Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  She rolled over to embrace him, and as the wellcloth sheets pulled aside he could feel that she wasn't wearing anything either. She seldom did, when she was expecting him.

  She had gone with a few spacemen in her time—had gone with all of them, really. But once Conrad had come back aboard, those temps and fill-ins had fallen away like dry leaves in a breeze. Or so it seemed to him now; he supposed the process had taken a couple of years. But when they had finally settled back into each other's arms again, they had fit perfectly, like the two halves of something broken, melding together again. Their early time together had been formative; she was a part of his character, and he imagined the reverse must be true as well.

  This was a minor detail which had slipped his mind, briefly, during that conversation on the bridge. He had left her once, with consequences he didn't particularly care to repeat. Could he leave her again, knowing that the same thing would probably happen?

  “You're all tense,” she said, feeling his back.

  He nodded, agreeing with that. “I know. I just . . . I just hate this job. Nothing about you, nothing about the ship. It was good to get into space again. I think I needed that, deep down in my soul.”

  Now she did sit up, pulling the sheets after her in the darkness. “You're speaking in the past tense. What's wrong?”

  “I don't know. I'm not sure.”

  “You're thinking of going back to P2?”

  “Yeah.”

  She digested that in silence for a while. When she finally spoke, what she said was, “I don't know that human memories were really designed for these long spans of time. I don't feel as though I've forgotten anything, though I'm sure the details of childhood fade as they move farther into the past. But I feel my life—I don't know—breaking up into portraits and vignettes. Time begins to seem less linear, more like a book of stationary pictures than a single long movie. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” Conrad answered, because Bascal had told him much the same thing. Supposedly, this view was closer to the physical truth than the errant concept of “movement” through time. But then he followed with, “No. I dunno.” Because he couldn't see a connection with the things that were bothering him, and he vaguely resented her going off on a tangent like this.

  But she continued. “You've been back onboard the ship for, what, about a decade? That seems like a continuous stretch of time, but when you're gone—not if, but when—it will all compress down to a couple of incidents. Whenever a period of time passes with nothing changing, nothing important, it goes into the log as one long incident. We remember it like a spring afternoon, or anyway I do.”

  And here Conrad began to get the gist of what she was saying. But only the gist, the outlines, so he stroked her neck and waited for her to continue.

  “When you left the first time, it seemed intolerable. In a good year, we would see each other for at most a few weeks, and I didn't want to live my life that way. But I don't think I understood. I don't think I really grasped how long life can be. We've had a spring afternoon together, yes, and perhaps we'll have a spring evening apart, and then a morning together, and then separate business again for a while. If we're going to live forever—and I don't think anyone really knows what that means on a personal level—we need to stop running our lives like morbid little tribesmen who'll be dead in ten years.”

  “You're giving me your blessing to leave? Do I understand you correctly?”

  She paused. “I think so. Yes.”

  “You'll wait for me? For years, if necessary?”

  She thought that one over, and said, “It depends what you mean by wait. I've never stopped loving you, though I haven't always liked you, or had you conveniently at hand when I needed you. When I see you again, none of that will be different. Age has its pleasant side, I would say. When next I see you, I won't really have to ask what you've been doing. It won't really matter. You won't have changed.”

  “We'll fit like two halves of a broken plate,” he suggested, although the implications were rather sobering. Were they so inflexible?

  “Yes! Good. But while we're apart, the edges may need to be covered. Our bodies require a certain amount of attention, and so do our spirits. And that's okay, because at the end of the day we'll still fit. Friendships of convenience may come and go, but the arc of our romance stretches on forever.”

  For the second time in his life, Conrad contemplated this notion uneasily. “Forever” was an easy word to say, but living it was another matter. Didn't everything have an end, sooner or later? But Xmary seemed so earnest in the darkness, so pleased with her observation—with him and with the universe in general—that he couldn't bear to disappoint her.

  “Forever,” he agreed, hooking his pinkie to hers to cement the promise.

