by Wil McCarthy
Fortunately, although he'd been studying the shifting decorations on her wellstone walls, he happened to be looking right at her when he said this. As a result, he saw the flicker of unease which passed over her face.
“You have?” he said, leaning forward. If there was one thing he'd learned in his life, it was not to let people conceal bad news. “There have been old-age deaths? Spill it, Brenda.”
“No,” she said, a bit too quickly and defensively. “Not that, definitely.”
He waved his hands in little circles in front of him, urging her on. “But . . .”
She sighed, and raised her own hands partway in a gesture of helplessness. “Look, a fax machine doesn't last forever. Ours especially; they seem to have about half the lifetime of a Queendom model, and I'll be damned if I know why.”
“So make more,” he suggested—but realized immediately what a stupid thing that was to say. Brenda's operation here was already bursting the seams of the Barnard economy.
“We'd need more people, Conrad,” she told him angrily. “More robots, more machines and raw materials. Can you give them to me? No? Then shut up.”
Watching her, hearing her, Conrad felt a sudden, sinking feeling in his gut. “Oh, God, Brenda. The machines are breaking faster than you can build them.”
She didn't deny it, so he went on, “And to build them faster you'd need a bigger colony, which isn't going to happen without more fax machines. It's an old-fashioned chicken-and-egg problem, isn't it?”
“I'm not familiar with that expression,” she said.
“I think it's from Rodenbeck. Now that you mention it, I'm not sure I'm using it right. But . . . People used to eat eggs, right? And if you eat too many eggs, you won't have enough chickens hatching, and . . . and then . . .”
“Conrad,” Brenda said with surprising gentleness, “you're blithering. I don't think I've ever seen you blither before.”
“Sorry,” he said, and with that word his thoughts snapped back into focus. “We're all going to die, aren't we? Of injury, of old age. Of disease. The fax machines are leading the way already, preceding us to the grave. This colony is a failure.”
She answered him with a level gaze, her eyes twinkling with faint wellstone lights. “That's been evident for some time. We're going to die, yes, almost certainly. My goodness, didn't you know?”
Conrad was so shaken up—and Brenda so surprised by this—that she took him by the arm and led him to the facility's main cafeteria, a huge room lined with tables, mostly empty at the moment because it wasn't lunchtime.
“We gave it a good try,” she was telling him. “And we have a long way still to fall. And as you can see, we're fighting with all our strength. For all we know, we may pull out of it.”
“No,” he said, seeing the lie in that.
“Well, if we don't, we don't. We knew the risks coming out here, didn't we? Didn't Their Majesties make it plain enough? We're free out here, to live as we please. And to die; immorbid doesn't mean forever. I never thought so, anyway. By the time it all winds down, we'll have had hundreds of years of freedom. It's worth our lives just for that.”
“But the children,” Conrad mourned. “All the beautiful children in this world, so eager and hopeful. Don't they deserve long lives, and children of their own? Don't they deserve the smell of a new fax machine on a warm afternoon?”
A bit of sourness came back into Brenda's voice. “Are you blaming me, Conrad? What the children deserve has nothing to do with anything.”
She seemed ready to launch into a soliloquy of some sort, a long poetic lecture about the facts of life and death, but instead she caught sight of something behind Conrad, and her face pinched into a scowl.
“What are you doing? Hey! What are you doing?”
Conrad turned and saw a trio of oversized robots marching toward them: two in front, and one behind them pulling a wheeled dolly of some sort. And on the dolly was the fax machine—number 449—in which Conrad had just refreshed himself. This by itself was not surprising; there were all kinds of robots around here, pushing and pulling and carrying things. But these particular robots were Palace Guards—dainty ones with frilled tutus around their waists and necks, like something from the earliest days of the Queendom.
When they spoke, Conrad couldn't tell if it was one voice or three. In any case, they said, “Brenda Bohobe, President of the Bohobe Plate Manufactory, we bring you the greetings of King Bascal. You are cordially invited to join him at a palace dinner party tonight.”
