Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  “This communicates an expectation,” Laureate Gwylan Smith had told his class once in a series of crossly delivered training lectures, “about the social function of the building, which in the end is more important than its exact physical form.” And since Gwylan Smith was one of the Queendom's dozen-odd premier architects, he almost certainly had a point. But respecting authority in that particular way had never been a part of Conrad's character. The unwritten Mursk transsect favored clean lines and smooth, unadorned surfaces, not because they were easier (although they often were), but for purity's sake. To the extent that his buildings conveyed a message, it was a no-nonsense, striving-for-perfection kind of thing.

  Except, of course, for this place, which had Tongan heraldry and iconography all over it. Even the wellstone facade was broken into tiles, each with the stars and cross of the Lutui family crest. Ugly, ugly symbols whose only redeeming feature was their color palette, which did at least match the grays and browns of the surrounding rock shelf.

  Ah, well.

  Domesville was not a large town, and the walk from the hospital to the palace took only a few minutes, through the industrial and warehouse quarter, past the town square with its burbling fountain, and then through the poorly planned maze of apartment buildings overlooking the beach.

  The walk was not particularly pleasant, alas. If this were Earth it would be a gray day, drizzling a cool, steady mist. P2's equivalent was a haze of yellow-brown, blotting out the sun and filling the air with the swimming-pool aroma of wet chlorine and salt. The sort of day that would kill an unmodified human within minutes, yeah. For the people of P2—“pantropes,” Bascal called them sometimes—it didn't even sting the eyes or irritate the nasal membranes, but even so the body remembered a different time, when it didn't have to process this shit. Hints of the old respiratory ailments, the pharyngitis and talematangi, resurfaced among the colonists when the halogen fronts blew through, and even the kids who were born here—if “born” was the right word—got cranky and indoorsy. But the walk was mercifully short.

  The palace itself was perched on a natural bench of native granite, just above the steeply sloping beach. This too was a bad idea in retrospect, because the ocean level had been on a steady rise ever since the colonists had arrived—not from their own activity but as part of the natural ebb and flow of the planet. Now, alas, the high-tide beach was half its former size, and it would've been better to have blasted the shelf with carbon subnukes and pulled the slope back another thirty meters or so.

  Live and learn.

  Backupsville, at least, had more sense and planning behind it, and the next city would be better still. Not that Conrad had all that much say in the top-level city planning or anything, but he recognized that his architecture did influence the landscape, and thus the layout decisions of the Senate and the city councils.

  And decade by decade, the lessons really did pile up, and he didn't have to be a genius—fortunately!—to internalize them, if only as rules of thumb. Conrad smiled to himself. The next time I colonize a planet, I'll know how it's done. Ha!

  The city's vegetation was sparse. There were irrigated gardens in the hills to the west, and the Bay Islands were the usual riot of green and brown, where alien and “native” vegetation wrestled for the best soil, the best access to sunlight. And here in town there were potted palms, a few as high as four meters, and troughed red bromide bushes spreading half as wide as a tuberail car. But most people in town had given up trying to grow anything in the ground itself. The bedrock was shallow here, the soil coarse and crystalline and full of pebbles, more like beach sand than potting soil.

  But Bascal, echoing his father, had stubbornly surrounded the palace with faxed soil, which probably had to be refreshed once or twice a year lest it wash away or soak down into the sand or turn too acidic or something. So the palace itself stood out above an oasis of palms and vanilla shrubs, grasses and sweet potato creepers.

  Anyway, the Beach Palace was kind of pretty in the noontime pids of a sunny day (“late spring,” if you will), its translucent tiles of white and red shooting tiny rainbows every which way, but in the afterpids of a mustard day like today (a stormy autumn?), it just looked foolish. The front walkway was of large, round paving stones—nonprogrammable—cut from the colony's first quarry in the hills during the early phases of Domesville's construction. The whole building was only two or three times the size of an ordinary family house, and like the beach palaces of Bascal's native Tonga, it reached for the sky only symbolically, with a couple of three-story towers at opposite corners.

  The front entrance was even more humble: a simple rectangle of wellwood set in a frame of that same ugly white tile. Fortunately the door knew him, and opened wide without his having to say anything. He strode inside, where the light was brighter, with more of the blues and whites that the eye began to crave on these brownest of days.

  “Greetings and welcome, First Architect Mursk,” the palace said. “His majesty is indisposed at the moment, but if you wait a few minutes I will print a fresh copy of him for you. Please, make yourself at home.”

  There was nothing homey about the foyer, or the closed, soundproofed offices adjoining it. Last time Conrad had been here, the palace had had a full-time staff of eight, only two of whom could be considered household servants in any meaningful sense. The others were office workers: bureaucrats and functionaries, keeping Bascal interfaced with the other machineries of government, with public opinion, with light-lagged news from Sol and the other colonies. But farther back, the actual living quarters were fairly comfortable, with natural and artificial light, with lots of soft places to park your ass and flat, hard surfaces to park a drink or a plate of food.

  And dutifully, the palace asked him, “May I bring you something, sir? A glass of wine? A platter of fruit, perhaps?”

