Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  “It'll be done soon,” Xmary said, with that wistfulness in her tone again. “Tomorrow we install the shipyard's own fax machines and pipe over some deutrelium and some mass from the buffers. My buffers. And after that, I'm off to Gatewood to pull a deutrelium refinery out of my ass. Well, out of Newhope's ass.”

  She was crying now. Conrad rocked her in his arms, not knowing what to say or do. Were humans ever meant for stresses like these? Did situations like this occur naturally, over the course of human evolution? Prolonged and painful separations? He supposed they must have, and he supposed they had always been hard.

  Over the later years of their journey Brenda had been building voluntary neurochemical balancers into the fax filter, and it occurred to Conrad that Newhope's crew might have gone into massive freakup a long time ago—gone murderous and suicidal, despondent and bitchy—if the “medicine” of the fax were not constantly propping them up. Conrad had gotten in the habit of printing a fresh copy of himself every couple of days, and sometimes more often than that, but still, even in a state of chemical balance, you could feel overwhelmed.

  Maybe this was what it was like, back in the Old Modern days, when friends and family members and neighbors would suddenly drop dead without warning, never to be seen again. That would be harder, right? Or did an immorbid future of infinite possibility simply short-circuit the grieving process, without truly eliminating the need? For all he knew, he and Xmary might never see each other again.

  What he said was, “And then, with a belly full of deutrelium, you'll return here and tow this yard to P2, where I'll be waiting. You'll leave the passfax with me, and with it I'll produce an orbital colony with a nice little corner to call our own. A place for you to come home to.”

  “This is my home, Conrad. Right here, on Newhope. I never would have believed that, but it's true. I have no other skills or ambitions, no other place to go, unless I change the . . . the definition of myself. If I don't do that, I lose you, and if I do do it, then I lose myself, and everything else that matters. Either way, nothing can ever be the same again.”

  And what could Conrad say to that? What was the purpose of revolution and exile, of starting fresh, if not that exact thing? She was supposed to feel uprooted. He tried to put words to this feeling, this dichotomy, but he was no Poet Prince. He didn't know a damn thing, not really. What came out of his mouth was a simple, stupid complaint: “This wasn't supposed to be painful. By gods, it wasn't. I've seen the master plan, and that wasn't in it.”

  chapter nine

  worldfall

  The probes were simple, thumbnail-sized dodecahedrons of wellstone, programmed with a titranium-impervium alloy for atmospheric entry and impact, and then filled in with whatever sensors and photovoltaics and telecom antennas their hypercomputers deemed necessary and appropriate for the conditions at their landing sites. Per the master plan, a thousand of them were dropped on the surface of Planet Two, while devices on the orbiting colony and a dozen other satellites scanned the planet's surface and subsurface from above with sensors of excruciating precision and subtlety.

  This raw data—enormous quantities of it—was then fed into hypercomputer algorithms designed in the Queendom, which sifted it for differences and similarities and then statistically and chaotetically analyzed it for greater meaning. The orbiting colony where this work took place was officially known as Lilililitata, literally “boiling cap,” a Tongan neologism that meant “valve” or “relief”—a place where pressure was blown off. But that was too much of a mouthful even for Bascal, who laughingly approved a mistranslation in its place: Bubble Hood. Anyway, the place had a population of several hundred by now, most of whom were employed in the hands-on analysis of the results, and the filing of reports, and the forming and testing of hypotheses so that a picture of P2's inner and outer workings could emerge in something more than astronomical detail.

  “My boy,” Bascal told Conrad expansively, “the synthesis of data is information, and the synthesis of information is knowledge. Knowledge is constructed, piece by piece, from loose, unkitted parts.”

  Bubble Hood was a sphere two hundred meters across, and had originally been intended to revolve around a polar axis to produce half a gee of artificial gravity. Conrad had two problems with that, though: First of all, he wanted the bubble to be transparent, but the planet spinning by every forty seconds would—he knew from experience!—make people sick if they could see it. Second of all it was a waste of space, since the gravity vector would be “straight down” (that is, straight through the inward-facing floor) only at the equator. Everywhere else would be a hillside, broken into terraces by unnecessary “buildings” inside what was already a large, climate-controlled structure. So on a whim, Conrad had crossed the scheduled spin-up off his list and ordered his people to print up hundreds of gravity lasers and scatter them every which way throughout the structure.

