The Wellstone

by Wil McCarthy

  Luckily, the atmosphere here on Varna contains a lot more nitrogen than the plant and microbial life strictly require. As an air thickener, nitrogen leaves a lot to be desired—you need a large planette to contain it over geologic time—but such things had always been a matter of fashion, back when planettes were still being built. Which is fortunate, because the refueling of the brass sphere would have taken a lot longer on a noble-gas world. One cannot spin explosives from xenon and neon.

  “Handmade,” Bruno de Towaji remarks, running his fingers along the lines of the chemry’s brass case. “A single device for a single purpose. I see armies of craftsmen, digging ore from the mountainsides, smelting and refining and beating it into shape for this one use. Extraordinary.”

  He’s been around the chemry for days, but now, in the lamplight and the gloom of early morning—their last morning—he seems to really notice it for the first time. His tone suggests surprise and admiration, as well as condescension. He might be describing a piece of primitive art. He is wearing the felt johnnysuit Radmer has brought for him, to go beneath the topcoat and leathers that will protect him from the cold of space. It’s hardly a garment to be snobby in.

  “I’ve used worse,” Radmer tells him as he fishes the packing trowel from a compartment on the sphere’s exterior.

  “Yes, I suppose you have. Life in the colonies was—”

  “Fine,” Radmer tells him, a bit testily. “It was fine. No worse than we have on Lune today. A handmade world requires humans in a way that the Queendom never did. Over time, one learns to appreciate this.”

  Bruno makes a sour face, all shadows and beard. “Requires them as fuel, perhaps. Uses them up. Works them over. Kills them.”

  Radmer glances at the blue-green half-disc of Lune, hanging peacefully in the starry sky, then favors his one-time king with a hard, unfriendly glare. “Would you rather live forever, Sire? Truly?”

  Bruno does not reply, so Radmer—who after all has pressing business on that squozen, half-sized moon up there—gets back to work. He mixes up the grit and paste in the flask, digs a wad of it out with the tip of the trowel, and starts slathering and packing it into the last of his course-correction charges. It’s a delicate operation—a slip of his hand could blow a substantial chunk out of the planette—but the danger doesn’t faze him. Radmer and danger have been on close, personal terms for longer than he cares to remember.

  “We didn’t realize what sentence we’d imposed,” Bruno muses. His tone is wistful and full of regret.

  “No one sees the future, Sire.”

  “No, I suppose not. But mistakes are supposed to educate us, yes? Instead we have thirteen colonies, thirteen failures, and none of us any wiser for the experience.”

  “Millions of pages were written on the subject,” Radmer points out impatiently.

  But Bruno dismisses this with a shake of his head. “Analysis. Rhetoric. Imperfect analogy. None of us understood what was happening. Are there messages which cannot be copied? Organisms which cannot reproduce? Our Queendom, so simple and inevitable in its logic, rested on a foundation of prior society. There were hidden variables that refused to transcribe to the colony environment. There must have been.”

  Radmer hasn’t had time to consider this subject in recent years, but now with the clarity of hindsight it seems simple enough. “I think it was just a matter of money. A network of collapsiters, spaced every hundred AU from here to Barnard, would have made the Queendom continuous. Or directly connected, at any rate. If the carrying capacity of Planet Two had been higher there’d’ve been no need for a second colony.”

  Bruno grimaces. “That’s four thousand collapsiters, lad. At least ten-to-the-fourteenth tons. We’d’ve had to dismantle a moon just to make the neubles to make the black holes—a whole second Nescog, and never mind the energy cost of shipping them.”

  “Impractical,” Radmer agrees. “Perhaps a fleet of cargo ships could have served the same purpose. Sending one vessel—even a fine one—is quite a leap of faith, if you think about it.”

  “I have,” Bruno says. “And the shame will never leave me. You’re quite right to despise me for it.”

  Radmer looks up in surprise. “Sire, have I blamed you for what happened? I don’t think anyone ever did. No one knows everything, sees everything.”

  “A king should,” Bruno complains. “A civilization should. We had the wherewithal to reason it out.”

