have been detected from worlds that were undergoing the conversion process. No one except
Cosmic Unity would have been able to decrypt them anyway, but there were none to decrypt. The communication blackouts appear
to have been voluntary, triggered by the need to concentrate on conversion.” Did he really believe that? May doubted it. “But
one thing is definite. Every one of those fourteen thousand worlds has been totally peaceful ever since adopting the creed
of Cosmic Unity. There have been no interplanetary wars and no international or civil wars. Not so much as a riot. The Community
of the United Cosmos is a haven of peace and tranquillity.”

Second-Best Sailor gaped at her. “What are you talking about?”

“Our new visitors.”

“Are they willing to
trade
? What goods’ve they got?”

Stun wrinkled her nose at him. “Do not ask me to help a potential competitor, Second-Best Sailor.”

“Surely ya c’n give me a few
hints
—” He broke off. His apprentices were splashing in the sea next to the boat, jabbing excitedly at something in the water.
To the amusement of the Neanderthals, he shot off down the well instead of just jumping into the sea. A few moments later,
he appeared between the two apprentices, just visible in the polluted dockside swell.

He had taken this sudden action because he’d noticed that Fat Apprentice had found a jellyfish. Short Apprentice was trying
to spear it with a bilgehook. They obviously thought it was a jelloid, whose stings could be fatal, but Second-Best Sailor
recognized it for what it was. And he had an idea why it was there.

“No!” he bellowed. The sound waves generated by his speech-siphon were strong enough to be audible from the air, despite the
ripples that broke along the boat’s hull. “Leave it out, boys! That could be a letter from
Mother
!”

If it was a message from the reefwives, it had either been dispatched long ago or it had traveled unusually quickly—probably
piggybacking on a messenger hawk flying at high altitude to catch the fastest air currents, and dropped into the ocean near
its destination. By its size, the jellyfish must have endured an arduous journey, much of it out of water, for its substance
was almost entirely dehydrated. If it
was
a message, had it survived? Would it rehydrate without serious molecular damage?

Leaving the apprentices to quiet the creature and make sure it did not get washed away by the current, Second-Best Sailor
returned to his cabin. There, he slipped out of the sailor suit and swam back outside. Even though the jellyfish was starting
to rehydrate, it seemed on the point of expiring.

He reached out one of his more sensitive tentacles, to stroke the animal’s gelatinous surface. . . .

“Ooosh!”
The expulsion of water through his siphons was involuntary. That
hurt
. The little beast had stung him.

According to plan, then.

Now he must wait while the toxins coursed through his circulatory system, up into the midbrain, and then . . .

Second-Best Sailor
, said a faint voice.
Remember this message with care, for it can be told only once
. Second-Best Sailor had no idea how this magic worked—it actually involved tailored neurotoxin chains that caused sequential
inflammatory reactions in parts of his sensorium. A molecular message system, a kind of long-distance chemical telepathy.

There followed a complicated series of instructions, but their general gist was simple. “We suspect Cosmic Unity to be a malignant
benevolent memeplex. We are making contingency plans in case we are right. Select a few nines of fellow mariners, and persuade
the ’Thals to convey them offplanet immediately and evacuate them to a suitable
safe
home for an indefinite period. Reveal our existence to them. Repeat:
Tell them that the reefmind exists
. The ingrained social prohibition is lifted, but only as far as this group of Neanderthals is concerned. The danger is great,
and concealment would now be counterproductive. Send an encryption disk to our males at Atollside Port that will link them—and,
at one remove, us—to the ’Thal ship’s ansible. We will then handle the task of convincing the ’Thals that a coral reef can
house a conscious mind. That will be easy, for our intelligence cannot possibly be attributed to you males. Tell the ’Thals
to confirm their choice for the evacuation world with us. As payment, offer them free simulations for life; do
not
delay action by attempting to bargain.”