Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  “Oh, a long time,” Carl replied. “Two or three millennia.”

  “Really, that long. Hmm.” This matched closely with Conrad's internal, off-the-cuff estimate, so he believed the figure at once. And that was a real problem, because Bascal had told him the economic crisis could well last for five. “Over time,” he'd said, “the price of metals will drop, leading to relief in other areas. But it involves centuries of digging.”

  Carl Piñon Faxborn waited patiently for ten seconds, and then another ten, before finally asking, “Is everything all right, Mr. Mursk?”

  “No,” Conrad told him, looking around for the supports that held this place together. “It isn't. I'm sorry to say it, Mr. Faxborn, but there will have to be some big changes around here.”

  chapter twenty-two

  the architecture of deceit

  It made Conrad sad—depressed, even—to see where things were headed. Because he was going to betray Bascal. The compulsion was as palpable as a brick to the head, and he had no intention of resisting it. Indeed, Conrad was not merely an old space pirate and revolutionary but a two-time mutineer. And history had a way of repeating itself. As in those childhood mutinies, he would be recruiting at least a handful of allies, and if he knew his business—which at this advanced age he almost certainly did—then he would select only people who truly saw things his way, who would not turn him in, or out, as a means of currying favor.

  The strange thing about it was that Conrad hated rebellion, hated conflict of any kind. All he'd ever wanted to be was an architect or matter programmer or construction boss of some kind. To build things, right? What was so wrong about that? Even in his years of wandering, he had never relinquished ownership of Murskitectura, and had in some sense never stopped pining for it while he was away. He just didn't want it to be the first, last, and only thing he ever did with his life out here among the stars.

  Would his childhood self be pleased at the way things had turned out? Helping his father repair roads had been all right, though not terribly exciting, but even that was just nepotism, an extension of the invented “chores” he was called upon to do at home, on the theory that they built character. To get the job for real, to hold it as a grown-up and earn real money at it, he would've had to compete against thousands of other applicants. And be judged not by his father, but by impartial authorities of the bureaucracy, or worse, by computers with no feelings at all, no concept of justice, only a set of goals to be weighed against the available inputs.

  And that was just not enough to hang his hopes on. At least he was qualified to be a paver's assistant; he'd had about as much chance of designing buildings as he did of becoming king. On Earth, or anywhere in the Queendom, he would've been eternally fuffed. It was natural enough to feel angry about such a circumstance, and Bascal, when they'd met at summer camp, had latched onto that anger like a supermagnet. Without that influence, Conrad would probably never have been more—or less—than a foul-mouthed delinquent. Unbeguiled by the Poet Prince, he would never have turned pirate, never have joined the Children's Revolt. Knowing the way things went for him, he probably wouldn't even have heard about it until after the fact.

  But once you started defying an abusive authority, it was a small step to defying any and all authority, on any point you happened to disagree with. Maybe that was a good thing and maybe it wasn't, but Conrad felt in those dreamy days after Wendy's funeral that it was certainly an irreversible one. Standing up for what you believed in . . . Well, it was a learned art, wasn't it? Like riding a bicycle. And once it was in your head, you couldn't unlearn it. Or maybe you could, with some subtle Queendom technology in the hands of the right sort of expert, but here on Planet Two—on Sorrow, he reminded himself—you were stuck with yourself for life. However long or short that might be.

  And so . . . Conrad could pretend to be whatever he liked: an architect, a naval officer, a hermit scientist. A paver, for crying out loud. But he would drop it all when his true calling beckoned: rebellion. The longer he lived, the more betrayal and strife he would see, would invite, would cause through his own dogged efforts.

  Damn.

  In the first few weeks he did almost nothing but mourn the very different lives he might have led. How did it come to this? he would ask himself. How did I become this person? How did we, collectively, become this place? Sorrow, yes; wasn't that a thing worth rebelling against? Or, alternatively: I caused all this to happen. If not for me, it would have worked out differently. Maybe better; it could hardly be worse. Did he have a responsibility to make good on his errors? Or was this merely the start of a new cascade of mistakes?

