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Nick's next visit to the yacht he entered the corridor housing the ship's
medirobots and read the biological specifications on Fowler Aristov,
the would-be colonist mentor who still reposed there in the deep freeze.
Not Nick's ideal of a body for himself, but acceptable, he supposed, in an
emergency.
But what about Jenny? She came first. He must find the right fleshly envelope
for her, even if he failed to accomplish as much for himself. And among the
organic females currently available, none, in Nick's opinion, came up to the
standard of beauty that was required.
No, he had better stick to method one. Given sufficient time and care,
human bodies could certainly be grown in the station's artificial wombs. There
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was an overabundance of zygotes aboard the station among which to rummage
for desirable genetics.
Despite the scrambled records, a suitable pair could certainly be located,
given time for the slow mechanical search required.
That, of course, was only the beginning. Assuming that suitable bodies for
himself and Jenny could be grown, the next step, loading their
personalities into those immature brains, was surely going to present new
difficulties. According to the plan he'd worked out with Freya , that
phase would have to be
2
accomplished concurrently with the process of organic growth.
Organic brains and minds would have to be fabricated in successive
levels of refinement, as a sculptor cuts away the stone in finer and finer
increments.
And either method, stealing bodies or growing them, would eventually
require that the information-storage masses in which the two disembodied
people now resided-three skulls' volume each-be physically moved to the
place where the organic vessels were being prepared.
Several members of Dirac's crew, now even Brabant and
Engadin to some degree, were growing increasingly dissatisfied with his
continued emphasis on somehow recouping his personal losses.
The political adviser scooped up a handful of tiles and let them go
clattering to the deck, then watched moodily as a small machine came
rushing to arrange the statglass rectangles in some kind of order. Varvara
brooded: "First we spent our days searching for a woman who wasn't
here when the berserkers came. Now we're looking for a tile, a single tile,
that no one in
God's universe could find!"
The bodyguard, grumbling in general agreement, compared the latter task to
that of locating one star in the Galaxy, without a chart.
Dirac's adviser and mistress urged: "We've fought the berserker to a
standstill. What we ought to be trying to do now, and I've already told him
so, is get the whole station free of its grip. All right, sure, save the tiles
if we can. The best way to do that is to go after the berserker now and make
sure that it's dead."
"You mean go aboard it?"
"That's what I mean. Dangerous, sure. But if we wake up and think we'll
realize that just staying here, devoting ourselves to meaningless
tasks, is suicidal. If the berserker doesn't get us, the nebula is sooner or
later going to close in and we'll be trapped."
"So? What do we do?"
"If repairing the yacht is really out of the question, then we must
go aboard the berserker, make sure it's dead, and find some way to
manipulate its drive. That's the only way we can start ourselves
back in the right direction. That method saves the protolives as well;
we can tow the station and its cargo out of the nebula again."
Everyone agreed on at least one point: If they maintained their present
course, heading straight into the nebula, sooner or later they would
inevitably get trapped in a shifting of the Mavronari's clouds, caught so that
centuries instead of days of travel would be needed to restore them to their
homes.
After long days of searching through cargo bins and various pieces
of equipment, it still seemed impossible to determine whether or not
the tile containing Lady Genevieve's donation had ever been turned over to
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the filing system. The problem of finding this protochild among nearly a
billion others appeared to be practically impossible.
Barring success with the software, the only way to locate one tile among the
billion might be to have people, or robots, physically examine all the
stored tiles, one after another. "Is there only one machine on board
designed to do such testing? Get through a million tiles a year, and we
can finish the job in only ten centuries."
"Of course the chances are we'd find it in half that time."
Something like a hundred thousand tiles per standard month.
That would mean three thousand a day. More than a hundred an hour.
Neither Zador or Hoveler could remember what had been done with that
particular tile, in the panicky moments right after the alert was sounded,
other than that it had been put down either on the arm of Hoveler's chair or
on the edge of his console.
On several details the two bioworkers' memories were in conflict.
Well, organic brains tended toward the unreliable in many ways.
Nevertheless Dirac continued to insist that a strong effort be made to
find his family donation. The Premier had now publicly announced that he
might be able to reclaim Jenny only by reconstituting her from her
genes. Of course his wife's full genetic code would not be available from
the zygote, but that would provide a start. And the full code might
be here somewhere.
Sometimes parents who donated a protochild to the colonizing project
were asked to leave their own complete genetic records as well. Neither
Hoveler nor Zador knew with certainty whether this had been done in the case
of the Lady Genevieve. If it had, and the specimen could be found, then
cloning should be possible. Zador and Hoveler themselves had performed
such procedures in the past, for special medical reasons.
Dirac at about this time unveiled a surprise: a personal service system, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]