by Wil McCarthy
“Hi there,” he returned, stepping up to offer his hand. “I like what you've done with your hair.”
The kids enjoyed that; their silence fell away into cheers and hoots and catcalls. They liked it even better when she rose to a standing position, reached for the ruff of Conrad's shirt, and pulled him in for a kiss. Then, pulling away, she looked around and addressed them all again. “Let's reconvene in an hour. Right now I have more pressing business.”
And who, in an immorbid society where hormones raged in young and old alike, could fail to understand that? With a smile so wide it must have hurt, Xmary took Conrad's hand and pulled him toward the building's entrance. The crowd cheered.
“But weapons are illegal,” Sandra Wong was saying. She was in one of the apartments—Conrad's, apparently—standing primly while Conrad and Xmary, Eustace and Feck sprawled on the bed. A dozen of the kids, whom Xmary had identified as potential leaders, sat on the tables and chairs and floor, watching the exchange with interest. Sandra gestured at the small fax machine built into one of the walls. “This thing won't even print them for you. And why should it?”
“Anything can be a weapon,” Feck pointed out reasonably. And Conrad had to smile, because Yinebeb Fecre—aka Feck the Facilitator—had improvised his way through more sudden skirmishes than Sandra could possibly imagine. Like Conrad, he had sent his share of bodies to the Cryoleum, and to the even more final crematorium of Barnard's stellar furnace. “We could stage an impromptu golf tournament. I don't know about you, but my aim with a golf ball is pretty good. I suspect our collective aim, with hundreds of golf balls, is even better.”
“But why would you do such a thing?” Sandra wanted to know.
“To stay alive?” Feck suggested.
“But your patterns have been safely archived. Everyone's have. All you'd be doing is disturbing the crime scene, making it harder for the authorities to determine what happened.”
“We're supposed to let them kill us?” Eustace Faxborn asked, more in confusion than genuine horror. “We're supposed to trust our lives to a backup system that we haven't personally tested? I'm sorry, miss, that's nonsense.”
Eustace had spent virtually her entire life aboard Newhope, trusting nothing, testing everything, and fixing whatever she could. She was a no-nonsense kind of gal; when their nav solutions were corrupted and they'd suddenly realized they were drifting into a dust shoal, she'd hardly batted an eye. When the nav lasers were overwhelmed, and then damaged, and then ground to dust themselves, she'd shrugged and run diagnostics on the ertial shield. And when the ship was holed and tumbled and coming apart, she'd simply called out, “Cryo tubes,” because that was the final backup. When all else fails, leave a good-looking corpse.
“There's no law against self-defense,” Xmary told Sandra Wong. “I looked it up. In fact, under maritime law, which applies here, you're even allowed to defend a stranger's life ‘with all necessary force and means.'”
“But that's crazy,” Sandra said. Like Eustace, she seemed more perplexed than upset at the misunderstanding. “I think each one of you needs to consult with your own caseworker and hash out an activity path that leads away from violence.”
Xmary was about to object, but really, Sandra Wong was the ranking authority here. And while Conrad had no particular awe for authority—he'd led his share of mutinies and rebellions over the years—he did at least know enough to work with them, until such time as you were working against them.
“That's probably wise,” he said to Sandra, and was satisfied with the surprise on her face. “Could I trouble you to send for them? We have no intention of breaking the letter or spirit of the law; we just want to present our enemies with a discouraging target.”
He sat up and looked at the kids assembled here, feeling for a moment that he could barely tell them apart. Here in the Queendom, modifying your mind or body required an alteration permit, and those were hard to get. As a result, these were some of the purest humans he could recall ever seeing.
It was too bad, in a way; Conrad was used to reading people's character in their bodyforms. Troll? Centaur? Self-created jumble of anatomical talents and handicaps? Gorgeous human of near-mathematical perfection? Here they were all just kids, and to the extent he could read them at all, it was in their clothing and posture, their coloration and adornment, their facial expressions and manners of speech. And these things were easily changed, easily imitated. They didn't require the bodily commitment that even, say, backward-bending knees would require.
More or less at random, he singled out one of the young men seated on the table. Like many of his fellows, the kid was shirtless—clad only in a pair of loose trousers and a thrice-looped wellgold necklace that flashed improbably in the room's dim light. But his skin was chlorophyll green, lightly striped with darker tones, and Conrad liked that, taking it as a sign of personality.
“You,” he said, “what's your name?”
“Raoul Handsome Green,” the kid answered.
“Handsome Green? Really?”
“Yes, sir. That's the name my parents gave me.”
“Hmm. Good one. And when did they give it to you? How old are you?”
“Fifty-one, sir.”
“Do you have a specialty?”
“I do. I'm an art appreciator. Mostly Late Modern photography, although I admire the painting and sculpture of that period as well.”
“Hmm. I see. But you have other skills, right? Can you swim?”
“Yes.”
“Hold your breath?”
“Sure. For five minutes, maybe . . . I dunno, maybe six or seven minutes.”
“Really? Good,” Conrad said. “Very good. Why don't you find some other swimmers and go print up some gill-diving gear? If we're attacked, I'll bet you four-to-one it comes from underneath.”
