Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  “Sure, Boss. What sort of troubles?”

  “If I knew, I'd tell you. But we're already facing price increases which affect our ability to do business, and that may have something to do with it. Just be aware.”

  “There has been some gossip, I guess.”

  Conrad raised an eyebrow. “Yes? Like what?”

  And here Mack showed what a disturbing thing the smile of a troll could be. “Sir, if I repeated it, I'd be gossiping. But I can try to get some details for you. Should I ask around?”

  “Not overtly,” Conrad said, after thinking about it for a moment. “It may be nothing. It's probably nothing. But if you see any signs that things are maybe not going so well, let me know.”

  “All right,” Mack said with typical pragmatism. “Will do.”

  And he would. Mack was a man of his word, and reasonably creative to boot. The funny part was, neither of Mack's parents—both of them human—had ever displayed much initiative or leadership, or even a good work ethic. But when you mixed them together just so, you got something more than the apparent sum of the parts. It couldn't be anything in the way he was raised, because Mack wasn't “raised” at all in the usual sense. Like most of the children of Barnard, he was born in a fax machine, as a weighted random mixing of the genes and generic memories of his parents. He had entered the world at the physiological age of fifteen, knowing how to speak and walk and tie knots, and with the vague sense that he'd had a childhood somewhere, though the specific details were muddy.

  He had joined Conrad's crew only five years later, already a productive member of society, and with a rather disarming acceptance of anything his elders might choose to tell him. One of the first on-the-job lessons Conrad had tried to impart was to question everything—especially authority—because if a child didn't know at least that much, what great things could you really expect of him? And so, Mack had dutifully joined the trolls, not merely in shape but in habit and thought.

  “They're raw. They just seem to have it closer to right,” he'd told Conrad at the time. And what could Conrad—himself a childhood rebel—say to that?

  With its wide-open spaces—empty land totaling five times the Earth's own surface area—P2 also had centaurs, who could cover a lot of ground in a day. They were “indolent, snooty fuffers,” in Mack's opinion, and you didn't tend to see them much in the actual cities. They needed to stretch their equine legs, and tended to stay in the farm country and the wilderness beyond it.

  Of course, there was more to society than just these two groups; while a majority of people preferred a human skin, fully twenty percent of the colony had gone troll or centaur. Another five percent had taken even more exotic turns—like the semiaquatic gillmen and four-armed vishni—or had fit themselves into body plans of their own unique design. Some of the forms were beautiful—hell, a few were glorious—and their owners claimed to have viewpoints as unique and valuable as the skins around them.

  “I can think in shapes,” one young man had told Conrad in a job interview, through a mouth that seemed little more than a slit in the pimple-like protuberance of his head, on a body covered in smooth yellow scales. “I can smell an improper angle.”

  Which was probably true. Probably. But the boy could barely walk, and couldn't look up at all, and Conrad had advised him to seek employment in some industry where his death by falling debris was not quite so bloody likely. The fact remained that the human form had been refined through a million generations of primate evolution, where these one-off experiments had not. Any architect could tell you that new features—especially glorious ones—exacted their cost somewhere else in the system. There were trade-offs aplenty, but no free lunches, or even cheap ones. And the consequences of random experimentation could be awfully severe.

  Indeed, many of the self-made were lurching, shambling disasters—the failed “angel” subculture being the most prominent example. In the unlikely event that Conrad ever decided to shed the humanity that Donald and Maybel Mursk had given him, he would probably stick close to an established body form for exactly this reason: because a thousand boisterous kids couldn't be too far wrong. If nothing else, they knew what felt good.

  “Anything else?” Mack asked.

  “No, thanks, that's all for now. I'll see you. End call.”

  The holie window winked out, leaving Conrad alone.

  There was no doubt about it, of course: Mack was his surrogate son. As he'd told the monarchs of Sol, he'd never yet felt the desire to procreate. Oh sure, he made copies of himself, but he'd never found anyone that he felt comfortable mixing them with, to create an entirely new person, as different from Conrad as Mack was from Karl Smoit.

