The Braintrust: A Harmony of Enemies Page 9

  She watched him approach, giggling.

  Amu spoke to her through the translator on his phone. “Are you available? I have money.” He waved his uncle’s twenty-dollar bill. “Do you have a friend with a larger bosom?”

  The girl’s eyes grew wide. “Wow, you sure are forward enough.” She glanced around. “You don’t want to do it here, they’ll arrest us.” She laughed. “Catch me if you can.” She dodged him and ran past a restaurant and a shop filled with fuzzy stuffed animals you could buy for the patients. She then turned right off the promenade. He sprinted after her.

  In moments they had left the promenade behind and were closing on a wide pair of ramps that led up and down to other decks. There were no other people around; Amu figured all the lazy Westerners used the elevators exclusively.

  The girl stopped at the ramp and rolled her hips against the railing. “Are you ready to do it?” she asked.

  “Yes, yes, now,” he said as he grabbed her.

  She smacked one of his hands away, but he still had a grip on her with the other. “What are you doing? Do you think I’m a hooker?”

  Now Amu was confused. “Of course.”

  She slapped his face. “Idiot.” She smacked him again. “Pervert.”

  “Hey!” Amu had rapidly moved beyond confusion into anger. No woman should slap a man like that! He swung his fist at her face, and although she leaned away from the punch, he connected.

  The girl jerked her other arm free and stepped back. A wicked smile lit her face despite the bruise forming under her left eye. “Thank you,” she said, and proceeded to put all her weight into a jab to his solar plexus.

  Amu found himself unable to breathe, much less defend himself. She kicked him in the knee, and he went down on the other knee with a shriek as she chopped his throat, doubling the difficulty he was having catching a breath.

  He watched helplessly as she pushed him onto his back. How quickly things could go wrong, he thought almost philosophically. He could only gaze at her as she pulled her right arm back, twisting her whole upper body for a full-strength strike. Only then did he notice the enormous ring she wore. He thought it was going to hurt a lot.

  She struck just beneath his eye. His head bounced off the rubbery-but-still-hard deck covering, and suddenly the eye now swelling shut hardly hurt at all.

  The girl stood up and pulled her cell from her hip pocket. After she called the police, she muttered something his phone translated as “One down, two to go,” but that seemed unlikely.

  ***

  Jamal once again congratulated himself on his foresight in putting tracking software on Amu’s phone. After getting Amu’s text, he called Marjan and ran to meet him on the Chiron’s promenade. They came around the corner just in time to see a skinny little teenage hooker knock Amu to the floor.

  Jamal’s anger at his brother quickly transformed into fury at the infidel slut who had beaten him. He reached under his shirt for his chura, too angry to remember the cameras.

  But Marjan had not forgotten. “Jamal!” he hissed. “Stop!” Marjan grabbed Jamal’s arm as the vengeful brother pulled the knife from its sheath.

  Then Marjan saw more bad news approaching. “Look! Police!”

  Jamal froze. He felt his heart skip a beat as he watched two men wearing yellow shirts with black shoulder patches, black pants, and thick leather utility belts hustle toward the girl.

  He’d seen a number of people wandering the decks with yellow shirts and black pants, but he hadn’t realized they were police till now.

  And then he realized how to find Jameela.

  He was distracted from this satisfying insight as he watched the police roughly drag Amu to his feet and cuff him. Why were they cuffing him, not the slut who’d beaten him so horribly? How could a little teenage slut best his brother like that anyway? And why were the police laughing and chatting with the slut when it was obvious that Amu, who could barely stand, was the victim?

  Amu started to fall again and a policeman with rage in his eye dragged him upright. Jamal reached once again for his chura, but he realized, without Marjan’s warning this time, that it would be a mistake. He let his hand fall. He was here to gain vengeance against a wife who had struck her own husband. He had to let the infidels go. Amu would understand.

  At least Amu’s denigration had not been wasted. Foolish he might have been, but he had, with this incident, put Jamal on Jameela’s track.

