by Wil McCarthy
Conrad looked down at his food, then up again at the maroon bug that was Bechs. He seemed disappointed. “You know, truthfully, I'm already full. What would you like to know?”
Conrad Mursk turned out to be very nearly an ideal interviewee, whose life story could, Bechs sensed, fill volumes of its own. Nearly everything Bechs asked was met with a long, detailed answer which neither rambled nor lacked a point. A longtime spacer, Mursk had as much vacuum lore as any of his crewmates—and quite a bit more than Eustace Faxborn. But unlike the other three, Mursk had done a lot of additional things with his life, spending more than a century of it on the ground, and decades more on the sea and on the ice of Planet Two's small polar cap.
He was never a politician—he made that abundantly clear—but he had nevertheless been a member, if unofficially, of King Bascal's inner circle. He'd been remotely consulted on several occasions by the King and Queen of Sol, and seemed to have been present at almost every major turn in Barnard's history.
“I'm a trouble magnet,” Mursk said at one point. The admission seemed to sadden him, which only heightened his aura of thoroughness and thoughtfulness. If he had a single great fault, it was a kind of self-doubt that bordered on self-loathing. To hear him tell it, he'd done little good in his life. Still, Bechs sensed through these deep layers of modesty and guilt that nearly every calamity had involved his attempting to, often against terrible odds.
“Our departure helped collapse the Barnardean economy,” he would say. Or, “I shortened the Children's Revolt through an act of blatant treachery.” Or, “I never convinced the government to soften its punitive measures, and in terrorizing the miners into ending their rebellion I gave my de facto approval to their indenture.”
But from these statements Bechs extracted the unspoken corollaries: I've risked my life to preserve innocents. I know when to cut my losses. I know how to broker a deal. I am unspeakably interesting. Bechs could have questioned this man for days, for months; but as fate would have it, the two had only been talking for twenty or thirty minutes when a commotion rose up outside. Not the buzz of reportant cameras but the actual shouting of live human beings, transmitted through the paper-thin, almost tentlike wellstone of the dormitory shelter.
“Excuse me,” Mursk said, a look of worry blooming on his face. He rose from his chair and moved to the wall, murmuring “Window” to it just as though he'd been in civilization all his life. And when the window appeared, he said, “Oh, brother.”
Conrad had been expecting trouble since before he'd even arrived here, and he'd spent much of his time huddled at a library in the apartment's wall, learning what he could about Fatalist tactics. But what he saw outside was a surprise nonetheless. There was an attack of sorts under way, but the invaders coming down the staircase were not gray-skinned Fatalist ghouls or skeletal Death avatars, but ordinary men in blood-colored jumpsuits trimmed with white.
Conrad had spent time in four different Barnardean services, and had a fine eye for uniforms. These were neither military nor medical; they looked more like a mechanic's coverall than anything else. They had names stenciled in black across the left breast, but no indications of rank or functional specialty. Indeed, the only insignia was a white rectangle on each man's left sleeve, bearing a blood-red circle surrounded by five outward-facing triangles. A sunburst, highly stylized.
Conrad counted twenty men, two of them with bullhorns and all of them carrying objects he recognized immediately: contact tazzers, capable of dropping any human being in his or her tracks with the merest brush of their business end. The tazzer was a humane weapon as such things went, but the people who'd actually been struck by one—Conrad included—tended to give them a wide berth. In the words of the poet Rodenbeck, “Being tazzed is like being stepped on by an electric elephant.”
The other surprise was that the half-dressed kids at the bottom of the stairs—nearly a hundred of them—were holding their ground rather than falling back or scattering.
“What's happening?” Bechs asked, buzzing up beside Conrad for a look.
“It's the Red Sun eviction team,” Conrad answered. Then, in a much louder voice: “Feck! Xmary!”
He stepped out onto the balcony, prepared to vault over its railing as Xmary had done, or at least call down advice to the children and warnings to the Red Sun security. But the surprises just kept on coming.
