Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  “Yes?” Conrad said to them, then gasped as he realized just whom he was addressing: Bruno de Towaji and Tamra Tamatra Lutui, the King and Queen of Sol.

  Conrad hadn't seen them—even their images—in so long that he could scarcely remember what to do. He was tempted to drop to his knees, but remembered in time that he, too, was a friend of kings. He had never knelt for Bascal—well, never seriously—so why should he for Bascal's parents? He made an awkward bow instead, placing his right hand on his stomach and raising his left in the air behind him.

  “Your Majesties! Welcome! I am . . . rather surprised to see you here. What can I do for you? Or have you perhaps arrived at the wrong address?”

  Tamra laughed. “Malo e leilei. You're Conrad Mursk, yes? The architect? Then we've been forwarded correctly. We bring you greetings from the Queendom of Sol.”

  And King Bruno, looking around him, smiled in wonder and said, “Good God, it's like stepping back in time. We had towers like this when I was a boy. Well, perhaps not quite like this. But we needed them, you see, because there was no collapsiter grid. No other way to get on and off the planet, unless you wanted to plow the air in a hyperjet. This place is beautiful, lad. Is it your own work?”

  Conrad shrugged. “Largely mine, yes, about eighty years ago. I think it's held up rather well, given the haste of its construction and the heavy use it has seen since then.”

  “No doubt, no doubt.”

  Conrad cleared his throat. “Is there, ah, is there some reason for your visit, Sires?”

  “A little reassurance, if you please,” the Queen of Sol said.

  Conrad blinked. “I beg your pardon? Reassurance on what?”

  “We get only the official Instelnet news and information channels from Barnard, plus a smattering of narrowband entertainments, and of course the personal messages from our son. But amid this clutter we find that something doesn't smell quite right.”

  “The data,” Bruno added, “imply one or more hidden or neglected variables of great importance. Our analyses complain of being incomplete, and warn us not to rely on them.”

  A bit of the old defiance fluttered in Conrad's heart, and he said, “You have no authority here. Sir, madam, I'm sorry, but it's true. We don't have to do things your way. We don't have to open our ports to your every scan. For that matter we needn't share information at all. Are you here as spies?”

  “Should spying be necessary?” Tamra asked, with neither humor nor anger. “Our concern is for your welfare.”

  “Naturally.”

  King Bruno smiled, perhaps a little sadly, and said, “Let us be friends, lad. Let us speak frankly, and in our mutual interest. We mean you no harm—surely you know that.”

  And here Conrad relented, unsure why he'd pressed the point to begin with. Because surely this was true: there could be nothing sinister in their motives. Just parental, condescending, and superior, as always. And from the safe remove of six light-years, he could forgive them for that. Couldn't he? He eyed the two holograms carefully and said, “You two are quite a large program, aren't you? Very detailed, very capable. You mean to have a real conversation.”

  “Indeed,” the King of Sol confirmed. “We've been clogging your planet's receivers for days. We will pay, naturally, in intellectual property concessions, and perhaps this proves some measure of sincerity on our part.”

  “But what is it you want?”

  The queen stepped forward half a pace. “Just your thoughts, Architect. Your impressions. Do you sense anything amiss? Something in the ecology? The economy? Your resource allocations have been quite peculiar—one might almost say primitive.”

  Conrad could only shrug. “We have a lot of work to do. We're trying to install an entire civilization from scratch, building up from bare rock. Metal-poor rock, I might add. Frankly, I think we're doing quite well. We've hit our stride.”

  “Your population dynamics, then. Surely those peculiarities—”

  “We have a labor shortage, madam. We've had one since the very beginning, and quite frankly, it gets lonely here. There's only so much time you can spend talking to yourself, talking to the same few people over and over. Surely you don't begrudge us our children?”

  “No. Certainly not. But your methods—”

  Methods, yes. There had been developments in that area, to speed the population growth along. Conrad said, “You find it unseemly.”

  “Well, it's . . . pragmatic I suppose,” the king answered uncertainly.