  It was obvious, once you thought it through. What would that bitch do when she got to the BrainTrust? You had to have a job to be allowed to stay here. Would she work as a waitress? They didn’t even have waitresses. The bots did all the food service.

  No, Jameela would join the police force. It was her only skill.

  All Jamal had to do was check with the police stations, which were surely few in number. At one of them he would find her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  For a Little Trouble More

  People are invariably smarter than their political beliefs.

  Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman, SeaSteading

  Dash worked her way through the list of final candidates. She had met Randa Saunders, aka Pipelines, Lucas Kahn of automotive subcomponents, Tom Kovern the financial forecaster, and Ryan Morgan, who stiffly explained that he did voter behavior correction. She was puzzled by this last one until he explained in exasperation that it was like psychohistory, “Not that you would know anything about that, either.” Dash had simply raised an eyebrow, and replied, “I doubt Harry Seldon would believe the analogy, Mr. Morgan. Psychohistorical analysis requires aggregation of a population so large it would encompass multiple planets.” Morgan was so surprised he almost choked, but after that he behaved quite well.

  She was exhausted by the time the last candidate entered her office.

  Clint Maupin stepped into the room with the aid of a cane. Two other men accompanied him. The younger one, who had a stocky build and had probably been a football player in his younger days, rubbed his hands together and introduced everyone. “Dr. Dash, this is my father, your patient. I’m Cliff Maupin, and this is our lawyer, Aaron Wright.” Dash looked at the lawyer curiously. A lawyer? Why bring a lawyer with them? After they were seated, Dash went into the explanation of what would happen once more. If she had to do this again, she thought she might do well to record it and just play it back. The lawyer peppered her with questions about what could go wrong. “What if the replicating factories didn’t stop replicating?” They could not replicate, she explained patiently, outside the hydrogen peroxide bath in which they were prepared. “What if the telomeres got attached to the cell wall, not the nucleus body?” Then we would look upon it with amazement, though it would be as unlikely to be harmful as it would be unlikely to happen in the first place. And so on.

  In the end, Clint Maupin leaned forward on his cane and rose. “I’m eager to give this a go,” he said. “Any objections?”

  Cliff answered smoothly, “No, Dad.”

  “No, sir,” the lawyer confirmed.

  As Clint reached the door, his son put a hand on his shoulder. “Aaron and I want just a couple last words with the doctor, Dad. We’ll catch up with you in a minute.” His father grunted and continued out the door.

  As Cliff turned back to Dash, Byron came rushing in, halting upon seeing that Dash still had company. “Excuse me,” he said.

  “No problem,” Cliff said. “Just give us just a moment.” He turned to loom menacingly over Dash. “I and my lawyer just wanted to warn you, Doctor, that if this treatment kills my father, we will sue you till your eyes bleed.”

  Dash frowned. Cliff was invading her personal space, but she stood her ground. “You clearly have not read the contract, Mr. Maupin.”

  He took another step closer. Byron straightened, ready to intercede.

  Cliff spoke again. “I guarantee we can make you suffer.”

  She looked down at her list of notes. She did not feel particularly intimidated—all Americans were tall, so she had got
ten pretty immune to being massively outsized. But neither did she want to have to deal with this person in the quite possible event of a complicated outcome. “Well, as it happens, it won’t be a problem,” Dash said firmly. “We already have enough volunteers for our first experiment.”

  Byron gave a little start of surprise, and Aaron interjected. “Our understanding was that he was already accepted.” He paused, clearly relishing his next words. “We naturally expect compensation if he is cut from the program so late in the process.”

  Dash was contemplating how to express her opinion of this absurdity when Cliff turned to the lawyer and shook his head. “No, no, it’s all right.” He glanced over his shoulder at Dash. A look of delight filled his face for a moment, then his expression darkened. “Let’s get out of here,” he said angrily.

  Byron watched them thoughtfully as they departed. “That bastard doesn’t want his father to be rejuvenated. He wants his father to die.”

  Dash looked at Byron in slowly growing horror. “Of course. Oh, my.”

  “Should we let Mr. Maupin into the program just to stiff his son? Their threats to sue you are pretty foolish out here on the BrainTrust.”