Raoul Handsome Green had no response to that.
“Is something wrong?” Conrad asked him.
At least Raoul's face was expressive; his look combined the sullenness of a frown, the helplessness of a shrug, and the pointed amusement of a smirk. “I don't know how to do those things, sir. Who do you think I am? Who do you think you are? We don't become interstellar heroes just because you walk into a room.”
There were scattered sniggers at this from the other kids.
“You're all staying here illegally,” Feck pointed out, fluttering his hand in annoyance. “What I would say is, who's taking care of you if not yourself?”
“There are libraries here,” Conrad said, “right? You can pick up a block of wellstone and start asking questions. They still teach that in the schools, I assume? Research?”
Raoul shrugged. He wasn't going to commit to an answer one way or the other.
“Anyone else?” Conrad tried.
It went on like that for a while, and Conrad eventually decided there were three separate problems here. First there was the obvious ignorance of these people. He found this personally disgusting and offensive—how could they look themselves in the mirror?—but in all fairness they simply had no practical experience. Doing anything. Nor did they need any in the eternal lives the Queendom had mapped out for them.
They were drowning in knowledge, but actually absorbing some, actually learning a skill, was something they did for amusement, not for money or survival. Their minds simply didn't work that way. Of course, they'd all been born on Earth. If this conversation were taking place in a Lunar dome or asteroid warren, a planette or a spin-gee city in interplanetary space, he might have better luck. Presumably, ignorance could still be fatal in places like that, and would be discouraged.
Secondly, though, there was the problem of authority. Conrad and Xmary didn't have any. They had surprised the crowd with their leaping and prancing, and yes, their status as returning star voyagers did carry a certain shock value. These kids had never met anyone like them; nobody had. They were clearly impressed. But it didn't mean they would listen.
And there was a third problem which perhaps overshado
wed the other two.
“Maybe the platform needs sinking,” one kid suggested at one point.
“I'm happy to risk my life,” said another. “And I don't even have current backups.”
“What point are you trying to make with this self-defense crap?” asked a third, with genuine puzzlement.
And finally Conrad understood: these kids were deathists. Not Fatalists, perhaps, but not the sworn enemies of Fatalists, either. The philosophy of random mass murder did not strike them as obviously wrong. “There are too many people,” they'd said several times already. “There's no purpose for any of this. Maybe there used to be, but we've never seen it.”
And it was a strangely difficult point to argue with; Conrad had groaned under the same burdens in his own youth. The answers had been different then, but the questions had not. And yet, life—any life—was full of challenges. Could it really be so different here?
“You may feel a greater urgency,” he suggested, “when death is actually imminent.”
chapter seven
in which certain difficulties
are unmasked
“Your Majesty,” said Reportant Bernhart Bechs to the Queen of Sol, “this seems an awkward time for the king to be absent. Did you ask him to leave a copy behind?”
“No,” she said, not only to Bechs but to the other reportants here, clustered around her and her Palace Guards in a buzzing hemispherical swarm. Ordinarily her personal press cordon was set at eighty meters, with strict acoustic volume limits to discourage uninvited chitchat, but this was a press conference. Typically these would be handled by her press secretary or by some crisis-specific bureaucrat, but there was a lot going on this week, and she had dozens of copies working all across the solar system. Printing out one more was hardly a bother, and people were burning with curiosity anyway, so she had generously permitted the paparazzi to approach within ten meters of her physical person, and to ask—within the bounds of decorum!—anything they wished.
“The king,” she went on, “does not divide his attention when matters of science loom large. He is cloistered at his workshop on Maplesphere, and will remain there until his experiments are complete.”
“Does that mean weeks?” Bechs followed up. “Years?”
Bechs was, at the moment, a four-winged news camera only slightly larger than the queen's pinkie nail. Strictly speaking this wasn't necessary; they were in Chryse Downs Amphitheater on the northern lowlands of Mars, and Bechs' physical self—one of him, anyway—was in a rental office just a few kilometers away. He could remote this bug; there was no need to be it, to run a shadow of his brain within it. Too, he was among the most respected reportants in the Queendom, and would be welcome at her side in his own human body. But old habits die hard, and Bechs was an old, old man. He was accustomed to interviewing Her Majesty in this way, and she, for her part, always recognized his signature wine-red cameras.
“Weeks, most likely,” the queen said. “If his problem is tractable he'll solve it, and if it isn't he'll move on to something more immediate. It's possible he'll uncover new principles requiring much more detailed investigation, but if so he will delegate the problem—at least temporarily—to his technical staff. He's aware that I have pressing tasks for him here, and he won't lightly refuse.”
“Is it the wormhole physics again?” asked another of the cameras.
“I don't discuss my husband's work,” she reminded. But her tone was indulgent, for when Bruno retreated to Maplesphere, which happened three or four times each decade, he generally returned with treasures: the backtime processor, the quantum screw, the popular word-cypher game known as “Nickels.” Nothing could match the twin bombshells of his early career—collapsium and ertial shielding—but he remained the most inventive soul in a population of one hundred and sixty billion. Tamra would never blame her subjects for being curious about his current interests.
“What's happening with the Barnard refugees?” asked someone else.
