Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  “He's got good friends at his side.”

  “And bad ones,” the queen said matter-of-factly. “More than enough bad ones. I wish we could separate them out somehow.”

  “True. True enough. But none are in positions of significance.”

  The queen declined to respond to that. Instead, she tossed her hair back and said, “You like little Xmary. In her little captain's uniform.”

  “I do, yes. She's a formidable young woman. And her young man, this Conrad Mursk, has been a better friend than Bascal deserves. I say that as a pained and disappointed father.”

  “Mursk is a coaster, though a likeable one. Or his peers seem to think so, at any rate; he took second and third place in a lot of the voting. He could almost have been the captain, or the engineer. He might even have been king. Gods, what a thought.”

  “I don't know,” Bruno mused, running a hand along the balcony rail. The damned thing had a sense of drama; his fingers left a wake of pseudogold in its wellstone surface, fading to trails of some gray-black material like coal ash, which finally faded again to whitewashed iron. “There's something of substance about that lad. Not intelligence, not charm; his talents are modest in both regards. But he gets his way nonetheless, eh? We could send our boy packing in far worse company. And we've backed these children up, every one, with copies in deep, safe storage. If they all died tomorrow, it would be as though they never left.”

  “And if they die in nine hundred years?” she asked, misting up again. “What will their childhood backups mean then? Their adult selves will die and be reincarnated here, minus the wisdom their adventures should have taught them. They'll have to take our word for it, or else live the same mistakes all over again.”

  “So gloomy,” Bruno said, moving his hand up to stroke her chin. “Our first decade together seemed to last forever. That first century was long, and often beautiful. But the time blurs, doesn't it? The racing by of years has nothing to do with mortality. It's something in the wiring, part of our essential definition as human beings. These ten centuries, my dear, will hustle by like a spring morning. And if our son chooses not to return at the end of it, why, we'll go and visit his new family. Granny and Grandpa, driving out for the holidays.”

  The queen smiled at that, and for a moment Bruno caught sight of his reflection in her eyes. Here was a man who had invented collapsium, had invented ertial shielding, had laid out the telecom networks that were the Queendom's very backbone. He was the richest man who'd ever lived, and by most accounts the smartest (although he personally would never believe it). He had fought great battles, even rescued the sun from destruction, this former Declarant-Philander of Spanish Girona. But there was nothing complicated about him.

  “Never change,” she instructed. “Bruno, Bruno, you are my anchor. By which I mean, you drag me to the bottom and hold me there until my struggles cease, while the waves break overhead.”

  “Ah. And are you drowned yet? Have I filled your lungs with the bright saline of hope?”

  She didn't answer for a while. On the railing, her own fingers left trails of glittering diamond, hard and clear, which refracted the light of Newhope's sail, and of its rippled twin in the ocean's broad mirror. And when she finally spoke, all that came out was, “You must fill me with more than that.” For she had the body of a twenty-year-old and the grieving heart of a mother, and neither could be soothed by words alone.

  chapter four

  of creation and power, and the

  finding of oneself

  Conrad was minding his own business, sliding down the ladder railing and whistling some half-remembered tune, when everything around him lurched violently to starboard. The railing was yanked out from under him, and he flailed backward, and would have hit the floor if the wall hadn't come along and hit him first.

  “Ow!” he cried, just as the floor really did come up and smack him in the butt. “Little gods!”

  “Collision avoidance. Sorry, people,” said the voice of Robert M'chunu over the intercom.

  “Get processed,” Conrad muttered under his breath, picking himself up and probing gingerly for bruises.

  This kind of crap was just a fact of life onboard a starship. Given their speed of travel and the range of their sensors, if there was any debris in their path which was too large to be disintegrated by the nav lasers and too small to be spotted telescopically and plotted around, they had about ten seconds to get out of its way. With lateral thrusters belching fusion exhaust at one full gee, you could juke laterally by about half a kilometer in this length of time. And that was usually enough; it was the safety margins that really killed you, made you juke five or eight or ten kilometers instead.

