Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  She punctuated this comment by taking up Mack's trollish hand and squeezing it. Mack, for his part, seemed at ease, as though he did this all the time. They made an interesting pair, this princess and troll, for trolls were, by all accounts, unusually gifted in the arts of love, but had almost no sense of taste, culinary or otherwise. Ironically, this fit perfectly with Conrad's architectural style, making Mack a very good successor for him: passionate and direct, free of silly distractions. But when it came to subtler business, the finer things in life were said to slide right by a troll, unnoticed or taken for granted. Like this banquet? Like fair Wendy herself?

  Still, in a world where death was possible, odd pairings like this might be the norm—might even be preferred. The pressure was perhaps not so much to find a soul mate for all eternity, but to find someone smart and funny and interesting, to keep you company for a few decades while entropy crept up from behind. In his mind this new world was like a dance floor, urgently beckoning: grab a partner and go, before the music stops!

  “I was going to marry her mother,” Bascal chimed in with a leer. “Truly, I was. But things got more difficult after Wendy was born. It changed the dynamic, and our relationship never really did spring back. It was Nala herself who called it quits. She's a surveyor now, and happily married out in the Blackberry Belts somewhere. We wish her all the best”—he glanced at his daughter as if for confirmation—“but she resists contact, and we have for the most part respected that. Even on this fine occasion.”

  A coarse, unamused laugh escaped Conrad's lips. “Funny, you didn't respect me when I resisted contact.”

  And here, the king's expression darkened. “Is that so? Well. You could have been my most trusted adviser, Conrad. There was no one else for the job. But even before you left Domesville, your avoidance of me had been, I would almost say, pathological. It hurts my feelings, but more to the point, it deprives society of a trusted voice.”

  “The voice of reason?” Conrad asked with uncharacteristic sourness. “Next you'll tell me that with my advice, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. As if I could have done anything. As if I know anything the rest of the world doesn't.”

  To his credit, Bascal considered these words seriously before replying, “Fair enough. We're at the mercy of economic forces that are larger than any of us. But still, you could've helped. You could have tried.” He looked glum for a long moment, but then found a reserve of cheer somewhere inside himself and said expansively, “I am sorry about the kidnapping, old friend. Perhaps we should have asked, but this occasion, this one particular occasion, demands your presence. A bit of melodrama makes it all the sweeter.”

  “And what occasion is that, exactly?”

  “Why, Wendy's birthday,” Bascal said, sounding genuinely surprised. Another thing Conrad was presumed to know.

  “I'm fifty years old today,” Wendy chirped. The look on her face was appallingly self-satisfied.

  Conrad's own face fell into a gape of dismay. “You're fifty? That's impossible. After you were born, I spent a few year . . . a few dec . . . well . . .”

  He had spent a lot of time out and away. In space, on the sea, in the quiet of the Polar Well. Maybe it had been fifty years. Jesus and the little gods, when Conrad was fifty he was already the architect of a world, and that was his third career! First he'd been a paver's boy, and afterward a space pirate. This little girl, this supposed child, had lived a natural human lifespan and then some. Conrad found himself looking her over, appraising her in much the same way that Brenda had appraised him earlier. He felt he should reassess her in some way, change his baseless opinions about her, but he didn't know where to begin.

  Finally, he just forced a smile and said, “Goodness, how the years fly by. It's a curse of the immorbid, this putting things off, this plenty-of-time-for-that-later mentality. It causes us to miss the things that happen quickly, even important things that are right in front of our faces. Like the flowering of a delightful young woman. My apologies, Princess, and happy birthday.”

  “Thank you,” she said, looking appropriately charmed.

  “Really,” Conrad said, “I'm surprised you remember me at all. We saw each other, what, four times before I shipped out?”

  “Six,” she replied. “But who's counting? Mr. Mursk, the people we meet in early life leave a powerful imprint. When the mind is still forming and the hormones rage, and everything is brighter and grander, a face is so much more than just an oval of skin. We remember them, oh yes, and though they stray apart from us, they never really leave.”