  It wasn't that he lacked for women in his life, either. In fact, the breeding program had been accelerated for that most carnal of reasons: the colony had had more men than women, and the gender imbalance was pleasing to no one. So the faxes of Domesville and especially Bupsville had cranked out hundreds—and eventually thousands—of custom-built women into the waiting arms of the colony's men. And maybe, if Conrad thought about it, that was part of the problem: the word “children” to him meant “other people's children,” whom he might hire, or ask out on a date, or engage with in more specific recreational activities.

  But to breed with one of them, to use a child to produce another child, well . . . that did strike him as unseemly. This probably marked him as an eccentric or even—God forbid—a naturalist in the eyes of the children who knew him. But a man had to have his limits, and know them, and stay within them if he wanted his own respect.

  And anyway, the dating pool of women his own age was pretty damned sparse, and he'd worked his way through most of it—the bits he cared for, anyway—in the colony's first century. And with this reflection, it occurred to him with some surprise that he was probably waiting for the wheel of his life to make another big turn and give him a shot at Xmary again. He wasn't her first love, nor probably her longest, but she was his on both counts. That meant something, and though it seemed a complex task to bring his life back in line with hers, well, he did have forever in which to accomplish it.

  And this thought, in turn, brought a rare burst of sympathy for his ancestors, for the thousands of human generations who had lived and died in the distant past, never dreaming of this moment. If he were one of them, he'd've dropped in his tracks a long time ago and never had his second chance, or even known that he'd wanted one. “Life is short,” they used to say. Ha!

  And goodness gracious, on the heels of that came still another realization: if the future really was infinite, then his second shot at Xmary, like the first, was doomed to fail. And then, perhaps, to succeed again. And again, and again, in a never-ending cycle he could neither change nor wish to escape from. And he felt in that moment, for the first time in his life, what it truly meant to be immorbid. And for some reason, the idea made him shiver.

  chapter thirteen

  the medicine show

  At the hospital, despite his VIP status, they made Conrad wait. And not even on wellstone couches, but on cloth ones with some sort of foam padding inside, about as comfortable as sitting on open ground. And said couches were full of people, some slightly known to him and some not, some obviously sick or injured and some apparently healthy. There were several couples here as well, sitting with their hands clasped together and excited or expectant or nervous looks on their faces.

  “You know, I designed this building,” he told the receptionist.

  And that was a mistake, because the receptionist and door guard was Genie Scott, whom Conrad had spent a few days fuffing, many years ago. They were long days—Barnardean days—and once you spent the sleepshift with a woman, even one sleepshift, you pretty well forfeited your right to tell her anything like that, ever again.

  “You'll wait in line like everyone else,” she said firmly. “I don't care if you designed the planet.”

  “Well, I did design the . . .” But he saw her look and declined to finish the sent
ence. Anyway, there was a security robot waiting in the storage room behind her, visible through the open doorway, and although it was no Palace Guard, if Conrad made too much trouble the thing would simply throw him out in the street again.

  So he sat and waited for nearly an hour before the nurse, a young man he'd never seen before, ushered him into an examination room.

  “Sit down, please,” the nurse instructed. They were very firmly polite here, apparently quite accustomed to impatient patients.

  Conrad leaned his rump against the edge of the examination table—which fortunately was made of wellstone, smooth and supple beneath his touch—and at once the white walls of the room came alive with sensors and displays, shining lights and bursts of sound just beyond the edges of Conrad's hearing.

  “Hmm,” the nurse said, studying the walls and ceiling, paying no attention to Conrad himself. “Oxidation, telomere shortening, apoptosis, intracellular lipofuscin buildup . . . Sir, you're suffering from a condition known as geriatry.”

  Conrad nearly laughed out loud at that. “Old age? I'm familiar with the concept, yes.”

  “How long has it been since your last fax?”