  If the thing you were avoiding was the size of a thumbnail or a particularly large grain of sand, and it was bearing right down the ship's centerline, then you really only had to dodge fifteen meters to let it skate past the edge of the hull with nary a scratch. But that did nothing to protect the sail, which was needed to slow down again at Barnard, and which was actually still giving them some fairly substantial push, even out here in the Oort Cloud, ten times as far from the sun as the orbit of Neptune.

  And fuck if it was empty space. The last-minute dodges—“jukes” they were called—were happening ten or fifteen times a day. This was down substantially from the third-day peak of a hundred and four, but damned annoying nonetheless. Human bodies simply weren't meant to withstand this sort of sustained battering. Even null-gee hockey players would fax themselves a fresh body after every game, but here onboard ship, in the middle of operations, there generally wasn't time. For this reason, all nonessential personnel were being cycled—very willingly—into fax storage. The ship had been quiet before, but now it was deathly quiet. As the thrum of the nav engines faded away, the air resumed its stillness.

  The skeleton crew—now a partial skeleton crew—actually had no particular use for Conrad Mursk. He didn't keep the engines or the fax machines running; he didn't navigate; didn't maintain or forecast or repair. Thus he was tempted—more tempted every day—to jump in the fax and let this part of the mission be over. Stored as data, he'd experience no time or sensation of any kind. He would simply step out of the fax in a hundred years, and everything would be great. But somebody did have to look after the crew as a whole, and anyway Conrad felt it was bad form for a first officer to go to sleep while there was still work being done.

  So he dusted himself off, climbed gingerly back onto the railing, and slid four decks down to Engineering.

  There, Money Izolo's crew of five was down to just himself and Peter Kolb. And Peter didn't look too happy. He was holding his eye and glaring balefully at a waldo hanging down from the ceiling. This was one of those things you could stick your arms into, to operate robotic arms inside one of the reactor cores. But it necessarily had some solid and angular parts, whose indentations were clearly visible in the flesh around Peter's eye.

  “Hi, Petes,” Conrad said, pulling out the sketchplate which held his to-do list. (He was a big believer in lists; they had saved his life more than once during the Revolt, and were anyway vital in holding entropy at bay.) “You okay?”

  “I think I popped my eyeball,” Peter complained.

  “Popped it? No way.” Conrad immediately felt better about his own bruises, and guilty for whining about them, even to himself.

  “He's fine,” Money said from across the room. He was staring intently into a holie display on one of the wall panels and waving a wellstone sketchplate at it to absorb the image, and presumably perform some calculation on it. “Quit clowning around, you. I need those cooling parameters updated.”

  “No, seriously,” Peter insisted. “I'm hurt.”

  “Let me see,” Conrad told Peter. And then, when Peter didn't pull his hand away, more firmly: “Let me see. That's an order.”

  Reluctantly, Peter uncovered the wounded eye, and Conrad couldn't suppress a groan of disgust. “Eeew. Yuck.”

  “Did I pop it?” Peter ask
ed worriedly.

  “You did something to it.” Truthfully, Conrad couldn't really tell what he was looking at. There wasn't a lot of blood, and as far as he could tell there was no eyeball jelly leaking out or anything, but something unpleasant had happened to the eyelid, and to the eye underneath. There were vertical gashes of pink and white where nothing like that was supposed to be, so that it barely looked like an eye at all.

  “All right,” Money relented. “Go visit Stores and have yourself reprinted. But hurry back—I need those numbers or we're going to vent some irreplaceable coolant mass. Understand? Mass we'll have to do without for a hundred years, or maybe forever.”

  “Yes, sir,” grumbled Peter, brushing past Conrad and hurrying out the door.

  “You could be more sympathetic,” Conrad said.

