Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  “And how would you know that, exactly?” Conrad answered with rising irritation. “What have you tasted lately?”

  “A fair question,” the king conceded. “To the untrained eye, I've been doddering around in a cellar for a century and a score now, probably—if not obviously—deranged. But in fact, my dear boyo, there's not just one of me bumbling around the ship. When I'm alone, I print dozens of copies of myself, each with a different work assignment. There has been, at times, a whole society of me, with its own social structure, differentiation of labor, and even a sort of service economy—necessary because I don't always agree with myself about who should do what. Especially when the work is unpleasant. One gets to know oneself very well indeed under these circumstances, and knowing oneself is the first step along the path to understanding others, and therefore what life is all about.

  “In addition, laddie-oh, I've absorbed one thousand classics of written literature, in ten different languages. I've also watched at least half a million hours of television—all the classics of the Queendom, and of the societies which preceded it—and I have seen and read the major analyses of them as well, and even added my own voice to the body of criticism. You tease me for abandoning poetry—” In fact, Conrad had done no such thing. “—but there was a hubris to my early works which I now find inexcusable. Chief among the presumptions of youth is the spouting of platitudes, which are understood intellectually but which exist without experiential context, and are therefore not felt. Thus, in an information sense, they're meaningless: a repetition rather than a reformulation. As a poet I was an utter fraud, and have been atoning at length for that sin. When I know enough, when I've learned enough, the muse will visit again, and this time her gifts will not be abused.”

  And if the words themselves made a certain amount of sense, albeit one of fatalism, they were delivered with a strange, plodding sort of mania, like the downhill slide of some immense glacier, cracking and grinding its way over any possible objection. One might as well argue with a storm, with the orbit of a planet or the slow rotation of the galaxy itself. That was decade fever. That was Bascal Edward. The two had become indistinguishable.

  “I also converse with the ship, of course. By now, its outer personality is shaped primarily through its interactions with me. Not that you would know this, robophobe that you are. And if that social scene begins to feel barren, why, I simply create other personalities as needed. I once spent a decade raising a family of robots. They're in storage now, but I'll bring them out—I will!—when I have a palace to move them into. And of course there is neural sensorium, which is real enough when you've nothing better to compare it to. I have seen London and France, my boy, and more than my fair share of underpants as well.”

  Conrad had no idea what that was supposed to mean, but it had an elderly sort of sound to it: wistful and boastful and vaguely, smugly superior. Not for the first time in his life, he wondered whether he and Bascal were still friends, whether they really knew each other at all. But Bascal certainly seemed to feel a bond, and since they couldn't avoid each other anyway, that pretty well decided the matter.

  Robert and Agnes were not as bad, as insufferable, as fevered by the passage of time. But they had logged their share of solo hours, too, and of years in various too-small societies with bizarre, insular customs of their own. They still wore their uniforms—everyone did—but their own had mutated in strange, subtle ways: the shoulders too broad, the waist too narrow, the braids and insignia so bright that they actually glowed a little. And there was a hint of transparency to the fabric—perhaps an echo of their old nudist ways, though it looked more funerary than sultry. Sometimes Conrad would find them wandering around the ship like ghosts, together or separately, lost in thought and mumbling to themselves. Agnes had brightened the blue of her skin as well, and Robert had added a subtle pattern of tiger stripes to his that through some trick of the light was plainly visible through the corner of your eye, but could scarcely be seen at all when you looked right at it.

  “I've spent my life steering this ship,” Robert would say sometimes, in an angry, almost accusatory sort of way. “Don't you tell me how to count beans, sonny. Your rank at this point is an absurd formality.”

  Of course he said nice things, too, like, “You're a fine young man, Conrad. I always thought so. Follow your passions, and this long, long life of yours will ease by like a pleasant dream.”

