Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  They had set the ferries down beside a shallow but steep-banked stream, almost a waterfall really, cutting down along the equally steep bank of the seashore. The ferries were at the crest of it, on flat ground, but the sand dropped away sharply to the east, along a contour that was neither “beach” nor “cliff,” but something in-between which the site survey had named a “subcritical intertidal embankment” or “depositional foreshore bluff.” Such features were, apparently, typical of the shorelines where they weren't vertical cliffs of granite bedrock.

  The planet's two oceans were completely isolated from each other, and this was the larger of the two. Overall it was slightly wider than Earth's Pacific Ocean, though it covered a much smaller fraction of the planet's oversized surface, so Bascal had insisted it was properly a sea, and had named it the Sea of Destiny.

  The men were all outside milling around on the sand, beneath a sun that looked remarkably like Earth's own—no larger or smaller or dimmer, and only very slightly redder. And the filter masks were working just fine; Bascal had even engineered the surface properties so they didn't fog up on the inside. But there was room for improvement, because breathing in the masks was kind of like sucking chowder through a straw. You could do it, no problem, but the comfort factor wasn't quite there. The air that did get through felt thick but somehow unsatisfying. Not enough oxygen.

  Anyway, Bascal was beside himself with glee—literally—and the two of him were pointing and gesturing wildly. “The city's Main Street will run right here, east-west, from the shore to the first ridgeline of the mountains, and perhaps beyond. Forty meters wide, and lined with domes on either side.”

  The other nodded. “Yeah, great! Put the palace right here on the beach, like proper Tongans. Matatahi Falehau, the Beach Palace. But tall, yes? Looming over the city, as a proper palace should.”

  “Really? I thought perhaps over there, so the ridgeline doesn't hide the sunset. Not tall, but hugging the rocks like it's been there a million years. So perhaps the city should be farther south, over there a ways.”

  “Hmm. Interesting. Lemme think about that a minute. Our own planet, Your Most Regal Majesty! You know how excited I am.”

  “Indeed I do!”

  The two Conrads had diverged by this time, no longer quite identical, and while one of them hovered by the Bascals, absorbing their plans and injecting the occasional comment, the other one was down below at the waterline, hunched over, studying the river stones lining the mouth of the stream. They were mainly granite, as near as he could figure, but they had a funny sort of sheen that was new to him. Chlorination weathering, maybe. If these stones came from the mountains above—and they must have—then some of the bedrock up there, properly quarried and polished, would make for interesting facades. The really raw thing was the way the different layers of it striped the ridge's face in such wildly different colors. Not just browns and yellows and reds, but actually some greens and even blues as well. Or so his eyes had told him up there, through the yellow haze of fifteen kilometers of atmosphere.

  Looking down again, he noticed movement in the stream's clear water, between the stones.

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh, my. Will you look at this.”

  No one was paying attention to him at that moment, and he was too rapt to notice or care. He leaned closer, watching the wriggling forms. The “animals” of Planet Two were, he'd been told, extremely primitive. Denizens of the water—never the air or land—they possessed only five cell types, loosely grouped into three layers: skin, gut, and muscle. There was no nervous system, no immune system, and no real digestive system other than a simple holding chamber—the gut. Nutrients and wastes simply sloshed through the spaces between the cells, and the creatures' metabolisms—stunted by chlorine and starved by low oxygen levels—supported movement which was very sluggish indeed by Earth standards. Most were tiny—pinhead-sized or smaller—and drifted along with the ocean currents, feeding on bacterial mats and occasionally on each other, though never on the chlorine-spewing algoids, large or small.

  One creature, though—the lidicara—was different. Conrad couldn't help but know this, because it was nearly all the biologists could talk about. How fascinating! How surprising and raw! Most days it was hard to get their minds on anything else. But seeing it now, seeing a hundred of them swirling around his boots like animate snowflakes, he understood what all the fuss was about. Here was a thing that moved with purpose, with ambition. An actual alien creature! The other animals were radial forms—tiny urchin/starfish with little to distinguish them—but the pale lidicara jetted around fast enough to need some streamlining, some architectural finesse. The thing even had a cluster of sensory cells or something at its front end. “Cephalization!” the biologists screamed when the subject came up. “The thing is growing a head!” Slowly, of course—the fossils of seventy million years ago looked much like the creatures here at his feet—but even to Conrad it sounded like an important development.