  Conrad thought of his own parents, and of the King and Queen of Sol, and of Bascal and all the other boys he'd gone to camp with. . . . He hadn't seen some of them in a century or more, but they remained his friends, the best friends he'd ever had. He could not disagree with Wendy's point.

  “I always thought,” Wendy went on, “that you were fleeing from me as well as from my father. The very sight of me seemed to drive you into a panic. As it did my mother. It's a curious thing, isn't it? Confronted with youth, we discover the lack of it in ourselves. We must face the things we used to be, and the things we dreamed of but never were, and never will be. Do I frighten you still?”

  There didn't seem to be a lot of emotion riding on the question. She wasn't going to be upset one way or the other, no matter how Conrad answered. But she was honestly curious, and for this reason Conrad gave the question considerable thought. Other conversations began to spring up around the table, but finally he said over them, “I think part of it was just my own weakness, Princess. You wanted . . . something . . . which I feared I might actually provide. It would have been unseemly, and I didn't trust myself.

  “But there's truth in what you say: you made me feel old, for the first time in my life. And now you're fifty, and I feel older still. You are a bit frightening, yes. Your father has always been a sort of mad genius, and the women he loves have been intelligent as well, and always . . . sharp, I guess you'd say. Hard-edged.” He cast a glance at Brenda and found her looking back at him with a blend of annoyance and curiosity.

  “So you fear I'm a deranged genius as well?” Wendy asked. “A faha alapoto?”

  Conrad gestured with his hands, not quite nodding, not quite agreeing. “I just . . . I remember how we were: determined to change things, determined to get into trouble. And we have, on both counts. This colony's entire population is paying for the indiscretions of our youth. With their own lives, as often as not.”

  Here Bascal injected a comment of his own, in vaguely wistful tones. “Death has been a constant companion through every age. Our own parents faced it early in their lives, or believed they did. In fact, death has shaped us all; the process of apoptosis, or programmed cell death, is crucial in the growth of any organism, from the lidicara to your own self. It's what gives you your shape and structure. Without death, you'd be a mindless blob, as monstrous and misbegotten as anything that ever spilled out of a fax. With death written into our very programming, did we really believe it could be banished forever?”

  “Didn't we?” Conrad shot back. “Shouldn't we? What's civilization for if not to protect the lives of its people?”

  The king smiled and shook his head. “No, sorry. That's a nice theory, but the only thing civilizations act to preserve is their own continuity. That's a very different thing. Rome lasted a thousand years, with an average citizen's life span of just twenty-five. Think about that. Lives were fleeting; it was ideas and institutions that mattered. Perhaps we have something to learn from their example.”

  “How to die?” Conrad asked. “No, thank you. They didn't have a choice about it.”

  “We may not, either,” Bascal said unhappily. “What are we to do, evacuate the planet? Newhope was meant to carry a hundred live people, plus cargo modules, including memory cores. Do we put everyone in storage? We can't, because the cores are full, and making more would tie up our best remaining faxes, further exacerbating the shortage.”

  “We co
uld freeze the living,” Conrad suggested half seriously. “Ship them in coffins.”

  But Bascal rebutted that at once, and firmly. “Frozen bodies take up ten times more volume than the core space for a scanned human image. Captain Li Weng, how many coffins can your ship hold?”

  Xmary shrugged, clearly reluctant to take Bascal's side over Conrad's. “I don't know. Properly containerized, I suppose it would be thousands.”

  “Hundreds of thousands?” the king pressed. “Our entire population?”

  “No,” she admitted, plucking a final morsel off her plate and popping it into her mouth. “Not nearly.”

  Conrad had no reply to that, and the king's next words were gentler. “The answer is to live well, Conrad, to take joy in every day that remains. That has always been the answer. Do you know much about economics?”

  Glumly, Conrad shook his head. “Not beyond what it takes to run a construction company, no. Why would I? I never thought I'd need it.”

  “Well,” the king said, “it never hurts to know what fate has in store. I'll summarize for you, if you don't mind. Do you know what a free market is?”