“What are you doing?” Brenda repeated, pointing at the fax machine just in case they somehow failed to take her meaning. “That belongs to the Bupsville hospital.”
“This device,” the robots said, “has been impounded on the authority of King Bascal. No further information is available at this time.”
“That's absurd,” she said tightly. “It's not his. It's not even finished! It has force/speed tests still to go, and—”
“Our records show that this device was employed on a volunteer who is not a Manufactory employee. Therefore, it is working. Therefore, it is impounded. Brenda Bohobe, you are to come with us.”
“Am I under arrest?” she demanded.
“You are invited,” they told her, in an inflectionless tone which nevertheless managed to imply that the two words were, if not identical in meaning, then at least close enough for government purposes.
“Here now,” Conrad told them, though he knew it was pointless, “you can't just barge in here and take things. Do you realize how valuable that machine is?”
One of the robots swiveled its head to face him and said, “Conrad Mursk, First Architect of Barnard. You have a standing invitation at the palace, and will please accompany us.”
“I don't think so,” he said, even though confronting Bascal was exactly what he should probably do right now. He just wanted to see what the robots would say, what they would do. He wouldn't take orders from them, not in this lifetime, not even if they were ordering him to do something rational.
Fortunately, they spared him any further concerns on the matter by pointing a tazzer beam at him and flashing him senseless.
chapter twenty
the feast of permanence
The palace dining room was not large, as such things go. It held a single long table with seating for twenty, plus some additional wellstone chairs along the walls so that, Conrad supposed, people could come to watch their betters eat.
Well, maybe that was unfair. If he were going to sell that feature as part of a building design, he would call it “buffet seating,” good for informal parties and such. Which he supposed this gathering probably was. And this room was, he reminded himself, part of a building he had personally designed!
There were no decorations or lighting fixtures per se, because the walls and floor and ceiling were all made of wellstone. Light and windows could appear anywhere. But this by itself had become a rare thing on P2, and its novelty was not lost on Conrad now, especially since the programming was all new. The surfaces emitted a soft glow, with cleverly subtle spotlights shining down onto the table itself. Looking up at the ceiling he found it difficult to see precisely where they were coming from.
The shadows were carefully controlled as well, while stained-glass windows along the north wall admitted just enough natural light, in just the right mix of colors, to lend a picnic air to the proceedings. The windows were nonrepresentational, and shifted slowly from one pattern to another. This, too, was a quaintly decadent touch, and showed good taste. Princess Wendy's, apparently.
Brenda's stolen fax machine—a great, gray slab surrounded by exposed piping and circuitry—dominated one end of the room, with Bascal sitting before it at the head of the table. To his great surprise Conrad found himself seated at the foot of the table, a position of honor to be sure, and in spite of the manner of his arrival he could not help feeling flattered. At the king's left was Princess Wendy, and beside her, to Conrad's additional surprise, was Mack.
Conrad would never forget the initial meeting between those two: throbbing with subdued passion that seemed destined to burn itself out within a few weeks. He hadn't stuck around to see the end of that kiddie relationship, but he had never doubted that it would end. Until now. Funny; he'd traded a dozen messages with Mack over the years, checking up on his old business, his old protégé, but Mack had never once mentioned the princess. And yet the way he sat, the way she sat, the way they looked at each other . . .
“Hi, Boss,” Mack said to him, and though he smiled there might have been a bit of rebuke in his tone. For he still ran Murskitectura, the company Conrad had started in the early years of the colony. And he ran it alone.
“Hi, Mack. How's business?”
The smile became a smirk. “How do you think? The population's not expanding, there's no free capital for discretionary building, and your damned masterworks will last five thousand years if they last a day. We're getting margin work: adding a new housing wing here and there, in your name and style. You cast a long shadow, Boss.”
“Sorry,” Conrad offered sincerely.