“We are not taking names,” said one of the bullhorn carriers in an amplified but outwardly reasonable tone. “No one here will be punished. We simply request that you vacate these premises so they can be put to humanitarian use.”
But the kids—boys and girls alike—were forming up into battle lines as though they'd been training for it all their lives. Their wellgold necklaces and earrings flashed and flickered in the sunlight, not merely reflecting but in some way modulating the glare. Passing notes in class, oh my, in their own secret language. Did they feel it as taps upon their skin? As nerve inductions? As sights or sounds?
They couldn't change their bodies, but clearly they could use their brains. And whatever they were passing, whatever they were saying to each other, the Red Sun workers seemed oblivious to it until it was too late, and their fate was sealed. When the mob had self-assembled into five clean ranks, they rushed their attackers. Silently at first, as rows one and two launched into motion, but then rows three and four let out an ululating yell, while row five raised its fists in defiance.
Nor were these kids afraid to absorb some hurt; the first two rows were sacrificial, simply throwing themselves against the Red Sun line—in some cases right up against the tazzers. This put the Red Sun workers off balance—literally—so that the third and fourth lines could sweep them off their feet, wrenching the tazzers from their hands. This was also sacrificial, as most of the kids involved went down twitching and grunting. But the fifth line swept over them without opposition, taking up the tazzers and hurling them away, without even bothering to use them against their owners.
Instead, the Red Sun people were hauled up by their armpits and threaded into cunning arm- and neck- and headlocks that made optimum use of the strengths and weaknesses of human anatomy. The guards, like everyone else, must be terribly hard to injure, but against overpowering leverage they had little recourse.
“Here now!” one of them said.
“This activity's unlawful,” tried another.
But more kids were streaming into the area, and the ones already here were finding their voices. “We're not hurting anything! Why are you on us like this? Leave us the hell alone!” And then, in a rising chorus: “Into the drink with you! Swim for it! Swim for it! Swim for it!!”
“Excuse me,” said the camera of Bernhart Bechs, buzzing down for a closer view.
Conrad didn't know what to feel. Barely fifteen seconds after the first commotion, the kids were dragging their captives toward the platform's edge, at the juncture between two of its flower petals, and they really were going to throw them in the water.
“Stop!” he shouted after them. “There are . . . there . . . shit. There are smarter ways!”
But nobody was paying attention to an old man's babbling, and if he jumped down there to intervene, in all likelihood he'd just be going for a swim himself. Damn! Whatever faults these kids might have, helplessness was clearly not among them. And Conrad had seen this all before, had lived it all more than once—the anger, the spontaneous order and chaos, the pent-up need for action. Alas, Utopia, Rodenbeck had written in the wake of the Children's Revolt, thou retreatest from immorbid grasp as a cricket from fractious children.
And yea, verily, Conrad could feel it in his bones: the dream of a better life never ended, even when all sense said it should. And so the Queendom of Sol—forged with the loftiest of intentions by the best minds in history—was poised, once again, at the brink of revolution.
“Eternal life,” Conrad observed though no one was there to hear him, “is a tuberail car that won't stop crashing.”
chapter eight
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br /> in which old haunts are revisited
Perhaps Conrad should have stayed. Perhaps he should have brought his negotiating skills to bear, and brokered some sort of agreement between the squatters, the platform's rightful owners, and the Constabulary who'd come pouring out of the fax gates a few minutes after the fighting had ended. Perhaps he should have let himself care. But in fact he did none of these things. Feck and Xmary knew the squatters better than Conrad did, and had also enjoyed more extensive contact with the Queendom bureaucracy. In some sense, they'd begun the negotiation process well before the actual skirmish—before Conrad's revival had even begun—and he didn't feel like playing catch-up.
Hadn't he done enough already? Didn't he have his own needs and wants? Indeed, far from helping Xmary help the kids, he tried to seduce her away.