  The results were interesting to say the least, especially after their long imprisonment in the narrow tower of Newhope. This particular conversation found Conrad and Bascal in a maze of transparent surfaces, facing each other at right angles, with a sketchplate hovering uncertainly in the air between them while the khaki light of P2 glowered down motionlessly from “above.”

  “Theoretically,” the king continued, “the next step is wisdom, the sum and synthesis of knowledge. But the more I think about it, the more I think that's a quality I've never seen. I'm sure it exists somewhere—there are sixty billion humans in the universe so far, and at least a few more arriving every day—but wisdom has a quality of mirage about it, retreating when inspected. Historical figures have the benefit of distance, and are incapable of making new mistakes, so we're free to see them as wiser figures than anyone contemporary. But there will be no new historical figures, will there? We are all of us contemporary, always and forever.

  “And the wise woman is always a puffed-up biddy when you get to know her, isn't she? The wise man is a fretting gambler. If you guess right a hundred times, my boy, people will call you wise. But with all those billions of people kicking around, statistical narrowing demands that there be winners, even if all the decisions are random. There will be people who have always guessed right, every time in their lives. But it's meaningless, isn't it? Because if their next action is also a guess, it will have no more validity, no greater chance of success, than the cockamamie theories of a punk in some kiddie café. We most of us fail, Conrad, but we find our strength in numbers. If someone succeeds, if someone is wise, then civilization staggers forward, if not happier then at least a little bit richer, a little bit grander.”

  “Kind of a harsh view, Highness,” Conrad said crossly. “Be useful for a minute. Focus. What can you tell me about the chlorine situation?”

  Conrad had been a little unnerved, at first, when he realized he was the ranking officer for an entire planet, with hundreds of people answering to him. Technically speaking, space crews fell under the command and jurisdiction of the government of Barnard, hence of Bascal personally, and would eventually be reconstituted as some sort of Royal Barnardean Navy, but none of that long-term stuff had been unpacked yet.

  The current government, such as it was, consisted of little more than conversations over lunch and dinner, mainly between himself and Bascal, and these were concerned as much with their old days at camp and in the Revolt as with anything contemporary. And since Bascal, with a Juris Doctor, three PhDs, and a ridiculous assortment of master's degrees, was taking a direct and leading role in the sensor analysis, this placed him, in a funny way, under Conrad's command.

  Bascal was currently specializing in the biology of the native life-forms and their effects on the larger environment of the planet. But he required a certain amount of direction and had to be pumped periodically for information. For all his newfound age and gravity, he was a rather impulsive worker, selecting random tasks and attacking them for a while with battering-ram intensity, and then flitting on to something else, leaving a debris trail of half
-completed projects behind him. The jellycells! The lidicara! The chlorine-producing algoids! The weather!

  It was hard to argue with this approach—King Bruno had invented collapsium in exactly this way, and in the following centuries had parlayed the discovery all the way to the Nescog, the collapsium-veined telecom network which permitted Queendom citizens to fax themselves anywhere at all, including everywhere at once. But Conrad did not have centuries to wait, and the analysis of P2 needed patience and focus far more than this lurching and somewhat playacted brilliance. So Conrad found himself growing increasingly—if inappropriately—bossy.

  And while the King of Barnard was thirteen decades Conrad's senior by this point, the new relationship seemed to bother him not at all. He was enthusiastic and accommodating, as willing to take direction as to give it, and Conrad found himself, for the first time in years, feeling the old bonds of friendship come truly alive. Sure, the king had a bad case of the Fever, and spoke like a bad echo of his father. But as a rebel, the Prince of Sol hadn't needed any role models. By definition, almost, he'd been his own man. All he'd had to do was struggle against the status quo, without having to actually run anything himself! But as a king, what other lead did he have to follow? Who but Bruno had ever been the immorbid king of an immorbid people?

