Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  Not that he'd've had a century to fatten his brain anyway, since the QMS Glover Gailey was twice as fast as Newhope, with better braking protocols besides. By the time he got to Wolf, the noveau-Bascal had found the good grace to recognize himself for what he was: a divergent archive, now wildly different from the legally recognized individual. Therefore, he changed his name from Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui to Edward Bascal Faxborn, and named the original—the King of Barnard—his cousin rather than some alternate aspect of himself.

  The following year, the Queendom of Lalande was established. They had requested a copy of Tamra Lutui as their queen, but were refused on the grounds that she did not wish to leave her native Sol, nor her husband (who had not been elected Lalande's king), nor to have more than one Queendom to spread her love between, nor to deny the young colonists the chance to find their own way into the future. Instead, the Lalandans resorted to one Bethany Nichols, who by the cherubic age of thirty was both a successful playwright and a prize-winning athlete, as well as a darling of the telereception circuit.

  Conrad realized with some shock that this young queen had been born in Sol system well after his own departure from it. She was, in some sense, from his future, or from some sort of parallel universe. And this was a telling point: society was far larger than just the place he had left and the place he had come to. Society was not—what a shock!—about Conrad Mursk at all.

  In the decades that followed came the Queendoms of Sirius, Luyten, Ross, and Eridani. None of these star systems were especially suitable for colonization, but they were the ones that God had made available in Sol's immediate neighborhood. Wolf and Lalande at least had life-bearing planets, though decidedly un-Earthlike ones, but the other stars were sterile. The spores of life would land anywhere, bloom anywhere with even approximately the right mix and balance of elements, but these blasted systems had little more than cinders and ice, debris fields and cold, moonless giants.

  Terraforming these places—even hollowing them out or doming them over, squashing them to planettes or spinning them into habitable rings—promised lifetimes of toil. Immorbid lifetimes, with dubious payoff at best. Their colonists were predominantly volunteers, too, which made Conrad wonder just how bad things had gotten back Solways. How stifling, how crowded and hopeless did things have to get before a lifetime on bare rock seemed preferable?

  Then again, perhaps the younger Conrad would have leaped at the chance. Perhaps his experiences here and on Newhope had made him overcautious, stodgy, old. He didn't know what to think about that.

  In any case, the Queendom of Sol seemed to pause then, drawing its breath, and it was rumored that the next wave of colonization would be aimed at brown dwarf stars, tiny and nameless and cold, too dim to be visible even from their own outlying planets. This sounded even more miserable to Conrad—even farther from the ideals of Ireland or Tonga, or any of the other scattered paradises of Earth.

  But many of these dwarfs—failed stars or oversized planets, simmering in the warm fusion of their own deuterium—were closer at hand than the genuine star systems, and more promising in certain other regards. The light of the blue giant Sirius, being high in ultraviolet, was lethal to an unprotected human, as indeed the light of Sol could be even on Earth. And at least a brown star, dim as a fireplace coal, did not have that strike against it. Close enough to feel its warmth, you could stare right at it and never be blinded.

  At first, contact between the eight colonies was routed through Sol and was therefore exceedingly slow, but with the erection of a giant antenna farm at Bascal's insistence and Conrad's day-to-day direction, Barnard was able to join a lightspeed telecom network which connected the colonies directly. The Instelnet: a chatter of new societies, independent of the richer, fatter networks of the old Queendom. Later, redesign of the antennas boosted data rates by a factor of ten, and the addition of three more antenna farms, plus several dedicated power stations, increased it by still another tenfold. But that was the best they could do without telecom collapsiters, and even the Queendom of Sol couldn't afford to string those between the stars.

  The traffic was mainly compressed data, plus a few audiovisual channels carrying entertainments and news. It was, of course, impossible to transmit human beings. One needed a true collapsiter grid for that. However, with sufficient time and money and energy, it was possible to transmit intelligent, self-aware messages. Soon there was a steady diplomatic traffic as the various heads of state sent idiot snapshots of themselves back and forth for meetings and even staged dinners. And in the way of such things, the practice became a kind of vice for the wealthy, into which class Conrad found himself unexpectedly thrust.

