Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  “It has effect on these,” Xmary said sternly, waving a hand in the direction of the floor or, more properly, aft toward the cargo holds, where the Cryoleum pods were attached. “If they don't thank us, if they're not pleased at their uprooting and resurrection, then we will pack them into quantum storage and return them to Barnard as soon as possible. I, for one, will sleep soundly in the coming centuries, knowing that however little we've managed to accomplish, at least we've done something.”

  “Implying that I have not?” Bascal's image asked, amused. And angry, yes, with that impotent sort of anger people have when facing faits accomplis. “It's very easy for you, Xiomara, darling, to critique my performance. But I have also done my best, or rather King Bascal has, and considering his heritage and education, I would say his best is no small thing. You're welcome to disagree, but it is history, and not yourself, that will judge the greater good. And history is long, my dear. Very long. If you live to eat your words, I pray that His Majesty is there to see it.”

  Conrad flashed an obscene gesture at the recording and said, “Thank you so much for stopping by, Bas. You know the way out, I trust? Your labors here being at an end, you can send yourself back to yourself, reply paid.”

  “He can't,” Feck said. “That sail was also our high-gain antenna. Without it, we're restricted to low-power, low-bandwidth, short-range communications. And our departure hyperbola doesn't pass anywhere near P2, or a suitable relay station. The king's ghost is stuck here with us, and we with him. Does this amuse you, Sire?”

  The imaginary king took three imaginary steps toward Feck, and mimed as if to pat him on the cheek. “Feck, my boy, who could have guessed that a soft little berry like you would grow into such a fine, formidable fellow? Not I, certainly. I assumed you'd be running a puppet theater or writing Hedon programs for deep-tissue massage. But I've been wrong before, ah? And shall no doubt be wrong again.”

  “You flatter me, Sire,” Feck said, with only a trace of irony.

  “Do I?” the king exclaimed. “Do I really? You have made a powerful enemy, sir, and it need not have been so. You'll learn just how flattering my attentions can be! But nevertheless, you have earned my respect, and that is a thing not lightly won.”

  He took another step and stood before Eustace, who lay with her head in Feck's lap and her arm thrown across her face. “You,” he said, “are awfully young to have fallen in with a crowd like this. A pity you'll spend your formative years in such a noninformative environment. You have my sympathy, dear, and that is not lightly given either.”

  “These sound like good-byes,” Xmary said.

  “And so they are,” the king agreed. He strode farther around the room, to place a ghostly finger underneath Xmary's chin. “I have fond memories of you, little one, and I regret that we've not been better friends. Perhaps if we were, this sad affair would not have intruded on our reality.”

  Xmary smiled thinly at that. “This is a point, Sire, which I fear you've never fully grasped. We haven't been friends, nor lovers, for the very same reason that we aren't allies now. Place the fault with me, if you like, but I don't have any other enemies that I'm aware of. Only you. My regret, Sire, is that you caught my adolescent eye before Conrad did. Feck and I have history as well, but notably, I feel no regrets about that.”

  “Ouch,” Bascal said mildly. “You wound me, and deliberately so. I've never sought your pain, Xiomara, nor anyone else's. But I do not shrink from it, either. The avoidance of pain at all costs . . . well, that has a name. It's cowardice, and I have no wish to embrace it. So fare thee well, my dear, until we meet again.”

  Conrad sat up in his couch. “You're just going to erase yourself?” This was an idea he couldn't stomach even now: disposable people. This was of course a matter of choice, deeply personal for everyone who made it, but no one could stop him from being offended.

  The king smiled. “I wish I could hug you, Conrad, or tip a glass and be drunk. We remain good friends, don't we? You could put a knife to my very throat—you could cut my throat—and still I'd seek your advice, your humor, your warmth. ‘What do I do now, boyo? Bleed to the left? To the right?' Does this say more, I wonder, about you or about me?”

  “It says something,” Conrad answered with a helpless shrug. It was true; time and circumstance had gotten between the two of them many times, but had never truly separated them. It was tragic, in a way. For both.