  “About five years, I think,” Conrad answered. “Give or take a few.”

  Now the nurse did look at him, and he was scowling. “You mustn't go that long, sir. That's more than enough time for tumors to develop and metastasize. Or you could suffer arterial blockage—calcium or simple dietary fat—and, you know, drop dead. Losing five years of accumulated memory!”

  “I'm familiar with the concept,” Conrad repeated, less amused this time.

  “Well then, shame on you twice as much. Do you have trouble hearing, or tasting your food? Aren't you tired? Don't you feel run-down in the evenings?”

  “Sometimes,” Conrad admitted. “But I don't need a lecture about it. How old are you, son?”

  “That hardly matters, sir,” the nurse told him firmly and politely. “The doctor will see you in a few minutes. If you like, you can watch TV in the meantime.”

  “Ah. Thank you, no. I'll just enjoy the quiet.” There was little enough of that in his life these days.

  As promised, fortunately, the doctor only made him wait a few minutes before appearing in the doorway with a gentle knock. He had on the obligatory white coat—who could trust a doctor without one?—and he had some sort of auxiliary sensory apparatus strapped to his head, like a pair of Old Modern spectacles with cones of rigid black wellstone projecting out from the lenses.

  “Conrad Mursk. Conrad Ethel Mursk, first mate of Newhope, executive officer on the pirate fetu'ula Viridity. How the fuff are you, old man?”

  Only then did Conrad realize he was looking at Martin Liss, Newhope's nominal (though symbolic) medical officer and one of Conrad's old camp buddies from way too long ago.

  “Martin! Wow, raw, it's . . . well, it's great to see you. You look . . .”

  “Like a bug-eyed monster, I know.” Martin took the spectacles off, grinning broadly. “But I can see right through you with these things, in more senses than one. It saves a lot of time.”

  “Time for what? I'm just here to step through a fax machine, if it's all the same to you. So they've made you a doctor, have they? How long has that been going on?”

  “Quite some time now,” Martin answered seriously. “The need was clear, so I did the studying and put five copies through five years of simulation each. Believe it or not, I'm qualified to treat most ailments with no fax machine at all. Not that people generally find this reassuring.

  “To answer your question, this examination becomes part of your medical record, which gives us an idea how your body ages, how it changes over time, what sorts of breakdown it's prone to. Our fax filters have gotten pretty good, and in theory, the fresh copy we print will include corrections for the worst of these. People aren't faxing as often as they used to, so it behooves us in the medical profession to ensure that they get the most out of it when they do.”

  Conrad chuckled. “Sounds complicated, my friend. I'd rather just remember to fax more often.”

  Martin's smile looked a little bit forced. “We'd all like that, Conrad. We all remember those days. Someday it'll be like that again, but right now this is the way we do things. Now, all things considered, you're in pretty good shape, what with the time scales involved and the high radiation flux. In my medical opinion, you'll hold together for another thousand hours. Can you come back then? Two days from now?”

  Puzzled, Conrad asked, “Why? What happens in two days?”

  “Your fax appointment,” Martin said. “If you were freshly dead but still salvageable, or in the middle of a heart attack or something, I'd stick you in the machine right away. But as I say, you're in reasonably good shape, which gives you a lower triage rating.”

  “The machine is that busy? For Barnardean days at a time? What the heck is it doing?”

  Martin shrugged. “Oh, you know. Clonings, childbirth, repairing fractures, and amputations . . . the usual routine. Plus downtime for maintenance, of course. But listen, if you lose a limb between now and March, I'll promise to move you to the head of the queue. How's that?”

  “I see. It does help to have a friend in the business,” Conrad said, forcing a smile. But this, too, sounded like a problem. Maybe he was just paranoid, maybe the King and Queen of Sol had just put him on edge, but suddenly he could see problems all around him. And in all the world, in all the universe, there was only really one person he could talk to about that.

  “I'll say hi to Bascal for you,” he told Martin. “I've given myself the day off, and if you don't have time to fix me, I believe I owe that man a visit. Socially, you understand.”

