Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  “You've got a fresh body this time,” Conrad said encouragingly.

  “Newly printed,” Bascal agreed.

  “And how long did you let yourself go before that?” Conrad accused. “Were you blind? Arthritic? Was your mind playing tricks on you?”

  “Maybe a little,” Bascal said with a dismissive wave of his hand. He looked impatient.

  “You know, we really should modify those fax filters. There's no reason you should become decrepit like that, just because you haven't faxed in a while. Why should our bodies age? Why should the radiation damage accumulate instead of being repaired? Or bouncing off?”

  “I don't know,” Bascal said, pausing to think about it. “That's a good question. I'll add it to my list of things to do.” And he reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a little wellstone sketchplate, and said to it, “Item: modify fax filters for aggressive immorbidity and repair.” Then he looked at Conrad and nodded smugly.

  On a hunch, Conrad asked, “Bas, how many items are on your list?”

  Bascal glanced down at the sketchplate. “38,450. Or rather, 38,451, thanks to you.”

  Wow. Conrad's own lists rarely exceeded ten items, and the longest of his life had been under thirty. “That's a lot of items.”

  “I suppose so. I suppose it is. How are you, Conrad?”

  Quietly annoyed, Conrad answered, “I'm exactly the same as the last time you saw me. It was, like, five seconds ago. But you're older and wiser and weirder, right? You've got another master's degree.”

  “Four, actually. Atmospheric dynamics, planetology, stellar plasma dynamics, and biochemistry. Truthfully I'm running out of things to major in. Soon I may have to start accumulating doctorates.”

  Little gods. Knowing he didn't really want to know, he asked, “What year is it?”

  Bascal counted on his fingers, in that weirdly fast way his father had taught him. “Let's see. Four, eight, twelve, sixteen . . . We're sixty years into the voyage, so it's Q353, 3.5 centuries since my dear mother's coronation. Perhaps we Barnardeans should mark our dates from my own ascension, though, or from our departure, which conveniently occurred on the same date. By that calendar, it's year 61. Sadly, our voyage has been quite uneventful, except that our positional uncertainty has grown outrageously. Four hundred AU and climbing. Astrogation is having fits about it.

  “The good news is that Barnard, tiny speck that it is, is finally visible to the naked eye. You have to squint, but you really can make it out. A little red dot, just off the shoulder of Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer. As we draw closer to it, those errors should start to come down again. That metal-poor piece-of-shit star, also known as Gliese 699 from the Dim Star Catalog, has only four ten-thousandths the luminosity of Sol, and seventeen percent of its mass. It's practically a sila'a, like the pocket stars we used to have in the Kuiper Belt. Remember those, Conrad? Remember hacking that one by voice to get a launch beam out of it? That was fun. Anyway, Barnard is an old man—already twenty percent older than Sol—but he'll outlive her by forty billion years, maybe more.”

  “Okay, thanks for the lesson. So why did you wake me up this time?”

  “It's good news, actually,” Bascal said quickly. “It's the surface gravity. We were worried about the planet's high mass, right? Four times the mass of Earth. But the Queendom astronomers have been studying its infrared profile, and they figure it's got about two and one-quarter times the diameter of Earth, as well. That means the gravity is around .8-gee, not bad at all. And being so close to the star, it's got some greenhouse heating which makes the atmosphere a lot thicker than you would suspect. About three bars of pressure—that's three times what you'd experience at sea level on Earth. That's not so bad, eh? Low gravity, thick air—you could practically fly. Hammer spikes into the air and climb it. What do you think about that? How does that affect your habitat designs?”

  Conrad struggled not to sigh. That was good news—much better than he would have expected—and on some level he should be happy about it. But Planet Two was still very unreal to him, very hypothetical, and he resented being nagged in this way. If you could call it nagging, when it happened at twenty-year intervals and longer.

  “That is good news,” he admitted. “We won't have to crawl around like slugs. It hardly seems like a punishment at all.”

  The king grinned. “So? Shall we do some redesigning?”

  “Well, I hate to tell you Bascal, but although I did some of the initial sketches, those habitat designs have been vetted by real architects. The structures are gravity-insensitive, or nearly so. All we do is build them and move in. Sorry.”

