Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  “There are other women available,” she sulked. “I was always a party girl. I'm tempted to say just a party girl. The rest of my life has been . . . a fluke of circumstance.”

  “Aye,” he said, kissing her hair. “There are other women. And some of them were in the August Riots, and some were space pirates, and some were confidantes of the Prince of Sol. You alone were all three of these things. You fooled the queen to her own face, and talked a Palace Guard into doing your illegal bidding. You turned your back on the chance to be a princess, and sowed confusion in the streets of Denver. Shall I go on?”

  “Don't bother,” she grumped. “You've at least been a first mate before. Well, sort of.”

  “Sort of,” he agreed, laughing. In fact, he'd never held the actual title, and had clung to the de facto position only through threats and blackmail, onboard a rickety homemade fetu'ula commanded by a suicidally depressed prince. And—this part wasn't funny—eight people had died along the way. Horribly, for the most part. They'd later been restored from backups, but the whole experience had left a bad taste in Conrad's mouth that was still with him these eight years later.

  “Sorry,” she said, catching his shift of mood. “You probably don't like your job, either.”

  “Not particularly. It's a hundred-year voyage, and even if we're in storage for a lot of that time, we'll still be living a lot of years in . . . this.” He spread his arms to indicate the narrow confines of the lounge. “And I'm supposed to hold things together? Me? The Paver's Boy of County Cork?”

  “This is our punishment,” she reminded herself.

  “Aye.” Now he was the one sounding bitter. “We're punished for wanting a future. Well, we've surely got our fill of one now.”

  “A pretty good one,” she said, rising to the bait. “A whole star to ourselves. A new king, a new society. That's not so bad.”

  “No, it isn't. Am I squishing you, by the way?”

  “A little. I wish we could turn the gravity off in here.”

  He snorted. “Now that would be rude.”

  Once you'd lived in space for a while, you got used to the idea that all the stars were out there for you to look at, all the time. After that, you always felt sort of cheated when you were standing on a planet, which blocked half the sky all by itself, and had an atmosphere that washed out the remaining starlight except at nighttime. Fuffing in zero gee was like that: always a good time, and you got used to the total freedom of it. In gravity, you always had some surface pressing against you, and you found yourself wanting to reach right through it to get in the proper position. Actually there were special beds designed to accommodate spacers and former spacers in this way, and Conrad had toyed more than once with the idea of installing one in his quarters.

  But turning the gravity off was a no-no. It was generated in the aftmost compartment of the ship's crew segment, about halfway down the long needle that was QSS Newhope. Conrad even knew the buzzwords to explain it: a zettahertz laser—that's a trillion gigahertz, you know—operating at four watts and refracted through a pair of Fresnel condensates to form an isotropic beam exactly thirty meters wide, terminating at the collapsium barrier of the forward ertial shield. The photon becomes a spin-positive graviton at high enough energies, and will penetrate a light-year of lead. You couldn't deflect it, or control it on a room-to-room basis. It was gravity, pure and simple, and you either had it inside the ship or you didn't. So while Xmary had the authority to turn it off for an afternoon fuff, the inconvenience to the rest of the crew would be substantial. Along with their sniggers and smirks.

  Anyway, it wasn't really zero gee without the grav laser; thanks to the ertial shields there were all kinds of screwy momentum and inertia effects in here. People got the spins, got the upchucks, got the willies and the shakes when the gravity was off. You'd have to fuff quickly to avoid serious trouble.

  “Floor hologram, please,” Xmary said. Beside them, a few meters away, a murky cube appeared. Well, kind of a cube—holographic displays emanating from the floor tended to look really good when you were standing up, and really bad when you were actually lying on the floor itself. Her calling for one was, in its own way, an announcement that they should get up. And indeed, she was disentangling herself, reaching for her clothes, letting them shimmy onto her like living things.

  Conrad reached for his own uniform's pants, inserted his feet, and let them slide up. There were all kinds of clothes in the Queendom, including spray-on, wrap-on, and clothes that looked like a ball of putty until you stepped on them or smacked them with your fist, at which point they came alive and sort of straitjacketed themselves around you, taking on some stylish cut and color. In this regard, Conrad and Xmary were a little old-fashioned for their generation. They liked to see the shape of their clothes before they put them on. They liked to pull them from the fax, look them over, request modifications, and then dress.

