Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  Of course, not every adventure on the sea was fish or monster related. Snowflake really did encounter some weather every now and then, especially in the polar latitudes where it occasionally met its namesake, where the ice on the deck and the instruments and steering controls would occasionally get so thick that Snowflake couldn't maneuver at all and had to radio for emergency warming by batteries of orbital lasers.

  Of course, Conrad still had his money, and during his infrequent trips to Backupsville he still sometimes sent copies of himself off to the stars and gathered up the replies. There were always fewer incoming messages than outgoing ones, though—he'd lost two more copies of himself out there, and something about that began to bother him in a way it never had before. Lost in transmission, yes: two more pieces of himself he could never recover, experiences and conversations he'd genuinely had, but would never know about. Would they have changed him? Solved his problems?

  Finally, he ceased the practice altogether—no more would he cast his soul upon the spaceways—and when a call came in for him from the King and Queen of Sol, he refused to accept it. Let them come in person, or else leave him in peace.

  In spite of these sobering distractions, Conrad could have been happy at his fishery job for a long, long time. Alas, it was not to be. The main outcome of Snowflake's research was the realization that fish stocks were falling dramatically, everywhere, regardless of any human predation. Per Giotti's years-ago warning, the planet's ecology had always been propped up by human action. But now every available hand was digging ore or growing food or stitching together fax machines of increasingly, alarmingly poor quality. There was nothing left to prop up the ecology with, and so it slumped, and fell, and after sixteen years in the salt air Conrad finally couldn't bear to watch the planet die anymore, and so resigned his commission.

  From there, he found himself moving southward, building more roads again for lack of anything better to do, until he found his way to the Polar Well itself, where there were no roads and couldn't be any. Like many warm terrestrial planets, P2 had no polar caps per se, but given the grazing angle of the sunlight at extreme latitudes, it did have regions which were permanently in shadow. Most notably the Well: a hundred-kilometer-wide depression ringed by sharp-toothed mountains, where the fall of snow and the melting and refreezing of ice made the terrain anew every 460-hour cycle of day and night.

  Increasingly, agriculture was a necessity for the colony rather than a diversion. It was a source of fuel—a low-tech means for harvesting the ruddy light of Barnard and converting it into human activity, through the mediating elements of starch and sugar and comestible proteins. But agriculture, unlike fishing, really was at the mercy of an uncooperative climate, and the weather patterns of P2 were surprisingly complex, and surprisingly dependent on the speed and direction of winds in the Polar Well.

  So there were sensor stations there, and the sensors were always getting covered with snow and ice or sinking into pools of slush, and no one had ever found a good way to make robots understand how best to clean and care for them. So each of the seven stations—arranged in a rough hexagon with the seventh and largest at the center—had to be manned by one actual human being, who lived alone in a nearby hut. Which sounded nice, didn't it? To be a hermit who also served a vital need for the greater good? When a vacancy opened up, Conrad saw his opportunity and moved in.

  Here, in the land of permanent twilight and permanent cold, of snow and ice, of clear, bright starlight that cut through the hazy atmosphere, Conrad found a kind of clarity he had never known before. Maybe it was just the solitude—he'd never had that, either—but he had a lot of opportunity to ponder it, and over time he decided that the environment itself was a crucial element in this new sense of peace.

  Here in the Well, human beings could live, but only barely. This wasn't a matter of body forms, but simply the hugeness of nature; lapses of attention quickly became serious, even fatal. Especially in bad weather. In his first season on the job, his immediate neighbor to the east had frozen to death, and had had to be evacuated in a special coffin housed within a robot tractor built especially for this purpose. Ironically, they took him north to Pectoralis and had to thaw him out again there, just to freeze him properly for long-term storage. Such was the fate of the colony's dead: neither heaven nor hell nor simple oblivion, just an icy limbo in the Cryoleum, on a spit of land popularly known as the Fin.

  Conrad hadn't known that neighbor—hadn't been moved particularly by his death—but a few years later it happened again. The same isolated hut, the same exact stupid circumstances, and this time the victim was Raylene Pine, a woman Conrad had gotten to know rather well over the radio and through occasional conjugal visits by tractor or, when one of them was feeling particularly ambitious, by snowshoe.

  Her death hit Conrad hard, because it was the first time in his long life that he'd ever known anyone who had actually died for real—who had simply dropped out of the world, dropped out of the universe, and in all likelihood would not be coming back. What a strange concept! He wept off and on for weeks, and part of him—the last shreds of his childhood, perhaps—withered away and never did grow back.

  Around this same time, in her increasingly disheartened messages to him, Xmary complained that Newhope's fax machine had finally been confiscated: relocated to Bubble Hood and then finally to Domesville. As a not-too-surprising result, the miners and refiners of Barnard space were in a state of open rebellion, and the only thing keeping them even marginally in line was the threat that their frozen dead would not be respected, would not be relocated to the Fin for proper storage. These were fun times indeed, but the discussion's main effect on Conrad was to remind him just how precarious his own situation had become.

