Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  The sight of it was, for a moment, too alien for Conrad's mind to process. He did not, in that first second or two, have any idea what had happened, and all he could think—literally all he could think—was that young women really did shriek in horror, like extras in a bad movie, when something hot and red was splashed upon their gowns.

  chapter twenty-one

  till death do us park

  Five days later, after the public funeral procession had wound its way through the streets of Domesville, those same dinner guests—almost the exact same collection of people—found themselves on a tuberail car together, with Wendy's freezer coffin placed conspicuously at its center. Some of these men and women were crying; some were stoic; but most displayed that brittle, funereal cheerfulness which, as the years ground on, all of them would learn all too well. They might be immorbid—emphasis on the “might”—but given enough time, nearly everyone else they knew would end up in one of these boxes.

  The accident was freakish and bizarre, but so was every accident. Such was their nature in a world of mature technology. It was shocking enough that the princess had died; did her archive have to be corrupted in the process?

  “This is much harder than I expected,” Bascal was saying to Conrad, as they sat together on a bench across the aisle from the coffin. “It occurs to me, belatedly I suppose, that the brunt of this fatal recession will fall on our children. You and I are freshly scrubbed; these bodies will hold together for centuries. With proper care, perhaps a good deal longer than that. But if the colony is going to survive, we must have children. Our population needs to triple, maybe quadruple. And once the faxes are gone, we'll have no way to protect these youngsters from the vagaries of time and fortune. Generation upon generation, they'll be born and live and die without ever once having the benefit of proper medicine. And that will be hard on the parents. Unimaginably hard.”

  Conrad hadn't known Wendy all that well, but he fancied he was grieving as much and as hard as the people who had. Not Bascal, perhaps, not Mack or her other close friends. But the other mourners, the acquaintances and well-wishers, did not seem any more or less stricken than Conrad himself. Even Xmary, who had spent nine months with Wendy during an extended Domesville shore leave, had retained her composure, and in fact could not attend the funeral event itself due to a critical departure time conflict.

  But the hugeness of Wendy's accident—its suddenness, its permanence and unappealability . . . Those communicated. They penetrated any facade. Wendy had had other plans for the evening, and did not go bravely to her death, or see it coming in any way. Who did?

  In some sense everyone in Barnard knew this woman—she was their princess after all—but Conrad realized he could probably sit in the funeral car of a total stranger, someone he'd never once laid his gaze on, and still spend half the time wiping this salty mist from his eyes. Tears: another worldly anachronism.

  He was tempted to reassure himself that these were strange times, that these feelings were nothing a human being was ever meant to endure. But the actual facts were quite opposite: in the grand scheme of things, it was the immorbid Queendom that was unusual, not this sad, mortal kingdom. Most of the people who'd ever lived had done it under conditions far more painful and hopeless and humiliating than these. This thought by itself brought fresh tears to his eyes. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, indeed.

  “I'm sorry,” he'd told Mack, over and over again. “So very, very sorry for you.”

  “Pity the world,” was Mack's only answer. “I love her, I miss her, I want her back, Boss. But I'll be all right. Troll hearts are made of tougher stuff.”

  Still, where Bascal was concerned, Conrad's duties were clear: he was bursting with sympathy, and while he rarely knew the right thing to say, he spouted platitudes from old plays and stories, and they sounded all right. But that was only when he felt he must speak; mostly he didn't say anything at all. Instead he listened, and since Bascal wasn't much inclined to talk either, as often as not the two of them just sat together: two old men on a bench, at a loss for words, overwhelmed by their world.

  He patted his old friend on the knee. “Bascal, maybe it's time we cut our losses. We could stop having children, and start ferrying the ones we do have back to Sol. With prudence, and perhaps some risky allocation of faxes and memory cores, I'll bet we could complete the job in five trips.”