  “Yes,” Bascal said, “I shall erase myself forthwith, having spent enough years on this ship for one lifetime already. Even an immorbid lifetime! Good-bye, First Architect, and farewell. We'll meet again if it's within King Bascal's power. This much I promise in his name. Though he knows it not, and I shall not remember, you may keep this promise close to your heart.”

  “Don't be like that,” Conrad said, suddenly intense and sincere. “No one wants your blood. We can set aside a bit of wellstone to store your recording, and if we arrive safely at Sol, I'll transmit you back at my own expense. You'll be home before you draw your next virtual breath. Even the awful moments of our lives are precious, Bas. Don't throw them away.”

  The recording looked at him silently for several seconds, then finally said, “That's a kind offer, sir, and will not be forgotten when the final tallies are weighed. It's also a pointless gesture, but it does indeed make a difference to me personally. I will do as you say, with your captain's permission.”

  “Granted,” Xmary said tiredly.

  The king's smile turned genuine then, and he stared expansively around the observation deck—indeed, around the whole ship. “If every subject in my kingdom were as brave and as kind as you traitors and dogs, I should have no worries for the future. Very well, then. Let's do this thing before I offend you further, and the offer is withdrawn. Feck, if you will assist me?”

  Feck nodded. “Sure thing, Bascal. For old times' sake.”

  “A fine reason to do anything, since it's more the old times than the new ones that define who we are. Lead on, please.”

  And so Feck got up and left the room, with both Bascal and Eustace trailing behind. Not that Eustace could expect to help, but perhaps being so young, so burning with passion, she couldn't bear to be parted from her husband for more than a few minutes. Either that, or she sensed that Conrad and Xmary might want some time alone. Either motive spoke highly of her, Conrad supposed. Perhaps she would be a fine officer one day, a fine human being. There would be plenty of time to find that out.

  Sighing, Xmary got up from her couch and plopped herself down in Conrad's lap. “Look at those stars,” she said quietly. “Never moving, never changing. Seven hundred years from now, we'll look out the same window and see the same view.”

  “It'll change a little,” Conrad assured her.

  “Don't be a smartass, all right? I'm not in the mood. This seems a very sad way for things to end, after such a promising beginning.”

  And here, in spite of everything, Conrad couldn't help but laugh. “Is that any way for an immorbid person to talk? Young lady, darling, baby doll, this is still the beginning of our lives. If there are endings, they're unguessably far in the future.”

  He squeezed her for a long, fond moment before adding, “This thing is just getting started.”

  And history may remark at length upon the errors of Conrad Mursk, but assuredly, this statement is not among them.

  epilogue

  chapter twenty-six

  in which the footsoldiers of an

  army are confronted

  The “base” of this Aden Plateau, Bruno muses, is more properly an inflection point, where the concave-down shape of the bluff itself gives way to the wrinkled but generally concave-up terrain of the basin beneath. The city of Timoch is still visible in the distance, through the tree line running along the bluff's base, but he sees that if they travel much farther, those towers will disappear behind forests and ridges, not reappearing until the two men are much closer.

  Not that they will get any closer. Not that they w
ill have that opportunity.

  “Is there a road?” he asks his old architect, Conrad Mursk, whose name, like his face, has worn down over time. Like the moon itself, yes, it has been crushed to half its normal width, made denser and more gravid. Radmer, indeed. A strange—yet strangely appropriate—abbreviation.

  “Aye, there is a road,” Radmer agrees. “But we'll have to cut several miles to the north to reach it. And the enemy patrol, I'm afraid, is directly in our path. I tried to skirt around them, but—”

  “But I am too slow for you,” Bruno finishes. “My apologies, Architect. Or should I say ‘General'?”

  Radmer shakes his head. “I've been neither thing for many centuries, Sire. These days I'm a . . . a hobo, I guess you'd say. Though I don't like the sound of the word, particularly when applied to myself.”