  It was a hazardous occupation, this monitoring of weather stations in permanent shadow, and as the years slid by Conrad found himself marking time by the deaths of his colleagues. He came to realize that he was pushing the odds himself, that after three or four decades in this place he would surely die, and as had happened in several other cases, they might not even recover his body. The ice was a flat sheet hundreds of meters thick—an ice lake, the geologists insisted on calling it—and sometimes in the expansions and contractions of the day/night transition it would just crack, straight down to the bottom, and sometimes a person would fall in, and then inevitably the cracked ice would warm just enough to collapse and refreeze, and it would have taken the resources of a starship just to identify the body, buried half a kilometer deep in the ice.

  And so, reluctantly, Conrad began planning his exit strategy. He would return to civilization; he would get a real job and resume a normal social life. He would even, he supposed, resume regular contact with King Bascal, though the prospect held little joy for him. The fact that they were friends—had always been friends—did not make up for the increasingly heavy-handed tactics of a government under pressure.

  But new thoughts can be dangerous in an environment where routine equals safety. One day, while morosely planning this sad excuse for a future, Conrad was hiking along his northern perimeter when the ice groaned and banged and cracked in front of him. Not a deep crack—a crevasse to the lake bottom itself—but a much rarer surface crack that was eighty meters long or so, and just wide and deep enough to admit Conrad's snowshoe and then swallow his foot up to the ankle. He stepped in it, yes, and fell badly, and surprisingly enough it was not his leg that broke but his left arm and collarbone. It was just about the most painful thing that had ever happened to him—death included!—and walking back was a hassle and an agony, and finally a deadly ordeal.

  There was a meter of powder on top of a meter of packed snow, with the ice underneath, and while Conrad had sprung for the best snowshoes available—featherlight platters of wellstone which stuck to snow and ice as though they were glue—snowshoeing was still hard work under even the best of circumstances. And these were hardly the best of circumstances; he couldn't use his left arm at all, which meant he couldn't use
his left shoeing pole, which meant he was effectively a three-legged creature, rather than a four-legged one as the environment demanded.

  Being dazed with pain didn't help matters either, and he had neglected to bring any food or water on this hike. He always carried a wrist phone when he was away from the hut, but when the wind was blowing and whipped up the snow, reception could be spotty. Also, he wasn't sure he'd given the thing a proper charge recently; there was no sunlight here to run it, and it was easy to forget to touch it against a powered wellstone surface. So he dutifully called for help every ten minutes, but no help materialized, and no one called him back.

  And then, like an idiot, he managed to lose his way in the blowing snow several times, and while hypothermia was not a risk—not in his high-end wellcloth bodysuit—by the time he found his way back he had become rather seriously dehydrated. He spent his first ten minutes sitting in a chair drinking warm water, and then spent his next ten minutes peeing it back out again. Only then did he feel fit enough to approach the hut's communication gear and raise his neighbors.

  Two of them arrived by tractor before the shift had ended and saw to his injuries as best they could, but what he really needed was evacuation to the Domesville hospital or, in a pinch, the one in Bupsville. What he got instead was a ten-day tractor ride to the southern outpost of Aurora, where they had to rebreak his bones and then set them the old-fashioned way, by sealing his shoulder in piezoelectric foam while a pair of robots pulled his arms out straight. He spent four surly weeks in a convalescent ward, and when he was finally fit to travel again, he did not return to the Polar Well, but instead caught a tractor north to the print plate factory on the southern outskirts of Bupsville.

  He had had it—had it—with this fax shortage, and he was bloody well going to do something about it, though he couldn't imagine exactly what. Not then, anyway.

  chapter nineteen

  faxworks

  With the obvious exception of the Orbital Tower, buildings on P2 tended not to be more than two or three stories tall, and in fact one story was by far the norm. This was partly because the stronger materials were very expensive, making it cheaper to build out rather than up, but mostly it had to do with the hugeness and emptiness of the planet itself. Instinctively, people seemed to want to cover it with human things to whatever extent they could. With more than five times the land area of Earth and a millionth the population, they were in little danger of overurbanizing it, or even leaving much of a mark. But they did what they could.

  Even the unstoppable blackberry infestation, and the plagues of mice and “indigenous” pool beetles which followed along with it, covered barely more than a tenth of the surface, clinging mainly to the coastlines and the humid equator. Which of course were the planet's most desirable places; the rest was mainly featureless desert, flat plains, and low, careworn mountains. By some estimates, it would take ten thousand years to fill up all the nooks and crannies of this world with macroscopic life-forms. And even then, the low levels of metal in the crust—especially iron—meant that the soil was basically sand, and would support jungles and farmland only where carefully constructed soils were laid on top. And that required fax machines and elements from the asteroid mines, both of which were in decidedly short supply.