  The lidicara's shape was like nothing ever seen on Earth, and at a glance, on his hands and knees with his masked face hovering right above the water, Conrad could see how it had come about. The creature had started out as just another seven-armed starfish, but somewhere along the way its “front” arms had shortened and thinned, becoming feeding appendages or something, while the other limbs had slid toward the back, fitting together into a kind of teardrop shape, with one elongated limb at the back serving as a kind of tail.

  Right there and then, Conrad discovered an interest in biology which he had never once suspected. Wow. There were only a few hundred cells in these animals, right? As opposed to the trillions in his own body? And he found himself wondering what happened inside, down in the DNA, to permit—to create?—such changes as these. And it occurred to him, with a prickle of excitement, that he—that this particular Conrad Mursk—could abandon all other responsibility and simply pursue this question, reintegrating with the “real” Conrad, the navy's Conrad, at some future date.

  Hell, with the mass restrictions lifted—with a whole planet of buffer mass at his disposal—he could spin off as many copies as he wanted. Even the Queendom's plurality restrictions—twenty-five hundred copy-hours per person per month under normal circumstances—needn't apply here, not unless Bascal wrote a proclamation about it or unless the Senate, when it was elected and holding regular meetings, decided to pass a law.

  “Conrad!” he called to his other self, thirty meters up on the sandy bank. “The lidicara are beautiful! We've got to preserve them, share the world with them. . . .” His voice trailed away when he realized the other Conrad wasn't listening. To himself he said, “Got to share the world.”

  He studied the dancing forms, admiring the way they not only tolerated the poison in the air, but actually souped themselves up with it. Would a bit more oxygen in the atmosphere hurt them? Would it supercharge them even more? If life here really was related to life on Earth—and Bascal insisted that it was—then maybe the lidicara's chlorine-breathing structures—halochondria, they were called—could be imported into Earthly cells? He pulled out his ever-present sketchplate and said to it, “To do: investigate fax modifications to adapt humans to chlorine atmosphere. Discuss with Brenda: Can we change ourselves instead of the planet? Or in addition?”

  The ocean waves here were tiny—at least for the moment—and he felt them lapping pleasantly at his heels, slowly working their way up the stream as the tide came in. “Be aware of it,” the site surveyor had warned them over the radio link. “The tide will be in the middle of its range, rising steadily at ten centimeters per hour.” Was that a lot? It didn't seem so here and now. As his shoes grew damper and saltier Conrad simply moved uphill a step, and then another, following the channels of the stream's mouth, crawling up along the foreshore's steep bank.

  P2 had no moon; its tides were exclusively solar, and since it was so damned close to Barnard they were formidable indeed. Thanks to the planet's 3:2 tidal lock—three revolutions for every two orbit
s—they were also slow, following the 461-hour cycle of the “day” and to some extent the 691-hour cycle of the “year.” But though they were sluggish, the tides were far more powerful than those of Earth. A hundred times more powerful, in fact, though their effect on the actual water level was not quite so dramatic as that. For one thing, the land was higher near the equator, so the seas were up in the temperate zones—one in the northern hemisphere and one in the south—where Barnard's pull wasn't quite as strong.

  And the fact that the seas themselves did not reach all the way around the planet limited how far and how well a tidal bulge could travel. Or so Conrad had heard, second- and third-hand. The survey had pegged the tidal range for this location at plus or minus thirty-one meters, with little variation over time.

  Had a planet like Earth been at this position, with its thin skin of rock floating atop a sea of metal-rich magma, the land tides would have been plus or minus several meters, and daily catastrophic earthquakes would be the norm. Along with volcanoes, yes, bursting out through sudden rifts in the crust. Fortunately P2 was a stiffer world, with a much smaller and cooler liquid interior. But even so it had a few large, semiactive volcanoes.