  And indeed, this “classique” style remained by far the Queendom's most popular, though in actual composition it only vaguely resembled the leathers and textiles of ancient times, or even the synthetic fabrics of the Old Modern era. Queendom fabrics were spun largely of silicon for one thing, and their fibers were a thousand times finer than a human hair. But like the wellstone of the hull, these wellcloth fibers moved electrons around in creative ways, forming structures that mimicked the properties of atoms and modules, radically altering the cloth's apparent composition.

  And they adjusted themselves independently, aye. Shouldn't they? Conrad had worn natural cloth from time to time—even been forced to in his days at Camp Friendly—but the stuff didn't keep you warm and dry, or cool and airy, or whatever. It didn't stop projectiles, or harden to sponge-backed diamond in a fall. It didn't even look good, not really.

  So he and Xmary weren't Luddites or Flatspacers or anything, and anyway these Newhope uniforms were pretty raw—green and black, flecked with hints of subliminal starlight. Xmary's had two impervium bars on the collar, where Conrad's had only one. And hers shaped itself differently around her rather different form, but otherwise they looked about the same. Which is to say: gorgeous. Anyone could be young and beautiful, but to be stylish was a thing the Queendom admired greatly. It was perhaps the one area where the opinion of youngsters was still considered important.

  Once the two of them were on their feet, the hologram looked a lot better, except for a stripe running down the length of it, just left of center. This defect remained stationary as the holographic cube rotated through it. Weird. Beneath it on the floor, Conrad could see a narrow, matching streak of discolored material. Frowning, he got down on his knees and scratched at it with his fingernail, feeling the difference between that and the faux metal plating around it.

  “Huh. Something wrong with the wellstone,” he muttered.

  “Broken threads?” Xmary asked.

  “It looks more like contamination.” Here was another thing he knew a bit about: matter programming, and the perils and pitfalls of wellstone. He was going to be an architect someday. “The composition of these threads has been altered. They're still working, still shuffling electrons and forming pseudoatoms, but not the right ones.”

  “It's in a perfectly straight line,” the captain said, “but it's not aligned with the ship. It just slices through. I'll bet it's a cosmic ray track.”

  “Hmm. Yeah, probably. There's a spot here on the bulkhead as well. Some kind of heavy particle firing through here at the speed of light.” He traced a path in the air with his finger, matching it with a sort of projectile noise. “I'll note it in the maintenance log, and if the nanobes haven't fixed it in a few days, we'll wake up damage control.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, then shuddered. “We're taking the same kind of damage ourselves. Our bodies.”

  “We did on Earth, too. Maybe not as much, and maybe not as high energy as that.” He nodded at the streak. “But there are charged particles flying through us all the time. Poking holes in our cells, flipping bits in our DNA . .
. It's one reason people used to grow old, isn't it? Before there were fax machines to reprint us from scratch?”

  “Yuck, Conrad. I don't need a biology lesson, especially from someone who failed it in school. Anyway, let's see a graphic of Planet Two, please.”

  The floor thought about that, pausing for a moment before deciding she was talking to it. Then the translucent, holographic cube was replaced by a translucent, holographic sphere. But not a featureless one; it was paler around the middle, darker and bluer at the top and bottom, and clinging to it all around was a thin haze of refractance, a suggestion of atmosphere.

  The captain cleared her throat. “Planet Two, my dear.”

  “Best guess, anyway,” Conrad answered. “A five-year-old could draw this.”

  “Well, they have detected oceans, and some suggestion of a small polar cap.”

  “Who has? I don't know how they get that,” Conrad protested. He'd done a little amateur astronomy himself—in space, where it was a matter of life and death—and he knew how difficult it was to resolve a dim, distant object as anything other than a pinpoint. “All they've got is an analysis of the light reflecting off the planet's atmosphere, right?”

  “Well, the air is breathable.”

  “Maybe,” Conrad said. “Barely. I heard you'd die from the carbon dioxide.”