  And thus was sealed the fate of a ship.

  chapter eighteen

  mursk wandering

  Of course, Xmary could have come with him, or arranged to have a copy made. The possibility was certainly discussed, but even after these hundreds of years in the cramped confines of Newhope, she still claimed to have unfinished business there. Conrad suggested that it might be broadening for her to try some other jobs for a while, but she protested that she had eternity to do that, and needn't—in fact shouldn't—be in any hurry right now.

  Conrad didn't think a centuries-deep rut was the best way to start off eternity, but he didn't press the point. Neither did he wish to reenter his old life as an architect, nor his even earlier life as an unemployed confidant of Bascal. The king, the oppressor, the Man. This was said and thought in joking tones, yes, but in a period of crisis there was something unsavory about government, and for better or worse Conrad had no desire to associate himself with that anymore.

  So he took his own advice, inserting himself beneath the blanket of P2's atmosphere and seeking odd jobs on the outskirts of civilization. A few of these lasted six months; a few lasted a year or two. He supervised robots in a factory for building more robots. He was the editor and publisher of a rural news service until the communities he served closed up and moved elsewhere in search of better agricultural soils.

  He even did a turn as a road builder, bulldozing and paving and cobbling streets for old-fashioned maglev vehicles, and even wheeled vehicles, to travel along. It was important work, because large aircraft and spacecraft were increasingly scarce, and for the mining and quarrying communities of the southern lowlands and the mountains between Domesville and Bupsville, there was virtually no other way to get around anymore unless you were a centaur, and even they couldn't carry ore.

  That job felt too much like a retreat, though—a shallow attempt to revive his childhood, without even his father there to supervise. So Conrad moved on, and moved on some more. He spent a season as a hermit, taking clay out of the dry riverbed and fashioning it into bowls and oil lamps and fat-figured women in a cold and poorly ventilated shack in the desert. But that was really a retreat, and no service to civilization at all, in its hour of greatest need. So he took a real job again, and this time it stuck.

  He was the captain of a fishing boat on the Sea of Destiny. He had a staff of four—bristly unshaven men, all. Their job was to sail P2's larger ocean—shallow and poisonous though it be—tracking the migrations and population dynamics of various species of fish. This was directly helpful to society, since the fax shortage had driven other boats out here to catch the fish for actual human consumption. The movement and fluctuations of the schools were also an important indicator of the health of the infant ecosystem. And yes, out on the ocean there was no one to confront or argue with, nothing to dispute, nothing all that much to worry about.

  Except perhaps the weather, and even that was nothing compared to Earth or—God help them—Neptune, which P2 more closely resembled in some ways. Yes, it was a hostile planet for ordinary human life, but Conrad and his men were not ordinary humans. No one on P2 was, or ever would be again. And while the oceans were technically larger than Earth's, they were shallo
wer and occupied a much smaller percentage of the planet's uselessly large surface. And P2's rotation wasn't fast enough to generate meaningful Coriolis forces, so when the sun heated the ocean's surface during the long, long days, the tropical depressions which formed over it were not pulled into raging cyclonic hurricanes. Instead, they formed simple rain showers—or at worst, tornado-spawning thunderstorms—which roamed the oceans aimlessly and were easily avoided.

  Indeed, the planet's greatest storms were the dry ones, sweeping off the desert plains and into the ocean. This happened most often at daybreak, as new slices of atmosphere rotated into the heat and proton flux of the solar wind. The resulting aurora could be quite beautiful, but the accompanying ground-to-sky lightning, the random blasts of dry wind off the warming sand, sometimes took the coastline by surprise. When they came, the storms would rise an hour behind the sun and quickly rocket out to sea, carrying clouds of stinging grit which blotted out the sky and clobbered the surface acidity, killing raft vegetation for hundreds of kilometers and driving the fish down, down toward the featureless bottom.

  At night, the oceans gave up their heat again, turning over, exchanging with the warm, nutrient-rich muck at the bottom. In this sense, P2's shallow oceans were more fertile—more habitable and forgiving—than Earth's deep ones. No sterile, crystal blue depths here! This turning over was a weather event unto itself, generating thick, cold, chlorinated fogs that reduced the visibility to twenty meters or less and clung to everything in a slick film, turning all but the stickiest of surfaces into skating rinks. But Conrad's ship, Snowflake, rarely sailed at night, except during the mating season of the beholder squids, which glowed eerily beneath the water's churning surface and were one of Conrad's absolute favorite sights in the world.