  “That sounds good,” Conrad admitted. He still didn't like buildings nattering at him, but there was something about this one that he'd grown a little fond of. It wasn't human—it wasn't a friend or anything like that. But he liked it in the same way he might like a dog, or a character on a TV show, or an interactive recording of someone he vaguely knew.

  A household robot, like a manikin of brightly polished gold, appeared from somewhere, carrying a platter with Conrad's food and drink. Its movements were inhumanly quick, inhumanly graceful. The swivel and bend of every joint was computed to the eighth decimal place, with a result so poetically beautiful that it nearly always brought a smile to Conrad's lips. The platter tilted crazily in the thing's hands, but of course the gee forces were calculated just as precisely, and when the platter was whisked down onto the table beside the armchair Conrad had selected, the only sound it made was the soft whisper of displaced air. The surface of his wineglass betrayed not so much as a ripple. And then, just as quickly, the robot danced back into the shadows and was gone.

  Conrad sighed, both amused and saddened at the sight. Like almost every home or office or rustic cabin in the old Queendom, this place was built around a central fax machine, providing everything from fresh air and fruit to fresh copies of the host himself. But those large, medical-grade print plates were hard to come by, and a typical P2 home had one or two much smaller fax machines instead, of decidedly submedical grade. But it was nice to see, if only for a while, the way things ought to be.

  Conrad tasted the fruit, and sipped the wine, and these brought another sigh. There really was a difference! A real fax machine produced atomically precise copies of the things in its library. Not convenient approximations or shortcuts, not flavored synthetics, but something actually identical to the original. You could fool yourself into thinking the other stuff was just as good, or nearly as good, but a taste of the real thing quickly dispelled that notion.

  Presently, Bascal appeared in the living room's arched doorway, dressed in a pair of loose white trousers and a flowered, tapa-patterned shirt of royal purple.

  “Hey there,” he said, smiling warmly. He hurried over, f
ar less gracefully than the robot had done, then grabbed and shook Conrad's hand in both of his before settling into the adjacent armchair. “You're looking exceptionally haggard this afternoon. A bit blurry around the edges, are we?”

  “I've just come from the doctor,” Conrad said. “I've got a fax appointment two days from now. I'll be freshly scrubbed and full of beans then, probably fuffing everything in sight. Martin swears I'll survive in the meantime, and I see no reason to disbelieve that. He's not so much of a goofball anymore, our Martin. Or anyway he hides it better than he used to.”

  Bascal, for his part, did not look exceptionally haggard, or worn down in any way. He had that freshly faxed look, which only came from doing it every morning, no doubt at the insistence of a nagging house and staff. Although, Conrad reminded himself, this copy had just stepped out of the machine, and would look fresh in any case.

  “Well, do please be my guest.” Bascal gestured toward the room's far end, where Conrad could see the cylindrical print plate projecting out from the walls like a quarter-pillar running up along the corner. “Step through. Be a new man.”

  Conrad thought about that. It was certainly a tempting offer, shrugging off the wear and tear of the past several years, but he'd already made his appointment at the hospital, and really Genie was right: he should be a good citizen and wait his turn like everyone else.

  “I'll pass,” he told Bascal, “but thanks. And how are you?”

  As if he didn't know. As if everyone on the planet didn't know what their king had for breakfast every morning. For better or worse, this was how the human mind worked: a figure or two at the top, not necessarily loved or even admired, but elevated and studied with fascination. Monarchic capitalism was the ultimate form of human government, because it was the only one that really accepted human nature and used it to maximum advantage. And as long as you had a Senate actually running things, or pretending to, then the worst aspects of the monarch's own humanity could be curbed as well, or guided into useful channels. That was the theory, anyway.

  “I'm well,” Bascal said. “Very well, my boy. And it's very nice to see you. You should come by here more often, really. Well, I suppose we would've seen each other at the Gravittoir dedication ceremony, anyway, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't visit.”

  Shrugging, Conrad answered, “I'm running single these days. Maybe I'll make an extra copy at the hospital next month, but then, for crying out loud, I'd have to wait through triage again just to reconverge the memories. It seems like a lot of bother.”

  “You're a busy man. I understand. The people of Sol may languish in their ennui and malaise, their joblessness and underemployment, but here beneath the mustard sky we need every hand, most especially yours. You always were my top guy, Conrad.”

  Conrad laughed. “That's blatant flattery and you know it. I may have been your favorite guy, at least occasionally, but I was never your best. Never close.”

  Bascal's face darkened. “That's not for you to decide, boyo. I hear my parents came to see you. A great big whopping message, tying up the works for thirty-nine hours. Almost two pids of nothing but them! Do you want to tell me about that? Are they snooping again?”

  “They mean well, but yes. They're worried about you. About us. And the more I think about it, the more I think there may be something to it. Things here in Barnard aren't going quite according to plan, are they? Shouldn't we be farther along by now? Not grubbing in the dirt for buffer mass, or slapping together these half-assed miniature print plates. Shouldn't we be running this place by now? Faxing across the system in our shiny new collapsiter grid?”

  “The issues are complex,” Bascal said, spreading his hands.