  “Which is good,” Bascal had insisted when the subject came up, “because this metal-poor world cannot prick itself and bleed. The radioactive heating of its interior is insufficient to drive tectonics or volcanism. Without the tides stretching and pulling at the core, raising blisters on the crust, there would be no renewal of the surface. It would smooth itself into a giant billiard ball, and the metals would all find their way to the bottom of the ocean and eventually be buried by sediment, and the biosphere would die.”

  Hmm.

  These were Conrad's last coherent thoughts, for as he scrabbled up the hillside, the ditches of the stream's delta grew deeper, their banks sandier and rockier and steeper. In studying the lidicara, he had thrust his hands into the stream's warm water, and failed at first to notice that its acidity was turning his fingernails yellow and burning at the edges of the flesh beneath. Only when he tore a fingernail right off on the river rocks did he finally pull his hands out. Seeing the damage then, he stood up in alarm.

  Next, as near as Ho's investigation could figure it, he lost his balance and dug an arm into the stream's bank. There were no roots or grasses there to hold the bank in place, so it crumbled, and one or more large stones came down on his face, knocking the mask free and breaking his nose. Even this might not have been fatal if he hadn't taken a breath of native air, then coughed because of it, then coughed even harder from his own blood running down into his throat. Still not fatal, if he hadn't spasmed, falling face-first into the stream, and then gasped at the agony of its burning in the membranes around his eyes. But he did each of these things in turn, and so inhaled a small quantity of the water, which was not at all kind to the tissue of his lungs.

  On the first sight of him lurching up the foreshore, Ho and Steve—ostensibly there to keep him safe—burst into laughter. They may be forgiven for this, since the state of Conrad's injuries was not apparent at the time, and the drunken stagger of his walk, combined with the mud on his face, really did present a comical image. Conrad himself said, “Boyo, it's a lucky thing she's not here to see you.”

  Regrettably, the injured Conrad collapsed and died with these words in his ears. The surviving Conrad never did find out what he was doing in that stream, since there was no fax here to resuscitate him while his brain still lived, and since Bubble Hood and even Newhope lacked the facilities to read his dead memories. This sort of thing had happened to Conrad once before, back in Ireland a long, long time ago, and it did not occur to him now to interpret the event as any sort of omen. If it had, things might have gone very differently.

  Instead, he was left only with an enigmatic to-do entry, which itself proved pivotal in the colony's history—indeed of colonial history in general. And while the idea—pantropy, the re-forming of themselves to suit this new world—would certainly have come up sooner or later, Conrad would wonder until the end of his days why he had been the one to raise it. There was a Tongan word for this feeling: kuiloto mamahi. Literally, “blind sorrow,” the mourning which occurred when one did not know precisely what had been lost. And this, too, would prove important, though the extent of it would not be apparent for hundreds of years.

  Life is like that sometimes, all the more so when it lasts forever.

  chapter ten

  the red badge of security

  Two years later, the occasion of the Security training finals found Conrad and Bascal in the bleachers at Victory Stadium, in the burgeoning town of Domesville, surrounded by fellow colonists in an atmosphere of gaiety, complete with hurled confetti and the joyous tinkling of glass shattered on slabs of landscape-friendly wellrock.

  “I still say you should have a private skybox,” Conrad opined, for the stadium was brand new—this was its inaugural show—and he'd designed it with such improvements in mind. “It would only take a few days to install.”

  Right now the stadium held two thousand people—nearly half the population of P2—but it could easily hold three times that many, and could be expanded upward—someday would be expanded upward—to accommodate up to thirty thousand.

  This was Conrad's eighth original building—small gods be praised, he really was an architect, no longer tweaking the designs of Queendom engineers!—and like the others this one had been designed with one foot firmly in the future. The colony would grow and change, yes, and he'd be damned if that obvious truth would come back to bite him on the ass later.