  “Sure,” Conrad said. In the same way he knew what a guillotine was, or a printing press. Contrivances of the Old Modern era, or perhaps even earlier, before even electricity had been tamed, when the world stank of horse manure and burning wax.

  “Don't look so disdainful, my friend; free markets were elegant, self-correcting systems. With supply and demand driving the cost of goods directly, pathological outcomes—the razing of forests, the overvaluation of trivial commodities—were uncommon and brief. Most of the horror stories come from partially free markets, distorted by ill-considered policy. In fact, it's been shown mathematically that unregulated markets were two-thirds as efficient as perfect-knowledge monarchies. Without hypercomputers to guide them, the Old Moderns learned—painfully, to be sure!—that nature was better left to take its course.”

  “Why are you telling us this?” asked one of the young men Conrad didn't recognize.

  “In your case, Titus,” the king answered coolly, “because you happen to be here. As a bonus, you're also ignorant and in sore need of enlightenment. Others are merely curious.”

  “‘Monarchy is the mathematical optimum of governance,'” Conrad quoted.

  “Yes,” Bascal agreed, “but only with sufficient computing power to back it up, and only if the monarch himself is sensible. This is in large part why we retain the anachronism of a Senate, to whom formal power is nominally assigned. It's a check against my own potential for error. They have their own analysts, their own computers, and they're free to overrule my judgments if they deem it necessary.”

  And if they don't value their careers, Conrad added silently. Bascal was well known for arranging the dismissal of senators who failed to share his vision.

  “What I'm getting at,” the king said, “is that we can, in some actual tangible sense, prepare ourselves for what lies ahead. Quantum mechanics demands that the future be uncertain, but not infinitely so. Finite uncertainty, you see? Which is the same thing as a tiny bit of certainty. And as it happens, our productivity curves do not appear to crash to zero. Indeed, with finite certainty they seem to skirt it and rise again into prosperity. We have a long, dark night ahead of us, but if we can maintain that continuity of civilization, with labor-driven industries and children born the old-fashioned way, as actual babies from actual wombs, then our morning will eventually come, and with it perchance the revival of our dead.”

  “Maintain it how?” asked the young man named Titus.

  Bascal smiled at him. “Has it occurred to you, boy, that I'm addressing someone other than yourself?”

  “Oh,” Titus said, dropping his gaze. “Well. My apologies, Sire.”

  “Accepted,” Bascal answered dismissively. “Now do shut up.”

  Toying with his mug, Conrad cleared his throat and said, “Why, uh, did you take this fax machine, Bas? As a birthday present? It belongs to a hospital.”

  “I know very well to whom it belongs, boyo. They'll receive it in due time—probably within a few days—but in the meanwhile it has an official state function to perform. Namely, the archiving of the critical personnel here assembled. Backups have been sporadic since the palace machine went down, but continuity requires not only the right people, but also some synchrony among them. I can't have a five-year-old copy of my finance minister collaborating with a fifty-year-old copy of my security chief! Therefore a hard cable, surrounded by layered insulation of almost geological dimension, has been laid from here—from this very room wherein we dine—to the Southland Data Morgue where the memory cores are stored.

  “And yes, never fear, I'll be updating the records of more than just you few; over the next few days we'll be cycling over a thousand people through these opalescent gates. Notices are going out as we speak.”

  A thousand people. Barely half a percent of the colony's population. Conrad wasn't so dense as to require an explanation: Bascal could not save everyone, so he would save—literally save, archive, store—the people he deemed most valuable to the colony. Death would come, yes, but not for all. The imperfect promise of freezing and eventual revival would be reserved for the proletariat, the rabble, the serfs and peasants, while this immorbid elite feasted its way through the crisis.

  Conrad sighed, feeling a bit more of the fight drain out of him. He could see the logic—even the inevitability—of this approach. But he and Bascal had been faced with such decisions before, in the very darkest of their pirate days, and Conrad had insisted at the time that they seek volunteers, that they draw straws, that death be accepted only as a voluntary sacrifice, not imposed as a sentence upon weeping innocents. And he'd been overruled.