  Later, when he began drawing up plans for a new Cryoleum and Data Morgue, the vague outlines of a plan began to take shape. It wasn't a great plan—in fact it was disappointingly lacking in any sort of subtlety or finesse, and would not by itself improve humanity's lot. Like the Children's Revolt, it was more a call to action—fraught with the potential to inspire—than an action in its own right. But it did at least have the virtue of being readily achievable.

  As with his previous mutinies, he felt no sense of hurry. In fact, at the age of 330—older than his hidebound parents at the time of his birth!—he was inclined to take things very slowly indeed.

  “There is psychological value,” he told Bascal as the project unfolded, “in placing the dead so far from the living, as you've already done. Pectoralis makes a good resting place, suitably remote. But this constant traffic in coffins creates bottlenecks and logjams along the tuberail network. Embarrassing, right? There'd be benefits if it were possible to bring the entire facility—or parts of it anyway—a bit closer to the cities for brief periods.”

  Deaths did tend to cluster in the Ides of Dark, the hundred-hour window between Barnard's midnight and the long, slow breaking of dawn. Sunrise funerals were therefore the norm, and it was not uncommon for two or three of them to fill a train, leaving other mourners waiting on the platform for a shift or more, as if they didn't have enough problems already. But by their nature these things could not be planned in advance.

  “Fine,” Bascal told him, through the haze of grief that seemed these days to separate him from the rest of the world. He was sitting at his writing table, tapping a stylus against its surface, which was dark with scrawled lettering. If the voyage to Barnard had silenced his muse, then Wendy's death, for whatever reason, had reawakened it. Verily, it gushed! The Poet King—now a single, without copies to spread his presence around—spent as much time crafting songs and sonnets as he did running the government or visiting with the kingdom's grieving people. And these creations were astonishing in their honest, unpretentious elegance. In “The Freezing of Our Dreams” he wrote,

  Dear,

  If peace there be (and peace there must!) it lies beyond these jagged bluffs,

  through efforts (ours!) of faithful (us!)

  And paradise there be (there will!) then it's a thing that we must build,

  Ere frozen dreams themselves are spilled,

  I fear.

  And when at last we find them thaw, these children's parents children, raw,

  upon the skin of Sorrow's Fin and won from sin to life and limb,

  rejoice—we shall!—that we have brought them . . .

  Here.

  But the hope behind these comely words was a distant thing, as false as the promises that had led Conrad astray so long ago. You can be an architect, yes! All it will cost you is . . . well, everything. And damn him, Conrad would still have agreed, even if the promise had been phrased exactly that way.

  “Longing be the stronger force,” Rodenbeck had warned in MacSquinky's Reverse. “Gravity and comeuppance must wait their turn upon the stage, until the heart has had its fill of that which breaks it.”

  Indeed.

  “The reception area will be a separate module, freely traveling,” Conrad said, pointing to the features on his drawing which were meant to convey this. “In principle, we can bring it all the way to Domesville
, and then send it back to Pectoralis again so that no one need dwell in its memory-haunted shadow.”

  “That's fine,” Bascal repeated without looking up. “I trust you.”

  And then, to his enormous credit, he added, “You're up to something, Conrad. I can always tell. But as I say, I trust you. Don't embarrass me, all right? Or yourself.”

  “I shan't, Sire,” Conrad replied, wondering if it were the truth.

  And they left it at that. Conrad was free to continue, unimpeded and unexamined. Who had the time to harass him? But—clever Bascal!—these words squirmed in his mind, raising blossoms of doubt wherever they touched. As the months and years of the project unfolded, Conrad found himself, more and more, accosting youngsters in the street.

  “Would you return to the Queendom if you had the chance?” he would ask them.

  And the replies would go something like, “Of Sol? I've never been, sir. But they live forever, yuh? That sounds a bit nice.”

  Or, “They have a fine grasp of aesthetics, don't they? I like to watch about them on TV. But to go there and stay? I dunnae, that's a big step.”

