Lost in Transmission (11 page)

“Shut up, Bas,” said Brenda's voice over the comm system. “Passfax contact in forty-five seconds.”

With no discernible noise, the middle third of
Newhope
's hull had split open and folded itself out, looking—as Conrad had said—like a pair of dainty insect wings. This exposed the passfax, which then extended bootward along telescoping mechanical rails until it was thirty meters clear of the hull. Conrad realized he'd never seen the passfax before, not even a recorded image, but it looked exactly like he imagined it should: a gigantic fax machine with shimmery gray print plates on either side, thirty meters wide and a hundred tall. Like a big, flat sandwich. Like a pair of pearly gray doors slapped together around a tangle of plumbing and machinery.

“Those are the largest print plates ever constructed,” Bascal said to Brenda, as if somehow she wouldn't know this. “They are the largest single objects on the ship—the largest that could fit inside her. Any wider and they'd have to be assembled here on station, but I've never heard of a print plate with seams. That would be a tough assembly problem.”

“Contact in fifteen,” Brenda said in a louder and more irritable voice. On the well-window viewscreens, the gray-black asteroid—looking for all the worlds like a gigantic turd wrapped up in spiderwebs—approached the port face of the passfax.

“Not a problem without solution, one presumes, but surely expensive to implement? I wonder. I do miss our technical discussions, Brenda.”

“Shut up! Contact in five, four, three, two . . .”

There was the tiniest flicker of light where carbonaceous stone met the quantum machineries of the print plate, and then the asteroid was slipping—centimeter by centimeter—into the fax machine, for disassembly into individual atoms. But
Newhope
's mass buffers were full. Or nearly full, at any rate; a few tons might fit in here or there, to replace the mass of printed humans and robots and other equipment, but there was certainly no room for three megatons of disassembled rock. Instead, finished pieces spilled out the passfax's other side: metal beams, rolls and blocks of wellstone, clear panes of monocrystalline diamond.

Such a thing had never been attempted before: the real-time assembly of so many pieces, from so large a mass, with so little buffering. Nothing like the passfax had ever been needed before; this one was the prototype, the first of its kind. It had performed as intended, meeting requirements and passing diagnostics, so the infant
Newhope
—itself a prototype—had been constructed around it.

“It would be nice,” Bascal mused, “if we could simply extrude the whole, finished structure in one go. As it stands, we'll have that robot swarm crawling over the wreckage for hours, fitting the puzzle pieces together. And when they're finished, we'll see that primal eldest symbol of civilization here, within the borders of our Kingdom. A shipyard!”

“Your Highness,” Xmary said impatiently, “we're all excited. But could you tone down the commentary, please? Or do it somewhere else?”

“Ma'am, I believe His Highness is recording for posterity,” Robert protested.

“I don't care if he's recording for God himself. This is a work environment, in the middle of a delicate operation.”

“Ouch,” Bascal said. “
Two
ex-girlfriends telling the king to stifle himself. Let him eat cake! Or at least, let him stuff his cakehole with something soundproof and chewy. Very well, my dears, your sovereign will slink to the privacy of his quarters, there to contemplate the future of his future. And yours.”

His tone was jovial enough, but as the king left his seat and leaped for the downward spiral of the ladder, Conrad was pretty sure he caught a gleam of teardrops at the corner of those royal brown eyes. This was perhaps an emotional moment in more ways than one, and for more people than just Xmary and Conrad.

“Wow,” said the newly awakened Zavery Biko from his seat at the Systems Awareness console, when the king was safely out of earshot. “He seems different. Has he gone a little bit crazy?”

Conrad would have answered in spite of decorum, but Xmary saved him the effort, speaking almost the very same thoughts that were poised on his own tongue. “Bascal Edward was always crazy, Zav. Brilliant and impulsive, vaguely unhinged. He's an interesting man to stand beside, and I mean that in the Chinese-curse sense. Life in his shadow will never be dull.”