  This news seemed to grind Bascal. “I thought we were on our own here, liberated from the long and overprotective arm of parental love. We should be so lucky, eh? They'll be looking over our shoulders till the day we die. Which is never.”

  Conrad felt a smirk coming on. “Well, you never know. We might get lucky and meet death somewhere along the way.”

  Bascal glared at him. “Yeah? Be careful what you wish for.”

  And for no reason he could think of, Conrad felt a shiver run down his spine. Did Bascal know something, suspect something? Or was it just a general gloom that had settled over him in his time alone? He said, “There will be plenty of other work, Your Highness, without redesigning things that have already been carefully designed. There's a whole world to be built. Why don't you just pop yourself into storage, and we'll see when we get there?”

  The king's smile returned, if wearily. “You make it sound so reasonable.”

  “Isn't it?”

  Bas waved a hand, looking conflicted. “I just don't know, Conrad. This plan seemed so sensible when I started. Now, well . . . If it was the wrong thing to do, I should just commit suicide, and refresh an older copy of myself who maybe hasn't gotten so crotchety and demented. But I can always do that later, right? Meanwhile, it makes sense for me to stay my course. Because if this is the right thing to do, and I blow my only chance to finish it properly, then that opportunity will never come again. A hundred years of wisdom is nothing to sneeze at. That's a big thing, well worth a bit of sacrifice.”

  “But it's so hard,” Conrad protested.

  Bascal grimaced. “My friend, it is much harder than you can possibly imagine. As bad as you think it is, multiply that by ten. Multiply it by a hundred, and you still have no idea. Maybe I'm just going bananas here, but I'll let a doctor make that determination once we've arrived. Well, we don't have any doctors, but I can let a psych program or medical officer interview me and transmit the results back to Earth for confirmation. Then I can pick any archive copy of myself along the way. I can choose my optimal self, from a library of stored snapshots. The Catalog of Bascal Edward. How many people have that privilege, without also excising decades of critical memory? Not many, my friend. Not many at all. But in the meantime, yes, it's difficult.”

  He paused for a minute and then added, with pathetic hopefulness, “I'd be honored if you'd join me for lunch.”

  Now Conrad did sigh, because he'd eaten two meals in the past two hours, and did not feel like eating a third. Did not feel like even watching someone eat another meal. He said, “I'm not really sleeping in here, you know. No time is passing at all. I almost wish it were.”

  Bascal blinked. “You've already eaten?”

  “Twice.”

  “Oh. I didn't realize. Seriously, though. Would it kill you to spend the day with me? Spend a couple of days. Maybe you can help Robert with the navigation.”

  “Robert is awake?”

  Bascal nodded. “Brenda, too. We had Xmary last month as well, but that was just for a couple of hours. Command decisions; I'm sure you know how that goes.”

  And Conrad felt a stab of anxiety at that remark, not liking the implications. “How long has Xmary spent out of storage? Altogether, I mean.”

  “Oh, I don't know. Six months more than you? Maybe a year. I'm not sure, Conrad. Why, are you worried?” It was the king's turn to smirk. He
singsonged, “Everybody's getting older but you, Conrad! You're the impatient one, hustling along to journey's end without stopping to smell the rosewater. You'll be a boy when we get there, and the rest of us will have some seasoning on us. Unless, you understand, you spend some time outside the memory core.”

  And this at least was a relief, because Bascal really hadn't changed all that much. Not in his interaction with Conrad, anyway, which had always been light and humorous, yet vaguely conspiratorial, vaguely coercive.

  “That's quite a sophisticated twisting of my arm, Your Highness. This ‘seasoning' has done wonders for you, I can see.”

  “So you'll stay, then?” The plaintive tone had left Bascal's voice. “I'll make it a request rather than a decree, since you and I are not really friends at the moment. My boy, I've seen you for two hours out of the last sixty years. Don't presume too much, all right? I am your king, and you're some snot-nosed kid I used to know.” Then he paused, touching his chin. “Well, that's not quite fair. You're with me in spirit a lot of the time, even if you're not aware of it yourself. But anyway, yes, I'd enjoy the chance to synch up with you again. I'll bet even Brenda would enjoy your company.”

