by Wil McCarthy
As a result, his materialization in the Copernicus town square was greeted by no small number of shouts and dirty looks from the hundreds of people assembled there. Ah, yes: the people of Luna.
The moon's gravity was too low for the planet-born and too high for the space-born. Too high also for practical low-gee manufacturing, and the place couldn't compete with Mercury for solar energy, or with the asteroids for mineral accessibility, or with anyplace for remoteness from the traffic lanes and comm chatter of Earth. So industry here was even scarcer than on Mars, and with no carbon or hydrogen of its own, Luna wasn't exactly a garden spot.
And yet, in Conrad's day it had ironically been one of the most expensive places to live in all the Queendom. As a result, it attracted a small population of fierce eccentrics who loved its vast lifeless spaces, its laissez-faire attitudes, its quaint little crater-domed towns. People who could afford to pay! Lunatics, yes, who looked down on the crowded Earth with thumbed noses. Oh, how happy they would be at the news of their eviction!
“Developer,” one woman called out to Conrad as he exited the fax. On her lips, the word was definitely a curse. “Trillionaire! Dirty robber baron,” said someone else.
Looking around, Conrad decided that the Lunar domes, too, held a lot more people than they used to. The only uncrowded place he'd yet seen was Maplesphere itself—hardly representative of society as a whole.
“What's wrong with the moon we have now?” demanded a red-haired man in reedy tones. And with a shock, Conrad realized he was looking at humanity's greatest playwright, Wenders Rodenbeck, who had penned such classics as Uncle Lisa's Neutron and Past Pie Season. Under other circumstances, Conrad would have been pleased to shake the man's hand, to sit down with him over a mug of hot tea and chitchat about the ways of the world. But Rodenbeck—a noted opponent of terraforming—had brought an angry mob with him, and Conrad figured this might not be the best time. In a glance around the square, half a kilometer beneath the town's domed roof, he could even swear he saw the hooded, translucent figure of Death out there at the back of the crowd. When he looked again, though, the apparition was gone.
“I didn't start this project,” Conrad called out to the mob, for all the good it would do. “Your king has simply hired me to take a look at it, to alleviate the crowding problems and provide a home for billions.”
That went over well. The crowd groaned and shouted and cursed.
“Listen,” Conrad said. “You'll be compensated for the fair value of your property here, and as far as I'm concerned you can continue to occupy it for as long as it's safe—probably several years, while we're getting the project logistics in order.”
“Go back to Barnard!” someone shouted, and Conrad answered angrily, “I wish I could, sir. How very rude. How many of your friends have died forever?”
Presently, a group of men in heavy but helmetless space suits pushed their way to the front of the crowd, and Conrad, fearing violence, briefly wished the Palace Guards were here. Or at least the local police, who on Luna were renowned for their courage and skill. But the leader of the men said to him, “Mr. Mursk, I'm Bell Daniel, the president of Lunacorp Construction.”
“You're hired,” Conrad said at once. “Your first assignment is to find me an office, away from this mob.” Then, thinking about it, he added, “It might also be a good idea to start digging a hole.”
“Um, okay. What sort of hole, sir? How deep?”
“All the way through,” Conrad told him.
Only much later would it occur to him that he had missed his chance to see the moon—the old, the original moon—in the skies of Earth, before King Bruno's proclamations had begun the long, slow process of crushing it.
“Call Xmary,” he told the wall of his new office, just as soon as he stepped inside. The network took a few fractions of a second to figure out whom he meant, and the light of his signal itself took a second and a half to reach the surface of Earth. But presently her face appeared, framed against clouds and sky, green grass and oceans.
“Conrad,” she said, “where have you been? Three days you've been gone, and no message?”
“Sorry,” he told her. “A lot has happened. It turns out I'm a trillionaire. Also I met the king, and I have a job. Oh, and my parents say hi.”