  “Aye,” Radmer says. “That we did.”

  The correction charge is now fully packed—and wildly explosive—so Radmer drops the trowel into the dinite flask with a clink of metal on glass, and then sets the flask down in the shadows beside the chemry.

  “We’ll leave this equipment behind,” he tells Bruno matter-of-factly. “And more. It’s necessary, to compensate for your weight on board the capsule. If you like, we can store it in your cottage rather than littering the ground.”

  Bruno shrugs. “It hardly matters.”

  “To the immorbid, Sire, little things always matter. Perhaps you’ll return here someday. Or someone will.”

  He finds the charge housing’s end cap nozzle and screws it back on. Several of these have blown out—burst their threads when the dinite charges went off during the outbound leg of the trip. But the charge cases themselves unscrew, so the damaged ones have been removed and the intact ones shuffled around so that the capsule has a reasonable balance of corrections available in each of the six ordinal axes.

  “Perhaps I will,” Bruno says unconvincingly.

  Now Radmer is impatient again. “I’m not taking you to certain death, you know. I’ve lived down there a long time. The people are as kind and wonderful as people ever are, and they deserve our help.”

  “Aye, and that’s the problem,” Bruno agrees, with his own little measure of anger. “They need help and care and kindness, and then they die. And then another generation needs help, and they die as well. On and on it goes. Before the Queendom, keeping dogs was like that: eventually they would exhaust all patience, all love, all grief, until the thought of caring for one more dog became an obscenity.”

  Radmer slams and latches the storage compartment on the skin of the brass sphere and moves to open another, which spills out yards of silk and twine. He says nothing.

  Bruno wipes his mouth, and examines the new Timoch boots Radmer has given him. “And yet. And yet, there was always another mutt, wasn’t there. Wagging its tail.”

  “The parachute needs sewing and packing,” Radmer says flatly. “After that, we depart. Do you have any personal effects you’d like to bring?”

  In spite of everything, Bruno spreads his arms and laughs. “Do I look like a man with personal effects?”

  “No. Indeed.”

  A pang of hunger sounds in Radmer’s gut. This is not surprising; working the chemries all week has kept him in a state of constant famishment. In response he has denuded the planette so savagely that he genuinely worries the wild potato and yam and carrot species—and possibly some of the fish—may have been driven to extinction. The fruit trees he’s less worried about, since picking them clean doesn’t kill them.

  But in point of fact, Radmer can digest leaves and grass—all the Olders can, though they don’t relish it— and if this long chore were to drag on any longer, the astronomer Rigby would soon notice the color green vanishing from Varna’s miniature landscape.

  Again, from an energy standpoint, it would have made more sense and been more efficient to feed soil and vegetable matter directly into the chemry, rather than using his own body as the power plant. But that would have required a vastly more complex device, versatile enough to detect and assimilate and reformulate a wide assortment of chemicals. And things simply don’t work that way on Lune anymore.

  “Can you lead me to some bananas?” he asks Bruno.

  Again, there is laughter. “That will be a long walk, my dear architect laureate. But there may still be a bunch or two on the planette’s other face.”

&nb
sp; “Sold,” Radmer says. “I can use the break.” Then, as they set off, he tells the old king in a more thoughtful tone, “You know, the brevity of a natural life does have its upside. Fifteen years of peace and prosperity may not seem like much to you, but on Lune it’s long enough to raise a family. And fifty years is a lifetime, literally. I can say, without exaggeration, that my personal actions have brightened the lives of hundreds of millions. This is, of course, dwarfed by your own record, but these are the children of my children, forty generations along.”

  “This war of theirs,” Bruno says, waving off the compliment. “It’s a bad one.”

  “Very bad,” Radmer agrees, marveling at how poorly those two words convey the true situation on Lune.

  “And you believe I can help.”

  It’s Conrad’s turn to laugh, albeit humorlessly. “I’ve been a fool before, Sire. Many times. But I fear at this point that only you can help. Or rather, that if you cannot, then there is no hope at all.”