  Sourly: “Doubtful. How long has she been out?”

  Bascal laughed. “Not as long as myself; don't worry. Altogether she's had about six years of subjective time, spread out over the voyage. One year for every ten of mine? That sounds about right.”

  “Thaw her out when you need her, eh? Is it three days a month? Five weeks a year?”

  “Whoa, be careful,” the king said seriously. “Don't talk like that around her. She's older and wiser, too, but she's still sensitive, and you always had a habit of tweaking her. Just don't, okay? Or the next time you step out of that fax, you might have fifty-seven arms and no mouth. I'm only half joking. A fuffing Hindu god is what you'll look like.”

  After a moment's silence, Conrad suggested, “Why don't we go to the observation deck? I'd like to see Barnard.”

  “Well, we'll need to put a realtime window on the ceiling for that. Obviously, Barnard is dead ahead, so you can't just look out through the side of the hull and see it, or up through eleven decks. Even if we turn the sail and bulkheads transparent—which would bleed all our heat into space, by the way—the ertial shield's lensing effects are highly nonlinear. Might as well be looking up through the surface of a lake. There is a nose compartment just above the water tanks, I guess, where you can get a blurry sort of view with your own two eyes. I haven't been there in years, and I wouldn't advise going up without a radiation suit. Every particle in free space hits that nose like a cosmic ray. Kinetic energy rises with the square of velocity, so at .1 C even a helium atom can rip up your genome a bit.”

  “Yeah, I know all that,” Conrad said. He knew some of it, anyway. “Can we just print some radiation suits and go? I would like to see it with my own two eyes. How's the sail holding up, by the way? We had talked about maybe furling it for the journey.”

  “I know, but that didn't work out. It was never a good idea, because what were we supposed to use for forward shielding? Nobody likes eroding the sail on interstellar grit, but it sure beats eroding the forward hull of the ship. We just bleed some power off the reactor to bathe the fabric in infrared, keeping the nanobes warm, and they can repair a typical hit within a few days. Which is about how long we've got between punctures these days, so they mostly stay ahead of the damage. It still adds up, decade by decade, but the thing's not going to fall apart anytime soon. Not in the time frame we're concerned about.” He touched the wall. “Brenda, hi, it's Bascal. I've got Conrad Mursk here with me. Remember him? Our first mate? How'd you like to meet us in the forward blister? He wants to see the stars with his own two eyes.”

  “Hmm,” came the sleepy reply, after a few seconds' delay. “Hi there, sweetie. I'll go get a suit.”

  “Get three, would you?”

  “Sure.”

  The view was interesting, if a little disappointing. Ophiuchus was not one of the clearer constellations. Although the sun passed through it once per year as seen from the surface of Earth, the Babylonians had left it out of their zodiac, relegating it to a sort of eternal cultural limbo. It might've been their tenth month, between November's Scorpio and December's Sagittarius, but it just wasn't that dramatic a picture. The “Snake Holder” didn't correspond to any of the great myths, and the stars which formed the image were not much brighter than the other ones around them. This was especially true when you got outside the Earth's atmosphere.

  Still, Conrad had become well familiar with the image during training, and could pick it out now against the background stars. And Barnard, as advertised, was visible: an orange dot just off the hero's right shoulder. It was not the brightest star in the heavens—not yet, not by a long shot—but it was the brightest star in the constellation: a definite interloper, changing the picture to a more humanlike from by appearing in a patch where the Queendom's more distant view showed only empty space.

  “There it is,” Bascal said, attempting a shrug in his space suit.

  Brenda had gone all-out with these: Fall-era battle armor with a centimeter wellcloth all the way around, extra rigidizable padding at the shoulders and knees, boots like shipping containers, and a high, clear dome above the head, halfway between a Roman arch and a gothic one in shape. It was without a doubt the bulkiest space suit Conrad had ever worn, and while there was room for the three of them up here, it was a tight fit. Conrad usually felt claustrophobic in a space suit anyway, even tumbling free in the empty vacuum, and having three other space suits jammed up against him, head-to-head in a kind of flower or teepee shape, did not improve things.

