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member of the class was
assigned a character from the moment to create a hologram of: Brutus and the
other conspirators, passing Roman citizens and so on. These were to be made
complete not only in surface detail, but also with an interior monologue which
observers could access as they wandered through the scene. Athena had had a
couple of good years academically, so her peers entrusted her with the
centrepiece of the tableau, Caesar himself, just at the moment of being stabbed.
What none of her school fellows had really noticed was that Athena’s grades had
been in free-fall for a few months and that she had been resting on what had
been considerable laurels.
    It
was hard to say what had led to this decline in academic prowess; she had
really just lost interest in the whole process of education and had begun to
drift. Her teacher had picked up on the tiny cues which her body language gave
off as she attended, there in body but not in mind, the classes the robot gave.
Her slightly dilated pupils, the angle at which she tilted her head, the sleepy
rhythm of her breathing. It read the signs and went through the usual routines
to focus her attention, pleading, exhorting, nagging, until finally it backed
away from her, sensing that nothing it could do would reawaken the interest she
had once felt, that any such academic renaissance would have to come from
within herself.
    Which
was all well and good, but it unfortunately left her with the problem of a
piece of work vital not only to her but to a dozen other kids, which was due in
the next day and which she had not even started. She began the work,
constructing as clear a mental picture as she could of the Roman leader,
projecting it into an imager, tweaking it, revising it, working on every aspect
of its appearance and its mannerisms. At about one o’clock in the morning, it
became clear that there was no chance of her finishing, no chance at all.
    Waves
of anguished despair swept through her, and a profound feeling of shame and
defeat. It was her first public humiliation and the memory of it made her blush
until her ears burned, years later. And now the same feelings were beginning to
form within her once again. Half a lifetime away, and half the cosmos away from
the planet where she grew up.
    With
the loss of the mining equipment went all their ability to create iron sheeting
and girders. The initial buildings of each town were in place, roughly
constructed from carbolite panels harvested from Cassini, but that was all. At
least the people would have some kind of shelter, but they would have to get
their deep core supplies going again, and they couldn’t wait two years for the
next colony ship. Saunders World had precious few other resources, no forests
they could chop down for timber, even the rocks beneath their feet would be
incredibly difficult to quarry for building materials without the right
equipment. Their only option other than mining olerite was to cannibalise the
rest of Cassini itself for the materials to finish their towns, and Athena just
wasn’t going to let that happen. The ship was already stripped down to the bare
hull, and anything further would compromise its space worthiness on a permanent
basis. They needed Jim, badly.
    With
the thought of Jim came to her with total clarity the mental image of him
taking her through the blueprints of the mining machine. He was showing her how
to jury-rig a replacement which would not be as fine-tuned, would only turn out
sheeting and girders, rather than the limitless variety of objects the original
had been able to conjure out of the molten metal, but it would make their stay
on the planet possible. The vision was the strangest sensation because she
could hear every word he was saying as if he was in the room with her and yet
she felt sure that this wasn’t a memory of a conversation they had actually
had. Athena had a photographic memory; that was one of the reasons she had been
picked for this mission. Yet here was