Conrad had long since stopped thinking in terms of planetary
seasons and times of day, but it seemed like a long, lazy afternoon as the swarm of gleaming robots, over a period of six or eight hours, assembled the pieces extruded from the passfax. With his father, Conrad had many times helped to assemble vehicles in precisely this way, from kitted parts. When you were working on a road, or more properly, watching with bored eyes while your father worked on one, sometimes you found yourself in a remote location where the nearest public fax just wasn't big enough, or didn't have enough capacity in its midbuffers to extrude a complete machine. The machine's designers understood this, though, and so the machines rolled out in five or six easily mobile, easily connected pieces. And when you were done, you simply popped the pieces apart again, and fed them back into the fax. There were, of course, self-assembling kits whose parts were intelligent enough to get around on their own, but Donald Mursk had always disdained these, insisting that the ritual of assembly and disassembly was educational, fostering an intimate familiarity with the machinery, with the subtleties and intricacies of its operation.

“To use a thing properly, lad,” he had said one time, “you've got to know how it's put together.” And then, with a wry Irish grin he'd added, “That applies to women as well as machines. Keep that in mind for the future, eh? The study of anatomy is the best friend love ever had.”

Here in
Pule'anga Barnarda,
the Kingdom of Barnard, it was simpler to send robots out to do the actual assembly work. They were faster and stronger than human beings, more versatile than smart components, and of course they didn't complain. This particular kit—the Martin Kurster Memorial Shipyard, named for some old astronomer—consisted of several hundred distinct pieces that had to be rotated and translated in three dimensions in a particularly large and cunning geometry puzzle.

It was slow work, but fun to watch as it unfolded. For this reason, pretty much everyone on the ship was either on duty or in the observation lounge, and the number of people who were ostensibly on duty, but found themselves in the lounge anyway, was more than Conrad could count on the fingers of one hand. Still, except for Engineering and Information, Systems, and Stores, there were no critical assignments today, so Conrad was inclined not to notice.

As it came together, the shipyard proved every bit as large as the plans had promised, first equaling and then exceeding and finally dwarfing the outlines of
Newhope
beside it. The structure was mostly empty space, of course, but in Conrad's experience, most things were. Anyway, because of its great size, the project was visible from half the ship, and as it turned out, the view from Conrad's quarters was nearly as good as the ones from the bridge and lounge. So when their overlapping shifts had ended and the bridge was turned over to Robert, that was where Conrad and Xmary found themselves, looking out through the hull, which they had made transparent for this purpose.

“It'll be done soon,” Xmary said, with that wistfulness in her tone again. “Tomorrow we install the shipyard's own fax machines and pipe over some deutrelium and some mass from the buffers. My buffers. And after that, I'm off to Gatewood to pull a deutrelium refinery out of my ass. Well, out of
Newhope
's ass.”

She was crying now. Conrad rocked her in his arms, not knowing what to say or do. Were humans ever meant for stresses like these? Did situations like this occur naturally, over the course of human evolution? Prolonged and painful separations? He supposed they must have, and he supposed they had always been hard.

Over the later years of their journey Brenda had been building voluntary neurochemical balancers into the fax filter, and it occurred to Conrad that
Newhope
's crew might have gone into massive freakup a long time ago—gone murderous and suicidal, despondent and bitchy—if the “medicine” of the fax were not constantly propping them up. Conrad had gotten in the habit of printing a fresh copy of himself every couple of days, and sometimes more often than that, but still, even in a state of chemical balance, you could feel overwhelmed.

Maybe this was what it was like, back in the Old Modern days, when friends and family members and neighbors would suddenly drop dead without warning, never to be seen again. That would be harder, right? Or did an immorbid future of infinite possibility simply short-circuit the grieving process, without truly eliminating the need? For all he knew, he and Xmary might never see each other again.

What he said was, “And then, with a belly full of deutrelium, you'll return here and tow this yard to P2, where I'll be waiting. You'll leave the passfax with me, and with it I'll produce an orbital colony with a nice little corner to call our own. A place for you to come home to.”

“This is my home, Conrad. Right here, on
Newhope
. I never would have believed that, but it's true. I have no other skills or ambitions, no other place to go, unless I change the . . . the
definition
of myself. If I don't do that, I lose you, and if I
do
do it, then I lose myself, and everything else that matters. Either way, nothing can ever be the same again.”