  The king’s rusty, castaway voice is heavy with irony. “What will you do then? Maroon yourself on a planette? We’ll see about this, you and I. There is always hope. Giving it up is a sign of weakness.”

  “Ah,” Radmer says, ignoring all of the easy and obvious retorts.

  Ahead, the sun breaks over the round horizon, putting an end to their darkness, and Radmer—who was once Conrad Mursk—chooses to see it as an omen.

  When they’ve winched the sphere over into its launch orientation, when they’ve donned their leathers and sealed their hatches, when they’ve bolted the passenger chair into place and peered one final time through the windows at the soil and greenery and cloudy skies of Varna ... only then does it begin to feel real. Only then does Radmer feel the relief, the flush, the excitement, of success. Hitting Lune will be easy enough, compared to the journey here.

  “Will you do the honors, Sire?” he asks, handing the blast chains to Bruno. “One firm tug, on my mark.”

  “I will, yes,” the king says, taking the chains with a weird solemnity.

  “It already stinks in here,” Radmer notes. “I warn you, it will get much worse.”

  “Yes, yes. Just give the countdown.”

  “A countdown!” Radmer exclaims. “How quaint. Yes, that’s just what the occasion demands. Five! Four! Three!”

  And then he pauses, feeling a tickle of déjà vu at the edges of his mind, like the melody of an old, forgotten song. Or perhaps its lyrics: She doesn’t have an engine and she doesn’t have a fax gate ...

  “Two? One?” Bruno inquires.

  And Radmer answers him. “Sorry, yes. Fire.”

  So the chains are jerked and the charges detonate, and there’s nothing gentle or forgiving about it. Varna departs from the windows, and the sky grows black, and the two men, pressed back savagely into their seats, are hurled toward an uncertain future.

  All things considered, it’s a hell of a ride.

  appendix A

  glossary

  This book borrows numerous terms from its prequel, The Collapsium. Critical carryovers, plus additional terms first appearing in this volume, are defined below.

  Adamantium—(n) The pseudomaterial with the highest known toughness index, and the third-highest hardness. Because it is a poor conductor of electricity, adamantium has a high energy cost to maintain in comparison with other comparable pseudomaterials.

  Aft—(adj or adv) One of the ordinal directions on board a ship: along the negative roll axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and boots/caps directions, and parallel and opposite to fore.

  Asteroid belt—(n) A ring-shaped region in the ecliptic plane of any star where the tidal influence of major bodies has prevented the accretion of planetessimals into larger planets. Sol’s Asteroid Belt includes the minor planet Ceres, and otherwise consists of irregular rocky bodies (asteroids) smaller than 260 kilometers across. It extends from approximately 2.2 AU at its lower boundary to 3.6 AU at its upper, with a total mass (including Ceres) less than one-tenth that of Luna.

  AU—(n) Astronomical unit; the mean distance from the center of Sol to the center of Earth. Equal to 149,604,970 kilometers, or 499.028 light-seconds. The AU is the primary distance unit for interplanetary navigation.

  Boots—(adj or adv) One of the six ordinal directions on board a ship: along the positive yaw axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and fore/aft directions, and parallel and opposite to caps.

  Caps—(adj or adv) One of the six ordinal directions on board a ship: along the negative yaw axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and fore/aft directions, and parallel and opposite to boots.

  Cardinal direction—(n) Any of the six main compass points for solar navigation: upsystem, downsystem, north, south, clock, and counter.

  Chemry—(n) Any device that employs mechanical energy to drive the chemical synthesis of a product, most typically a food or fuel. Usually applied to human-portable devices; larger versions are more commonly referred to as “factories.”

  Chondrite—(n) Any stony meteoroid characterized by the presence of chondrules, or round particles of primordial silicate formed during the early heating of a stellar nebula. Chondrites are similar in composition to the photospheres of their parent stars, except in iron content.

  Clathrate—(adj) Of or pertaining to a compound formed by the inclusion of molecules of one substance in the crystal lattice of another. In Kuiper and Oort space, methane and noble-gas hydrates (i.e., water ices) are the most typical examples. Literally: “possessing a lattice.”

