Mind Over Ship Read Online Free PDF Page A

options.
    She shrugged under his rude weight and changed the subject.
Any word from Starke?
    She’s agreed to meet with us but hasn’t set a date yet.
    Stay on top of it
. Oliver removed his fist again and chucked her under the chin. “You’re a maddeningly stubborn woman,” he said in his disapproving tone. He went to the door and added, “Disobedience to the Supreme Council cannot and will not be tolerated. That’s the first rule. Remember it.”
    “Wait,” she called after him. “Don’t you want to see my tail?”
     
     
Skipping Stones for the GEP
     
     
    It was a perfect morning for skipping stones, warm and sunny. Meewee left his Heliostream office and told his calendar to hold all calls. But by the time he took a lift up to the surface and exited the reception building, storm clouds had moved in, and a few late-season snowflakes were falling. But the cart was waiting for him, and he was wearing a smart jumpsuit with an integrated heater, so he went anyway.
    Meewee rode out to one of the hundreds of hourglass-shaped fish farming ponds that dotted the ten-thousand-acre campus of Starke Enterprises, and by the time he reached it, the sun had come out again. He parked the cart and searched the banks for throwing stones, without much hope of finding any. The Starke ponds were lined with crushed basalt: blocky stones that were good for smashing the heads of snakes but abysmal for skipping.
    Merrill Meewee knew his stones. As a boy in Kenya, skipping stones was his favorite free-time activity. There had been an abundance of saucer-shaped missiles on the banks of his father’s own fishpond. Fat, river-smoothed disks, they skipped ten, twelve, sixteen times before slipping beneath the surface with a watery plop. His father, a man of little wealth but great forbearance, was not pleased with his boy’s solitary pastime, but he never ordered him to stop. Instead, he asked the boy how many stones he thought the pond could hold. I don’t know, Meewee remembered answering. A hundred thousand?
    Oh, such a big number! And how many stones do you suppose you’ve thrown already?
    Merrill, who was an excellent student, calculated the number of stoneshe might have tossed in an hour and how many free hours were left each day after school and chores, how many afternoons in how many years since he first discovered the sport. I would estimate 14,850, he informed his father with a certain amount of swagger.
    His father was impressed. So many? And all of them have gone to the bottom?
    Of course they’ve gone to the bottom, he had said, embarrassed by his father’s apparent ignorance. They’re stones. They’re heavier than water.
    And heavier than fishes?
    Of course heavier than fishes.
    Good, good, his father concluded, patting him on the head. Keep at it, son, and soon I won’t have to work so hard.
    Father?
    It’s true. When you fill up my pond with your stones, I won’t need nets and plungers to harvest the fish. I’ll simply wade in up to my ankles and pick them like squash.
    It was a lesson in diplomacy, as much as aquaculture, and it stayed with him all these years.
    There was a splash, and Meewee looked up in time to catch a flash of fin gliding across the surface of the larger bulb of the hourglass pond. The larger bulb was for the general population, while the smaller one joined to it by a gated neck was used as a nursery and harvesting corral. The fish were a transgenic species called panasonics. In Meewee’s opinion, they weren’t a pretty animal, what with pop-eyes, slimy skin, and a protruding lower jaw lined with needlelike teeth. But they were robust, easy to farm, and, kilo for kilo, one of the most nutritious natural foods that ordinary people could still afford. They yielded heavy fillets of orangish-red flesh that was high in the omega oils not found in other freshwater varieties. And grilled with lemon pepper or served with dill sauce—oh!
    Oh, to the devil with the stones, he thought, abandoning his