  It was an understatement, but Money just shrugged. “It's always something with that kid. Maybe he'll be more careful next time. Meanwhile, power demands on this fusion reactor are jumping around like spit on a heat sink, and the cooling system is not keeping up.”

  “I'm surprised that isn't automated,” Conrad said. “You've got hypercomputers, right?”

  “Well, yes and no. Newhope was designed with people in mind. There are built-in tasks for us, and of course there are always issues the designers didn't foresee. For example, this predictive cooling algorithm looks as though it was based on some kind of weather program, like for a domestic climate controller. It never has worked very well, and until we get it replaced, I'm using Peter.”

  “I see.”

  Money turned back to his panel for a moment, then looked up at Conrad again. “Was there something you needed?”

  Conrad nodded, glancing once at his sketchplate for confirmation. “Yeah, but it's pretty much just a status report. I'm trying to stop by all the stations today that still have crew, and see how everyone's doing. Looks like I've got your answer, or part of it anyway.”

  “Things could be easier here,” Money admitted.

  “You have a lot of issues like this?”

  He pursed his lips for a moment. “Oh, a few. Five or six. Keeps us busy enough.”

  “Okay,” Conrad said, nodding and frowning with the false wisdom he had learned at leadership school. As probably the smartest of the former Blue Nudists, Money was not the sort to be ordered around. He needed a gentler touch, a bit of praise and persuasion. “So you're fully burdened. You don't anticipate freeing up anyone else for storage?”

  “Not until the engines stop firing, no.” 1

  “Hmm.”

  “Even after that Peter and I, and one or two of the others, will have to stop by occasionally, to check on efficiencies and such. Maybe tweak a parameter here and there, or spec out a new monitoring routine.

  “The comm antenna is another issue. We're already using the whole sail for this, so there's no room left to expand communications. As our distance from Earth increases, we'll have to increase transmitter power to maintain our data rate. Or just live with a lower data rate, I guess. We are supposed to be on our own. But to answer your question, I think we need another ten days here at half-crew, and probably five or ten more with a single person on part-time watch. Then we can talk about storage. But truthfully, we need to go last. Or nearly.”

  “Why so?”

  Money shrugged. “Fax machines take a lot of energy. Of course they recover a lot of energy, too, forming chemical bonds and such. But the demand is asymmetric. With no crew, you don't have to worry about it, and with a thousand people sharing one machine, you can project your energy needs with statistics. But right now we've got almost as many fax machines as people, and it's getting to be a grind.”

  “And here I've been taking them for granted,” Conrad said thoughtfully. “Do we need some kind of rationing or scheduling system? Would that make your life easier?”

  “Yah,” Money said vaguely, “I don't know about that. Talk to your Chief of Stores. She's my main energy customer after propulsion.”

  Just then, Peter Kolb came back, stepping through the hatch like a new man, no longer holding his eye.

  “Better?” Money asked him.

  “Much,” Peter answered testily. “And don't ask me again for those cooling numbers. I'm on it.”

  Conrad found his Chief of Stores in the aft inventory, cursing and glaring. She was sitting on the floor beside the fax machine—the largest one in the ship's habitable compartments—with a bunch of tools and sensors and sketchplates spread out around her.

  “Is this a bad time?” Conrad asked, wincing inwardly because there was no good time to talk to Brenda Bohobe. Not for him, at any rate.

  Brenda looked up sharply, as if surprised to find anyone penetrating her little bubble of a world. “Oh. It's you. Hi.”

  “Some trouble here?” he asked.

  “The start of some trouble, I think.” She chewed her lip for a moment. “This is the fax most of our passengers stored themselves through, and in the last hundred or so, the system logged an increase in energy consumption. I've run the plots, and it looks shallow but exponential.”

  “So the machine is slightly broken, and it'll only get worse over time?”

  “Right.”

  “Wonderful. Have you identified a cause?”

