GREEDY

2404 CE

“Her?” Gene Hackshaw stared at the scruffy little girl from Japan, a question-mark cowlick standing up from her head. “Goro, is she the best you’ve got?” The girl they were looking at scratched at a cableport in her left temple, and stuck her little finger in her mouth. A red candy smear blotched her lower lip. Their words didn’t seem to interest her.

“The very best, Gene. Miyako passed every test we gave her, perfect score. Hello, Bedbug,” Goro wiggled fingers at the girl, and she wiggled hers back at him. “It’s playtime. Show this big man what you can do in the sim.”

She turned and eeled inside the simulator so fast that Gene blinked. The tiny hatch slammed shut.

“Wow,” Gene said.

“Yeah,” said Goro. “Come watch, now.” They walked over to a room-size holotank, and Goro and Gene picked up voicelinks and plugged in. A gray-bluish sphere, striations circling its sunward side, hung hazily at their left. A scattering of small spheres, gray, white and ivory, scarred and crazed with the wounds of airless moons, floated here and there: Miranda, Titania, Oberon. In a neat dotted circle about the large sphere hung great disks of soft light.

“Okay, Bedbug,” said Goro. “Take us on a ride around Uranus. Show Dr. Hackshaw the smelters. Then land us at Oberon Guidance Port.”

Ready, came the signal, a small bloom of red letters in the tank‘s center. Then, Hang On. The whole tank seemed to tilt, and Gene put a hand on the railing in front of him, catching breath and balance; the large sphere swung closer, and the shining disks and the moons whisked up out of view.

The tank took them on a plunge into the cloudtops of Uranus, then angled back out again, at a speed many times that of any spacecraft.

“Slower, Bedbug,” Goro said gently. “You’re too fast for us old guys.” A girl’s giggle sounded lightly in Gene‘s voicelink, and the movement settled back to a less-dizzying pace. Now they were moving up and out through the Uranian rings, shining in the dim sunlight. At nineteen times the distance of Earth from the sun, everything in sunlight looked shadowy, even in the amplified display of the holotank.

They skimmed around Uranus, the roiling clouds gray-bluish at the base of the tank, the ring riding precisely above them like a knife ready to split them all in half. Then Miyako‘s voice chanted, “Cordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona,” and “Juliet, Portia, Rosalind, Belinda, Puck, Puck, Puck,”, and the tank took them up past the scar-stamped moon Miranda, drawing them closer to a disk of light that grew until its circumference touched the edges of the tank‘s display.

“Smelter Four,” Goro said.

“So this is where they’re spinning steel.” Gene pointed to a speck near the center of the disk. “Can she take us there with the simulator?”

“Bedbug, can you put us next to the smelter there?” Goro raised a tank pointer and shot a thin white beam at the speck.

Hang On, came the signal. Abruptly the disk swallowed the whole display, and they plunged toward a growing dark speck that grew large; here was where Hau Ren made their starship-stuff. The display came to a stop with the smelter a kilometer away; a tiny ship, a freighter no doubt, was a shadow at the smelter’s dock.

“Wait a minute,” Gene said. “Is the sim using real-time data for this?”

Goro nodded. “Close. Light-delay only; just under three hours ago, that ship was docked and unloading dopants and virals for sponge steels.”

The Earth was at the time about twenty times as far from Uranus as it was from the Sun, so the light delay would be a little under three hours.

“She really moves her craft around,” Gene said. “This acceleration we’re seeing is just to speed things up for us, isn’t it?”

Goro smiled. “Only partly. When she heads out to the Cloud, she’ll handle a hundred Gs over a good stretch.”

Gene was stunned. “What? That’s impossible for humans!”

Goro held up both hands. “Hey, don’t look at me. She went on some live test rides out at Bonneville, and monkeyed with the monitors. While we watched, she pushed thrust way up above the programmed limits. She came out fine. I was so pissed and so scared, I couldn’t talk to her. I thought her brain was squashed. She’s amazing.” He peeled the end of an orange candyjack and stuck it inside his left cheek. His eyes widened a bit with the electric jolt. “She gets this kick, like she’s the whole ship, and the ship is just her. She always wants new cables to her body with more sensors, more motors. Greedy little thing. She’s tried out the anti-G fluid tank — loves it.”

“Why doesn’t she talk?”

“It’s a special form of autism. We’ve got five other kids in training, a lot like her. But none so good.”