  Farther down on the decade fever scale, Brenda and Peter and Bertram and Money had racked up a couple of decades each, and didn't often let you forget it. Even Xmary was puffing herself up a bit, and Conrad, who lagged her by a good eight years, supposed that he himself was not immune. When the ordinary colonists came out of storage, what would they make of Newhope's crew? And of their child-king, yeah, who in their subjective time frame had only just been elected a few weeks before?

  Well, maybe the move to larger environments—orbital colonies and finally domes on the planet herself—would do them all some good. After all, no one here was an expert in colonizing a new star. In this most crucial of senses, they would all be on equal footing. Not solid, but definitely equal.

  But the problems were already starting as Conrad pulled out a few teams of people who, in their studies, had specialized in astronomy and geology, or matter programming and zero-gee construction. Where possible, he introduced them to the ship no more than five at a time, and for no more than seven days at a stretch. But still it amazed him how quickly they grew bored and frustrated, claustrophobic at the confines of Newhope, and cranky—very cranky—at being told what to do. On more than one occasion bitter arguments erupted, and Conrad had to remind himself that these children, many of them, were only a few years removed from their days of revolution, and weeks at best from the Queendom's training and reeducation camps.

  So he gave them every possible benefit of the doubt. Until, inevitably, the first of the Barnard freakups occurred.

  What happened was that a fight sprang up between two of the newcomers. One girl was from the uprising in Calcutta, and the other from the sole revolutionary action on the surface of Mars, popularly known as the Chryse Feint. They started arguing about who knows what, and it came not only to blows, but to the Indian girl dragging the taller, thinner Martian to a maintenance airlock leading down to the unpressurized storage levels where the mass buffers and other equipment lived. There were security alerts all up and down the ship as the one girl—or woman, Conrad supposed—dragged the other down fourteen levels, past a dozen onlookers, most of whom tried to intercede in one way or another.

  There wasn't much to the Indian woman, who weighed no more than Conrad had at age fifteen, nor was there any real power behind her jabs and thrusts. But she knew exactly where to hit—the inner curve of an elbow or knee, the base of the nose, the soft tissue of the ear.

  When Conrad got there she was actually working the controls of the airlock, speaking voice commands and thumbing authentication circles, even rotating the locking wheel on the inner hatch itself. If she did not intend to murder the taller girl, she certainly made every effort to appear as if she did. Fortunately, it was no trivial matter to open the lock, especially with the white heat of rage slowing her down.

  Conrad arrived at the same time as Ho and two of his heavies: Steve Grush and Andres Murillo.

  “What's going on here?” Conrad and Ho asked at the same time.

  “Help!” cried the Martian girl, whose name Conrad could not for the life of him remember. She was not technically a member of the crew, so her uniform bore no insignia, and looked like what it was: a prison coverall. The Indian girl—Geetha something—wore a shorter, broader version of the same garment, and looked no better in it.

  “This shitnick Earther is trying to kill me!”

  “It certainly looks that way,” Conrad agreed, though Geetha had stopped with the controls and was simply restraining the other girl.

  “I was just scaring her,” she said flatly.

  “Sure you we
re,” Ho chortled.

  “Let go of her,” Conrad said, “and tell me what happened. Why are you doing this?”

  “She was careless. She nearly burned my hand. She nearly burned it right off, and somebody has to show this Martian bitch some damn manners. You understand? Some damn, some goddamn manners.”

  “I was nowhere near you! We weren't working together, and there is no way that telescope mirror would have burned you. The sunlight is too weak, you stupid twat! I could focus it right in your fucking retina for twenty fucking minutes, and you'd still be fine.”

  Geetha let the other girl go, but promptly brandished a fist at Conrad. “You think you control me? You think you tell me what to do?”

  “The chain of command thinks so, yes,” Conrad said. “And our lives depend on it. We can't have this kind of behavior going on. If you have a grievance, bring it to me. That's my job. If you feel you're in immediate danger, talk to Ho here, or just shout ‘Security!' at the nearest bulkhead. They'll break up your disputes, one way or another.”