Xmary nodded impatiently. “That's nice, dear. We're under attack.”
chapter eleven
in which death comes wrapped
in cellophane
So was Conrad, as it turned out. He heard a really loud noise, like a glass battleship crashing down outside his building, and a moment later his ears popped, and his building's exterior doors and windows were closing and vanishing, locking the place down.
“I'll call you back,” he said to his wife, then rushed to find Bell Daniel.
Fortunately, Daniel was caught just this side of the front door, and was sealed in rather than out. “The dome came down!” he shouted in the overloud voice of a deafened man. “Blew up and came down. I've never seen anything like it. It's the Fatalists, sir—I saw Death outside, with his arms up in the rising air and the falling wellglass. There were space suits, too, stealthed in inviz. That was before the dome broke.”
Conrad uttered a curse that even Barnardean spacers considered obscene. Fortunately, Daniel didn't hear it, and everyone else in the building was shouting and running around, or trying to call out on the Nescog. Or fleeing toward the fax machine, yes, but already the early arrivals were turning back, fleeing elsewhere.
“The Nescog is down!” someone said.
And that was impossible. It would take a huge calamity to bring down the entire network—even the shock fronts of a supernova would take hours to reach the solar system's remotest corners—and the fact that these people were all still standing here put sharp upper limits on the violence of what might've happened. But you could cut off a planet's access to the network. Conrad had done this himself, during the Children's Revolt, and he imagined a sparsely populated world like Luna could be serviced by as little as a few hundred hardware gates. How difficult would it be to smash them all?
“Window,” he said to the wall in front of him.
“Not authorized,” the wall replied.
“Excuse me?”
The wall cleared its imaginary throat. “Regrettably, sir, I'm observing disaster protocol, and am required to maintain a superreflective exterior. There could be hazardous radiation outside, or bioinformatic viruses, or visual imagery which could damage you psychologically. I'm incapable of allowing any harm to come to you, sir.”
“Override,” Conrad told it impatiently.
“Not authorized, sir. I can be overriden only by badged emergency personnel, government officials, and members of the royal family.”
“Yes?” Conrad snapped. “Really? Because I'm the chief architect of this fuffing planet, and I need to look outside.”
“I have no way to confirm that, sir.” The wall now sounded uneasy, and willing perhaps to hedge its bets. “Would you settle for a low-resolution cartoon, assembled from sensors on my exterior surface?”
Conrad waved a hand. “Whatever. Yes. Show me what's out there.”
Without further ado, the wall produced a hollie of the buildings outside, rendering them as hypersmooth, two-color fantasies. Broken walls were shown as stylized zigzags, and the shards of wellglass littering the streets were little isosceles triangles of translucent white. The worst of it, though, were the piles of bodies—the people who'd been caught out in the street and either explosively decompressed or taken down by flying debris. These, the cartoon represented as bright yellow, pillowy-looking figures with oversized heads, big black eyespots, and grinning half-circle mouths. A big heap of happy dolls, indeed.
But moving among the dolls were other happy figures—these in gray—and one very tall, very thin humanoid that seemed to be put together from marshmallows and sealed in a wrapper of black cellophane. That one was the happiest of all, with a toothy grin taking up the vast major
ity of its polished white cranium.
“Tactical analysis,” Conrad demanded of Bell Daniel, forgetting for a moment that they were both construction workers.
But the wall thought he was talking to it, and annotated its cartoon with little tags saying TO BE REVIVED for the dead yellow dolls, and POSSIBLE ACTIVIST over the gray smiling figures. For Death, it seemed at a loss, and marked the figure with a message saying only, INCONSISTENT READINGS.
And to his credit, Bell Daniel replied as well, saying, “Um, well, it looks like they're searching house-to-house.”
And indeed, the gray dolls had a tool or weapon of some sort—shown in the cartoon as a smiling padded fish—which opened perfectly rectangular doorways in the buildings, from which little cartoon swirls would emanate. The air escaping, the people inside suffocating. And when the swirls had stopped, a platoon of the gray smiling dolls would prance inside, only to prance back out again a minute or two later to join the rest of their darling little army.