  “Aye. That it is,” Conrad agreed without humor. “We were intended to find our own way in this place, our own solutions to our own problems, and I believe we're doing that. I don't feel the need for children of my own—not now, at any rate—but I do feel strongly about the right to have them. In the manner of my own choosing, thank you.”

  “Indeed. Indeed. It isn't our place to judge. But you're one of Bascal's friends. I assume you are still. If something were wrong—I mean seriously wrong—would he tell you?”

  “Hmm. I don't know,” Conrad answered honestly. “He might. If he thought I could help him with it, then definitely, yes. But I haven't heard anything. I haven't spoken with Bascal in, oh, I guess it must be four years by now. And even that was just pleasantries. I suppose that happens as you get older: the bonds of friendship maintain themselves with less and less reinforcement. Anyway, these days Bascal is a lot older than I am. He doesn't seek my opinion quite so often.”

  The queen strode to the transparent wall, looking for a moment as if she might press her face against it, as Conrad had done a few minutes ago. Of course, she wasn't really here, and had no face to press. “Let's begin with your ecology,” she said reasonably. “Magnifier, please.”

  But the wall's wellstone did not recognize her as a person, merely as data, and so ignored the command.

  “Magnifier,” Conrad told it, pointing to the spot where the queen had been looking. “Fifty times zoom, contrast filtering and color enhancement.”

  “Thank you,” Her Majesty said. “One forgets one isn't real.”

  “Well,” Conrad said, “let's hope your reply isn't lost in the mail. If it gets through, then these experiences will reach the real Tamra and Bruno, and thus you are real enough for practical purposes. Let's hope the gods of data communication are on your side.”

  Per command, a magnification circle appeared in the wall directly in front of Queen Tamra. From Conrad's angle, behind the queen, it showed the top of the forest surrounding Domesville, with a flock of startled starbirds flapping up out of it in that weird, almost vertical way they had, like malformed bubbles rising in a glass of beer.

  “The ecology isn't natural,” Conrad conceded. “How could it be? It was installed, yes, and I don't think anyone has ever let it settle down. Why bother? We call it ‘evolutionary extrapolation,' and here it's considered an art form. We compute—rigorously—the sort of creatures the native ecology might have produced, given enough time, and the ones which pass a popular referendum are instantiated. Whole herds of them. Whole flocks and bevies and swarms. We color them as we please, but as I understand it the selective pressures on the first few generations are pretty strong. So their final appearance is a compromise between what we give them and what works in the wild. And if they die out altogether, we tweak them and print more. Hell, even the atmosphere would change without our constant intervention.”

  Indeed, the line of atmosphere processing stations—gigantic print plates for a very primitive sort of fax—ran alongside the tuberail link from Domesville to Bupsville, and even from here you could see a fine mist rising out of them, oxygen and nitrogen liberated from a soil buffer somewhere and reacting coolly with the native gases.

  “But we aren't dependent on the ecology, Sires, or on the atmosphere. We can breathe the native gases, and as I understand it, we can eat a much broader range of foodstuffs than you can. In this sense, we haven't been human for a century or more. And if our reproductive methods reflect this, well, so be it. Times change
.”

  “Fair enough,” the queen said, looking over her shoulder at Conrad. “But those aren't real fax machines down there.” She turned farther and pointed a finger at the chamber's service fax, where Conrad's mug of red tea had been produced. “That's not a real fax machine either. It produces only simple chemicals, yes? We've seen the reports. That device could never fax a living creature, nor even a good semblance of a dead one.”

  Conrad fought down his irritation and struggled to be polite. “I'm not sure what you mean by ‘real,' Your Highness. It isn't a medical-grade fax machine, no. But so what? Do we need one here?”

  “Perhaps,” she said seriously. “One never knows until the time has come, and by then of course it's too late. For all of that, you're looking rather decrepit yourself. You have a paunch, young man, and a touch of gray at your temples. If there are ‘medical-grade fax machines,' as you call them, when was the last time you visited one?”

