Lost in Transmission (13 page)

At that moment, two copies of Bertram Wang sidled up. “I think we're ready to fly,” one of them said.

At Conrad's look, Bascal explained, “Bertram here is the only person in the entire colony, in or out of the memory core, with any experience piloting actual reentry vehicles. It's such a rustic way to fly—not a skill that most of us maintain, although in retrospect the jailers probably should have taken it out of the simulator and made it a part of our physical training. The ferries should fly themselves, more or less, but it never hurts to have an experienced hand aboard.”

“Of course,” Conrad said. “Nice to see you, Bert.”

“Hi,” Bert acknowledged.

There were six ferries in the bay—half a year's output from the Martin Kurster Memorial Shipyard, consuming a costly stream of crushed asteroidal rock. Each ferry could comfortably carry twenty humans, or up to a hundred if you stacked them in bunks, which was exactly what they would do when it came time to really populate the planet. And yes, it was inconvenient. Even when there were fax machines installed on the surface, there was no easy way to land the memory core itself. For that you'd need some sort of railroad, reaching vertically through the planet's atmosphere.

Or teleportation, yeah, but it wouldn't be possible to fax live humans to the surface from Bubble Hood until there was at least one telecom collapsiter in orbit around the planet. And that would require a collapsium manufactory—rather beyond their means right now—and something like fifty or a hundred gigatons of raw material. Dozens of neubles; little spheres of di-clad neutronium, pressed from a fleet of neutronium barges. Or from one really busy barge, perhaps, over a long period of time. And the Kurster Memorial Shipyard just wasn't big enough to produce a craft that large. Like so many other things in their nascent economy, neutronium barges would have to wait.

The Conrads and Bertrams and Bascals split up, each team going to one of the prepped ferries. Ho and Steve were already aboard, laughing about something and punching the seats. In this context they were not Security per se, but simply muscle. A pair of strong backs and reasonably obedient minds, in case there was real work to be done. There were probably better choices for that particular assignment, but Conrad understood the king's impulse; Ho and Steve had been with them from the very beginning, from that first exploratory riot at Camp Friendly. And although they were jerks, they were
his
jerks, as close to him in their own way as Conrad was. And yes, close to Conrad as well, in that way that old adventures had of binding people together.

Like Conrad and Xmary, for example.

“Settle down, men,” he told them crossly. “Steve, you're out of uniform.”

In fact, Steve was wearing a fishnet shirt and a pair of improbably shiny black trousers, with matching boots and cap. Hardly the best ensemble for exploring the surface of a hostile planet.

“Yes, sir,” Steve said with a smirk. He reached for a jacket draped over one of the seats, and it slithered up his arm and onto his body. It was a
Newhope
uniform—a Navy of Barnard uniform—done up in that same shiny material. Conrad looked it over with a stab of irritation, but decided he'd had enough friction for one day.

“All right, then. Let's buckle in, shall we?”

Bertram of course took the pilot's seat, and Conrad was ready to cede the copilot's to Bascal, but the king demurred, saying, “You're in charge of this flight, Mr. Mursk. I merely own the planet.”

And for some reason, that ground on Conrad's nerves as well. He nearly said something nasty, just because he could, and bit it back only with considerable effort. He tried to force himself to be cheerful. This was a day he'd remember all his life, even if he lived to be a million, and why remember being a shit when he could simply remember being unhappy?

He thumbed a warning toggle on the wellstone control panel, and moments later red lights were flashing all over the hangar bay, and nameless workers—mostly people Conrad had never met—were scurrying for the airlocks and the safety of the two control booths.

“Bay Boss,” Bertram said into the panel, “we are go for departure. Diagnostics nominal. You may open the doors when ready.”

“Bay Boss here,” said an unfamiliar female voice. “Go for departure, acknowledged. Depressurizing in five, four, three, two, one . . . now.” Outside the winged ferry, there was a sound like a sigh, trailing to whispers, and then total silence. The pumps were some serious quantum-scale hardware which paid the entropy cost and yanked out every molecule which touched them. In about a second and a half, the bay's interior pressure dropped to hard zero: five balls after the decimal.