  At any rate, the Faxworks—which Conrad had never seen up close—was architecturally consistent with the rest of the world: broad and flat and sprawling. The complex was surprisingly large—twenty buildings covering nearly a square kilometer altogether—and the whole area bustled with activity: people and robots scurrying along, automated tractors and forklifts rolling on paved lanes between the buildings, and loudspeakers blaring with voices, and with the chirps and screeches of acoustically broadcast data.

  As Conrad approached, he saw another traveler walking up toward the facility from the other side. Or rather, waddling up, for it was a dwarf angel, with gigantic wings and pectoral muscles and a tiny, misshapen head atop a skin-and-bones body dressed in dingy feathers. The expression on the angel's face was both vacuous and sad, as well it should be, for it had one of the worst-designed body forms Conrad had ever seen. P2's air was thick, but not that thick, and no matter how sorely the dream of flight might burn in the souls of human beings, in biological practice it remained elusive.

  You could stick wings on a human body, sure, but if you wanted it to fly you had to build up the chest muscles and lose a lot of weight everywhere else. With proper materials the wings themselves could be tough and nearly weightless, but “tissues” of this sort were rigid and fundamentally dead, like insect wings. There had been some experiments in piezoelectric deformation to allow the membranes to curl and flex, but integrating that with the human nervous system was an enormous challenge, and who on P2 had the time?

  Anyway, the sort of people who wanted to fly were also the sort who wanted to feel the wind beneath their wings. They wanted something like flesh, covered by something like feathers or leather or scales. And that took more muscle still. The sad result was a creature that couldn't really fly or walk. Turkeys, some people called them, and what a stinging truth it must be for the angels that heard it! The most pathetic cases came when would-be angels—perhaps inspired by that old poem of Bascal's—sought in desperation to reduce the mass of their brains. In the end, most of them still couldn't fly, and lacked the capacity to understand why. You saw them out on the street sometimes, forlornly flapping their wings, their eyes on the distant, unattainable sky.

  The body form was reversible, of course—you could always be human again—but you had to ask for it. You had to want it, to be smart enough to formulate the question. Conrad remembered a case, years ago, when a young angel's family, intent on restoring his humanity, had kidnapped him and shoved him forcibly through a hospital fax. They were promptly arrested for it, and in their absence the kid, like any addict, had gone right back to his old body form. “I have to keep trying,” he'd told a news channel before stepping through the plate. “‘Impossible' isn't in my vocabulary.”

  Ah, overreach: that most basic of human sins. How could you blame an angel for trying? For wanting heaven itself? Maybe when we die, Conrad sometimes wanted to tell them. Maybe we'll all be whole someday. Or perhaps the angels could become miners, and spend their off hours flapping through the open spaces of Element Pit.

  This particular individual paused at the edge of the compound, in confusion or uncertainty or fear.

  “H-h-help?” it said to Conrad.

  And Conrad, not wanting to be rude, tried to look at the thing without pity. “Yes?”

  “H-h-help me. I . . . need something. I miss . . . something.”

  Conrad shrugged. “I'll . . .” Try? Do my best for you? Leave you here in despair? “I'll send someone out for you.”

  There were no gates, no guards, and Conrad was free to walk right up to the premises and in between the buildings with no one paying him a second glance. Which was all well and good, but what he really wanted was to find Brenda. She ran this place, and if he wanted answers she was the first and most obvious person to talk to.

  He tried a passerby. “Excuse me, where can I find Brenda Bohobe?”

  “Everywhere, fool!” the woman said, hurrying along with her business.

  Conrad tried two others with similar results, but then he managed to grab a slender, humanoid robot by the wrist. It stopped walking and turned its blank metal face toward him expectantly.

  “Assist me,” he instructed. “Lead me to the director of this place.”

  The robot paused, whirring and clicking as its neck swiveled slightly, then said in a self-consciously mechanical voice, “Please release me. I am on assignment.”

  Conrad nodded impatiently. “Yes, I understand that. You're being directed by a hypercomputer, yes? Please inform it that you have been detained. It can juggle the work schedules accordingly. Meanwhile, I require your assistance.”

  The robot considered this, and then asked, “On whose authority?”

 
“My name is Conrad Mursk.”

  “First Architect Conrad Mursk?”

  There was no surprise or admiration in the robot's voice; it was merely checking a record somewhere, and verbally confirming that it had identified the right individual.

  “That's correct,” he told it.

  There was another pause as the robot weighed this information, or checked with a computer somewhere, but finally it said, “By ‘this place' I assume you mean the Bohobe Plate Manufactory as a whole. By ‘director' I assume you mean the company president. Do you wish to visit with Brenda Bohobe?”

  “I do.”

  “Then I will make an appointment. An appointment has been made. You will come with me, please.”

  Although he was in a bad mood, Conrad chuckled at that. “Will I really? Or what?”

  “Or you will miss your appointment,” the robot replied, with no particular emphasis.

  Robots were funny that way: an inhuman combination of brilliance and absolute witlessness. They were so serious about everything, it was difficult sometimes to avoid teasing, but of course you did that for your own benefit, not theirs. They didn't care one way or the other. You couldn't make them feel teased.