  Ah, the adventures they had on that proud little ship! The tides of P2 were high and slow, so that there were islands and peninsulas and even whole archipelagoes that would come and go—a landscape and seascape always in flux. There was so much to see, so much to explore.

  On one dry-shoe visit to the Drowned Islands, on a kilometer-wide reef called Umamaha, or Shallow Shoulder, Conrad and his men found themselves knee-deep in rotting fish. They had seen their share of fish kills before, but these were generally monospecific events triggered by a local resource depletion, and so were ultimately a sign of overpopulation. But they knew right away that this one was different, because it involved dozens of unrelated species and had no obvious cause.

  Ned Creswell, Conrad's senior ocean chemistry officer, opined thusly: “Nutrient levels in the water are all nominal, sir. And off the island, we didn't read any signatures of unusual decay.”

  “Meaning what?” Conrad probed.

  “Meaning the dead fish are all right here on the island, sir. Look at them: they haven't been dead more than a couple of pids. They flopped up here while the waters were receding. They were trying to get out of the ocean, millions of fish. From all directions, too, by the look of it.”

  “And why would they do that?”

  “Hell if I know, sir. If I didn't know better, I would say they were suffocating. Panicking. Trying to breathe the air while keeping their bodies wet? But if that were true, we'd see signs of it in the water. Dissolved gas levels have been normal all week.”

  “Hmm. Do fish leave ghosts?”

  “Hell if I know, sir. But we haven't got the equipment to read 'em in any case.”

  So they held their noses and walked around for a while in the ruddy brown light of morning, but the mystery only deepened.

  Said Giotti, the wildlife officer, “Whatever's scavenging these fish corpses, Captain, I've never seen anything like 'em before.”

  “They're bugs,” someone said helpfully.

  But that did little to shed light on the matter, because even Conrad could see that while these bugs were built on a generally Barnardean chassis—radial symmetry stretched out into a sort of bilateral torpedo—the similarities ended there. For one thing, these bugs had legs all over them. They were absolutely, positively covered in legs. Even the mouthparts were legs—a decidedly nasty feature when examined closely.

  “It's the proton flux from the sun,” Conrad speculated. “With a nice, hot yellow star, you can set your planet away from the fusion source. Here, we're practically nestled up against it. And the planet has no strong magnetic field to deflect the proton winds. You and I are full of healing nanobes, medically refreshed every couple of years, but there are no veterinarians under the sea. The radiation damage probably just builds up, generation after generation.”

  They began to notice, too, that a lot of the dead fish were covered in tumors. These did not seem, particularly, to have been the cause of death. When you found a fish asphyxiated on dry land, you didn't have to look much farther for what had killed it, even if the reasons for it remained mysterious. But still, there were more cancers than Conrad would expect to see in a healthy population. Was proton radiation a strong mutagen? He couldn't remember, though he would certainly look it up. Anyway, a star would emit neutrons and alpha particles and all kinds of other garbage as well. Clean-burning they were not! This by itself wasn't necessarily a problem, except that no one had designed adequate coping mechanisms into the animals. Or perhaps they had, and the mechanisms had stopped functioning, or something was interfering with them.

  “The ecology of this planet was never stable,” commented Giotti. “It never had any need to be, with freshly printed organisms compensating for any unforeseen population crashes. P2 is at best a garden, not a wilderness.”

  “Your point being?” Conrad asked, for Giotti was a man who stated the obvious far more readily than he stated his own opinion.

  “Well,” said Giotti, “in a stable ecology the mutants die out. Everything is perfectly evolved for its niche, and change comes slowly or not at all. Anything different or anomalous is defective, almost by definition.”

  “But . . . ,” Conrad said, with patient tolerance for his crewman's foibles. He was learning patience, oh yes, as anyone must who had lived this long and seen this much.

  “But an ecology without stable niches is more tolerant of mutation,” Giotti answered. “You might almost say it encourages mutation, as a means of trying out new body plans and lifestyles. Because you never know what's going to work better unless you try it.”