  But Bascal was shaking his head. “No. No, the mating urge is much stronger than that. Especially among the young, the doomed, the mortal, and most especially of all in poor economies. Read up on your history; it's all there. You could make a trip, yes, but by the time you got back, the problem would have doubled in size and complexity, and you'd be faced with whole generations for whom your departure—however heroic—would be a historical event. These kids don't pine for a Queendom they've never seen, never smelled, never felt between their toes.”

  “And on the return voyage,” Conrad said, as though the king had not spoken, “we'll fill the holds with print plates of the Queendom's highest quality. And while the colony is using those up, we'll be off fetching more.”

  Bascal's hands were waving in frustration. “That doesn't solve the basic problem, which is a dearth of industrial base. You can't cheat on this, Conrad. We've been trying for two hundred years, and where has it led us? I've run the numbers every way I can think of, and have yet to find any relief. Because relief doesn't exist. Not in this lifetime.

  “And anyway, economically speaking, the promise of rescue reduces the incentive to plan for the long term. There is a branch of psychology called lifeboat psychology that has many salient words on this point. I fear there is only one solution, and it's a hard, sad road indeed. The appalling thing is that none of us saw this coming until it was too late. Indeed, we may have been doomed from the moment Newhope's engines lit up. Which, by the way, is yet another problem with your theory: we have no launching lasers here. Newhope's departure velocity would be a lot lower than it was leaving Sol. The journey would take centuries, not decades, and by the time you got back we'd all be dead, or through the needle's eye to prosperity again.”

  This reply was about what Conrad had expected. It was rare indeed for him to have a thought which had not occurred to Bascal first, and Bascal always had planning and wise mathematics on his side. Or believed he did, anyway, and there was no changing his mind about that. Nevertheless, with a strange sense of déjà vu—a sense that they were not so far removed from their pirate days after all, he persevered. “We could ask for help. Surely the Queendom has realized our peril by now. Ask your parents for a rescue ship, ten times the size of Newhope. I'll bet they could have something here within fifty years.”

  But at these words Bascal's face, already blotchy with grief, simply closed down in anger. “We are prisoners here, or have you forgotten? We've been kicked out of Paradise, and now you propose to go begging at its gates. To die like a dog when with far less effort you could die like a man. I'm disappointed, Conrad. I wish I could say I was also surprised.”

  “Your parents haven't turned their backs on us, Bas. They wouldn't do that.”

  “No? They've got problems of their own, boyo. In case you hadn't noticed, they haven't produced a starship in decades. The era of colonial expansion has ended. It's just not cost-effective, and why would it be? Wiser now, they focus their not-so-limitless resources on terraforming, on digging new holes for their own burgeoning population to slither into. Places which are directly under their control, you understand, so that these colonial blunders, these fakaevaha and de'sastres, cannot be repeated. You have a good heart, Conrad—I've always known that. But equally, you've got a soft head and a weak stomach. You've never been good at facing reality when reality is bleak. Which, if you think about it, is always.”

  “Facing a reality that we're all going to die? Am I supposed to just accept that?”

  “Probably not all of us,” Bascal said. “But most. And yes, I expect you to understand that fact and behave accordingly.
If you don't accept the possibility of death, you have no way of putting your affairs in order, of planning your life as a useful enterprise. You'll simply collapse one day—maybe far in the future, but with no greater dignity for that. No higher purpose.

  “Or perhaps you'll throw your life away in a grand gesture. You do like to play the hero. But there is greater heroism, my friend, in being realistic. It's a greater service, to yourself and to the rest of us. Little gods, Conrad, you're a grown man. Act your age, hmm? Historically speaking, you're ten grown men laid end to end on the timeline of civilization.”

  “Aye,” Conrad agreed, slipping unconsciously into the surety of naval parlance. “That I am.” His thoughts, though, were not in agreement with Bascal's. He realized suddenly that they rarely had been, ever. This seemed a late and rather pointless epiphany, but he filed it with the others that had occurred to him over the years—his private stash of agely wisdom.