“They're probably looking for you,” Daniel said to Conrad. And Conrad felt a sinking feeling, because the same thought had just occurred to him.
“On Sealillia, too,” he said. “And probably in Cork, where my family lives.”
“Are they backed up? Your family?” Daniel wanted to know.
But instead of replying, Conrad turned and ran for the fax machine, shouting, “Space suits! Battle armor! Weapons! Now!”
And while he had no official standing as yet, and the building truly didn't know him from any other Tom, Dick, or Herzog in the Queendom—nor, for that matter, from the gray fuzzy attackers outside—it must be said (a) that the building was not stupid, (b) that every society recognizes a right to self-defense, and (c) that Conrad's authority-figure routine was neither self-conscious nor marked by any physiological signs of deception or duplicity. So it is not entirely surprising that when the Fatalists broke through the building's exterior, exposing its interior to the harsh Lunar vacuum, they were met not by corpses but by a dozen armed men and women and the withering rain of six tripod-mounted wireguns.
It was not easy to kill a Fatalist ghoul in full battle armor, but a combination of surprise and determination can accomplish much, and Conrad emerged from the building a minute later with five of his people still alive.
“Are you all right?” he asked Bell Daniel.
“I surely am,” the man replied angrily. “You will find, sir, that my way is like the toilet: when people go in it, they feel better, but when they get in it, they're shat on and flushed.”
“You'd've made a good sailor,” Conrad said to him, on the strength of that comment alone. And together they launched the counterattack.
“This cannot be,” said the King of Sol.
Altogether, in four separate attacks, the Fatalists had killed eleven hundred instantiations of eight hundred and twenty different people. More tellingly, they had coupled the assault with antimatter attacks on two of the great, secret archives where long-term human backups were stored. The aim was clear: to catch key people while they were dead, and delete their archival patterns. In this they were unsuccessful, since all of the deceased persons had either living instantiations elsewhere in the Queendom, or backups stored in other facilities. But in some cases, years of precious memory were lost, irretrievably.
Damn. Bruno had adored the Queendom's long peace, and hated to see it shattered like this.
“In a way it's reassuring,” said Cheng Shiao of the Royal Constabulary, “for with its death toll of zero, this is still the most successful Fatalist attack in Queendom history. If they pre-position their assets for these offensives—and surely they must—then we may suspect that this one has cost them dearly, and bought them nothing.”
“Except a lot of fear and suffering,” Conrad Mursk said, clutching at his wife's hand and glancing meaningfully at Bruno. Or rather, at the contingency copy of Bruno that had been instantiated at the start of this crisis. The “real” me is still on Maplesphere, Bruno thought, blissfully undisturbed. Or perhaps Mursk was staring at the Palace Guards, which (Bruno had already figured out) made him uneasy.
Well, he'd best get used to it. Before the dust had settled, even before the last of the shooting had stopped, Bruno had ordered these two Barnardeans hauled into protective custody at Constabulary headquarters on Tongatapu.
“If they're not safe there,” Tamra had remarked, “then no person is safe anywhere in the universe.”
She would later have cause to regret those words, but for the moment they seemed true enough, so that Mursk, in Bruno's opinion, most likely felt confined rather than endangered. A choice of two evils.
Bruno had placed himself in police custody as well, albeit at the head; he was known to involve himself from time to time in legal matters, when the mysteries were sufficiently compelling and the stakes sufficiently high. Could a scientist-king do any less?
Women ran the worlds from the household level on up to the monarchy itself, keeping track of schedules and finances and subtle balances of mood that perhaps trumped all else. He supposed they had always run things, or nearly always, even in the ages of supposed male dominance. But was their universe fully constructed? Fully invented? Were there no discoveries to be made, nor evildoers to be caught and punished? If women consolidated and civilized, surely it fell to men to build and fight, to push the boundaries within which their women ruled.
