Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  “We're still thinking about the air composition,” Bascal said, as if apologizing for the planet. “More oxygen would be nice, for one thing. This period is just one more stage in a long, slow unpacking. If a world has been birthed, alas, for the moment it remains an infant, suckling from the plans laid down for it by Mother Sol. But someday, my boy, we'll control the very air. We'll have print plates larger than this stadium, ringing all around the city and continually adjusting the gas balance.”

  “Not on my account, I hope,” Conrad said, clearing his dry throat. “I'll adjust. We all will.”

  “No doubt,” Bascal agreed. But he flagged a passing vendor—some freshly thawed Earth kid Conrad had never seen before—and ordered a chilled red tea “for my flimsy friend, here.”

  “Immediately, Sire,” the vendor replied with bright humor, jamming his fingers through the print plate of his vendory and hauling out a glass cup. “We mustn't have our VIPs fainting on opening day.”

  “Indeed not.”

  And here was another bit of ribbing: the men and women who put Domesville together naturally felt a bit superior to those who merely inhabited it. The newly awakened, moving into their assigned apartments and neighborhoods and jobs on the planet's surface, naturally resented this—such condescension had after all been a major driver of the Revolt. But they found it uncouth to say so. And in turn, the builders of Domesville denied any sense of envy toward the arrogant bastards who'd puffed the first air into Bubble Hood. As for Newhope's transit crew, well, who didn't resent them? Too old, for one thing, and too closely associated with the power structures they were supposed to be fleeing.

  The term “VIP”—Verily, Important Personage—smacked enough of Queendom pomp and foofery that it could not properly be given as a compliment. Nor received as one.

  Making faces at this punk who had seen so little and knew so much, Conrad raised a warning backhand that was only half in jest. “You want to work in the Lutui Belt, kid? If chlorine doesn't make you cough, try vacuum.”

  But he accepted the tea just the same. It was good—a blend of sugars and electrolytes, vitamins and flavinoids, with a hint of glycerine to improve fluid absorption, plus assorted stimulants and euphoriants and anti-inflammatories to improve the outlook of the person drinking it. “Good fer what ails ye,” as the slogan said, and indeed it was just the thing to soothe away the talematangi. Here was Barnard's first true culinary innovation—nothing at all like the astringent red teas of the Queendom—and Conrad saw no shame in enjoying it on its own terms.

  Even the container had a colonial flair: a narrow cone of glass with the pointy end flattened to form a stand. Glass because the scarcity of metals here, coupled with energy costs rather higher than they'd enjoyed in the Queendom, made gold or wellstone a bit too pricey for disposable cups. Technically, of course, the cups were recyclable, and would simply be hurled back into the fax when the show was over and the robotic cleanup crew swept the stadium's litter all the way down to the molecular level. But already there were sounds of breakage all around; these glasses were fun to smash.

  Such practices would be unthinkable in the Queendom, but that was the point of striking off on your own, right? New ideas, new traditions, new solutions shaped and limited by a fresh environment.

  “Better?” the king asked him, supplementing the question with an elbow to Conrad's ribs.

  “Much,” Conrad agreed, with answering jabs of his own. “Thank you for the drink, Your Highness.” In Sol, a harmless action like this would have drawn the ire of the unshakable Palace Guard robots, earning Conrad a painful tazzing at the very least. But here they simply earned him the wrath of the king himself, who grabbed Conrad's left arm and made as if to twist it.

  “Be a loyal subject,” the king warned, “or you may go home a fractured one.”

  “Ow,” Conrad said. “All right, quit it.” And then, when Bascal had released him: “Miserable tyrant. So how's this wildlife program going? I heard you were almost ready to release some animals.”

  Here the king grew more serious. “If by ‘animals' you mean ‘millimeter-sized burrowing insects,' then yes. We need them to condition the soil for the next wave of plant life. The modified lichens are taking off nicely, spreading out across the landscape in the spaces between the algoids. Now we're introducing more complicated root systems. But there's a lot of debate on this point, and I'm reluctant to impose a solution by fiat.”