  Worse, even the open space above the ceiling dome felt distant and contained. The view through the ertial shield really did look like he was peering through a lake: the stars were clearly visible, but they rippled, they shimmered, they broke apart into tiny rings of rainbow light. And there was a faint glow as well, a bluish haze, which Bascal said was Cerenkov radiation: the scream of particles exiting the hypercollapsite and slowing to the classical speed of light.

  “It doesn't look as red as I expected,” Conrad said.

  “‘Red dwarf' is a bit of a misnomer,” Bascal agreed. “I mean, the surface is still white-hot. Hotter than that, really. Main sequence stars are really ultraviolet-hot, and blue giants radiate a lot of X-rays. But the eye can be funny, can't it? Put Barnard right next to Sol and the difference would be more apparent. Anyway, that speck is where we're headed. That is where we will live out the term of our exile, or more probably, our lives, and since that term is infinite, we'd best make an effort to be happy about it. Personally, I think it's quite a pretty star.”

  “You write much poetry anymore, Bas?” Conrad asked.

  “Not much, no. Sadly, my artistic engine was fueled by injustices of the status quo. Now that I am the status quo and the injustices are my own, I find I have less to say, and less artfulness in the saying of it. But I do get your point: this is a sight which should inspire. I'll give it some thought.”

  “King Hermit here can barely be bothered to write log entries,” Brenda said. “He is the colony's chief historian, but you'd never know it to look at his books.”

  “There's not much happening,” Bascal protested. “What am I supposed to say? ‘Reactor output reduced by seventy-five watts, to account for Captain Li Weng's return to fax storage. There is one less mouth to feed.'”

  Brenda laughed again, and didn't answer. In the silence, in a moment of particular strength or particular weakness—Conrad wasn't sure which—he blurted, “Brenda, Bascal tells me I antagonize you. He would know, I guess, but the truth is, I've always felt the reverse: you going out of your way to antagonize me. But either way, it's kind of stupid. I'd like it if we could get along.”

  “That's interesting,” she answered seriously, and without too much of the rancor Conrad had come to expect from her. “I think you and I definitely got off on the wrong foot, back
onboard Refuge all those years ago. But I was right to be suspicious of you. You did get us caught. If not for you, we'd've lived out the entire twenty-year run in secret.”

  Conrad couldn't deny that. In those days, he and Bascal had ripped their way through more lives than just hers. On the other hand, it was a goddamn revolution. And a successful one, sort of. He was through feeling guilty and defensive over what they had accomplished. But had he been too hard on Brenda since that first ugly meeting? Too critical, too ready to see fault?

  “We did get off on the wrong foot,” he agreed.

  Bascal, perhaps sensing the conversation's potential now to veer off in a less productive direction, changed the subject. “Conrad has some suggested updates to the fax filters. I think it's a good idea, and actually I sort of wonder why we didn't do it a long time ago.”

  “Is it the immorbidity extensions?” Brenda asked. “It is a good idea, yah, and everyone seems to come up with it sooner or later. But it's incredibly difficult. In the Queendom there's no need for it, because everybody faxes daily anyway. I'm sure their finest minds could come up with a fine solution, but who's going to pay them? And here on Newhope we don't have a billion geniuses to draw on. Instead, my team is five people who never finished traditional school. But I have some ideas on the subject, and the next time I have a few months free, I may press ahead with some models and calculations.”

  It was interesting, Conrad thought, to hear her talking this way. She had changed since those early days, or at least let some hidden aspect of herself rise to the fore. This made him wonder, with a gut-gnawing anxiety, whether Xmary might have changed as well. For better? For worse? Any difference was unwelcome, if he hadn't been there to witness it, to share it and change along with her. Should he try to catch up? Spend six months, spend a year, spend five years out of storage, adding season to his soup? Or would that just send him off in still a different direction, increasing the distance between them? Damn it, this would be much simpler if people would stick to the plan, and simply stay in storage where they belonged. On a hundred-year coast between the stars, there was very little work that actually needed doing. Was he the only one who saw that?