  I can't quite remember, Conrad thought but did not say. “Listen, Bruno. Tamra. Parents of my friend, of my king. We're building a world here. Not your world, and certainly not the world we'd've picked for ourselves, if the choice were ours to make. But the result, like the animals, is a blend of what we want and what works.”

  “If it works,” Tamra said coolly.

  Bruno looked at the magnifier, at the fax, at the ceiling and the floor and the walls, at the planetscape spreading out beneath the tower. “All right, lad. You children have made some clever adaptations. Wait, my apologies: I shouldn't call you children. Each of you carries more responsibility than most citizens of Sol will ever experience. But yes, I can see there's nothing foolish about your methods, whether I personally agree with them or not.”

  You're damn right, Conrad thought. And oh my goodness, is that a touch of condescension in your tone? What he did say was, “Majesties, are you sufficiently reassured? I have work to do, and not enough copies to do it.”

  In point of fact, he had no copies at all right now. Probably he should rectify that along with the slippage in his biological age. And make a damned backup, yes. Losing five-odd years of memory would be inconvenient at best. No, worse than that. There were some treasures in there—experiences that might never come again, no matter how long he lived.

  Tamra said, “We are adequately reassured. For the time being, at least. Thank you for your time, Architect, and do say hi to Bascal for us when next you see him.”

  And with that, quite suddenly, the two holograms vanished.

  Conrad sighed, feeling self-conscious, feeling the scrutiny of his elders—his true elders—for the first time in many, many decades. Well, so be it. They did mean well, after all, and perhaps they had a point. About Conrad's appearance, if nothing else.

  He glanced at the floor and said, “Elevator,” and obligingly, a disc of material separated from the floor and sank a few centimeters into it. A matching cylinder, so transparent he could barely see it, emerged from the ceiling, stopping just above the level of his head. He stepped under it, onto the recessed disc in the floor, and the cylinder lowered itself around him so that he was sealed in a sort of jar, and then the whole apparatus fell out beneath him.

  He really should put a gravity laser in here sometime. He would have already, if the Gravittoir weren't making this whole structure obsolete anyway. Meanwhile, the elevator accelerated downward at half a gee, and his feet felt so tingly-light that it seemed they might slip out from under him at any moment. Not likely, given the impervium-toed traction shoes he normally wore on any construction site, and most other places besides. But it was unsettling nevertheless. Maybe he just needed more practice.

  The walls of the elevator remained transparent, but other than the lightness in his feet and the fluttering of his stomach, there was no impression of actual movement through the core of the tower. If there were imperfections in the wellstone walls of the shaft, they were imperceptible at these speeds, smearing together into a featureless gray blur.

  Anyway, the ride would take twenty minutes, so this was as good a time as any for a telephone conference. “Call Mack,” he said to the wall.

  A rectangular hologram window appeared on the side of the elevator after a few seconds' delay, and there was the artfully homely face of Mack Duggins, the son of Celia Duggins and Karl Smoit.

  “Yeah? Oh, hi Boss.” Mack was out in the street somewhere, walking briskly on his short legs, not quite huffing with the exertion. The holie's view followed right along with him as he walked, and Conrad imagined his own face, in a rectangular holie window of its own, following Mack along the street, along the facades of shops and homes and restaurants, growing and shrinking as it went, struggling to maintain a constant apparent size and range from Mack's point of view. Every now and then, people jostled past him, blocking the view, but despite the ongoing population explosion, Domesville remained a small town, without too terribly much foot traffic.

  Any resident of the Queendom—or of the Earthly societies which preceded it—would be surprised by Mack's appearance: a meter and a half of dense muscle and even denser skin, dark green in color and as bumpy as the hide of a dinosaur. The nose was prominent in his squashed-pumpkin face, the eyes were large, and the teeth so sharp and numerous that his mouth seemed barely able to close around them.