“On the contrary, my old friend,” Bruno said to Captain Shiao, “our Fatalist adversaries have exactly what they want. They've decohered an uncertainty, nailing a message to the collective lintel of our civilization. And the message is death. Whether or not anyone has actually been expunged, they've succeeded in reminding us all that true death is still possible, even here. Thus, they have altered the context of future debate, and furthered the cause of their deathist allies in polite society.”
“No doubt you're right, Sire,” Shiao said with utmost diplomacy, “but I would rather face an enemy who reminded me of death, than one who was actually capable of producing it.”
They all shared a laugh at that—except Shiao, who stood ramrod straight and seemed poised to leap into action at any moment. Indeed, Bruno would expect no less of him, for the universe required vigilant defenders for whom humor was a rare extravagance.
“They may still be capable,” Mursk said finally, studying the gloomy activity around him. They were standing in the Constabulary's Intelligence Control Unit, twenty meters underground. All around them were workstations occupied by grave-faced men and women examining graphs or holographic images or lines of scrolling text, or else listening to focused audio streams no one else could hear. In fact, the most talented among them were doing all of these things at once.
“Possibly, sir,” Shiao allowed, “but how? Wherever antimatter or fissionable materials are stored there is always neutrino leakage. Suspects will occasionally try to shield their contraband behind opaque condensates, but the shadow stands out clearly in our nasen-beam searchlights, which run continuously. This also allows us to track the absorption spectrum of explosives and toxins and fusionable materials. Neubles of course store a tremendous energy which can be released if they're broken, but fortunately they produce the sharpest echoes of all. So at least on the planets themselves, we know the locations of every gram of material capable of meaningful destruction.”
“Not all, clearly,” said Xmary Li Weng, in starship-captainish tones.
“All,” Shiao insisted. “And if we find one that isn't licensed we drop a team on it immediately. This morning's attacks were unusual, in that they employed positronium-in-wellstone fuel bricks which the targeted facilities had actually ordered for their backup power systems. Positronium cannot be faxed, and must instead be couriered, because it's two percent antimatter by volume. The suspects are presumed to have intercepted the shipments and tampered with their programming in some way, so that the containment fields would decay at a preset time. We're investigating that, and we'll be looking more closely at a
ll such shipments in the future.
“Meanwhile, although the attackers themselves have been wiped beyond hope of interrogation, we do know that they were produced from the buffer memory of several off-network fax machines. Since we know the locations of every single print plate within Queendom space, we will systematically scan their memories for all forms of contraband and all traces of proscribed activity. New filters will be installed in every machine, with or without their owners' permission. No one will harm another person in this way, ma'am, ever again.”
“Then in some other way,” she said, looking around the room as if probing for weaknesses. “Have you ever been in a battle, Captain? A real one, against powerful enemies?”
“Yes, ma'am,” Shiao replied stiffly. “Several times, ma'am.”
“And did the enemies' weapons never surprise you?”
“They always did, ma'am. I once battled with Marlon Sykes himself, and his methods were anything but conventional. I daresay I could never have beaten him alone. But then, as now, I had the king on my side.”
Hoy, Bruno didn't like the sound of that. He remonstrated, “The king is fallible, Captain, and he will thank you to remember it.”
“Yes, Sire,” Shiao said unconvincingly.
“Eh? What's that? Do I need to request a thousand push-ups?”
“No, Sire.”
Bruno didn't enjoy making trivial threats, but he knew Shiao enjoyed receiving them. Like many of the best police and soldiers, Shiao was a masochist at heart, and could not feel truly loved without at least the suggestion of pain.
And here, in truth, was the secret heart of Queendom power: treating people not as they asked to be treated, but as they truly wished, in their secret heart of hearts. Invasively, yes, for perfect rule required perfect knowledge, and in matters of state the Queendom recognized no right to silence or privacy. In unguarded moments, Bruno occasionally wondered whether this dictum applied to him as well, who had been dragged kicking and screaming to his own coronation.