  “Hence these leggybugs?”

  “I don't think those are going to succeed, sir. At least, I hope not.”

  And here some old words of Bascal's floated up in Conrad's mind: “The true measure of any life-form is how quickly it can skeletonize a cow.” By that half-serious reasoning, Giotti could hardly be wrong, for the leggybugs were not efficient scavengers, nor tidy ones.

  The men of Snowflake might've explored more—hell, they might've found the clue that would solve the whole mystery—but the long, slow morning was already beginning to heat up, and by the end of their next shift on the island the smell of rotting fish drove them back onto the boat and out to sea, none the wiser for their investigations. Would the incident have made more sense as an isolated, anomalous occurrence? It was hard to know, because they encountered several more such kills over the course of that year. And then the kills stopped, just as mysteriously, but the fish populations in that area never did seem to recover.

  “Ah, well,” Conrad told his men on a rare night of drunken revelry, when the light of Sol shone down upon them like a mother watching over her children. “If the sea weren't full of mystery, then what good would it be?”

  The night sky of P2 was a lopsided affair, with all the bright stars squeezed into a band along the river of the Milky Way, cutting at an angle against the horizon. Sol herself dangled from the belt of Orion, a fourth star in that perfect line, but brighter and spaced out a bit farther. A longer and much brighter line, cutting the sky from horizon to pole, was formed by Canopus and Sirius and Alpha Centauri, with Rigel and Betelgeuse and Procyon hovering nearby. Together they formed a single constellation, much bigger and clear
er than anything in the skies of Sol: Orion, the Randy Vaulter.

  “Men go to sea,” Conrad said beneath the Vaulter's light, “because the land is tedious, and the sea, which is never twice the same, obliges them. Drink up, laddies! Turn those mugs over and drain them dry, for tomorrow the sea will have new surprises, and beforehand we must needs refresh ourselves.”

  The parlance of sailors was saltier and more expansive than the clipped, dead-in-five-seconds urgency of spacers, and Conrad found that he loved talking that way as much as he loved the sea itself. In all his long life, this was the closest he would ever come to poetry. Alas.

  In the years that followed, they never did see any more leggybugs, although they did find a few amphibious creatures so strange that it was hard to believe they'd evolved from human-drawn designs. Perhaps their made-up genomes were unstable? Given to sudden fits of mutation in the isolation of an island ecosystem?

  Fancying himself a bit of a scholar, Conrad went so far as to trace the evolution of a particular beast, the island river nereid, from a primordial form—the sea nereid—that had been designed and introduced in the colony's earliest days. Then it had turned out that the river nereid really was man-made, though obscure, and the whole argument sort of collapsed.

  But then, as happens sometimes with scientific obscura, it revived again with lively debate in the ecology journals when a number of other established species—some more awful even than the leggybugs—turned out to have mutated in exactly the ways that Conrad had theorized. This touched off a wave of cryptozoological exploration which flew in the face of the colony's poverty, igniting imaginations. Who knew—who knew—what strange monsters might be found on and around these islands, or in the deeper trenches of the middle ocean?

  “It may be hubris,” Conrad wrote in a letter to several of the journals, “to believe that a system as complex as a planetary ecology can simply be installed to order, or controlled in place.”

  There were strange creatures as well in the growing Thorn Jungles, as blackberry bramble decided not only to take over the world's narrow soil belts, but to creep in around the edges of civilization itself. Naked-eye ghost sightings there were easily dismissed, for the lighting was always poor. And for similar reasons, the existence of a rumored Thorn Jungle Hydra was never verified, although other shocking discoveries were made during the hunt. Anyway such a beast was plausible in the extreme, for the jungle's own mutants kept company with unauthorized creatures invented and released without official permission. And who was doing the releasing? Civilization had its own monsters, driven half mad—or perhaps wholly mad—by ill-conceived body plans their human brains could not control without gross rewiring. More than one of these self-made unfortunates had disappeared into the jungles, and who could say what became of them? But that is another tale, and nothing to do with Conrad Mursk.