  Dash sighed, then shook her head. “No. Satisfying as that would be, as we explained in our original request for patients, the families need to be supportive.”

  “What about Carl?” Byron asked. “He has no family at all.”

  “At least,” Dash answered, “Carl is merely alone. He is much luckier, and a much better candidate, than poor Mr. Maupin.”

  Byron shook his head. “Poor Mr. Maupin,” he muttered. “I guess even being a billionaire doesn’t solve all your problems.”

  “Not if you have family,” Dash agreed. “And if you have no family, you have a different kind of problem.”

  “I still hate them all,” Byron muttered.

  ***

  Amu looked around the room where he would be judged. At least, “a judging” was the best interpretation he could make of the somewhat odd translations his phone was giving him regarding the proceedings. He might not have understood the phone as well as he should. Part of his problem was that his head was still a little muzzy. And his one eye was now throbbing. It was swollen shut.

  The room was quite bare. There was no jury box, much less the kind of jury he had seen on Western TV. The only people here were the judge, the hooker, a severe older Western woman in business attire, and a pair of peacekeepers glowering at his side. They acted as if he were the dangerous one, when in fact he was obviously the victim.

  The judge—was he a judge?—rapped a wooden block on the table in front of him. “I am Mediator Joshua Pickett. The two parties to the dispute are here?”

  The hooker, who was now wearing a peacekeeper’s uniform, spoke first. “Yes, Sir. Ping, Sir.”

  Mediator Joshua’s eyes lit with surprise. “Ping. I’ve heard of you.” He turned to Amu. “And you are?”

  Amu swallowed hard. “Amu Yousafzai. Sir.”

  “Amu, then. Very well.” Joshua looked at the older woman, whose presence was apparently as mysterious to the judge as it was to Amu. “Amanda? What are you doing here?”

  “Just a friend of the mediation, Joshua. I happen to know Ping, since she’s stationed on the Chiron. And of course a peacekeeper having a violent encounter with a tourist on Elysian Fields is a serious matter. Colin thought a member of the Board should be present, and he suggested I attend.”

  “Colin.” To Amu, it seemed that the judge put a great deal of weight into that name, whoever he was. “I see.”

  Mediator Joshua took a deep breath. “Let’s see the video.”

  The screen on the side wall lit up in a location where everyone could see the events. Amu watched with his good eye as his encounter with the hooker was displayed on the screen: he followed Ping around the corner, confronted her, grabbed her, and got beaten into hamburger. He started to sweat. He was perfectly innocent of any wrongdoing. She was just a hooker! But the video looked very bad. His brother had insisted over and over that punishments on board the BrainTrust were minor matters. They never cut off a person’s hand or stoned him to death like they did back home. But watching this replay made him realize just how much trouble he would be in if these people were sufficiently incensed about his assault on a peacekeeper. He shuddered to think what the police would do to a person who attacked a policeman back home. He blurted, “I am sorry. I had no idea your hookers could also work as policemen.” Surely they would understand his confusion?

  Mediator Joshua stared at him for a long moment, then buried his head in his hands. He muttered something that Amus’s translator interpreted as, “This is not funny. This is a serious matter.”

  The mediator put his hands back on the table, his face once again a mask of objectivity.

  “As nearly as I can tell, no damage was done to anyone except for, ahem, Mr. Yousafzai. Correct?”

  The hooker sported a good bruise herself. Amu expected her to make an issue of it, but she simply stood at attention and answered, “Yes, sir. No harm, sir.”

  Joshua turned to Amanda. “Has Amu here received medical attention?”

  “Yes, he’s received first aid. He’ll have a nice scar under that eye, but perhaps it’ll serve as a reminder to treat women a bit better.”

  “Not our business, Amanda.” He took another deep breath. “Ms. Ping.”

  Once more she snapped to attention. “Yes, sir!”

  Joshua closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “Amu was a guest on Elysian Fields. Surely you were told on arrival to treat tourists with the utmost respect even when they are being, ahem, irritating. I would have expected that a person with your skills—yes, I told you I’ve heard about you—a person with your skills would have been able to subdue a guest with less permanent damage.”