  Clock (also Retrograde)—(adj or adv) One of the six cardinal directions: clockwise when facing down from solar north. In Sol system, a minority of moons and comets orbit clock.

  Collapsiter—(n) A high-bandwidth packet-switching transceiver composed exclusively of collapsium. A key component of the Nescog.

  Collapsium—(n) A rhombohedral crystalline material composed of neuble-mass black holes. Because the black holes absorb and exclude a broad range of vacuum wavelengths, the interior of the lattice is a supervacuum permitting the supraluminal travel of energy, information, and particulate matter. Collapsium is most commonly employed in telecommunications collapsiters; the materials employed in ertial shielding are sometimes referred to as collapsium, although the term “hypercollapsite” is more correct.

  Comet—(n) Any celestial body consisting primarily of ices, clathrates, and chondritic dust. In most star systems, comet diameters are typically 100 kilometers or smaller, and rarely more than 1000 kilometers, although even in Sol system a few are 2000 kilometers or larger.

  Converge (also Reconverge)—(v) To combine two separate entities, or two copies of the same entity, using a fax machine. In practice, rarely applied except to humans.

  Counter (also Prograde)—(adj or adv) One of the six cardinal directions: counterclockwise when facing down from solar north. In Sol system all planets and asteroids, and the vast majority of moons and comets, orbit counter.

  Declarant—(n) The highest title accorded by the Queendom of Sol; descended from the Tongan award of Nopélé, or knighthood. Only twenty-nine declarancies were ever issued.

  Dinite—(n) Any detonating or deflagrating explosive consisting primarily of ethylene glycol dinitrate.

  Downsystem—(adj or adv) One of the six cardinal directions: toward the sun from any orientation.

  Duramer—(n) A translucent, gray-white pseudomaterial characterized by flexibility and high strength.

  Ertial—(adj) Antonym of inertial, applied to inertially shielded devices. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

  Fall, The—(prop n) Historical period of the early Queendom, marked by the destruction of the first Ring Collapsiter and the capture of Declarant-Philander Marlon Sykes by the forces of Bruno de Towaji. The Fall both preceded and precipitated de Towaji’s involuntary coronation as King of Sol.

  Fax—(n) Abbreviated form of “facsimile.” A device for reproducing physical objects from stored or transmitted data patterns. By the time of the Restoration,
faxing of human beings had become possible, and with the advent of collapsiter-based telecommunications soon afterward, the reliable transmission of human patterns quickly became routine.

  Faxation—(n) The act or process of using a fax machine.

  Fax Wars, The—(prop n) Historical period of the Late Modern era, characterized by abrupt changes in philosophy, religion, urban planning, and other disciplines following the introduction of practical human teleportation.

  Feng shui—(n) A system of spiritual geomancy, dating to the Medieval or possibly the Classical period of East Asia. Under more technical rubric, many principles of feng shui were carried forward into the architectural and matter programming disciplines of the Queendom of Sol.

  Ferromagnetism—(n) An attraction between uncharged materials, occurring when atoms of nonzero magnetic moment—containing spin-unpaired electrons and thus behaving as elementary electromagnets—spontaneously align themselves for mutual reinforcement. In atomic matter, ferromagnetism is associated with iron, cobalt, nickel, gadolinium, and certain rare earth elements.

  Fetula—(n) Any vehicle propelled or controlled by the pressure of light, including sunlight, starlight, and the radiation of sila’a and other artificial sources. The term “solar sail” is sometimes applied colloquially, but in fact solar sails are a subset of fetulae. From the Tongan fetu’u (star), and la (sail).

  Fore (also Forward)—(adj or adv) One of the six ordinal directions on board a ship: along the positive roll axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and boots/caps directions, and parallel and opposite to aft.

  Freefall—(n) The condition of free travel through any flat or curved spacetime in the absence of perturbing forces. Colloquially, any condition in which gravity or acceleration cannot easily be perceived. Freefall is a theoretical construct that does not occur in nature.