  “I don't doubt it,” Conrad allowed, “but every problem has a foundation. If we do have one, then what is it, and where did it come from?”

  The spread of Bascal's hands widened. “It's economics, boyo. To prosper we've got to grow the economy, and to do that we've got to increase the population. But there's a fax shortage, so we have to build more machines, and to do that we've got to bring in rare earth elements from the asteroids, so we need your Gravittoir to make it easier to get things on and off the planet. But that takes manpower as well, which creates even more population pressure.

  “In a way, this is a kind of golden age; we're not only achieving phenomenal rates of growth, we're innovating as well. Our fax filters are in high Instelnet demand in the other colonies, which have a lot of the same problems we do. But we also need our antimatter factories and deutrelium refineries, and we need to build and maintain our ships. Forget neutronium barges; it's a headache and a half just moving cargo around.”

  Conrad said, “This fax shortage sounds like a bit of an issue. It going to get any better?”

  Bascal paused for a pregnant moment, then answered, “Not right away, no.”

  “It's going to get worse?”

  Instead of answering directly, the king said, “We've got mitigation strategies in place. We still have the memory core from Newhope, and we'll be instituting a program of twice-decadely backups for every citizen.”

  “How big is that core?” Conrad pressed. “Our population is growing now, and not slowly. How many full human images can it hold?”

  Again, Bascal didn't answer directly. What he said was, “When it fills, there are other things we can do. Unfortunately, building new memory cores is another big problem, like building fax machines. It's more than just a big block of wellstone, you understand. Our need for core modules is reduced anyway, if we can solve the underlying fax problem first. So although it may not look like it, our little society here is directing all its efforts in that direction. Supporting the people who support the industries that support the fabrication of new print plates.”

  And all this sounded perfectly reasonable, which meant nothing, because Conrad knew Bascal too well. He looked his old friend up and down, finding nothing amiss, but even so he said, “You've got some master plan, Bascal, which involves pain for the rest of us. But you haven't invited our input. Have you even informed the Senate? Or are they ignorant cogs in this great machine of yours?”

  Bascal sighed, flashing a disappointed smile. “Et tu Brute? Once again, my best friend in all creation fails to invest me with his trust? This is my job, Conrad: running the colony. For the good of everyone, including yourself. And it's you who've refused my invitations to dinner. Your input has been invited.”

  “I trust you to do what you think is right, Majesty,” Conrad said, and found that he was also grinning, if a bit uneasily. “In the largest sense, over geological time. I trust you to be good to people when you feel you can afford it. I trust you to work hard, and to think hard about the problems we face. But you have a tendency to cut things close, to skirt disaster, and in the context of a whole society this could get pretty serious. Someone could die, irretrievably, with no copies or backups to take their place.”

  Bascal's look turned even gloomier. “Someone already has, boyo. One of the quarry kids down south. Never touched a fax machine in his life, not since the day he was born, and there was no stored record even of that. He'd already started to rot by the time they got him to the nearest hospital, and yes, the whole thing could have been averted if they'd had a fax machine on-site at the quarry. He was a real person, with dreams and hobbies and everything, and his death is very much on my head. You think I don't feel that every day? You think it doesn't weigh me down?”

  Conrad was aghast. “Can't they read his brain or something? Reconstruct his memories? Print a generic human with his genome, and stuff as much of him back into it as they possibly can?”

  Such things had been done before, back in the Queendom, on rare occasions when things had gone badly wrong. Conrad had fallen victim to death and rot himself during that first slipshod planetfall, but it had never occurred to him that such problems might still exist, after a hundred and twenty years of development!

  Bascal simply shook his head. “We don't have the right equi
pment for that. Not now, not for a while. The hospital's got the body on ice, or more specifically, on liquid nitrogen. There is hope for this boy, sometime in the indefinite future. We can probably construct some humanesque entity that believes it's him. His name was Bill, by the way. Bill Edison Chuang. He played the piano and studied dead languages.”

  “My gods,” Conrad said. And then, because he couldn't think of anything else to say, he said it again. Perhaps Bruno and Tamra were right to worry! As an economic indicator, surely death made a telling statement. Society's ultimate failure: losing the lives and continuities of its people.

  “Nobody told us this would be safe,” Bascal said gently but firmly. “We broke the law, and they shipped us here, and the wording of the edict makes it clear that they expect us to return when the sentence expires, with our tails between our legs and our heads bowed in humility. Or they did, anyway. I don't think the Queendom government—my parents or anyone else—had any illusions about what they were doing to us, what they were sending us into. And yet, here we are, making do.”

  “Why wasn't this in the news? This death.”

  “It was, but most people missed it. The kid didn't know anybody, not really. And his parents have declined to make a fuss. It really wasn't anybody's fault—just one of those things. If you live long enough, something improbable will happen. He just beat the odds early.”

  “How comforting. Maybe he's with God now, eh? Better off?”

  “I didn't say that, and don't you get sarcastic with me. We all have our jobs. If you do yours and I do mine, and everyone stays focused and we face these dangers bravely, we'll get through this. All of us.” He looked at the ceiling, and said, “Palace, bring in my family, please.”