  Bruno, who has never had much patience with self-effacement, says, “I'm confident you are much more than that, sir, and I do not require you to pretend otherwise.”

  He hefts his only weapon: an iron bar with a T-handle at one end and a slight, pointed curve at the other which Radmer has identified as a “trenching hook.” Radmer himself carries a small pistol and a satchel of “glue bombs,” plus a kind of stubby blitterstaff with a lightly weighted pommel and a basket handle. Bruno asks, “How long before this battle commences? I cannot see our enemies, and do not know how fast they move.”

  “Soon,” Radmer says, eyeing his old monarch appraisingly. “I will protect you as best I can. If we're separated, it's imperative that you make your way to Timoch. I cannot emphasize this point enough. There is information in your skull—at least I pray there is—on which the fate of this world depends.”

  “So you've said, yes. May I have one of those weapons, then?”

  Bruno can see the wheels of Radmer's mind turning. He conceives of Bruno as a fragile thing, a wrung-out old man. Which is absurd, since they were both ruggedized by the same fax filters, back when such things existed, and have been worn down by an identical span of years. Here is a man who's spent—clearly!—decades upon decades of his life at war. Perhaps not all at once, and not against such enemies as these. But he trusts himself, trusts his instincts and movements, whereas this hoary old King Bruno is, at best, an unknown element upon the field.

  “I invented the blitterstaff,” Bruno says in his own defense, “in the heat of a battle as fierce as the one we now face. At my back was Cheng Shiao of the Royal Constabulary, with a pistol and a sword and an abject refusal to die. And we won the day, sir. Just the two of us.”

  “And you captured Marlon Sykes' fortress and saved the sun from destruction, yes,” Radmer says. “Every schoolchild knows that, even today. I do not mean to offend you, Sire. My aim is to maximize the chance of getting you, in one piece, to the place where you're needed. How deep are your pockets?”

  “Monetarily?” Bruno asks, bewildered for a moment.

  “Literally,” Radmer says impatiently. “How much can they hold?”

  Bruno turns them out for inspection, and seeing them, Radmer nods.

  “I will give you two of the glue bombs. They adhere very well indeed to impervium skins, and they peel right off of human ones. Beware your clothing, though, and the metal of the trenching hook, and the stones and branches upon the ground. If you get into trouble, throw the bombs at their feet—at their feet, mind you!—and run like hell. Don't worry about me, or anything else except your own escape. Are we clear on this point?”

  “Very clear,” Bruno confirms, slapping the shaft of his hook. “But out of curiosity, sir, don't you think I could run more quickly without this hunk of iron?”

  “Oh, definitely. But a man in danger needs something stout in his hands. It will make you brave, though I hope not stupid, and with any luck that will keep you alive. You can always drop it later if you need to.”

  “Ah,” Bruno says, satisfied with that explanation. Those who have lived a long time accumulate this sort of folk wisdom as surely as a hiking sock accumulates burrs.

  And then, before another word can be spoken, a pair of gleaming metal forms break through the tree line and come at the two men, moving with that ancient fluid grace and speed which no citizen of the Queendom could ever forget. Robots. Household servants, actually, but no less formidable for that. And now that they're close, Bruno can see that they've been modified, their heads drilled open and some sort of black, auxiliary circuit box affixed to one side.

  To override the Asimov protocols? Certainly, it should be very difficult to get robots such as these—wherever they've come from—to raise a hand in anger. And yet, these two are carrying swords, and dancing forward with grimly mechanical intent. Behind them, another two robots burst through the trees, and then three more, and then another eight. Within moments, Bruno and Conrad are surrounded, and the younger man is shouting, “Behind me, Sire! Get behind me!”

  For the moment, Bruno does as he's told, although he knows enough of battle to realize that Radmer's best intentions are little more than hot air once the uncertainties of the action begin to unfold. He stays loose. He is not afraid of dying, has in fact tried at various times to extinguish this mortal coil of his. But in the peaceful tropics of Varna that proved nearly impossible, and having resigned himself now to helping a planet full of people he has never met, he feels rather strongly that he should live a while longer. Too, he is burning with curiosity at this turn of events, and wants very much to find out what will happen next.