“The four living crewmates remain in Red Sun custody,” she said. “No decisions have been made about the others.”
“Has the attack on Newhope accelerated the timetable for their revival?”
“I repeat,” she said, less patiently than before, “no decisions have been made. Whatever we finally do here will set a precedent for all time hereafter. There is no reason to enter into it hastily.”
“What about radiation damage?” another reportant demanded, somewhat angrily. “You can't leave them out there forever.”
“Steps are being taken,” the queen assured. “Whatever status these people are finally accorded, we will treat their remains with utmost dignity.”
Meanwhile, another Bernhart Bechs camera had found its way to Sealillia, to interview one Conrad Ethel Mursk. It would be the climax of a series; Bechs had already profiled the other three, whom he thought of as the Captain, the Comedian, and the Cactus. He'd even interviewed the ship itself.
In a lurid, voyeuristic sense, the Cactus was by far the most interesting of these; Xiomara Li Weng and her jokester second mate, Yinebeb Fecre, had been born in the Queendom and exiled in the Revolt. They'd had real lives, if sad ones, whereas Eustace Faxborn was created specifically for the interstellar return mission, stepping live and whole and nearly adult from a Barnardean fax machine. This custom had been commonplace out in the colonies, where—strange notion!—there was a chronic shortage of human beings. But in the Queendom this was considered one of the the basest possible perversions.
Especially since people named “Faxborn” were, for the most part, sexually active from the word go. Indeed, if the refugees' accounts were accurate—and Bechs had no reason to believe otherwise—Eustace Faxborn had married the Comedian shortly before the bloody surprise attack that was the mission's unauthorized departure. She'd begun less as a member of Newhope's crew than as part of its life-support system: a living sex robot for the otherwise lonely second mate. In this sense, she'd done quite well for herself, and Bechs was careful to say so in his profile.
“You could run that ship by yourself,” he'd said to her in the interview, echoing the words of the Comedian. “You could fix any subsystem. You've a quick mind, and quick hands to go with it, for you've been using them all your life.”
He'd meant it in the best possible way—most of his viewers had no such practical skills, and admired them greatly—but her reply was characteristically prickly: “Newhope ran for five hundred seventy-eight years without any crew. After the accident it repaired itself with no help from me. It's smarter than a human being when it needs to be.”
Which was partly true and partly her own sort of modesty, but mostly it was an uncomfortable and vaguely hostile evasion. The Cactus seemed at ease only when reciting facts, or describing the emotions of others. Her own self, her own feelings, were a troubling subject she didn't care to examine. And why should she? She'd lived her life in a microcosm, with only two other people besides her husband. Plus the ship itself, yes, which could spin out robots and specialized personality constructs to suit any whim or need. But it wasn't human.
“I regret the accident,” the ship had said to Bechs in its own interview, conducted at distance over the Nescog voice channels, with hours of signal lag between question and answer. “I was aware of the divergence in the navigation solution, but I was unable to formulate a response. I failed to realize the debris shoal was within our position envelope, and failed to imagine the resulting collision. I was caught off guard.”
“What did you imagine?” he'd asked in response.
And the ship had replied: “Very little, sir. Imagination is an inductive trait, and difficult to mechanize.”
Of course.
At any rate, Bechs had buzzed and flitted his way back here on the news that the ship's first mate—the captain's husband—had finally been released from hospital. Bechs would round out his story and then rerelease the whole thing, with commentary, to a curious public.
Unfortunately, several dozen other
reportants had beat him to it; he found Mursk seated at his apartment's tiny dinner table, swatting angrily at a cloud of them.
“Shove off, parasites. I'm done. I'm eating!”
And so he was: fax-fresh plibbles and bran flakes, steaming blood sausage and curried potatoes, with miso soup and the nutrient paste known as “mulm,” which Bechs had never seen eaten by anyone but navy crews and merchant spacers. It was far more food than a human stomach could hold, and there were three nearly full beverage mugs in front of him as well. Here was a man who hadn't tasted for decades. Not enough, anyway, or not the right things.
But still the cameras pestered him, spitting out questions, stepping all over each other in a haze of white noise. Most people had no idea how to run a press conference, even if they'd called it themselves.
“Welcome back to civilization,” Bechs said to him, raising his voice above the din. He could do that; he had a special volume license, along with other privileges. “You do realize, I hope, that you can order these cameras outside? They can't invade your home, nor peer through your windows, without permission.”
“Ah!” Mursk said. “Then my permission is revoked. Off with you pests. Off!” To Bechs he said, “Thank you.”
“Quite welcome,” Bechs assured him, while the others buzzed sullenly away. “I wonder if I could speak with you when you're finished, though. I've already interviewed your friends, and I'm hoping to round out my set.”
“You're Bernhart Bechs,” Mursk said.
“Yes.”
“I remember you from when I was a kid.”
“Do you?” Bechs was surprised, and pleased. “That was a long time ago.”
Mursk laughed. “You're telling me? But you did that thing on the history of Europe, and the one about the plight of juvenile commuters.”
“God, I barely remember it myself. When can I return, Mr. Mursk? I don't mean to trouble you.”