  He had done little to encourage this process, and felt gnawingly guilty about it. Egalitarianism was the new default, with no one citizen rising too high above the others—in theory. But when a hundred people pooled their resources to hire a building design, each giving Conrad a tenth of his or her rational wage, the wealth didn't take long to accumulate.

  On the other hand, money was kind of meaningless out here; food and clothing were as plentiful and nearly as cheap as they had been in the Queendom, most land was literally free, and Conrad did his best to see that buildings were not expensive either. Materially speaking, there wasn't a whole lot else you could buy.

  So he traveled, visiting Xmary and her lover Feck a few times up at Gatewood Station. And later he visited Xmary and some guy named Floyd Limpwick, whom she fell desperately in love with for a while, at their temporary quarters on the Lutui Belt Provisional Mass Crusher. But while Conrad was glad to see her, and she him (or so it seemed), they had never truly made that transition into friendship. He always felt a tinge of bitterness toward her lovers—even Money Izolo, who was his friend as well as hers. And really, they couldn't be happy to see him either. So the visits came less and less frequently, and Conrad found himself at the Instelnet Transceiving Station more than once, burning a decade's worth of savings to send his own little software homunculus to the stars and back.

  The hard part was finding a pen pal—someone to whom he could address his messages. At Wolf he could count on Edward Bascal, who still considered him a childhood friend, but it took some patient digging in the lower-bandwidth channels to find willing partners in Lalande and Sirius, Ross and Luyten. And the paid replies, when they came back, included partial sensorium: the sights and sounds of a foreign place, almost as though he'd been there himself.

  It was a bit like traveling, and as extravagances of the hyperrich go, this one garnered more interest and amusement than envy. At parties especially, people would ask Conrad about his journeys to the stars, and he would regale them with stories. Pale dusty rings arching above a world of ice; a sky with three suns; an aurora sizzling with stellar-flare protons, and beneath it an ocean thick and slimy with black vegetation, and lurking mountains of flesh which had been known to gobble unwary humans along with their normal grazing.

  Alas, his second reply from Luyten was lost in transmission, garbled beyond the ability of even a telecom hypercomputer to repair, and he mourned its vanished impressions and experiences almost as he would mourn a true copy of himself. But even that made for a good anecdote, and spiced his character with a fashionable tinge of melancholy.

  In this way Conrad became, over time, a seasoned and cosmopolitan adult, a galactic citizen who was widely seen, with only the mildest of envy, as rising above the inherent provinciality of this little province—humanity's first extrasolar experiment.

  One thing Conrad never did, though, was send himself to Sol. He'd already been there, after all, and while it might be nice to see his parents and some of the casual friends he'd known who had not themselves become colonists, he never felt any true need to send them more than text messages, or the occasional video monologue. And even that was expensive, by colonial standards. Too, as with Xmary, he had less and less in common with them as the years rolled on. The messages became dutiful rather than warm, and as terse as his sense of
duty permitted.

  But of course Conrad's fate was intertwined with the Queendom of Sol, and could not be so easily separated. And he had twice received his own visitors from the sky, pen pals writing back to him with animate messages of their own, and so in the fullness of time he was only a little bit surprised to find the Queendom of Sol coming to visit him, as a mountain had once allegedly called upon the residence of the prophet Mohammed.

  chapter twelve

  messages, bottled and un-

  In the twenty-fifth decade of the Kingdom of Barnard, in an orbital tower looking down upon the world of P2, the architect Conrad Mursk stands with a warm mug in his hand, staring across forty thousand kilometers of vacuum at his latest creation: the Gravittoir. This consists of a skyhook station, known artfully as “Skyhook Station,” suspended by three electromagnetic grapples “hooked” to Barnard, Gatewood, and Van de Kamp, as a triangular hammock might be slung between a trio of trees.