  “Debate on what?”

  “What to use to fill that niche,” Bascal said. From his tone, the question both amused and annoyed him. “Our libraries are full of Earth organisms, dozens of which could do the job handily once halochondria are introduced into their cell structure, but I've got people arguing that that wouldn't be fair to the lidicara. The native peoples, you see? All squidgy and helpless and stupid. Even if we leave the Sea of Repose completely alone—just isolate it from a terraformed Sea of Destiny and all the waterways we care about—the changes around it will still have an effect. If we introduce a lot of Earth life, and fuff around with the atmosphere in addition, we could extinct the little bastards in their own ecosystem.”

  “So, then. What'll you do? Engineer some lidicara ambassadors?”

  Conrad hadn't meant the question seriously, but Bascal answered it that way. “Something like that, yes. A modified form, specialized for burrowing and toughened up for a life outside the water. We're still wrangling over the details. Obviously we've got to release some Earth life if we want to support human beings on this ball, but first we may broaden the native ecosystem. Give it some of the resilience it might've developed with another hundred megayears of evolution.”

  “Compressed into what, a single year of engineering?”

  “Oh, no, Conrad. Much longer than that. We mustn't fall prey to any false sense of urgency; there's plenty of time to do it all slowly and well. Do it right. There's no death, no deadline, no pressure. Anyway my father would tell you that time itself is an illusion. There is no forward or backward, just an infinity of moments, like paintings in a gallery. And most of the paintings are nonsense! Strange as it seems, we simply pick the ones we like, and string them together into a story.”

  “You said as much in the ‘Song of Physics,'” Conrad mused.

  But the face Bascal made was sour and puckery. “Oh, hell. Let's not bring art into it, all right?”

  “You're the one who mentioned painting, Sire. Is that no longer considered a form of art?”

  That didn't quiet the king one bit. “It's not that I'm blocked, if that's what you're thinking. Truly, it isn't. My moments are simply filled, or else jealously protected in their empty state. There's no reason to insist on fresh poetry right now. The illusion of relentless movement through time is an aspect of consciousness. It is consciousness. The one to pity is the mortal human off thataway, in our past, ever plummeting toward his extinction and yet expected, somehow, to be cheerful! I, sir, have no such extinction in my plans, and can afford to take a few decades out to—oh, I dunno—build a civilization? Remake this world as God might have done it, and then invade it afresh with our own troops?”

  “So we're ethical conquerors, then,” Conrad said. “You tamper with nature in nature's own image, while I build the human world—from native rock as much as wellstone—to look as though it's always been here.”

  “You personally?” Bascal asked, now sounding a bit offended for some reason. “Everyone else is just a consumer, eh? A population with no purpose but to be housed by you, brick by brick with your own two hands? Conrad Mursk, First Architect of Barnard. Never mind all these robots, these work-study programs for the newly awakened, these fax copies we all have running around, busy every moment of the day. I would never have given you that title, boyo, if I'd known it would go to your head like this. Second Architect! Third Architect! Paver's Boy, for crying out loud. If I had it to do over again . . . But no, then you'd feel a need to prove yourself, to be worthy of more. Sometimes I think you were born to grind me.�
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  “Whether it please Your Majesty or not,” Conrad replied, “I was born to build. I've got mortar in my veins.”

  “And rocks in your head, yes. Bricks in your feet. Maybe a support beam up your ass.”

  Suddenly they were laughing again, and Conrad would have carried the joke farther, reflecting it back on his monarch, if the showtime trumpets had not chosen that moment to begin blaring.

  “Who's up first?” he asked instead.

  “Steve Grush and Luca Elmer Rodhaim,” the king answered in a stage whisper as the crowds slowly quieted around them. “Odds are seven to five in Steve's favor, with a spread of three and an overage of .6. He's switched from dual tazzers to a net and spear, though, which may bring his favor down a point.”

