Counting Heads

2.2

“That about covers it,” Eleanor Starke said. “Let’s move on to new business.”

The regularly scheduled board meeting of the Garden Earth Project was entering its third hour without a break. This was of no inconvenience to the ten members who had sent proxies to attend in their place. The only two members attending in realbody, Alblaitor and Meewee, fidgeted in their seats. Eleanor Starke, who was returning from space, chaired the meeting via holopresence. Her image sat at the head of the table. Behind her stood her Cabinet’s chief of staff, and behind it, a window wall overlooking the serrated landscape of the Starke Enterprises Southern Indiana headquarters. Except for the reception building, in which they met, the Starke facilities were located underground, leaving the ten-thousand acre campus free for tilt-slab soybimi cultivation.

“Merrill,” Eleanor said, “we’ll move your report to the end, if you don’t mind. I want to hear about Adam’s breakthrough discovery first.”

Merrill Meewee nodded; agenda order meant little at a Starke meeting. He glotted to his mentar, Arrow, Send in more coffee. And ask Zoranna if she wants anything.

Meewee attended in realbody because he was a Starke employee in the Heliostream Division and was able to come up from his office. He wore his trademark outfit: vermilion overalls with purple piping and a scarlet yoke, perhaps inspired by the ecclesiastic garments he used to wear a lifetime ago.

Zoranna Alblaitor was present in realbody because she had been conducting business in Illinois and had dropped in to visit. Or to snoop, Meewee suspected.

“I’d hardly call it a breakthrough, Eleanor,” Adam Gest’s proxy said. “More like the results of patient plodding.” The proxy was a projection of Gest’s head, shoulders, and right arm that he had made specifically for this meeting before going to bed last night at Trailing Earth. Like the other proxies, it floated serenely over its empty chair at the table.

“Call it whatever you want,” Eleanor chided him, “just show it to us. Let’s wrap this up.”

“Gladly,” said Gest-by-proxy. “Let’s start with our Oship at rest.” A model of the project’s recently completed Oship, the ESV Garden Kiev, appeared above the table. It was a double hoop of hab drums, like two giant donuts stacked together. The drums spun ponderously on a lattice superstructure, one hoop clockwise, the other counter. In reality, each hab drum was large enough to contain a small city and its surrounding countryside, and each of the hoops contained sixty-four such drums. Generous living space for a million people.

Meewee watched and listened closely. He felt it essential that he understand all aspects of the project, even though the engineering details usually went over his head.

“Now bring it to 0.267 light speed,” the Gest proxy continued.

The model’s hab drums ceased rotating—gravity would now be supplied by acceleration—and a radial wire frame appeared inside the donut holes to represent the electromagnetic propulsion target—the torus. The model seemed to be moving through a star field.

“It’ll take two hundred years of constant particle bombardment by Heliostream lasers to attain this relativistic speed,” the proxy explained. “The problem is that in two hundred years we’re bound to come up with numerous improvements for translating photons to propulsion. Until now we’ve been unsure how to incorporate design updates in an active torus generator while the Oship is receding in excess of a quarter light speed. Our so-called breakthrough came when we realized—”

“Eleanor?” Meewee said, interrupting the proxy. Eleanor was gone. Her holo had vanished. The proxies looked around at each other.

“Hey, Cabinet,” said the Jaspersen proxy. Cabinet was missing too.

They waited awhile longer, but Eleanor’s image did not return, and the proxy of Trina Warbeloo, the Garden Earth board secretary, said, “It’s undoubtedly a comm glitch. Eleanor, can you hear me?”

“I move we take a break while it’s being fixed,” Zoranna said and rose from the table. Merrill, she glotted to Meewee, Nick reports big trouble. I’m getting out of here.

Just then, Eleanor Starke’s image was reestablished. Its scape was roughly cropped, revealing a vignette of her and her surroundings aboard her yacht. She was pressing a hand against the fuselage window and speaking to someone unseen.

When she noticed the board members, she turned to them and lowered her hand. “I have an emergent situation here. I’ll rejoin you when I can.” With that, her holospace shrank to a dot, morphed into the Starke Enterprises sig, and faded away.

“Wait, Eleanor! What sort of situation?” Jaspersen’s proxy demanded. “Eleanor!” Jaspersen’s proxy was a head shot only, no shoulders, not even a neck, and it looked like a bobbing toy balloon.

“Arrow,” Meewee commanded his mentar, “show us Eleanor’s ship.”

The large Oship model was replaced by a live image captured by Heliostream satellites of Eleanor’s yacht tumbling in a fiery arc over the Pacific.

“No!” Meewee said. “That’s not possible.”

“Merrill, compose yourself,” snapped Jaspersen’s proxy. “Adam, do something.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Gest’s proxy replied, but everyone knew what Jaspersen meant. It was Gest’s company, Aria Yachts, that had designed and built Starke’s Songbird. The Gest proxy vanished and was replaced by a holo of Adam Gest, himself, in his bathrobe. He studied the stricken ship and said, “Listen, everyone, it’s going to be all right. Even with total avionics failure, Eleanor’s yacht has a passive fail-safe system. It simply cannot crash.”

Oh my God, Zoranna said to Meewee. Nick says he’s lying.

Gest plotted the Songbird’s trajectory, and unless the yacht’s fail-safe system kicked in soon, it would strike Earth in the western foothills of the Andes. The other proxies were being replaced, as their owners in time zones around the globe were alerted to the crisis.

“This can’t be happening,” said Trina Warbeloo in a bathing suit.

“No one can kill Eleanor,” said Jaspersen, sitting up in bed. “Though many have tried.”

He knows something, Zoranna said. He’s in on it.

In on what? Meewee shot back.

They lost their visual feed, and a globe with a tiny ship icon replaced it. As the members watched in grim silence, the icon representing the Songbird fell in an unbroken arc and disappeared in central Bolivia. Minutes crawled by, and the board members continued to watch the spot on the globe.

Finally, Jaspersen said, “What about rescue attempts?”

Zoranna said, “Teams have been dispatched.”

“What about Cabinet?” Andie Tiekel said. “Cabinet, are you there?”

No response.

“This is a black black day,” Jaspersen said. The others stared openly at him. “What?” he said.

Warbeloo said, “I move we adjourn for one hour. I’m sure we all have much to attend to.”

The motion was seconded and carried, and one by one the holoscapes closed, leaving Zoranna and Meewee alone in the conference room. “I don’t believe it,” Meewee said. “It didn’t happen.”

“Believe it,” Zoranna said as she came around the table on her way to the door.

“Where are you going, Zoe?”

“Home.”

“Now?”

Zoranna paused next to the door. “Oh, Merrill, don’t be so dense. I love Eleanor as much as you, but face it—no one of her stature has died since Stalin. I don’t believe her death was an accident, and neither did anyone else here. And until we know who killed her and why, I’d prefer to stay safely tucked away in my little fortress by the sea. I suggest you go somewhere safe yourself, Merrill, and watch your back.”

Meewee stayed on in the boardroom alone with his mentar, Arrow. Before long, pictures of the crash scene started coming through from the local witness and media bees, and Arrow displayed them for him. The Starke Songbird had gouged a trench in a soccer field. The damage was impressive. The medevac teams arrived—jennys and jerrys—and they sent the bees away. Meewee realized he hadn’t had the chance to give Eleanor and the board his report. His report was about plans for the launch ceremony. The Garden Kiev was scheduled to launch from Trailing Earth in three months. Meewee was in charge of the festivities. It was going to be an occasion to celebrate the project’s first triumph.