“This so-called Basic Assistance is pretty hefty,” he said. “We can go places, do things. You've spent your life on spaceships, dear, and on worlds that might as well be spaceships. But here's a place that offers wonders beyond the dreams of Barnard.”
They were sitting side-by-side on the steps outside the park dome, enjoying the night breeze off the ocean while the crowds chattered and shouted behind them.
“Sorry,” she said with a sheepish look he could just barely read in Sealillia's night-light glow, “but the rest of us are already broke. We retraced our old footsteps in Denver and Tongatapu. Went to the moon, took a submarine ride. We've been here two weeks; we blew through our monthly allotment in one.”
“So get some money from your parents.”
She put her head on his shoulder and sighed. “They won't see me, Conrad. They're still livid about the Revolt.”
“Really? A thousand-year grudge?”
“You don't know my parents.”
“Hmm.”
“Anyway, I think we can make a difference here. We should get back inside.”
“I'm sick of making a difference,” Conrad said, scanning the night sky for some sign of the moon, which he still hadn't seen. “When I built the Orbital Tower, I felt like I was making a real contribution to Sorrow's future. Not like a stadium or an apartment building; this was something that really helped. But it wasn't enough; it didn't save the colony. And everything else I try just ends up . . . I don't know. It wasn't so bad on the ship, but we're among human beings again. And the thing about human beings . . . I just . . . It seems like wherever I go, people are fighting. And I can't help them, and I can't make them stop. Can't I be tired of that? Is that okay?”
“Sure,” she said, hugging his arm. “For a while. But every now and then you poke your head up at just the right time, and it does help. Sometimes fighting is the right thing to do. We can get by without you here, so yes, go on ahead. Spend your allowance; have some fun. Just don't turn your back when you are needed. There's no point living forever if you don't use yourself as a positive force.”
He made a smile she couldn't see. “Aye, Captain.”
“I mean it, Conrad.”
“So do I.” But then he scratched an eyebrow, cleared his throat and said, “If we all did that, all across the Queendom and throughout the colonies, a hundred and sixty billion people using their lives as a positive force . . . That seems so overwhelming. How can everybody help everybody, when we're crammed together like this, or dying out among the stars? I don't know how to use my life.”
“Well, not by throwing people in the ocean.”
And that, at least, they could both agree on.
He had been to every corner of Barnard system, had crossed every millimeter of the space between Barnard and Sol. Twice! He knew the land and seas of Sorrow from pole to pole, and he had radioed personality snapshots to a dozen other worlds, and gathered back scores of self-aware replies which he'd folded back into himself. He was quite possibly the best-traveled person in history. But Saturn's rings were a sight unequaled in the colonies, and Conrad had never seen them with his own eyes. So that was where he went first.
And God damn if it wasn't the most stunning sight his eyes had beheld since the first time he'd seen Xmary naked. From a hundred thousand kilometers above the seething cloudtops, at a latitude of twenty degrees south, he found himself looking “up” at a ring structure that filled the center of his view, leaving only the edges black.
The planet itself was more striking than either of Barnard's gas giants, Gatewood and Vandekamp. Unlike those blank turquoise spheres, Saturn's blonde atmosphere was broken into subtle bands of light and dark whose edges blended together in little swirls and ripples that were probably the size of Earthly continents. Some of the lighter bands were split by very thin ribbons of dark, snaking north to south and back again, and a few of the dark bands were home to brunette specks and ovals that were darker still: storms, shearing and growing out of the boundary ripples. In his sailing days, Conrad had been a student of Sorrow's weather, and had seen patterns like this in the thermal maps of her currents and trade winds. But not right there in the sky, all at once.
Even the limb of the atmosphere was interesting; against the blackness of space he could easily pick out three separate cloud layers—call them blonde, brunette, and redhead—floating above the general murk. You saw nothing like that when you were this close to Vandekamp, and at Gatewood it was too damned dark to see anything at all.