  There will be times, alas—a few years out of every century—when these bodies will be poorly aligned, and will fail to support the station (being “beneath” it in a gravitational sense), and at these times the station will be forced to descend back to the planet's surface, and the citizens of Barnard will have to rely instead on the older and less elegant Orbital Tower, upon which Conrad presently stands.

  A synchronous orbit for Skyhook Station—one which completed its turns at the same rate as the planet itself—would have been much better in this regard, but there are no such orbits here. With the star so close and the planet's rotation so slow, the altitude of an orbit like that would be well outside the planet's sphere of gravitational influence. Or so Conrad's gravity specialists have persuaded him: this is the best solution for the given environment, and will in no way reduce the esteem of Barnard's First Architect.

  The purpose of the Orbital Tower is simple: to provide an elevator up out of the atmosphere. It was never intended as a permanent solution, and while the Gravittoir will be a great improvement, there is nothing permanent about it, either. Indeed, it's just another stopgap on the road to faxation; once the collapsiter grid is in place, none of this will be necessary. The Gravittoir is also simple: Skyhook Station has a weak gravity laser pointing downward, which creates a column of funny weather, but more importantly makes it possible for a properly designed spacecraft to be yanked off the surface of the planet and into space, where its thrusters can place it in orbit without drag or fuss.

  Stand with Conrad, and see what he sees: the tower stretching down beneath you: a narrow, gleaming cone of impervium whose base is roughly the size of a soccer pitch, whose nearly cylindrical apex is, by coincidence, almost exactly as wide as the starship Newhope, which brought you here long ago. The interior of the structure includes a sleeve of diamond which is technically capable of supporting the tower's entire weight, but with almost no safety margin. Know that for practical purposes, the structure is held up by the pressure of electrons in quantum dots, and runs a serious risk of collapse in the unlikely event that the power ever fails. Feel the meaning of that in your boots, in the wellmetal deck beneath you. A temporary structure, indeed.

  Because the tower is so purely vertical, and its base so distant beneath P2's tall atmosphere, you cannot see the foot of it. What you can see, if you strain your eyes, is the black line of a tuberail link joining the base of the tower with the city of Domesville, which even now is built in rings and circles—a concession to the domes that were never erected. It's a style; even the new construction falls into the same general pattern, so that from up here the city looks like a scattering of saucers and old-style shirt buttons around a pair of midsized dinner plates.

  There are just over twenty thousand people down there (or fourteen thousand individuals with an average of 1.4 instantiations apiece, if you prefer to count it that way) going about their daily business, which mainly involves the maintenance and expansion of Domesville itself, the rearing and education of its growing ranks of children, and the planning and governance and sociopolitical groundwork for the much larger population which is to follow in the centuries ahead.

  Then, running east from Domesville and perpendicular to the Tower Line, you can just make out the city's other tuberail, which runs thirty-five thousand kilometers east to Bupsville (officially Backupsville), the planet's only other major community. Not everyone lives in these two towns, and indeed, not everyone lives on the surface of the planet, or even anywhere near it. But together, the towns account for about ninety percent of the colony's population, and at least ninety-nine percent of its cultural output. If you squint, you can just make out Bupsville through a yellow-brown haze at the edge or “limb” of the planet. It doesn't look like much, just a gray discoloration, gleaming here and there with the bright orange-white of reflected sunlight. There is another tuberail line south from Bupsville, joining it to the Gravittoir's ground station, which, like the Orbital Tower, is located on P2's equator. But that line is far too thin and faint, too obscured by chlorine haze and water vapor and dust, to be visible from here.

  The ground station itself is visible only because Conrad has asked the windows to mark it for him, with a reticle of glowing red. Another reticle—this one green—marks the position of Skyhook Station, which fortunately is visible, if only because it gleams in full sunlight, like a tight little cluster of stars.