  “I fought people like you,” Geetha said through clenched teeth. “I fought to get people like you off my back. Out of my face, out of my fucking life. But here you are, like a big fat bag of pus. Chain of command my bleeding twat, fucker.”

  There was a time, Conrad realized, when he and his brothers and sisters in arms had used such language, and worse. But perhaps he had matured, or the youthful fires within him had cooled, because he found it shocking now, and offensive, and flatly unnecessary. He resisted the urge to tell Geetha to watch her mouth. At this point, that would be counterproductive. What he did say was, “Compared to some of the ships we trained on, this one is fairly spacious. Maybe not as big as the habitats you grew up in, but not tiny, either. Still, there is nowhere to escape to.

  “You can't even throw on a suit and go outside, because even though the radiation has finally died down, we're under maneuvering thrust half the time as we nudge, frugally, toward our target asteroid. You'd get lost, or slung to the end of your tether, or knocked in the head and burned. And there's no reason to go out anyway, if we use the fax machines wisely and judiciously, and treat each other with some minimum level of respect. I don't see a minimum level of respect here. Do you?”

  “She started it,” both girls said.

  And the Martian girl, finally free to do so, launched a punch at Geetha's stomach. Geetha launched a blow at the Martian girl's face and for good measure, a wild kick in Conrad's direction as well.

  “Oh, I don't think so,” Ho said. And with that, he drew a gas pistol from a holster hidden in his uniform somewhere, aimed it at the two girls, and pulled the trigger twice. It went Pop! Pop!—a vaguely comical sound, except that a round, red hole appeared in the side of each girl's head, and the two of them collapsed to the deck in a tangle of limbs. There was an immediate pooling and spreading of blood.

  “What did you do?” Conrad said, dumbfounded. “You shot them. You bastard.”

  Ho was matter-of-fact. “Judgment call, sir. One of these girls was clearly irrational, and both were violent and presented a danger not only to themselves and each other but very clearly to you as well. I felt it would be better if they were both dead for a while. The ship has instructions to record all such incidents of violence, so we can show them the whole scene when they wake up, and maybe they'll think twice next time they feel the urge.”

  Conrad looked from Ho to Steve to Andres, blinking. Something wet and warm ran down his forehead, and he wiped it away, then glanced down at himself and realized he was covered in tiny, bright spatters of blood. “Who . . . who authorized this? Who gave you permission to kill people?”

  “It's implicit in my job description, sir. It has to be. If you feel this particular action was in error, take it up with the captain. She may see your side, in which case I'll receive a punishment, and I don't think the captain much likes me so that's probably what will happen. But I would do it again, sir. And I have backing from the King of Barnard himself, so if shove comes to push, I have some ability to push back. I'm not stupid, Mr. Mursk, and don't appreciate your treating me like I am.”

  Conrad continued to gape in disbelief at these men from security. “Who said anything about your being stupid?”

  “You've always thought so,” Ho replied. “It's no great secret. You can think what you like, sir, but don't come down here and try to do my job for me. You haven't got the stomach for it.”

  At that, Steve Grush spoke up. “He is right, sir. He did the right thing under the circumstances.”

  Conrad shook his head. “He could've used a tazzer. He could have put them both to sleep, or separated them and dragged them to the fax.”

  “See, that's where you're stupid,” Ho said. “What's the difference, if I tazz them or if I brainshoot them? Either way they lose a period of consciousness. Either way, they wake up with a hole in the memory, and none in the skull. And the fact is, I don't have a tazzer with me right now, so I made a judgment call.”

  Conrad straightened, and glared at the other man. “Don't enjoy your job too much, Ho—not under my command. I'll talk to the captain, but unless you hear differently, you are to stop carrying projectile weapons, or any other form of lethal force, onboard this ship. That applies to the people under your command as well. You will proceed to the aft inventory and request a tazzer, and you will keep said tazzer with you, fully charged, at all times. When you need to immobilize a person, that is the instrument of first choice, with your own body being the instrument of second choice if for some reason the tazzer fails to operate. Do I make myself clear?”