  And to fit himself into that mold, Bascal had to be a scientist—in fact a demented genius of staggering proportion—who only reluctantly turned his attention to matters political and economic. This of course changed his whole definition—what it meant to be Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui—and even with the help of a fax machine there was only so much brilliance you could cram into your skull. Some things were still God's to grant. So Bascal was making up the difference by rote, simply memorizing an encyclopedia of facts and methods and then styling his hair and beard and mannerisms in an ensemble hypercomputed to enhance his credibility. Which Conrad supposed was how most scientists probably did it, or anyway the ones people trusted.

  The resulting facade was, on the one hand, very impressive and imposing and yet also quite approachable: the kind of public face you might actually want for your king. But on the other hand, it was really just another half-baked scheme, a kind of moral power-grab that Bascal had rushed through during the period when everyone else was sleeping. It had taken him a century and more of grinding effort, yes, but it remained fundamentally an impulsive, impatient act. In a way this was sort of endearing, for it was a sacrifice on the entire colony's behalf, but even so Conrad enjoyed pricking the facade and watching the real Bascal twitch underneath.

  “Chlorine?” The king harrumphed. “The situation is that we have some. Its release appears to be a defense mechanism of the sessile algoids, because there's sure as hell no energy advantage in the transaction. Well, usually none. As far as we can determine, they've been churning the stuff out for eight billion years. Chloride ions become chlorine molecules, and for four billion of those years, the lithosphere absorbed them. Very interesting geology, with chlorination weathering as well as oxidation playing a role.

  “But once the lithosphere was saturated, once every rock had soaked up as much chlorine as it could hold, the gas had nowhere to accumulate except in the atmosphere. It finally reached equilibrium, coincidentally just below the level which would be toxic to the algoids themselves. Since then, the levels have been propped up by numerous feedback loops, including a weak geochemical cycle that churns it all back underground, and they've been stable for a long time. I say that with a scientist's precision: a long time.

  “The concentration is more than enough to kill us, of course—one hundred twenty parts per million at sea level. Even the native multicelled eukaryotes have a hard time with it, and have evolved a number of interesting mechanisms for coping. The lidicara especially, which actually burn the chlorine as fuel. It's an interesting mutation, this chlorine business, since as far as I can tell, Barnard's ecosystem was seeded from the same primordial sources as Sol's. There's the same encoding—protein on top of DNA on top of RNA. And the same distinction between prokaryotic cells—the primitive ones, the bacteria and archaea—and the eukaryotes, with a clearly defined nucleus and an assortment of specialized organelles, which are themselves mostly subsumed prokaryotes. A party indeed.”

  “Telling us what?” Conrad asked.

  “Well, it tells us quite a lot, although it may not fit your definition of ‘immediately useful.' It's important because this places the origin of life on Earth and Barnard some four billion years and forty thousand light-years apart—the two stars were nowhere near each other prior to the current epoch. This means that the primordial source must be older still, and its children very numerous indeed. Life is durable, my friend, drifting in great spore clouds across the sweeping arms of the galaxy, sprouting wherever it lands and then freshly seeding the spaces around it. If I were a doctor trying to fight this infection, I'd be worried, because if you and I were to sterilize this planet right now, it would be teeming with unicells again within a million years. From the sky, my boy. From the very stars.”

  Conrad nodded unhappily. “This is where the master plan breaks down. We're supposed to terraform—we're provisioned for it, anyway—but we would have to eradicate the biosphere to have any hope of a breathable atmosphere.”

  “And we may, Conrad. We may yet. At this point I haven't decided, but when the world is mine to command, with the corruption of absolute power chewing away at my soul and the responsibility for millions of people pressing me to action, I may sign that extermination order. The natives can be archived and their ecosystem documented in detail, so that someday we can reconstruct it in a suitable environment, and they'll have lost nothing but time. Or perhaps we will leave them dead, and spare the galaxy a long, slow war between the microbial armies of halogenia and oxytopia. Chlorine is poison to more than just ourselves, so if we have to choose sides, we should obviously choose our own, and play to win. Barnard's spores could infect Sol, you know, or the stars of future colonies. Perhaps they already have, and that eons-long chemistry experiment has begun anew, barely measurable but slowly, steadily building. Poisoning worlds.”

