Heaven by Ian Stewart Page B

unexpressed judgment.
    “Transpods will be more effective,” she replied, speaking her thoughts out loud.
    “Correct. Ship is creating a suitable environment on board, where space is all but limitless, but the transpods cannot carry
     enough seawater.” Which reminded him. “Tell Stun to get the analysis of dissolved minerals in No-Moon’s oceans sent up to
     Ship as quickly as possible. And pay careful attention to the isotope proportions. The reefwives say that their husbands are
     very sensitive to deuterium imbalances.”
    May hung the ansible back on her invisible belt and set off in search of the polypoid captain. The strange sense of apprehension
     that had dogged her these past few days was much sharper now that she could put a name to it. But were the approaching strangers
     truly a menace, as the reefwives feared? Even they were unsure.
    The uncertainty worried her. Cosmic Unity’s declarations of universal love worried her more. It all added up to impending
     trouble. But what
kind
of trouble? She hadn’t a clue.
    Her mind returned to the task at hand. She had left Second-Best Sailor on his boat, kitting out his two apprentices and fifteen
     other mariners. He had had enough difficulty persuading those to accompany him offplanet, even with dire warnings of impending—but
     unspecified—doom. Now she was going to have to tell him to find twenty or thirty more.
    It wasn’t only Will who needed to be very persuasive.
    While she was doing that, Will was delving through Ship’s records, trying to find the best choice of a destination. It shouldn’t
     be too close—there was no point in evacuating the mariners to a world that would shortly suffer the same fate as their own.
     But it shouldn’t be too far, either.
    He had called up a three-dimensional star map of the local zone, a cube of space some five thousand light-years wide. The
     worlds currently embracing Cosmic Unity glowed lime green, and the frontiers of that religion’s expansion were highlighted
     in yellow. A long streak of yellow, running along the spine of the Trailing Spiral Arm, was pointing straight at No-Moon.
     They were coming, and they were coming fast. This memeplex was a powerful one, and no mistake. He began to appreciate
why
the reefwives wanted a random selection of their husbands evacuated from their homeworld before Cosmic Unity’s peace mission
     arrived in planetary orbit.
    The star map would help him to decide on a good choice of world to receive the evacuated mariners. The Tweel engineers had
     well-defined priorities, but these contradicted the advice of the Cyldarian ecologists. It was hard to gain consensus. The
     Cyldarians didn’t help. One of them was adamant that what mattered most was climate and atmosphere; another flatly contradicted
     this, insisting that what really mattered was the existence of at least one large sea, preferably an ocean. With an acceptable
     chemical composition, of course—that was one thing they both agreed on.
    The only thing, it seemed.
    Will valued diversity of opinion, because constructive dissent generally led to more effective decisions and kept everything
     functioning effectively. Nothing made Ship more sluggish than mere conformity. But dissent cannot continue indefinitely, and
     eventually he was forced to offer one of the Cyldarians a small inducement to shut up. The bribe worked like a charm, and
     within ten minutes, Ship had marked out six likely candidates in blue. Another ten minutes’ work by the Cyldarians and Tweel
     reduced that number to just one.
    Hoping that further study would not reduce it to zero, Will called up the data for this sole remaining candidate. It was a
     fairly ordinary world. Its main planetological features were two large polar icecaps. At their fringes they produced copious
     quantities of meltwater that fed a network of underground aquifers. Much of the land above was tundra, scrub, and desert.
     The aquifers fed into a single ocean, covering