But Mack just laughed. “Hey, I'm only a troll. What do I know, or need to?” He raised Wendy's hand in his own. “It's enough that I keep my lady in diamonds.”
This was a joke; diamonds were commonplace in the crust of P2, worth little more than quartz. But Wendy laughed, and seemed to find it witty.
“Welcome, First Architect,” she said, waving Conrad toward his assigned position.
Brenda was seated at Bascal's right, and seemed far more annoyed than flattered by the attention, while Martin Liss, the doctor from Domesville hospital, was seated to her right. Farther down the table sat a number of people Conrad didn't recognize, but then, in the middle, were Robert and Agnes M'chunu, whom Conrad hadn't seen in ages but who, by all reports, had made quite a good show of things after deciding to get married. They were light farmers or something, tending solar collectors and capacitor banks and selling power on the open market, but they also grew and sold vegetables. Conrad had a hard time picturing them grubbing in the dirt, although he supposed someone had to, or half the colony would be living on glucose and protein paste from crappy waste-disposal faxes.
They didn't need chairs; Robert and Agnes had joined the centaurs long ago. Galloping across the open countryside was perhaps not as glamorous as flight, but even so the centaurs were, in some sense, the realization of the angels' dream: speed and strength, with an empty world in which to test them. “We're the freest people who ever lived,” Robert had told him once. Now the two of them sat at the table on four folded legs, with dainty little prayer rugs under them to prevent their chafing against the wellwood floor. But they were still colored that same shade of bright, unnatural blue, from head to hoof to swishing tail. Even among centaurs, they were iconoclasts.
“Hello, sir,” Robert said to Conrad.
“Hi,” he returned. “You two are looking well.”
“Healthy as horses,” Robert said, then laughed at his own joke. “The country air does a body good, but I think by now you've learned that for yourself.”
Conrad was disappointed, though truthfully not terribly surprised, to find Ho Ng seated at his own left. With effort, he managed to smile politely at his old nemesis. Though still a commander in the Royal Barnardean Navy, Ho was married now, too, and his wife (apparently printed only a few weeks before) sat at his elbow looking adoring and excited and terribly, terribly young.
“If possible,” Ho was saying, while his hands sketched cylindrical shapes in the air, “you want to fire along the target ship's longest axis, to rupture the maximum number of compartments. The Queendom's naval theoreticians have never fought a real battle, but their analysis is bang on.”
“Have you fought a real battle?” Conrad asked him, surprised.
“Two,” Ho said, looking him over. “Space pirates, out in the Lutui Belt. Where the fuck have you been?”
Conrad snorted. “Nice to see you, too, Commander.”
To Conrad's right were a pair of empty chairs, and presently their occupants appeared in the doorway: Feck the Facilitator and his noble captain, Xiomara Li Weng. Conrad lit up when he saw them.
“Xmary! Feck! So they tazzed you too, eh?”
“What?” Feck said, looking back at him blankly.
“Where's Money?” Conrad tried.
And Feck answered, “Living on Element Pit, if you can believe it. Still working the bugs out of that neutronium drip-line pump of yours. He's going to blow that place up, I swear.”
“Of mine? I had nothing to do with that.”
“Really? Your name is on the patent. And truthfully, Money's onto something. Even the Queendom is taking an interest, though of course they're years out of synch.”
Xmary just smiled and sat down beside him. “Hello, darling. I heard you broke your arm.”
“Oh, that? It was nothing,” Conrad assured her. The sound of her voice had arrested him; suddenly he was seeing nothing but her eyes, her cheekbones, the happy upward curve of her lips.
“That's not what I heard. Someone told me you almost froze to death.”
Conrad sighed, then smiled. “The world is full of spies, I suppose. Yes, I caught my shoe in a crack and broke my arm falling; then I had to walk two kilometers through blinding snow with no direction finder. Are you happy now?”