  Conrad is here because he's seen the Gravittoir, the latest of his children, from every other sort of angle, and wants to see it from this one before it goes online. Before the Orbital Tower becomes an afterthought, useful only for rustic vacations and cargoes of the very lowest priority. Before Domesville ceases to be the planet's main spaceport, and becomes instead merely its political capital.

  Imagine yourself hovering invisibly beside Conrad, in a circular chamber at the tower's very top. All around you, the walls are transparent, though the ceiling has been opaqued to provide some shade from the noonday sun, and the floor has been similarly darkened to prevent vertigo, which from this vantage can be considerable. The launching tracks, running up along the outside of the tower, are also transparent (remarkably so, to your eye), and are only really visible if you know what to look for: four man-wide tuberails of wellstone spaced around the tower at ninety-degree intervals. Here and there, they catch the light in interesting ways, shooting rainbow-speckled sprays of it along the silver-gray wellmetal of the deck beneath your feet. It's rather cold here, and Conrad is bundled in a wellcloth jacket he brought with him from home, thinking ahead because he knows it's always cold here.

  Outside of Domesville, all around it, is the Forest Not-Quite-Primeval (its actual name, yes), where the green of Earthly vegetation battles with the brown of P2's “natives”—very few of which are genuine, unmodified algoids. And with a careful eye you can even discern the two streams running through Domesville in a Y shape: Chokecherry Creek and King's Creek, which merge to become King's River before emptying out into the half-moon shape of Transit Bay, and thence to the Sea of Destiny. These off-dry ditches are generously named, visible only for the vegetation and housing crowding along their banks. They're not real rivers—just the handiest applicants for the job. But the sea and the bay are for real, and beneath their blue-green veneer they are themselves a battleground of green and brown and black vegetation.

  The tower's structure is rigidized, actively controlled and damped to a degree that even Conrad finds astonishing, but nevertheless the floor transmits a vibration up through your boots. Or through Conrad's, more properly, since you aren't really here. This vibration, barely noticeable at first, quickly grows in intensity. A podship is coming up the rails. With a sudden smile, Conrad looks for it, leaning forward and pressing his nose against the transparent wellglass. He's rewarded by glimmers of light from below, shifting rapidly, and in another moment there is a sound like rain, and half the view is blocked for a moment as a C-shaped crew transporter, striped black and red, flickers past at seven kps, riding upward on two of the tower's four rails. The
thrumming continues for another fraction of a second, and then suddenly quits as the podship clears the top of the tower and soars on up into vacuum.

  God, you love it here. Or Conrad does. Or, more properly, Conrad did, for these events are long in the past.

  After building the place, he used to sit up here for hours, just watching the pods go by. More traffic downward than up: there was a net flow of resources onto the planet, as it was easier to mine pure elements out of the asteroid belts than to rip them from P2's metal-poor crust. But the upward traffic—the outbound traffic—was in its own way more romantic, since it consisted largely of children in their twenties heading for their yearlong, not-quite-mandatory tour of duty on the space station or vessel of their choice. Seeing them roar by like that, Conrad was reminded of his own early days in space, as the unofficial XO of a pirate ship.

  In many ways, these kids had it soft by comparison, although Conrad smiled to remember that Viridity had had its own medical-grade fax machine onboard, albeit restricted by stern software lockouts. There had been a pair of gleaming Palace Guard robots onboard as well, which had seemed very threatening and dangerous but had saved lives on more than one occasion. What days those had been! Not fun, but definitely thrilling.

  The walls of the chamber chimed and said, “Incoming message.” The voice was soft and distinctly artificial, as Conrad preferred, and it was nice to see that the Tower still recognized him and knew his tastes after all this time away.

  “Play message,” he said.

  A man and a woman appeared before him, in very nice holograms projected and reinforced from both the ceiling and floor, with maybe a bit of fill-in from the walls as well.