  He clapped the king on the knee again. “Let's speak of something else. Tonight, my friend, we'll drug ourselves insensible and talk about the past. Isn't that what old men do? And none of these subtle Queendom drugs will do: I'm talking about memory enhancers and straight ethanol. Maybe a hint of the grape, for flavoring.”

  Bascal smiled a brittle, funereal smile and leaned back wearily in his bench. “Oh, that sounds awful, truly. And yet, it's better than any of the alternatives. There are those who won't recover, and those who'll recover without assistance. And then there are those who require attention. Yes, I see it now: triage demands that we do as you say.”

  At the end of their three-hour train ride lay the Southland Cryoleum, five thousand kilometers away, near the center of the Peninsulum Pectoralis. The province was known less formally as the Fin, which Conrad suddenly realized was a kind of pun or double-entendre: the arm of a fish, yes, and also a word for endings. The fin, the terminus, the Land of the Dead. Their tuberail car was greeted by a man who claimed to have been Wendy's undertaker.

  “She was no trouble,” he assured them all in what he probably thought was a kindly voice.

  And why should she have been? With her body bisected like that, every blood vessel was laid open for his nanobes and preservatories, and he'd need only half the usual amounts! There wasn't a lot of her to freeze, and while the Palace Guards had surely loomed over him like metal angels of retribution, making sure everything was done just so, it hardly mattered that her cell structure—even the remains of her brain—survive the long freezing.

  Over in the Data Morgue, ten kilometers west of here, her core image had been corrupted—overlaid with half a copy, followed by a mess of random electrical noise and then silence. A set of plausible terminators had been computed and applied to the file—the news reports were emphatic about that—but nobody really believed that half a damaged body and half a damaged core image could be reassembled into a whole person again. Not the original person, anyway; no amount of technology, of royal wealth or staffing, could accomplish that.

  “Thank you,” Bascal said to the man, with apparent sincerity. Then he choked up a bit before managing to add, “We appreciate your efforts.”

  There was a bishop at the actual ceremony, in the Cryoleum's rather industrial-looking reception hall, but his words were perfunctory, his rehearsed praises and platitudes mercifully brief. This was a private ceremony, and there was little he could tell the crowd about Wendy—or about death and resurrection, or the mathematical possibilities of an afterlife—that they didn't already know.

  But then Bascal surprised them all by rising to the podium and singing, unaccompanied, a song he claimed to have written the night before. It was called “The Storms of Sorrow,” and Conrad found himself weeping afresh at its words—particularly “the rain upon sorrow's face.” Bascal had perhaps written better in his distant youth, but for a long-awaited first effort here in his own kingdom, it did not disappoint. The audience gave him a five-minute standing ovation when it was complete, which afterward seemed disrespectful to poor Wendy, but what the hell; they were out of the public eye here, and Wendy, too, would have liked the song. Her father's voice, barely remembered after all these years, was among humanity's most beautiful.

  Later, at the reception, Conrad balanced a plate of synthetic cheese and pickled blackberries on top of his wineglass in order to offer the king an admiring handshake.

  “Gorgeous music, Sire. Gorgeous poetry, moving and appropriate for the occasion. Listen to me, I sound like a sycophant! But I loved that, really. You talked about sorrow almost like it was a tangible thing. A place we've all come to.”

  Bascal nodded, with tears streaming down his cheeks. “Indeed, boyo, I have named this planet at last. I wanted to wait, you know? To see how things would turn out. And now we know: Sorrow, to remind us of our sins. A whole world of Sorrow for us to explore, to populate, to belong to forever.”

  And that was just too wrenching; Conrad put down his plate and glass and threw his arms around the king, and together they wept for a good long while. But while Bascal was weeping in helpless rage, Conrad cried in part for an even simpler reason: because Bascal was the best friend he'd ever had, and yet he felt in his bones that the two of them would never be closer than they were at this terrible moment. The future would not be the quiet downward spiral the former Prince of Sol had described, but something much darker and nastier. Something which would set the two of them firmly apart.