  Or occasionally an honest, “You're plibbles, old man. Bugs in the attic. Leave us alone, eh?”

  But a lot of the kids recognized their first architect and answered very differently. Telling him what he wanted to hear, he assumed. The Queendom, yes! Let's all go! And this more than anything sapped his enthusiasm, caused him to question the very postulates of his plan even as the groundwork itself drew near to completion.

  And then one day he stumbled into a funeral procession—fifty youngsters in traditional black and inviz, bawling their eyes out and screaming for someone named Jamie. A surprising number of them were carrying even smaller children in their arms or on their shoulders. Not fax-born pseudoadults but actual babies and toddlers! Courtesy, no doubt, of the liberal reproductive encouragements he'd been hearing about in the news. The Bascal Edward Fuffage Plan, people were calling it.

  “Who is Jamie?” he asked one of the childless mourners. He was painfully aware of how he must look: an old man plodding the streets in a lithe young body, crashing a stranger's funeral when it crossed his path. But he needed to know, or believed he did.

  The mourner, a young man in a black bowler hat, said to him, “Jamie is the son of Dennis and Tuv.” And at Conrad's blank look he added, “Up there near the front.”

  Ah. The couple leading the procession were a priest and priestess, and the knot of people immediately behind them did not especially stand out. But behind them, in a sort of empty bubble within the crowd, were a pair of shattered-looking young men, clutching each other in sad desperation. “Oh, God!” one of them was screaming. “Oh, God! Damn you, God, give him back!”

  These children of Barnard were nothing if not expressive. And children they were, too, lacking the subtle gravitas that marked the older generations.

  “How old are they?” he could not help asking.

  “Seventeen, sir,” the mourner said, and made a show of pulling away.

  “Wait,” Conrad told him. “Please. Are you their friend?”

  “Yes,” the young man replied, with evident irritation. This was an unwelcome intrusion, and in another few seconds the procession would be past and he'd have to jog to catch up.

  “Also seventeen?” he pressed.

  “I'm twenty. What's this about, sir?”

  Seventeen! Twenty! In Barnard these numbers meant something different than they had in the Queendom, where natural (or more properly, “naturalesque”) births and pregnancies were still the norm. And clearly those older meanings were reasserting themselves here as well, even if they didn't apply to everyone. But it was painfully young just the same. At an age when Conrad and Xmary had still been raising hell, these people were already raising families.

  Conrad struggled with his reply. “I'm just . . . very concerned about the plight of young people. I always have been.” He studied the retreating backs of the bereaved couple. “Dennis and Tuv . . . they somehow managed, in a tough market, to get a birthing license and a fax appointment. Was the child a . . . baby?”

  “Nearly,” the mourner told him, with tears quivering at the corners of his eyes. “Physiologically he was four. Now he's six, now and forever. He was struck by a falling bicycle.”

  Conrad could not picture that scene, or fathom how it might have happened, but the horror of it was plain enough. “And there are no backups, right? If they filled out the right forms and got very lucky in the raffle, Dennis and Tuv could reinstantiate the original Jamie blueprint, but it wouldn't be their little boy, the one they loved and lost. Nothing ever could be. And there is no other way—there is no other way—for two men to have a child of their own on this planet.”

  “Correct, sir. May I go, please? This is hard for me.”

  “You may go,” Conrad said gently. “I apologize for keeping you. But will you answer one more question first? If you could go to a place where things like this never happened—where sorrow never intruded on the lives of the young, and no one grew old, and tears were as rare as virgins . . . Would you go?”

  “It sounds like heaven,” the man answered. “And I don't want to go to heaven. Not now, not soon. But when I die, someday, then yes: I hope to awaken in a place like that. Doesn't everyone?”

  And with that he turned to go, breaking into a reluctant jog which was very much at odds with the procession's shrieking, languorous pace.

  But Conrad, having received at last an answer he could believe in, proceeded in the other direction with paradoxically lighter steps, with a lighter heart and a brighter future before him. It was time to be a sort of hero again, yes, because no one else was going to.

