Free Heaven by Ian Stewart

.
    Mental note!
He struggled to remember whether he had performed some essential duties, and failed. He set off through the boat, looking
     for Fat Apprentice, and found him in the cargo hold, scraping barnacles off the walls.
    “Did ya send an eel like I told ya?”
    Physically Fat Apprentice was scraping the walls, but mentally he was somewhere else entirely. He was trying to work out how
     to distinguish knowledge from opinion, and it took him a moment to realize that his captain was talking to him.
    “An eel, I said! Did ya send one?”
    Fat Apprentice believed in delivering more than he was asked to, a habit he had developed as a child. It had gotten him into
     trouble with his fellows on many occasions. “Better, Cap’n. The post office had some silver marlon, freshly fed and ready
     to go. They cost a bit more, but at least one copy ought to be there in three days. I hope that was right; it seemed real
     urgent. I would’ve asked ya, but I couldn’t find y’anywhere.”
    Second-Best Sailor had been touring the bars, and was probably unconscious by the time his apprentice went looking for him.
     And he doubted that his crew member had made much of an effort to find him. The sooner Fat Apprentice discharged his duties,
     the sooner he could hit the brightlife himself.
    “Ya got copies made like I told ya? Silver marlon c’n get eaten by predators, y’know, Fatboy, even if the zygoblasts
are
quick as wormshit. Eels’re more cautious, hug the crevices. They ain’t so overconfident as marlon.”
    “You told me to get the ’Thal datablet about the approaching fleet to the reefwives as quickly as possible, Cap’n. So I sent
     five marlon, each with one copy.”
    Second-Best Sailor did a quick mental calculation. Eels were safer, but best for nonurgent mail. The chances were about eight
     out of nine that at least two marlon would get through, and only one out of eighty-one that none would. Fat Apprentice had
     made a good choice.
    He wondered if he had made an equally good choice when he’d entrusted a piece of his wife to the Neanderthals as instructed.
     He guessed it had been a clever way to place an obligation on them. Now they were more likely to empathize with the intentions
     of the reefwives of Crooked Atoll, as expressed through their husbands, and that gave the mariners—especially
him
—a trading advantage. He was sure they’d keep her safe, and after all, it was only a
piece
. And he still had a second wifepiece, so he wouldn’t lack female company and consolation on the return voyage.
    He kept telling himself this, but it saddened him to lose even a piece of his wife. It was a kind of betrayal. He felt like
     a monarch who had married off his favorite daughter to a rival for political gain. Still, it was the reefwives themselves
     that had told him to lend her to the Neanderthal traders, and he certainly wasn’t going to disobey
them
. He wondered whether he had correctly guessed their intentions.
    He doubted it.
    She was a deep one, the reefmind.
    In the end, four copies of the Neanderthal datablet got through to Crooked Atoll, and the first took only two days. One marlon
     had been netted by fish hunters while taking a shortcut across Season’s-End Bay, and the message that it carried had gone
     into the cooking pool unnoticed. The rest straggled in a day later.
    The Neanderthal starship’s data reinforced and complemented what the reefwives already suspected from other sources. It also
     required them to dismantle the “future” half of their existing timechunk, which had been seriously wrong in several respects—in
     particular, its guesses about the content of the Neanderthal datablet and the effect of its reception upon the reefmind. A
     new extrapolation inserted itself smoothly and automatically as more accurate information was fed into the network of shared
     neurons, and it was as if the false perceptions had never existed. The reefmind was completely unaware that this