  And where do feelings like this come from, these sudden certainties? Are they tricks of neuroanatomy, or perhaps the quantum fluctuations of future time, echoing faster than light so that they impinge—however faintly!—on the past? Or if time be static and free will an illusion, are they perhaps the hand of God, shaping the landscape of immutable history? Are they true prophecies or self-fulfilling ones? In any case, all of history has turned upon them, more than once.

  “This place is ugly,” Conrad finally remarked, when the two of them had sought the safety of a bench in another room, away from the party proper. “No offense, Sire, but I wouldn't want my dog frozen here, much less my princess, who changed my own life simply by appearing in it.”

  “True,” the king agreed, looking around. The whole structure looked like exactly what it was: a warehouse. An industrial space for the storage of cryogenic goods. “All too true. If death is to follow us at every step, we should turn to face it on the ground of our own choosing: in a house of strength and human achievement. A cathedral, a tower, a fulsome garden! Not this . . . garage. Perhaps you could have a look around before you leave, with an eye toward improvements?”

  “Gladly, Sire. I'll begin within the hour. Will . . . you be all right?”

  “No,” the king said. “But I'm needed at the party, and at the palace, and at the helm of government. And you, my friend, are needed here in civilization.”

  “Aye,” Conrad agreed. “So it would seem.”

  He tracked down the mortician again and managed to get a tour of the facilities. Things were even worse than he'd figured; twenty-three thousand bodies entombed here already, in ugly slotted dewars of plastic foam and unprogrammed glass, filled with liquified nitrogen. There were power and temperature gauges all around, and signs full of warnings and instructions. Also warning lights here and there, flashing and beeping irregularly, disturbing the peace.

  “Do people come here to visit?” he asked the mortician, whose name was Carl Piñon Faxborn.

  “Sometimes. Not often. The bodies are shipped down here for embalming and cryolation, and as often as not returned northward for formal receptions, glass caskets and all, before coming back here for their final rest. Occasionally, we'll disinter one for another brief trip: a busy relative paying his or her respects, and occasionally we'll hold a re-viewing here on the premises.”

  That sounded awful to Conrad, and he said so.

  “Well,” Carl replied, unoffended, “the status of these people is problematic. Are they really gone? To heaven, or to a distant future? Who can say? Shall we treat them as patie
nts or as vacant husks? We try to err on the side of hope.”

  “I wouldn't come to visit here,” Conrad told him. “It's too cold.”

  Carl laughed politely.

  “Sterile, I mean. Uninviting. These gauges, like something from a power plant. This place should be beautiful.”

  “We are none of us opposed to beauty,” Carl agreed.

  “What are these flashing lights all about? Here, and here? Why do they beep like that?”

  “Ah,” Carl said, running his hand over one. “Those are our cosmic ray counters: proton, photon, heavy nucleus, and ‘other.' Sometimes one goes off: a vertical strike from directly above. Sometimes two go off: a diagonal strike. Sometimes it's three or four in a straight line, if the particle comes in horizontally. That's uncommon; the atmosphere blocks most of those. But we are very close to Barnard, and the planet's magnetic field offers little protection.”

  “Can't you put up a local field?”

  “We can and do, yes. But how large should we make it? How much energy should we consume in maintaining it? We count the rays that penetrate, sir, not the ones our systems deflect.”

  But you don't deflect them all, Conrad thought. And this was significant, because any Navy man or woman knew all about cosmic rays, how they riddled your body, cutting and poisoning. A little bit of damage was easily repaired by your body's own systems. Hell, in the funny ways of biology, a little bit of radiation damage was actually good for you. But a little bit more was bad. If the damage piled up faster than your body could repair it, you shriveled, went blind and senile, eventually died. Here, of course, the cosmic ray counts were smaller than they would be out in space, but . . . a frozen body could not repair itself. And with enough damage, even a high-end fax machine would have a hard time piecing the true person back together.

  Posing it as an idle question, he asked, “How long would it take these rays to chew a body up into irretrievable goo?”