Free Heaven by Ian Stewart Page A

subconscious
     revisionism was going on at all times. In effect, the currently active timechunk was a constantly updated contingency plan,
     seamlessly joined to a genuine historical record. It gave the reefwives a two-week head start before the invasion was due
     to begin, though they did not think of things quite that way. By now their timechunk contained an extrapolation of their actions
     over the succeeding two weeks, so as far as they were concerned, what they were about to initiate had already happened. To
     them, past, present, and future were meaningless distinctions: Time was a fixed block of events. But the contents of that
     block were ever-changing.
    They knew this because they remembered previous timechunks, as they remembered
everything
. But it was in the nature of the reefwives’ perceptions that the only timechunks that could pass into long-term memory were
     those that had been fully realized by actual events—the left-hand sides, so to speak, of earlier timechunks, regrouped in
     consecutive pairs and arranged in temporal order. A “live” timechunk still subject to revision was held in a different region
     of the collective brain.
    The replanting of the lemon trees was about half finished, and Second-Best Sailor had slipped on his sailor suit to go ’bovedecks
     and supervise the placement of the new roots, where mistakes were most likely. Stun was heaping compost into deep tubs set
     in the foredeck and ready to receive the grafted rootstock, currently lying on the dockside, swathed in rolls of dampened
     cloth. May had taken an ansible from the invisible belt at her waist and was talking animatedly to Ship about the latest news.
    “Ya needs to tamp the compost firmer ’round the edges,” the mariner observed. “Otherwise the lemons’ll suffer from foot rot
     if we hit too many fog banks ’round the tip of Cape Destruction.”
    The Neanderthal woman smiled. She could sense that he was nervous, and not just about his precious fruit trees, so she did
     her best to reassure him instead of pointing out that she knew a lot more garden-lore than he. Anyway, on this particular
     item he was right: The compost did need tamping. She had been about to do just that when he had clambered out from the ’tweendecks
     well.
    She watched, intrigued, as the water slid off his suit. It didn’t trickle in random rivulets, as she would have expected—it
     was more like a sock being pulled off a foot. When the mariner had first emerged, head vertical, tentacles trailing beneath
     him, he had been encased in a thin shell of water, which seemed stuck to the suit. Then the water peeled back from top to
     bottom, as if the suit itself had decided to remove it.
    It made a perfectly normal puddle on the dock.
    She picked up a soil hammer and began to firm up the compost while Second-Best Sailor watched over her shoulder.
    “Soon’s ya finish the gardenin’, Stun, I’ll be slippin’ port,” he said. “Like to stay longer—nice places here—but it’s important
     that we get back before late-season air currents set in; otherwise we’ll be weeks late and miss the meteor shower that’ll
     trigger the next fertilization window.” He leaned closer and said in a hushed voice, “I been practicin’ for that with the
     other bit o’ my wife, ya understand. The one I didn’t lend to you ’Thals. Reckon as how I might acquire some sons, if any
     survive their time in the plankton. Not that I’d
know
, y’appreciate, but it’d be nice all the same, if you catch my drift.”
    Stun straightened her back and tossed the soil hammer aside. She glanced at May, who had finished talking with Will on board
     Ship and seemed agitated. “The intruders are definitely coming this way. Their infleet transmissions say that they bring a
     memeplex of peace and goodwill, which is distinctly disturbing.” Her eyes narrowed.
    A psychic shiver ran up Stun’s spinal cord. “You can never be sure with memeplexes,” she said.