  The encounter was as disturbing for Martin as it was for Conrad. Afterward, he sat in his office for a while, thinking about it. The state of medicine on Planet Two had declined slowly—so slowly that he almost hadn't noticed—but every now and then a refugee from the past would walk in thinking it was still the old days, and Martin would be forced to look around him and really see things as they were. To ponder, yes.

  He didn't know precisely what he was pondering, what the causes were, what if anything he could do about it. If he demanded an audience with King Bascal, he would probably get it sooner or later, if only because they'd gone to Camp Friendly together as boys. But what could he ask for? What would he say?

  Medicine was a perfect profession for Martin, because when you got right down to it, he didn't have much in the way of initiative. It was a job for clever reactionaries; the sensors told him what was wrong, and the hypercomputers told him what to do about it, while he served mainly in a supervisory capacity, keeping things focused and moving. In a pinch he could set a fractured bone, or even synthesize an RNA blocker to, for example, shut down a tumor or a bacterial infection. He had never done these things outside of a neural sensorium, but he understood how they would be done, or was pretty sure he did. But presented with an unknown problem whose solution had not been rotely memorized, would he know what to do?

  And the concern raised by Conrad Mursk was a problem like that: unfocused, apparently sourceless. If it was a problem with the world itself, then for Martin's purposes it was undoctorable.

  But then again, it wasn't Martin's job to worry about these things. It wasn't Conrad's job either—he was just supposed to put up buildings, right? But Conrad had always had a nose for problems and a pushy way of making them his business. Even as a boy, he'd had a funny knack for getting to the heart of things, for patching something together that would at least keep life from getting any worse.

  And this thought went a long way toward quelling Martin's unease, because Conrad did have the ear of King Bascal, far more than Martin himself ever would. And if Martin had inspired Conrad to go and have that chat with the king, well, perhaps Martin had done his part after all.

  And Martin was good at compartmentalizing his worries, and he had a lot of patients to see today anyway, so he pushed the matter out of his mind, stoo
d up and straightened his clothing, fetched a mug of iced coffee from the low-grade fax machine in his office, and went on about his business.

  The encounter was also disturbing for Genie Scott, though for slightly different reasons. The thing was, in her estimation, Conrad Mursk looked terrible. About as bad as Genie had ever seen anyone who didn't come through the door on a trail of blood or shit. And this bothered her, because she'd been feeling like she maybe wanted another try at the first architect one of these days. But if the man couldn't be bothered to take proper care of himself, what made her think he could take proper care of someone else?

  Not that he'd ever really tried in their brief time together, but fuffing hell, that was a hundred years ago. Didn't people grow? Didn't they change and improve over time? Genie herself had overcome many faults in a forty-year, twenty-step program of her own design, and was thinking about gearing up for another pass soon, to clear up the leftovers and start in on a new set of faults. She wasn't vain; she knew she had an infinite supply of these, and could safely plan an eternity of self-improvement. She thought someday that she might even license the program to others, for profit, leaving this hospital job behind for someone younger, someone with less to contribute.

  Maybe she would even try it out on Conrad sometime, but on a professional rather than a personal basis. The thought of being intimate with him again had lost its appeal, at least for now. Geriatry, yuck! Shrugging, she too put the matter out of her mind, and resolved that she would have another crack at Dr. Martin Liss instead, who at least knew how the gift of a human body ought to be treated.

  chapter fourteen

  the glass palace

  Matatahi Falehau was a less imposing structure than you might expect, and a gaudier one. It was only the second building Conrad had ever designed from scratch—the first here on Planet Two—and he winced to look at it now. If he had it to do over again, there were a hundred things he'd do differently, both great and small. According to the “iconographic transsect” of Queendom tradition, buildings of greater importance were to be signified with statuary, coats of arms, physical symbols of various kinds, and cosmetic embellishments unrelated to the functional demands of the structure.