  The look she gave him was hard. “I have, yes, thank you. These kind of surges are always related to error correction. Now before you get too excited, let me say that a print plate doesn't last forever, and the large ones tend to die more quickly than the small ones. And this one here has probably got a million tons of throughput left before it gives up the ghost. With proper maintenance, it'll last for hundreds of years.”

  “And that's what you're doing now? Routine maintenance?”

  “I didn't say it was routine. There are burned-out faxels which my nanobes can't replace. To avoid molecular defects in the items being printed and stored, error correction has to judder back and forth around these. Like a snake's head swaying to improve the view.”

  “So then,” Conrad said with some relief, “there's no danger of pulling the passengers out of storage as cancer-riddled morons?”

  To his surprise, Brenda actually laughed at that. She had kind of a sadistic laugh, but good-humored just the same. “Unless they went in that way, no. What I'm doing right now is scrubbing behind the print plate's surface, bringing all marginal faxels up to full capacity. I don't know where this damage is coming from.”

  “Probably cosmic rays,” Conrad told her. “We're seeing traces of it all over the ship. It's going to be a fact of life until we slow down and get back inside a large magnetic field of some sort. But you get cosmic rays on Earth, too. Is this sort of damage unusual? Have you seen it before?”

  “Not unusual, no. Just more than I'm used to seeing.”

  “Well,” Conrad said with a smirk, “you could always print another fax machine.”

  He was joking with her. The print plate of a fax machine had, like, extradimensional quantum attributes that couldn't be stored or described atomically. People and oranges and even whole spaceships could be produced by fax machine, and most of the parts for another fax machine could be as well, but the print plate itself had to come from a special factory, and every square centimeter of it represented—according to rumor—a year's labor from a thousand patient elves. The amazing thing, when you thought about it, was how dirt-common these things had become even before the rise of the Queendom. By some accounts, as much as ten percent of the economy—both human and monetary—was involved in the production of fax machine print plates. Alas, that was pretty much everything Conrad knew on the subject.

  What he said to Brenda was, “Are there programs to monitor this damage while we're all in storage?”

  “Of course,” she said impatiently. “My crew and I will be pulled out if any of these machines degrade beyond a threshold value. But like I said, they've got a long life ahead of them. We take good care here.”

  “So, do you anticipate going into storage yourself soon? Or r
eleasing some of your people?”

  In response, Brenda scowled and threw up her hands. “I don't know. Ask me when I'm finished with this! I'm going to look at all the other machines, too. Louis McGee is worthless, how about you store him?”

  “He is on my roster,” Conrad confirmed.

  “Good. Now leave me alone. Please. Sir.”

  Conrad looked for Robert on the bridge, but found two of him in a service-core crawl space just forward of Engineering. Though the space was crowded and close, Conrad stuck his head in.

  “Some trouble here, Astrogation?”

  There was a thump.

  “Oh, hell,” said one of the Roberts, rubbing his head. “Don't startle me like that. Yeah, it's the sweep radar. I've reconfigured the antenna, but now it needs more power. I'm trying to boost the range.”

  “Can't you do that from the bridge?”

  “There's a safety interlock,” said the other Robert. “Bertram's on the bridge right now, issuing commands, but there's got to be a human thumb on the control point here as well. All critical systems need at least two nonidentical operators to modify. Some of them require five.”

  “Even the ship can't override it?”

  “Especially, the ship can't override it. Isn't that right, Ship?”

  A speaker appeared in the wall of the crawl space. “Absolutely, sir.” The voice was vaguely feminine, almost childlike. “I am completely at your command, and nothing could please me more. Of course I'm programmed that way, but feeling it is, I should think, a higher level of obedience.”

  “So,” Robert prodded, “you enjoy your work, even when it consists of letting me tinker with your guts?”

  “Immensely, sir, although I do hope you'll be careful.”

  “Right, right. Warn me if I'm doing something stupid.”

  “My programming demands it,” the ship confirmed. And then, as quickly as it had appeared, the speaker was gone again, vanishing with the faint crackle of programmable matter operating at needlessly high speed.