  Mack was a troll. There was nothing particularly unusual about this—the body form was optimized for the long days and nights, the bitter seas and tough native foods of Planet Two, and its subculture included nearly a thousand individuals in Domesville alone. These were mostly native children who had never seen the light of Sol except as a pinpoint in the night sky, and they wore their troll skins with proud defiance, as youngsters before them might have worn a jacket of rakish well-leather. Children had always had this talent: to pervert the practical into something symbolic. And truthfully, this had the desired effect in that Conrad was less inclined to trust a troll than he was a human being. Except for Mack, of course.

  “You treat me like I look,” a young trolless had once accused Conrad, on a crowded street at Festival time.

  Conrad's crime: stepping away from her so as not to loom. And his reply: “Obviously, miss. Our appearance is the first thing we say to the people around us, and yours is a scream of defiance.”

  To her credit, the trolless had giggled at that, and winked an enormous eyelid, and melted back into the rear of the crowd to be among her friends, her own kind.

  But in Mack's case Conrad knew the person beneath the skin—indeed, had known the person before the skin—and had long since stopped noticing the way he looked. In some sense this was the underlying message of Mack's appearance: that it was appearance itself that could not be trusted. Mack could be a wiseass without even opening his mouth.

  “Hi,” Conrad said to him over the holie link. “I'm going to be late on the job site this afternoon. I'd like you to complete the survey on your own, if that's all right, and then get those damned foundation people out there. I want a slab of actual stone this time—preferably basalt, but I'll take what I can get.”

  There were basalts in P2's metal-poor crust, but they were buried very deep, and approached the surface only at Belladonna Canyon in the Southern Lowlands, where a robotic quarry with no permanent human (or troll, or other humanoid) residents turned out a meager and sporadic supply of cobblestone and foundation slab. And without tectonics raising ocean floors into mountain ranges every now and again, P2 didn't offer much in the way of sandstone either. Mostly, Conrad had to make do with pumices and granites, or even, in a pinch, blocks of poured concrete. These days he was using wellstone only as needed, as its price seemed to be pegged to the colony's population numbers and was therefore rising steadily.

  And come to think of it, maybe that was the kind of warning sign the King and Queen of Sol were asking about. Certainly, in an optimal economy the goods and services should grow at least as quickly as the consumer base. Right?

  “All right,” Mack said uncertainly. “I can handle that. Should
I stop short of threatening violence?”

  “Please,” Conrad confirmed. “But not too far short. We can't keep building on pumice—not if we're going to live forever.”

  “Understood. I hope you don't mind a bit of curiosity though; what's so important all of a sudden? Not another woman, I hope.”

  “No. Well, fifty-fifty chance, I guess. I'm going to see a doctor.”

  Mack slowed a little, then resumed his quick pace. “Anything wrong?”

  “Just a tune-up,” Conrad assured him. “It's been a while. We mustn't neglect these things—the delicate machineries which support the soul.”

  “Noted,” Mack said. “Shall I expect you later?”

  “Just play it by ear. Your ears are big enough for that, I should think. Anyway, I'm not quite sure how the hospitals work anymore, or how long it takes. Don't expect me until you see me.”

  Mack seemed satisfied with that, but it was hard to tell for certain, because trolls usually looked satisfied. “All right, then, Boss. Have fun.”

  Mack took instruction very well, needing little in the way of hand-holding or micromanagement, and in Conrad's experience that was a very good sign indeed. The best leaders were also, for whatever reason, the best subordinates. Mack was a bit, well, green for a leadership position just yet—only ten years old by the calendar, possibly twenty or twenty-five if you counted adult-equivalent experience, for his childhood had been brief. But Conrad was grooming him, and when the time came, he hoped to hand over a lot of his day-to-day labors to this enterprising young man, freeing himself up for certain big-picture issues, like why his materials were getting so damned expensive.

  Bother it, maybe he should have taken Bruno and Tamra a bit more seriously. He cleared his throat. “Mack, I've heard a . . . rumor, I guess, that we might have some economic troubles lurking in the background. Not us personally—I mean the whole colony. Would you keep your eyes and ears open for me?”