  “You're a romantic,” Conrad accused. “And a melodramatist. This is pent-up poetry, leaking out through the holes in your logic. I know you, Bas. I can see you wriggling inside that monarch skin.”

  But Bascal shook his head, unamused. “We'll still be around in a million years, boyo. You and I, personally. These decisions carry palpable consequence, and the morality of it all is murky at best. Either action may brand me a monster or a fool, or both.”

  Conrad stifled a sigh. “All right, Tui Barnarda, point conceded. But our concern at the moment is extremely narrow, extremely short-term. The oceans will burn our eyes and sear our membranes. That's bad. The air is poison rather than fire, but twenty minutes' exposure will kill us just as dead. And my real question is, what do we do about that? What protective measures will we need when we walk on the surface?”

  “We needn't protect the skin,” Bascal said. “The skin is a protective measure, against all manner of chemical agents. Weak acids and other corrosives are precisely what the skin is there for. That, and foreign microbes. The body's weak points are its openings: the eyes and ears, the nose and mouth, the mucous membranes. At higher concentrations, we might also worry about the nail beds, and the anus and urethra, and in fact for immersion in the oceans that might be necessary.

  “But we're really just talking about air pollution, here. Chlorine is the worst of it, but there are plenty of other noxious gases in the brew, and all of them appear, to a greater or lesser degree, in the atmosphere of Earth as well. This was especially true during the Industrial Revolution, but even our squeaky-clean Queendom produced irritants—especially in the mines and refineries of the Elementals, who formed the wellsprings of the supply lines of the Queendom's fax infrastructure. And of course, the Earth's biosphere produces waste products of its own, and the planet itself—with its volcanoes and rifts and mineral springs�
��produces still more.

  “It's a matter of degree: here, a human being in good condition—and we are all in very good condition—will accumulate fatal lung damage over the course of about ten minutes, or possibly twice that long for certain individuals. For that damage to actually result in death may take another ten or twenty minutes, or longer if the source of further damage is removed.

  “And we have the fax machine, don't we? The panacea of panaceas? So in some sense, we can get by with no protective measures at all. Just stay indoors as much as possible, limit exposure to the native air, and print a fresh copy if you feel yourself starting to cough. In a more practical sense, we can design filter masks which simply reject all but the oxygen and CO2 and nitrogen our bodies expect. These masks would be passive and would have no consumable portions—no filters to clog, no power source to maintain or replace—so they'd last a good long while, possibly centuries. And they shouldn't need to, because you can fax a fresh one every morning, with your clothing.”

  “Well we can't all,” Conrad reminded him. There were only six fax machines within the confines of Bubble Hood, and one of them was in Bascal's quarters, and another in Conrad's. Rank came with privileges, you bet. And there was another in the messtaurant, and a fourth in the inventory, one in the emergency center, and one on the exterior of the hull.

  Most of Bubble Hood's citizens had spent at least a little bit of time onboard Newhope, and had gotten used to the idea that they must bathe every day, or else smell bad. This was mostly unnecessary in the technological ubiquity of the Queendom, where travel through fax plates and collapsiter grids cleaned and scented the body several times each day, but stepping into a shower for a few minutes was not so terribly different from stepping into a fax.

  Nor did the people here generally print fresh clothing every day. Instead they gathered it in batches and stored it in their rooms. The dress codes had been relaxed, and while many people continued to wear Newhope uniforms (either out of habit or because they liked them, or because they lacked the imagination to dress themselves any differently), many others wore the clothing which for them was still fashionable: children's styles from the Queendom of 150 years before. Some others paid attention to the Queendom news feeds and sensoria, which were only six years out of date, and dressed in those styles instead, but already this had begun to seem like a quaint and vaguely boobish thing to do. Un-Barnardean. So in fact one needed a lot of clothing, and needed to pick it carefully.