  He sent a message to Xmary that very night, putting events into motion which would, he hoped, in the fullness of time, change everything.

  chapter twenty-three

  by tuberail to the stars

  Mechanically speaking, Conrad's plan was simplicity itself. Over a period of several years, the Cryoleum had become five separate structures, each mounted on tuberails and capable of traveling across the face of Planet Two. And for various historical reasons, the tuberails of the ground network were fully compatible with those running up the sides of the Orbital Tower, which by now was itself a historical anachronism that no one paid much attention to.

  Traffic there was less than a tenth of what it had been in the glory days, even though it was cheaper than the Gravittoir. The Gravittoir was simply faster, and also more comfortable, with no sense of acceleration and none of the vibration or loud noises associated with tuberail travel. So when P2's morning was over, and with it the funeral season, it was very easy for Conrad to clear the Cryoleum's personnel on the trumped-up excuse that he needed to refinish the interior surfaces.

  Then he simply stole the entire facility.

  From a control station in the Orbital Tower itself, he whisked the buildings to Tower Base so quickly that it would be a day or two before anyone even realized they were gone. He did this neatly and with precision, allowing no interruption to the structures' power supplies or other services. From there things got even easier, since Murskitectura owned and operated the Orbital Tower. The Cryoleum buildings had been designed to fit side by side in Tower Base's large maintenance hangar, where Mack and his small team of loyalists tore the facades off them, revealing the more-or-less ordinary cargo podships beneath. Then, these pods were simply scooted up the tower like any other cargo.

  “This is politically dangerous,” Conrad warned. “I hope these people don't know what they're doing, or why.”

  “Let me worry about that,” Mack said with a wave of his hand.

  “Yeah? And what about you personally?”

  “None of your concern, Boss.”

  “The hell it isn't! I needed trustworthy help, so I called you. I'm not going to leave you hanging when I'm through.”

  “They don't do that anymore. Hanging.”

  “Not that specifically,” Con
rad said, “but what happens when you're caught?”

  “If I'm caught,” Mack corrected. “Don't worry. I love a good lie, a good sneak behind the bushes, and if it falls apart and I'm standing there with my trousers down, well, that's a challenge of a different sort.”

  “But—”

  “I can take care of myself, Conrad. Think who my teacher was.”

  Well, that was hardly reassuring. But what could he say?

  Soon the cargo pods were stripped and ready, and it was time to get things moving again. Conrad had considered swiping the Data Morgue as well, but its memory cores were much more valuable than the Cryoleum, much harder for the colony to replace, and for the most part the images contained inside them were of people who were not, in point of fact, dead. Including Conrad himself, for what little that mattered. Perhaps Bascal would find a way to print that copy out, and punish it for what Conrad was about to do, but it was a risk he would just have to live with. He had no access to the records himself, could not simply delete his image.

  It would be nice if Xmary could meet him at the top of the tower, but the orbital mechanics of P2 and its environment forbade this. If Newhope came to rest on the top of the tower, it would not be orbiting, and the mass of the ship itself—to say nothing of its ertial shields—would crumple the tower like a tube of paper. Instead, a complex system of orbital rendezvous was necessary, and herein lay one of the great risks of Conrad's plan. Newhope's failure to be in the right place at the right time would strand the pods in useless, unlicensed orbits where they would eventually bang into each other, or into the tower itself. Or worse, into something moving along a different orbit with much higher relative velocity.

  That is, if Naval Security didn't get them first.

  The first pod climbed away from the ground with a sonic rumble—never a boom, as booms were a symptom of wasted energy, of sloppy design—and was, within minutes, a mere gleam of sunlight on the tower's black face. The second and third pods quickly followed, and then the fourth. Twenty-five thousand frozen corpses. Twenty-five thousand children, bound for a kind of heaven. If he could save more, he would. If he could think of a better plan, he'd implement it without a second thought. But Conrad had always believed it was better to salvage something than to salvage nothing at all. And if those were the only choices, then his conscience was as clear as the path ahead of him.