  “Breathable to something, I mean. There is life there.”

  “Hmm. Yeah.” That much at least was undeniable. There wouldn't be free oxygen in the atmosphere—probably not even free nitrogen—without biochemistry to replenish it.

  “Fix this image in your mind,” Xmary said. “Don't ever forget. We won't always have these silly jobs. Before you know it, we'll be building a world of our own.”

  Conrad's smirk was somewhat bitter. “If you believe these clowns, which I'm not convinced you should, then Planet Two is four times the mass of Earth. Its day is, what, nineteen times too long? Fix this in your mind, dear: unprotected on the surface, you'd die in a couple of hours. The planet merely soothes the Queendom's conscience; Barnard is no friendlier than Venus, or the wastes of the Kuiper Belt.”

  “People live on Venus. And in the Kuiper.”

  “Sure they do. We did. But we could fax ourselves to Earth anytime we needed to. Fresh air, sunshine . . . We won't have those things at Barnard. Not for a long time.”

  There was a sound at the door, a scratching and thumping as if someone were nudging it with an elbow. And then, ever so faintly, the sound of voices. There was an unsealing noise, like someone hawking to spit, and then the hatch was swinging inward.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello?” Xmary called back.

  “Are we decent in there?” The voice belonged to Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui, the former Pilinisi Sola and Pilinisi Tonga, the Prince of Tonga and of the Queendom of Sol. Now, newly elected as King of Barnard.

  That hatch had been verbally sealed, but of course locks meant very little in a programmable world, where Royal Overrides could compel the obedience not only of machines but of the very substances from which they were made. At least the king had had the courtesy to knock.

  “Hi, Bascal,” Xmary said. “Come on in.”

  The hatch swung inward, and Bascal stepped into the room. He was wearing the same sort of uniform that Conrad and Xmary were, but his was purple and bore no insignia. He wore no crown or other signs of office, unlike his mother the Queen of Sol, who wore a ring for every civilized planet in her domain and carried, at least on formal occasions, the Scepter of Earth. But Barnard's civilization—all twenty people of it—hadn't had the time to develop such trimmings. Perhaps they never would.

  Bascal's skin was the tan color of mixed ancestry, or “hybrid strength” as he liked to say: a dark Tongan mother and an olive—if brown-haired—Catalan father. Bascal was a son of the Islands, now exiled to hard vacuum, hard time, hard life among the stars.

  “Hi,” he said, a bit sheepishly. “Are we interrupting?”

  “Not now,” Xmary replied. “A few minutes ago, you would have been.”

  “Well, that's all right then.” Bascal stepped inside, away from the hatch, and a woman trailed in behind him. Her uniform—green and black like everyone else's, though it didn't go with her bright blue skin—bore the markings of an engineer.

  “You know Brenda Bohobe,” Bascal said.

  Xmary looked annoyed. “She is my Chief of Stores, third engineer, and fax machine specialist, Your Majesty.”

  And more. Brenda had been one of the Blue Squatters, along with Robert and Agnes and the others. Conrad and Xmary had met her at the same time Bascal did, in the midst of the Children's Revolt. The king was just being pedantic, a failing he seemed to have fallen into in the wake of his election.

  “Hi, Brenda,” Conrad said.

  Brenda looked back at him with an expression that was both irritated and smug. “You didn't mess the place up, did you?”

  “Not that I know of, Engineer Three.” Conrad tried to say this in a way that dressed her down but didn't make him sound overly concerned about it. He was technically her superior, after all. But it was grinding, her always sniping at him like that.

  “Ah,” Bascal said, his eyes lighting on the hologram. “Planet Two. Now there's a site for naive eyes, who've never yet caught glimpse of a thing undoable. Plotting its takeover, are we? Scheming its subjugation to the fist of Man? Or are we making friends, filling out a shopping list to surprise it with the gift of ourselves? That's the fist of Woman, I reckon: to love a thing into submission. Either way, my friends, I'm encouraged to see you fuffing by its light. I was going to name the place—such is my privilege, I'm told—but I figure we should wait for the formal introductions. Find out what she's like, how she treats us.”