  From the wellwood stadium floor below, the sound of trumpets gave way to flat warning klaxons, and the “go” lights flickered from green to amber. The crowd went silent. Then the lights went red, and the welliron sally gates curled aside, and two nearly nude men sauntered onto the killing floor from opposite sides of the stadium. The crowd broke into a roar; this was going to be good.

  On the left, coming in from the east gate, was Steve Grush, bearing the promised net of impervium fibers, and a wellwood spear with a wicked—probably atomically sharp—point. On the west was Luca Rodhaim, with the two-handed Ringing Sword that was fast becoming his trademark. In an ordinary bout that vibrating blade could be counted on to bi- or trisect the nearest opposing Security rep within twenty seconds of gates-up, but Steve was an unforgiving fighter, and a monstrously quick one, second only to Ho Ng in the rankings.

  “I'll bet you five million dollars,” Bascal said as the two combatants closed and circled.

  “On what?”

  “On mayhem.”

  Conrad was supposed to bet against mayhem? In the finals? “No deal,” he said. But then Steve threw his net, spiraling out on its weights like a miniature galaxy, and although it was impervium, the Ringing Sword slashed right through it, flinging it to the ground in two uneven pieces.

  “Shit, wait,” Conrad backpedaled. “I'll take it! Clean kill.”

  The move had been a feint; Steve was counting on that reaction, and followed up with his spear before Luca could bring the sword down and through and back up again. The thing was light, but not that light. And so the tip of Steve's spear lanced forward in a left-handed thrust that caught Luca just under the chin. And that was that.

  Except that Luca didn't fall down. The spear wasn't even lodged in his throat; it had skated off to the side instead, tearing a red gash along his neck but apparently missing everything vital along the way.

  “What the—”

  And now Luca was bringing the sword around and over, and Steve was off balance and a lot farther forward than he ought to be, and the sword came down right on him.

  Well, not precisely on him; he managed to jerk to one side at the end of the stroke, so that instead of cleaving his head in two it merely severed his right arm at the shoulder. The sound of the flesh parting wasn't audible over the gasping of the crowd, but Steve's scream of pain and rage certainly was.

  And still the fight was not over! Staggering back in a spray of blood, Steve somehow managed to dodge a second blow, and then block a third one, though it cost him the front third of his spear. And then, amazingly, he contrived to clock Luca on the side of the head with the broken shaft, and then jab him in the stomach, and then whack him even harder across the side of the skull!

  Now Luca was staggering back, bleeding from the nose, and Steve was falling back as well. But Steve had regained his equilibrium, and circled carefully in his retreat, putting the bright, mango-colored sun in Luca's eyes while he . . . while he . . .

  Dropped the broken spear. And fished his severed arm up off the bloodstained killing floor. And hefted it like a club in his left hand, with the shoulder end forward. And charged forth to beat Luca across the head with it! Once, twice, thrice, dodging strokes of the Ringing Sword all the while!

  The crowd went wild as Luca Elmer Rodhaim scrambled backward, tripped, dropped his sword clanging and ringing against the wellwood floor, and suffered an uppercut like an overpowered golf swing from Steve's severed arm. His head fell back against the wellwood of the killing floor.

  And even then it was only over in the sense that Luca was out of the running. He wasn't going to win this. Actually beating him to death took Steve another full minute, and an ugly spectacle it was, particularly since Steve himself was bleeding out all the while, and afterward barely had the strength to raise his remaining arm in victory before he, too, collapsed and died.

  “That's why he's still Luca's boss!” Bascal murmured admiringly as the gleaming medic robots danced out onto the field.

  But here was an interesting point: could they really call it Security training if neither combatant survived to learn a lesson from it? If the medics were quick, he supposed, they might salvage some sensory impressions and short-term memory from the corpses. Maybe. But anyway, what was the story with that spear to the throat? Luca should have died right then!

  “It wasn't a fair fight,” Conrad protested.