And what could Conrad say to that? What was the purpose of revolution and exile, of starting fresh, if not that exact thing? She was
supposed
to feel uprooted. He tried to put words to this feeling, this dichotomy, but he was no Poet Prince. He didn't know a damn thing, not really. What came out of his mouth was a simple, stupid complaint: “This wasn't supposed to be painful. By gods, it wasn't. I've seen the master plan, and that wasn't in it.”

chapter nine

worldfall

The probes were simple, thumbnail-sized dodecahedrons of
wellstone, programmed with a titranium-impervium alloy for atmospheric entry and impact, and then filled in with whatever sensors and photovoltaics and telecom antennas their hypercomputers deemed necessary and appropriate for the conditions at their landing sites. Per the master plan, a thousand of them were dropped on the surface of Planet Two, while devices on the orbiting colony and a dozen other satellites scanned the planet's surface and subsurface from above with sensors of excruciating precision and subtlety.

This raw data—enormous quantities of it—was then fed into hypercomputer algorithms designed in the Queendom, which sifted it for differences and similarities and then statistically and chaotetically analyzed it for greater meaning. The orbiting colony where this work took place was officially known as
Lilililitata
, literally “boiling cap,” a Tongan neologism that meant “valve” or “relief”—a place where pressure was blown off. But that was too much of a mouthful even for Bascal, who laughingly approved a mistranslation in its place: Bubble Hood. Anyway, the place had a population of several hundred by now, most of whom were employed in the hands-on analysis of the results, and the filing of reports, and the forming and testing of hypotheses so that a picture of P2's inner and outer workings could emerge in something more than astronomical detail.

“My boy,” Bascal told Conrad expansively, “the synthesis of data is information, and the synthesis of information is knowledge. Knowledge is constructed, piece by piece, from loose, unkitted parts.”

Bubble Hood was a sphere two hundred meters across, and had originally been intended to revolve around a polar axis to produce half a gee of artificial gravity. Conrad had two problems with that, though: First of all, he wanted the bubble to be transparent, but the planet spinning by every forty seconds would—he knew from experience!—make people sick if they could see it. Second of all it was a waste of space, since the gravity vector would be “straight down” (that is, straight through the inward-facing floor) only at the equator. Everywhere else would be a hillside, broken into terraces by unnecessary “buildings” inside what was already a large, climate-controlled structure. So on a whim, Conrad had crossed the scheduled spin-up off his list and ordered his people to print up hundreds of gravity lasers and scatter them every which way throughout the structure.

The results were interesting to say the least, especially after their long imprisonment in the narrow tower of
Newhope
. This particular conversation found Conrad and Bascal in a maze of transparent surfaces, facing each other at right angles, with a sketchplate hovering uncertainly in the air between them while the khaki light of P2 glowered down motionlessly from “above.”

“Theoretically,” the king continued, “the next step is wisdom, the sum and synthesis of knowledge. But the more I think about it, the more I think that's a quality I've never seen. I'm sure it exists somewhere—there are sixty billion humans in the universe so far, and at least a few more arriving every day—but wisdom has a quality of mirage about it, retreating when inspected. Historical figures have the benefit of distance, and are incapable of making new mistakes, so we're free to see them as wiser figures than anyone contemporary. But there will be no new historical figures, will there? We are all of us contemporary, always and forever.

“And the wise woman is always a puffed-up biddy when you get to know her, isn't she? The wise man is a fretting gambler. If you guess right a hundred times, my boy, people will call you wise. But with all those billions of people kicking around, statistical narrowing demands that there be winners, even if all the decisions are random. There will be people who have always guessed right, every time in their lives. But it's meaningless, isn't it? Because if their next action is also a guess, it will have no more validity, no greater chance of success, than the cockamamie theories of a punk in some kiddie café. We most of us fail, Conrad, but we find our strength in numbers. If
someone
succeeds, if
someone
is wise, then civilization staggers forward, if not happier then at least a little bit richer, a little bit grander.”

“Kind of a harsh view, Highness,” Conrad said crossly. “Be useful for a minute. Focus. What can you tell me about the chlorine situation?”