  In his first months on the planet's surface, Conrad had waited around for some sense of normalcy to assert itself. Then, when the first year had passed, he thought perhaps things would settle down in the second. But so far the level of chaos remained on a steady increase: more buildings, more change, and above all, more people. The resources of Bubble Hood limited the number of kids they could pull out of fax storage in any given month, but the more that were out, the louder the hue and cry became to release those few who remained. The sleepers had missed quite enough of humanity's greatest adventure, thank you very much.

  Still, even the most pessimistic projections showed the memory cores emptying out within another five months, or eight Barnardean days if you wanted to count it that way. A less experienced Conrad might've been tempted to pick that moment—finally—as the true start of Barnard's history, but increasingly he had the sense that history never really started, or was always starting. There was enough work to keep everyone busy for decades, or maybe forever, and truly decisive moments, with whole futures hanging in the balance, had always been rare. And that was a good thing, right?

  The years of the colony were Earth years, by the way. P2's seasons, its cycles of day and night, were just too strange and inconvenient to warrant a calendar of their own. If not for the “Barnardean hour,” ever so slightly shorter than a standard one, even the day itself would be an adversary: 461 hours long—a prime number, indivisible by anything useful. As it was, the day stood at 460 hours, and the official clock had 20 hours on it, breaking the day into 23 “pids,” each consisting of two 10-hour “shifts.”

  So a “shift” was kind of like an Earth day or night, except that the sun barely moved during its span, while the 20-hour “pid” was second cousin to an Earthly solar day. Except, again, that the sun barely moved. It was kind of like living at Earth's poles, where summer was eternal day and winter was eternal night, except that the winters here weren't appreciably cooler than the summers, and anyway the Barnardean day was closer to an Earthly month in duration.

  What a mess. In Conrad's opinion, these shifts were about four damned hours too long, and the pids four hours too short. But the planet's peculiar orbit could not be argued with, and despite widespread grousing no one had come forward with a better clock. He wondered if he'd ever get used to sleeping in the daylight, and he hated working in the dark even more. His job sites were lit up like crime scenes! But a
ll that seemed to do was blot out the stars, making the sky seem that much blacker.

  Once the clock was in place, mandated and prototyped and programmed into the walls of every office and residence, Bascal had studied the calendar possibilities for 20 pids before throwing them out in disgust and mandating the Queendom's own Greenwich Mean Proper Date—uncorrected for light lag—as the standard Barnardean calendar. “We needn't rebel against that,” he'd said at the time. “P2's ‘year' is of no use to us.” And indeed, Conrad figured the people of Barnard were confused enough. Better to hang onto a few precious shreds of the culture and planet that had spawned them. At least you would know when your birthday was.

  “Skybox? What nonsense,” Bascal replied for at least the third time that month. “Do I deserve a better view than my countrymen? Your efforts are appreciated, my boy, but I'm quite pleased to watch the action from here.”

  “Climate controlled,” Conrad said, by way of temptation. But it was a silly offer, a joke; Domesville was right on the coast, and so far as their two years' stay had yet revealed, the climate didn't seem to fluctuate all that much. It rained, but mostly at night, and while Barnard made a warm, bright, shockingly ordinary sun to fill their daytime sky, you had to work pretty hard to get a sunburn from it. There just wasn't enough UV. In fact, if not for the impoverished soil, the poisons in the air and water, and the absurdities of clock and calendar, this place would be damned close to paradise.

  So they laughed together at that, until Conrad broke into a most embarrassing fit of coughing. Embarrassing, because like a lot of people he still wasn't really used to breathing human-lethal concentrations of chlorine and carbon dioxide. His cells, filled by the fax with halochondria and carbon reducers and half a dozen other new organelles, could process the air without difficulty, but it just didn't feel right. It smelled funny (truthfully it smelled like semen), and it tickled slightly in the lungs. The talematangi or halogen cough occurred in a minority of the population—less than twenty percent, these days maybe even less than ten—but its sufferers were the butt of more than their share of jokes.