  “You need a shave,” Conrad observed. It was just an expression; what Bascal really needed was to reprogram the cells in his face to stop producing unsightly hair. Either that, or simply step through a fax machine, commanding it to give him a real beard.

  “Do I? Who says?”

  “What, are you growing a beard? Growing one?”

  “The old-fashioned way,” Bascal agreed. “It seems more proper than just printing one, or printing myself attached to one. I'm not dressing up here, Conrad—I'm growing into a role.”

  “It's a lucky thing everybody's in storage,” Conrad prodded. “You look like you're growing into a pirate again. Or a hobo.”

  “Ha, ha. You slay me, sir. A king does need a beard, though, don't you think? It provides a certain sense of gravitas.”

  Conrad smirked. “Even a king in exile?”

  “Especially a king in exile, boyo. I have no real duties here. I command the expedition, but your darling Xmary here commands the ship. My citizens are in a state of quantum slumber, and even when they awaken, they'll be much too busy to look to me for anything more than emotional support. Unlike my parents, I really am a figurehead. I rule myself and nothing more.”

  Xmary smiled, without much warmth. “It takes more than a beard, Your Majesty.”

  Bascal's answering smile was equally polite. “I never said otherwise, Captain. It's a grave responsibility, to look good doing nothing. Eternally, no less, for we shall never die! But give me time and I'll do nothing better than anyone has ever done it. I'll be the King of Nothing, and Nothing will bow down before me in admiration.”

  Xmary laughed at that, though she clearly tried not to. She and Bascal had had a fling once which had ended bitterly, and as far as Conrad could tell, that sort of thing never really healed over.

  “Don't you have a ship to steer?” the king asked gently. “I saw the Earth outside my window. These are treacherous shores, awash in paint chips and spalled flecks of wellstone. The detritus of civilization: bullets, every one.”

  “Robert has the con, Sire, and my complete confidence.”

  “Ah, good for him. Though this ramrod of a ship may be thin for his tastes, as well as freakishly light.”

  “Still,” Brenda said, “it'
s a safe feeling, knowing he's up there.”

  Instead of Xmary, yeah. Conrad opened his mouth to dress Brenda down more firmly—

  But if there was one thing the King of Barnard knew, it was how to head off an unpleasant conversation before it got too far along. He turned to the window and spread his arms. “Where is it? The Earth? The moon? We came up here to see them, to revel in their glow.”

  “You're a few minutes late,” Conrad said. “If you like, I can rewind it for you. Or change the magnification or something.”

  But Bascal just waved the suggestion away with a frown that was partly genuine. “No, no. It wouldn't be the same. I can see the Earth in playback anytime I want, right?”

  “But not the real thing, maybe never again,” Brenda said sourly. Or maybe that was just her normal voice; it was hard to tell the difference.

  “Well,” Conrad said, in his best official, first-mate tone, “perhaps we'd best surrender the room.” He turned to Xmary. “Shall we finish our walk?”

  “Sure.”

  When they were outside, sealing the hatch behind them, Conrad muttered to her, “Those two are spending a lot of time together. I never see him anymore without her attached at the hip. Are they an item? Have they been?”

  “For a while now,” Xmary said. “You know, for a first officer in charge of crew issues, you're not very observant. You might want to work on that.”

  “Well, I'm slow, but I get there eventually.” He thought for a moment before adding, “Do we need a title for her? Something like Philander or Sackmate, but for women? You know, to denote her formal status as consort to the king?”

  “How about Shrew?” Xmary suggested sweetly, plopping herself on the handrail and sliding down out of sight.

  chapter two

  perihelion tides

  Four weeks later, the bridge was crowded with nonessential personnel. Xmary and Conrad of course, and Robert in the Astrogation seat, and Agnes Moloi at Information, and Zavery at the somewhat redundant position of Systems. Bascal and Brenda were here too, in special chairs that had been installed for the occasion, and beside them was Ho Ng, the Chief of Security. Thankfully, Money Izolo and Peter Kolb, the first and second engineers, were down in the engine room itself, monitoring the reactors. But Bertram Wang, the second astrogation officer, was here, standing because there were no extra chairs, nor space to install one.