Conrad had been a little unnerved, at first, when he realized he was the ranking officer for an entire planet, with hundreds of people answering to him. Technically speaking, space crews fell under the command and jurisdiction of the government of Barnard, hence of Bascal personally, and would eventually be reconstituted as some sort of Royal Barnardean Navy, but none of that long-term stuff had been unpacked yet.

The current government, such as it was, consisted of little more than conversations over lunch and dinner, mainly between himself and Bascal, and these were concerned as much with their old days at camp and in the Revolt as with anything contemporary. And since Bascal, with a Juris Doctor, three PhDs, and a ridiculous assortment of master's degrees, was taking a direct and leading role in the sensor analysis, this placed him, in a funny way, under Conrad's command.

Bascal was currently specializing in the biology of the native life-forms and their effects on the larger environment of the planet. But he required a certain amount of direction and had to be pumped periodically for information. For all his newfound age and gravity, he was a rather impulsive worker, selecting random tasks and attacking them for a while with battering-ram intensity, and then flitting on to something else, leaving a debris trail of half-completed projects behind him. The jellycells! The lidicara! The chlorine-producing algoids! The
weather
!

It was hard to argue with this approach—King Bruno had invented collapsium in exactly this way, and in the following centuries had parlayed the discovery all the way to the Nescog, the collapsium-veined telecom network which permitted Queendom citizens to fax themselves anywhere at all, including everywhere at once. But Conrad did not have centuries to wait, and the analysis of P2 needed patience and focus far more than this lurching and somewhat playacted brilliance. So Conrad found himself growing increasingly—if inappropriately—bossy.

And while the King of Barnard was thirteen decades Conrad's senior by this point, the new relationship seemed to bother him not at all. He was enthusiastic and accommodating, as willing to take direction as to give it, and Conrad found himself, for the first time in years, feeling the old bonds of friendship come truly alive. Sure, the king had a bad case of the Fever, and spoke like a bad echo of his father. But as a rebel, the Prince of Sol hadn't needed any role models. By definition, almost, he'd been his own man. All he'd had to do was struggle against the status quo, without having to actually run anything himself! But as a king, what other lead did he have to follow? Who but Bruno had ever been the immorbid king of an immorbid people?

And to fit himself into that mold, Bascal had to be a scientist—in fact a demented genius of staggering proportion—who only reluctantly turned his attention to matters political and economic. This of course changed his whole definition—what it meant to be Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui—and even with the help of a fax machine there was only so much brilliance you could cram into your skull. Some things were still God's to grant. So Bascal was making up the difference by rote, simply memorizing an encyclopedia of facts and methods and then styling his hair and beard and mannerisms in an ensemble hypercomputed to enhance his credibility. Which Conrad supposed was how most scientists probably did it, or anyway the ones people trusted.

The resulting facade was, on the one hand, very impressive and imposing and yet also quite approachable: the kind of public face you might actually want for your king. But on the other hand, it was really just another half-baked scheme, a kind of moral power-grab that Bascal had rushed through during the period when everyone else was sleeping. It had taken him a century and more of grinding effort, yes, but it remained fundamentally an impulsive, impatient act. In a way this was sort of endearing, for it was a sacrifice on the entire colony's behalf, but even so Conrad enjoyed pricking the facade and watching the real Bascal twitch underneath.

“Chlorine?” The king harrumphed. “The situation is that we have some. Its release appears to be a defense mechanism of the sessile algoids, because there's sure as hell no energy advantage in the transaction. Well, usually none. As far as we can determine, they've been churning the stuff out for eight billion years. Chloride ions become chlorine molecules, and for four billion of those years, the lithosphere absorbed them. Very interesting geology, with chlorination weathering as well as oxidation playing a role.

“But once the lithosphere was saturated, once every rock had soaked up as much chlorine as it could hold, the gas had nowhere to accumulate except in the atmosphere. It finally reached equilibrium, coincidentally just below the level which would be toxic to the algoids themselves. Since then, the levels have been propped up by numerous feedback loops, including a weak geochemical cycle that churns it all back underground, and they've been stable for a long time. I say that with a scientist's precision: a long time.