From the other end of the table, Brenda called down at them, “He won't be breaking it anymore, Captain. These latest filters weave wellstone and nanotubes into the bones, along with a cylindrical sleeve of brickmail.”
“They do?” Conrad asked, surprised. Brenda hadn't mentioned that at the time. There had been no consent forms, no permissions or fine print, just a casual step through the plate. He found the idea vaguely unsettling, though; brickmail was a three-dimensional array of interlocked benzene rings—carbon chain mail, some called it—and it was the strongest nonprogrammable material known to humanity, by a considerable margin.
It was porous, too, allowing gas molecules to diffuse through, and even small fluid molecules like water. Well, under the right conditions, anyway. It wasn't difficult to picture a honeycomb of that stuff inside his bones, propping them up, making them stronger and lighter than bones had any right to be. The idea of being indestructible was actually kind of appealing—he might even survive a bit of Security training—but of course he still had blood and marrow, internal organs and all that. If something really bad happened to him, they would find—intact!—these bits of artificial skeleton, with no Conrad attached to them.
Unless—and this was a crawly sort of thought—the changes ran deeper than that. His arm began, nonsensically, to itch.
“Am I still human?” he asked Brenda.
This provoked a hearty laugh from everyone at the table, most especially Mack.
“As much as ever,” Brenda replied, and then did something Conrad had never imagined her capable of: she winked. This brought more scattered laughter from the assembled diners, and Conrad had the distinct feeling there was some joke here that he wasn't in on. Spending the past few decades in such isolation had seemed like a good idea—most immorbid people seemed to do it sooner or later—but it did have its disadvantages. Even onboard Newhope, he'd been connected more or less directly with the machineries of government, and with the palasa, the bronze, the upper stories of Barnard's social pyramid. Not so on Snowflake, or in the Polar Well.
C'est la vie.
When dinner arrived, it pushed upward from the table's surface as if growing: bowls and mugs, plates and utensils rising into the light of existence. Conrad realized with a shock that the entire tabletop was an industrial-grade print plate, cleverly disguised. Good God! Here was a table he'd be sure to keep his elbows off of, lest it suck him in for raw material!
“Kataki hau o kai,” Bascal said in his best Tongan, marking the official beginning of the meal, though in fact more than one set of fingers had already pinched a morsel.
The dinner itself wa
s an odd blend of old and new traditions. The main course was a Barnardean favorite: TVs. This consisted of dozens of little television holies composed of edible polymers and served in a bowl, chilled. The pictures on all the little screens cycled through some of the best-known scenes from the early Queendom and the late Tongan monarchy at the tail end of Old Modernity. There was sound, but it was turned down so far that Conrad couldn't make it out over the conversation around him.
Along with TVs there was a salad composed mainly of Earth plants that grew well on Planet Two: dandelion and collard, sweet potato and dwarf peanut. But it was seasoned with a bitter mash: tévé from the islands of Tonga, also known as “famine weed” for its habit of sustaining the Polynesian peoples when other crops refused to grow. Ironically, though, no one had ever come up with a strain of tévé that could survive for long in the open on P2. You could grow it in filtered hothouses or print it whole (and dead) from a high-end food machine, and that was about it. Its presence here could only be symbolic: a carefully orchestrated nod toward the deprivations outside.
There were other delicacies: red tea and iceberg soup, sugar blossoms and meatcakes, but these were fitted in like garnishes around the two main courses. Truthfully, it was a better meal than Conrad had seen in centuries, or maybe ever.
Conrad turned to Princess Wendy and said, around a mouthful of TVs, “It's very nice to see you again, young lady. I've just realized that I never did meet your mother.”
Wendy's smile was radiant, almost painfully beautiful. Conrad did not doubt that she was a constructed creature, the child of her parents but equally, obviously, tailored to some optimum, some royal ideal of humanity.
She said, “I rarely see Mumsy myself, First Architect. She is not after all a member of the royal family, and while you might hope such things would not come between a mother and daughter, or any two people really, the simple fact is that they do.”