  The hooker leaned her head sideways uncertainly. “He is much larger than I am.”

  The mediator grunted. Disregarding the hooker’s response, he continued, “And loath as I am to defend Mr. Yousafzai here, I am almost sympathetic with his interpretation of your behavior and attire as that of a…”

  As the mediator struggled, Amu interjected, “Hooker.”

  Joshua rolled his eyes. “Indeed.” He looked hard at Ping. “As a peacekeeper, you must strive to uphold a higher standard of behavior, even off-duty. Perhaps you could see your way clear to wear a little more clothing in the future?”

  Ping frowned. “But if I had done that, he probably would have assaulted another guest. I wasn’t dressed any differently than many of the women on Elysian Fields.”

  Amu helpfully offered, “That is true. There are many hookers there.”

  Joshua winced. Disregarding Amu, he answered Ping. “I see your point.”

  A moment’s silence, and the judge pounded his block of wood again. “Very well. Mr. Yousafzai is to be taken to temporary holding and placed on the first ferry departing for a suitable port to return to his home country. Questions?”

  Amu suddenly realized he’d been holding his breath, wondering how many lashes he would be given. They were just sending him home. What a wonderful outcome, just as Jamal had said!

  On his way to the ship’s brig, the guards allowed him to stop in a restroom. He looked at himself in the mirror. The swelling had subsided somewhat and he could see the outlines of the scar the older woman said he’d have. He rather thought it would give him a rugged look. The girls back home might appreciate this proof of his manly toughness, a reminder of his participation in the faraway battle to regain the honor of his family.

  As long as the girls didn’t hear that he’d gotten it from a teenage hooker. Perhaps that part of the story need not be told.

  ***

  The meeting with the Maupins had left a bad taste in her mouth, so Dash was pleasantly surprised when Colin tapped lightly on her door. “I promised you a visit to one of the nuclear reactors. Is now a good time?”

  “Oh, my, yes.” Dash grabbed her tablet and was out the do
or.

  Down the elevator they went to the orlop deck, which was the bottom-most deck of the entire ship. The theme here in the bowels of the vessel was Tundra. Dash felt a chill just looking at the murals of ice floes covering the walls of the passages. She would have gotten quite lost, she suspected, but Colin moved with the sureness of someone who had spent a lot of time here.

  He eventually led her into a tiny room with dimmed lights. A dozen computer screens adorned the walls. Dash glanced at the screens. “Two of them,” she whispered to avoid distracting the two men looking intently at one of the displays. “I suspected you had two of them aboard each ship. Are they in the pylons?” The pylons were a pair of dixie cup-shaped protrusions that extended downward from the bottom of each isle ship’s hull. Roughly six decks in depth, the pylons were constructed of reinforced concrete just like the hull itself. “The first time I saw the plans for a generic isle ship, I thought the pylons would make excellent places to house compact nuclear reactors.” She paused. “Of course, I am sure the pylons are also very helpful in maintaining stability during ocean storms.” She glanced mischievously at Colin. “So you did not quite lie to the media about the purpose of the pylons.”

  Colin ducked his head and gave her an equally mischievous smile. “It would be poor engineering to have the pylons serve only one purpose,” he agreed, “though I find that most people think that one purpose is, in general, sufficient.”

  The taller of the two men turned at the sound of their voices. “Colin?” He peered at them. “Good to see you.”

  “You too.” Colin performed a brief introduction. “Rhett, this is Dash, our newest medical research lead and project owner. She is also a, um, nuclear reactor cognoscente.”

  Rhett was dressed in the style of a cowboy. He wore a western-cut blue shirt which closed with studs tucked into tight black jeans. His boots seemed better suited to the sandy towns and hills of Arizona that Dash had seen in numerous cowboy movies. Of course, the decks of isle ships put no serious demands on any form of footwear; more than one admin in her own research area wore high heels. Dash suspected Rhett had earned those boots the hard way, since his face had the deep lines of someone who had spent much time in the sun.