“The concentration is more than enough to kill
us
, of course—one hundred twenty parts per million at sea level. Even the native multicelled eukaryotes have a hard time with it, and have evolved a number of interesting mechanisms for coping. The lidicara especially, which actually burn the chlorine as fuel. It's an interesting mutation, this chlorine business, since as far as I can tell, Barnard's ecosystem was seeded from the same primordial sources as Sol's. There's the same encoding—protein on top of DNA on top of RNA. And the same distinction between prokaryotic cells—the primitive ones, the bacteria and archaea—and the eukaryotes, with a clearly defined nucleus and an assortment of specialized organelles, which are themselves mostly subsumed prokaryotes. A party indeed.”

“Telling us what?” Conrad asked.

“Well, it tells us quite a lot, although it may not fit your definition of ‘immediately useful.' It's important because this places the origin of life on Earth and Barnard some four billion years and forty thousand light-years apart—the two stars were nowhere near each other prior to the current epoch. This means that the primordial source must be older still, and its children very numerous indeed. Life is durable, my friend, drifting in great spore clouds across the sweeping arms of the galaxy, sprouting wherever it lands and then freshly seeding the spaces around it. If I were a doctor trying to fight this infection, I'd be worried, because if you and I were to sterilize this planet right now, it would be teeming with unicells again within a million years. From the sky, my boy. From the very stars.”

Conrad nodded unhappily. “This is where the master plan breaks down. We're supposed to terraform—we're provisioned for it, anyway—but we
would
have to eradicate the biosphere to have any hope of a breathable atmosphere.”

“And we may, Conrad. We may yet. At this point I haven't decided, but when the world is mine to command, with the corruption of absolute power chewing away at my soul and the responsibility for millions of people pressing me to action, I may sign that extermination order. The natives can be archived and their ecosystem documented in detail, so that someday we can reconstruct it in a suitable environment, and they'll have lost nothing but time. Or perhaps we will leave them dead, and spare the galaxy a long, slow war between the microbial armies of halogenia and oxytopia. Chlorine is poison to more than just ourselves, so if we have to choose sides, we should obviously choose our own, and play to win. Barnard's spores could infect Sol, you know, or the stars of future colonies. Perhaps they already have, and that eons-long chemistry experiment has begun anew, barely measurable but slowly, steadily building. Poisoning worlds.”

“You're a romantic,” Conrad accused. “And a melodramatist. This is pent-up poetry, leaking out through the holes in your logic. I know you, Bas. I can see you wriggling inside that monarch skin.”

But Bascal shook his head, unamused. “We'll still be around in a million years, boyo. You and I, personally. These decisions carry palpable consequence, and the morality of it all is murky at best. Either action may brand me a monster or a fool, or both.”

Conrad stifled a sigh. “All right,
Tui Barnarda,
point conceded. But our concern at the moment is extremely narrow, extremely short-term. The oceans will burn our eyes and sear our membranes. That's bad. The air is poison rather than fire, but twenty minutes' exposure will kill us just as dead. And my real question is, what do we do about that? What protective measures will we need when we walk on the surface?”

“We needn't protect the skin,” Bascal said. “The skin
is
a protective measure, against all manner of chemical agents. Weak acids and other corrosives are precisely what the skin is there for. That, and foreign microbes. The body's weak points are its openings: the eyes and ears, the nose and mouth, the mucous membranes. At higher concentrations, we might also worry about the nail beds, and the anus and urethra, and in fact for immersion in the oceans that might be necessary.

“But we're really just talking about air pollution, here. Chlorine is the worst of it, but there are plenty of other noxious gases in the brew, and all of them appear, to a greater or lesser degree, in the atmosphere of Earth as well. This was especially true during the Industrial Revolution, but even our squeaky-clean Queendom produced irritants—especially in the mines and refineries of the Elementals, who formed the wellsprings of the supply lines of the Queendom's fax infrastructure. And of course, the Earth's biosphere produces waste products of its own, and the planet itself—with its volcanoes and rifts and mineral springs—produces still more.