  This, at least, is the pleasure of a long life: the very large number of unexpected things which can happen to you before it's done.

  Bruno watches as Radmer fires three carefully aimed shots, each one striking the black box on the side of a robot's head, bursting it, causing the owners to clatter to the ground like puppets with their power switched off. Which is, of course, exactly what they are. But the remaining attackers cover ground very quickly, so Radmer holsters his weapon and hurls a glue bomb at the feet of another two.

  It bursts with a comical farting sound, and Radmer's aim is either very lucky or very sure, because filaments of yellow-brown glue spring up between the two robots' legs, joining them to each other and to the ground and the rocks, so that in spite of their grace the robots trip and fall on their faces. They still grip their swords, though, and the joints of their arms can bend and swivel every which way, so when Radmer grabs Bruno by the ruff of his leather jacket and tows him forward, there is a bit of leaping and sword dancing involved. In fact, one of the blades strikes Bruno on the back of the thigh, gashing the skin there, a fact which he will not realize until later.

  Had they been fighting humans, taking down five of them would've left an opening large enough to escape through, assuming they ran for safety with all their might. But the robots are too quick, and the two men too grossly outnumbered. The broken circle of attackers smears out into a horseshoe, and then a closed ellipse, and the two of them are caught again.

  “Royal Override!” Bruno shouts at them, summoning his most kingly tone. “Stand down and await instructions!”

  It's a desperate and probably futile gambit, but if these ancient machines are of Queendom manufacture, mightn't they heed their old king? The Royal Overrides are woven deeply into their being, far more so than even the Asimov protocols.

  And indeed, they pause at his voice, slowing their forward rush, lowering their weapons slightly. Considering this new data, yes, sifting the input through what remains of their ancient programming. For a moment, Bruno thinks perhaps this disastrous war might be brought to a swift conclusion after all. They listened! They heeded!

  But no, alas, even before the echoes have died they are shaking off their moment of indecision and advancing once more with murderous intent.

  “What do they want?” Bruno cannot help asking.

  “To kill us,” Conrad answers simply. “To loot our bodies and steal any metal they can find.”

  As he speaks, he draws out two more glue bombs and uses them to immobilize another trio of
robots. But then the robots are upon them, and the battle is hand to hand, and Radmer is pulling out that stubby little blitterstaff of his, whose basket hilt appears, to Bruno's eye, to have been hammered from ordinary metal. So, he judges, were the swords of the robot army, which clang like bells when Radmer parries them.

  The business end of the blitterstaff flickers with colors and patterns, with blurring lights too quick for the eye to see. It is a short rod of wellstone shifting between various highly reactive states, noxious chemicals and fields and software all churning together in a deadly, unpredictable mess. Where the swords touch it, they spark and smoke, bend and twist, but do not come apart the way wellmetal would. The steel, being ordinary and nonprogrammable, is blit-proof. Whether this is a sign of a very enlightened attacker or a very crude one, Bruno cannot say, and at this particular moment it hardly matters.

  Radmer is a clever swordsman, though, and despite the speed and grace of his attackers, he strikes two of them with the tip of his stick, and they, at least, do fall apart into shrieking, smoking fragments and fibers and dust, briefly alive with light and oil and then collapsing to the dirt in smoking masses.

  But there are too many attackers, and Radmer cannot engage them all, much less protect Bruno against them. This becomes apparent only a few moments before it becomes hopeless, so Bruno throws a glue bomb of his own, swings the trenching hook at the head of his nearest attacker, and runs. Another cut stings across his back, and another gleaming metal robot looms in his way.

  Although it's rather stronger than a human, it is also lighter; he knocks its sword aside and deals a sharp blow to its head. This has, as far as he can tell, no effect whatsoever, except perhaps to unbalance the thing very slightly. Nevertheless, he strikes again and then takes off running as fast as his ancient body will carry him.