  It was an effort to keep his voice from quavering. This was not a reaction of fear, although he and Ho had certainly had their run-ins in the past. But Conrad had just watched two people murdered right in front of him, the blood splattering in his face, and although the two could be revived by any fax machine, and probably would be within a couple of days, the sight of their murder wasn't something he could shake off so easily. His body was screaming, Fight or flee! Barf or faint, do something!

  Ho seemed to sense this and was about to say something, probably along the lines of Conrad being soft, or a pussy, or needing to leave the hard decisions in the hands of someone capable. And once a thing like that was out in the open, on the record as it were, it would hang over them all for the rest of eternity. And that just wasn't acceptable, so Conrad held up a hand and jumped right in with, “I don't want to hear any argument about it, Ho. You're already in violation of any reasonable code of conduct. Throw insubordination on top of that, and it could be a long, long time before you come out of storage. Do I make myself clear?”

  Ho just rolled his eyes. “Very clear, sir. Full of mystery you are not.”

  Conrad straightened farther, staring down the three security officers. “That will be all, Mr. Ng. The three of you are dismissed. Send someone else to clean up this mess.”

  The three did as they were told, shuffling out of the chamber and up the stairs, but they seemed more amused than upset by Conrad's reaction, and he guessed, wearily, that the matter was far from settled.

  chapter eight

  the unpacking

  The target asteroid was nameless and would remain so, both because it was a minor body—smaller than Newhope—and because it was about to be destroyed. Or rather, reshaped and reborn. They pulled up alongside it on August 1 of the year Barnard 123, or Queendom 416, or—according to Robert, in a particularly pedantic mood—2680 by the old Christian calendar.

  “Well,” Conrad said, cracking his knuckles, “it's finally time to unpack.”

  But when he turned to Xmary, sitting beside him on the bridge, her face was misty rather than exultant.

  “What's the matter? Cap'n?”

  The corners of her lips twitched up for a moment, and then sank once more. “My ship,” she said sadly. “My beautiful ship. In a few minutes, we'll split open her belly, pull out her entrails, and feast upon her corpse.”

  Robert looked
back at them, clearly about to say something, but Conrad headed him off. On matters of crew morale, Conrad had clear jurisdiction, and concerning the emotional well-being of Xiomara Li Weng in particular, it was as close to absolute as these things ever got.

  “It's not as bad as all that, ma'am. We're not pulling out Newhope's entrails, just, maybe, pumping her stomach. And, you know, going through her pockets. She'll never be the same, it's true: the clean, needle lines of her shape will be broken up a bit. To my mind, she's spreading her wings. Or perhaps she's a stork with four thousand babies to deliver, plus whole communities for them to live in, and infrastructure to support them. But Newhope, my dear, will live on. For a long time, I think.”

  But Xmary was shaking her head. “She won't be aerodynamic, Conrad. She won't be properly equipped. She won't ply the starways ever again—not without a major overhaul, or unless we strip her down even farther. From starship to tugboat, in one vicious cut.” She dropped her voice to a murmur, so that only Conrad could hear her—although technically, the wellstone around them was more than capable of picking up her voice, amplifying and recording it, and since the fundamental programming had been laid down by Queendom engineers, one had to assume it was doing exactly that. But barring the unlikely return of said starship into the hands of said Queendom engineers, this mattered little.

  It should also be noted that in the Queendom, belief in far-future “quantum archaeologists” was widespread and unshakable. People generally agreed, for whatever reason, that their actions, their imprints, their electromagnetic ghosts would be open to future scrutiny, even where the events themselves took place in the absence of witnesses. Information persists, people were fond of saying. This was a reasonable supposition, and in many ways provably true, for such archaeologists already existed in small numbers. But for the most part the belief sprang from the same irrational roots as the urban and rural and faery myths of earlier ages. And the queen's subjects could not know of the terrible changes in store for Sol and her planets—changes that would crush a great deal of this information completely out of the observable universe.