  “Fairer than it would have been,” Bascal said quietly. “Luca had some armor plates under his skin. Why not, with fax machines at his disposal and stodgy Queendom proprieties suspended? And yes, I knew about it, and don't worry, I won't collect on our bet. I just wanted you to feel involved in the action. This is a nice stadium, by the way. Well designed, good acoustics. Much classier than crowding around like schoolboys while Security brawls in the streets. My cap is off to you, sir.”

  “Thanks,” Conrad said, taking the compliment at face value. But pride was not among the emotions he felt just now. It did make a kind of sense for Security to stay sharp through dueling, and with a fax to print fresh copies of the dead and wounded, there was no particular reason for them to pull their punches. They weren't beating on innocents, here, and Conrad wasn't about to tell consenting adults what to do or not do with their own bodies. And yes, shamefully, it was exciting to watch these hard men and women fight for their lives.

  But he could see right away that there'd be an arms race, with Security personnel beefing up their bodies in more and more elaborate ways. This wasn't about public safety at all. Had he really thought so? It wasn't even about scaring the public into a law-abiding stupor, although from Bascal's point of view that might be a nice side effect. Really, mainly, it was about violence for its own sake—a dark, repressed bit of human psyche dragged out into daylight celebration.

  “You look aggrieved,” Bascal said to him, with a touch of genuine concern.

  “Yeah,” Conrad said. But with effort he shrugged off these bleak feelings and said, “It isn't necessary for me to approve of everything people do in this colony.”

  Bascal smiled and put a warm hand on Conrad's shoulder. “Indeed not, boyo, for such is the nature of freedom. If we were all restricted to your personal sense of propriety, then you would be king, and a tyrant, and the people would weep to have come so far for so little. The city already has its first filthy beggar, did you know that? It's Louis McGee, and I wish him well of it, for apparently that's the thing that makes him happy.”

  Conrad snorted. That was a delicate face to paint on such an indelicate matter; there were still sporadic freakups whose perpetrators had to be cycled back into fax storage again until such time as the colony had resources to deal with them. But would such a time ever truly arrive? The neural balance filters were voluntary, as indeed they had to be; put that power in the hands of government, and where might it end? There were crazies back home, too—sad-eyed addicts and vagrants unable or unwilling to ask for help. They were the curse of any free society.

  “Anyway,” Bascal continued, “a beggar does round the place out a bit—make more of a world of it. We have thousands of others to pick up the slack, and if things get too busy we can all double up. Print an extra copy: one to work and one to enjoy our hard-won freedom.”

/>   “Meaningful work is its own reward,” Conrad countered, irritated at the thought of Louis getting a free ride. “After a lifetime without it, we should all be clamoring. Who needs extra copies?”

  The king laughed. “Ah! Hoy! And we also have you, my friend, reaching for greatness in your own personal way; and this world, this star system, is the screen upon which your epic will be writ. You don't have to make me proud—you don't have to do anything—but I hope you'll find your potential, and live up to it.”

  And here Conrad drew himself up and said, “On that, Your Majesty, you can bet the planet.”

  Which is, in some sense, exactly what happened.

  book two

  the colonium

  chapter eleven

  on settling down

  Even without improvisation for its own sake, there was lots of hard work to be done, and nearly everyone was busy nearly all the time. They could print extra copies of themselves to rest and relax, and then integrate that experience just to say they'd had it, but Conrad, like many colonists, elected not to. Hard work was refreshing. Their bodies were young and physically fit; they demanded the bliss of meaningful action. Conrad thought, perhaps, that he had never truly slept before in his life. But in those early years, in the building of a world, he felt both more awake and better rested than he'd ever known he could.

  And as this was happening, the second of the great colony ships arrived at its destination: Alpha Centauri, aka Rigel Kent, aka the Republic of Kent. An actual republic, with no monarch at all! And Conrad had thought he was rebellious.

  Next came the Kingdom of Wolf, which had requested a copy of Bascal at departure time, to be its own king as well as Barnard's. The other Bascal, though, was printed from a pattern that had languished in storage since Newhope's departure. He'd awakened off balance, a century and a half out of his proper time, and had then meekly followed his ship's storage program rather than spending the transit time in solitary study.