Conrad had seen—not personally but through the eyes of a holographic avatar—tidally locked planets like Gammon and Wolf, whose surfaces were as banded and stratified as any gas giant's atmosphere. The sun never rose or set; the melting point of water was a geographic location. That was kind of pretty, if inconvenient for the inhabitants. But for sheer visual impact it was nothing compared to the Eridanian world of Mulciber, where clouds of tin spilled as rain into quicksilver oceans, in countless craters smashed down by cometary impact. From its dusty moon—the only safe place to view it—the planet looked like an iron ball decorated with hundreds of circular mirrors.
Conrad had seen his share of ring systems, too, but here was the true majesty of Saturn; its rings were young, still nursing their original complexity. He could barely take his eyes off them. According to the hollie windows in the dome of the observation platform, each of the three main rings was wider than the Earth, and the innermost one began almost exactly one Earth diameter away from Saturn's visible edge. These were nice amaze-the-tourist facts, but from this vantage point Conrad couldn't really tell where the “three” rings were supposed to be; he counted at least a hundred, of so many different colors and thicknesses and brightnesses that they each, like mountains or oceans or cities, seemed to have a distinct character all their own.
The observation platform itself was interesting, too. He shared it with five other gawkers who'd come through the fax at the same time. And to keep them all from barfing in surprise as they sailed out through the print plate, there was gravity; not from a finicky graser but from actual Newtonian mass. Within its soap-bubble dome the platform was a flat triangle of diamond sitting atop another flat triangle, with a neuble's worth of neutronium squashed between them. A billion tons of matter: a fifty-fifty mix of protons and neutrons, with a haze of electrons shimmering around them, giving the substance a pearly appearance. The heart of the structure was, in essence, a single gigantic atom, pressed flat and oozing superfluidly into the corners of its prison.
Conrad had come to see the planet, but as the minutes stretched on, he found his attention drawn more and more to the floor beneath his feet. He'd learned a fair bit about neutronium during his brief tenure as a gravitic engineer, and had been fascinated by its liquid qualities. The theory of it all was far beyond him, but he'd gotten surprisingly far by thinking of neutronium as a kind of oil, impossibly slippery and impossibly dense.
There were whole worlds of this stuff out there in the wider universe: neutron stars. Atoms the size of Earth, with the mass of two or three suns, held together not by nuclear forces but by their own enormous gravity. In his more romantic moments, he sometimes dreamed of seein
g one up close. What would it look like? What color would it be? If immorbidity meant anything at all, surely he must someday have the chance to find out?
In any case, between the extremes of hydrogen nuclei and neutron stars lay the man-made neuble: a two-centimeter atom held together by pure human stubbornness. They had only two uses: they could be squeezed into the tiny black holes from which collapsium was made, or they could be exploited architecturally for their intrinsic gravity, which was considerable.
In free space, the pull of an ordinary spherical neuble could break a person's back, could fold a person's limbs around itself in a bone-snapping, rib-crushing embrace that admitted no hope of escape, or even breath. He'd heard of accidents like that, where it took a team of specialists and superstrong robots a week and a half to pry the body off. Not for any sentimental reason, but because burning it off could ignite or destabilize the diamond shell, releasing the tremendous pressure it enclosed. Bang.
For this reason, neubles were rarely encountered in free space, and the builders who employed them were very careful about surrounding them with protective structure. Their gravity fell away rapidly; two and a half meters away it was Earthlike, and at twenty-five you could barely feel it. Squashing one flat like this was a neat trick that spread the mass and gravity around, allowing you to get closer without getting killed. But it also struck Conrad as surprisingly risky for the staid old Queendom of Sol; he'd only ever heard of circular platforms being fashioned in this way. Squares and triangles had a nasty habit of concentrating stress at the corners.
“How old is this platform?” he asked the wall.
And one of the hollie windows replied, “A very intelligent question, sir. It has been in service as a tourist destination since Q20.”
The very earliest days of the Queendom, in other words. “Huh. And who designed it?”
“Declarant-Philander Marlon Sykes, sir.”