  Still, honor demanded his next words, which he stood to deliver. “Sire, I thank you sincerely for this honor, but I must decline. I wouldn't feel right about it.”

  Bascal gave him a hard look, then finally an unhappy shrug. “Suit yourself. I think it's a mistake, and I'll invite you to reconsider. The colony needs its founders, its senior members, its most talented and insightful. But Jesus, Conrad, that tazzing was a joke. For old times' sake, you understand? And for my daughter's birthday. I'm not a monster, boyo. I'll not force anyone.”

  This answer was unexpected, and Conrad was somewhat unbalanced by it, like a man who throws his weight against a wall only to discover it's really a curtain. To add lack of insult to this lack of injury, Bascal then rose from his seat—a signal to the other diners that the formal part of the dinner was over, that casual chitchat and milling around were duly authorized. This of course broke the spell of Conrad's gesture, leaving him no room to reply unless he raised his voice. And that would make him look like an ass, if he didn't already.

  Damn.

  “You're always showboating,” said Ho Ng, standing now at Conrad's elbow. His voice was quiet, more amused than menacing. “Imagining we're all, like, waiting to see what you'll do. Like we give a shit. So you'll be dead and frozen while the rest of us pull things back together. How dramatic. Is that supposed to make you a hero?”

  Ho's wife, looking on from the sidelines, seemed rapt at his words. Or maybe just honestly in love. That couldn't be a bad thing, could it? Even if the man she felt it for was a shitheel? She seemed so young, so innocent. Maybe she'd be good for him.

  “I may last longer than you think,” Conrad told Ho, and surprised himself by sounding amused. “Apparently I'm made of brickmail.”

  Ho sneered. “Join the club, fuckwipe. I can see in infrared and breathe carbolic acid. You could shoot fifty holes in me without breaking my stride.”

  “And you're charming, too,” Conrad told him.

  “Oh, Conrad,” Xmary said, touching him on the arm. “Don't be like this, please. I want you safely stored, and not just for your sake or mine. It's the right thing to do. You are important to the colony.”

  “He may be stored already,” Brenda said, sidling up around a knot of chatting
youngsters. “I wasn't in the room when the cables went live, but Conrad's image was in the fax machine's buffer. If they flushed it rather than scrubbing, then he'd've gone straight to the Data Morgue.” Then she addressed Conrad directly: “I don't know what the fuss is about, anyway; you've never been deleted off the original personnel core. Some copy of you is kicking around down there, younger and snottier than you are today.”

  “See?” Ho chimed in gleefully. “Showboating. Thinks he's something special. Better than the rest of us, certainly, when really he's just some old fuck hiding out in the countryside. Counting snowflakes.”

  And that was rather an artful jab for someone as coarse and uncomplicated as Ho. Conrad felt he should choose his next words carefully. But just at that moment, the other end of the table rang with the clear, bell-like tones of dinner spoons on wellstone mugs, and a knot of admirers around Princess Wendy were shouting “Ten thousand years! Taha mano ta'u! Ten thousand years!” and hauling her in the direction of the fax machine.

  “Wait,” she laughed. “I have to relieve my bladder; I have to fix my hair.”

  But her friends were having none of that. “Fix it in the future!” they teased her. “You need some flaws to break the symmetry; store the real you!” And with a slingshot hold on her arms, they hurled her forward against the print plate.

  “No! Not so hard!” Brenda shouted at them, but it was too late; the princess had gone ballistic, still on her feet but stumbling forward with one arm stretched out before her and the other trailing behind. To her credit, the last expression on her face was one of simple joy: the birthday girl enduring her mandatory ritual punishments in the spirit with which they were delivered.

  The fax, alas, was not so accommodating. Accepting Wendy's careening mass, it flashed and sparked and groaned and then went dark; and with a smell of scorched meat the back half of that young, royal body rebounded from the print plate, flailed upright for a boneless moment, and then collapsed in a squirting heap upon the floor.