When the pressure was off them, the ferry bay doors did not so much open as curl aside, like theater curtains, and Bertram had to negotiate with his other self to determine who would go first, so they didn't both crowd each other on the way out. The ferries themselves were smart enough to avoid any true accident, but it would be bad form to rely on them for it, and the Bertram in this particular shuttle won the bit toss anyway, and so they went, lighting their engines and shooting out into starry blackness.

The brownish light of P2 flooded in through the windows, both virtual and real, and then the world itself hove into view, a swirling sphere of yellow-white clouds, of isolated blue-green oceans and vast, amber-colored continents.

P2's plant life, such as it was, relied on something darker than chlorophyll, something chestnut-brown which drew its energy mainly from infrared light. Conrad would miss Earth's greenery in the open spaces, but the multicelled algoids were not without their own special charm. All across the planet, in dense patches between the deserts, the probes had shown chest-high forests of the stuff, waving in the breeze like translucent blades of wheat.

And Conrad, realizing he was about to see this sight with his own two eyes, felt his heart leap. To hell with Xmary. If she thought she could do better than him . . . Well, she wasn't stupid. Maybe she could. But he was here, and she was not, and this really was an important moment in both their lives.

“Living large is the best revenge,” Bascal murmured behind him, as if eavesdropping on his thoughts.

Conrad looked over his shoulder and said, “Sire, that is possibly the most intelligent thing you've said all day.”

The way that Conrad got horribly killed was sort of funny in
retrospect.

They had set the ferries down beside a shallow but steep-banked stream, almost a waterfall really, cutting down along the equally steep bank of the seashore. The ferries were at the crest of it, on flat ground, but the sand dropped away sharply to the east, along a contour that was neither “beach” nor “cliff,” but something in-between which the site survey had named a “subcritical intertidal embankment” or “depositional foreshore bluff.” Such features were, apparently, typical of the shorelines where they weren't vertical cliffs of granite bedrock.

The planet's two oceans were completely isolated from each other, and this was the larger of the two. Overall it was slightly wider than Earth's Pacific Ocean, though it covered a much smaller fraction of the planet's oversized surface, so Bascal had insisted it was properly a sea, and had named it the Sea of Destiny.

The men were all outside milling around on the sand, beneath a sun that looked remarkably like Earth's own—no larger or smaller or dimmer, and only very slightly redder. And the filter masks were working just fine; Bascal had even engineered the surface properties so they didn't fog up on the inside. But there was room for improvement, because breathing in the masks was kind of like sucking chowder through a straw. You could do it, no problem, but the comfort factor wasn't quite there. The air that did get through felt thick but somehow unsatisfying. Not enough oxygen.

Anyway, Bascal was beside himself with glee—literally—and the two of him were pointing and gesturing wildly. “The city's Main Street will run right here, east-west, from the shore to the first ridgeline of the mountains, and perhaps beyond. Forty meters wide, and lined with domes on either side.”

The other nodded. “Yeah, great! Put the palace right here on the beach, like proper Tongans. Matatahi Falehau, the Beach Palace. But
tall,
yes? Looming over the city, as a proper palace should.”

“Really? I thought perhaps over there, so the ridgeline doesn't hide the sunset. Not tall, but hugging the rocks like it's been there a million years. So perhaps the city should be farther south, over there a ways.”

“Hmm. Interesting. Lemme think about that a minute. Our
own planet,
Your Most Regal Majesty! You
know
how excited I am.”

“Indeed I do!”

The two Conrads had diverged by this time, no longer quite identical, and while one of them hovered by the Bascals, absorbing their plans and injecting the occasional comment, the other one was down below at the waterline, hunched over, studying the river stones lining the mouth of the stream. They were mainly granite, as near as he could figure, but they had a funny sort of sheen that was new to him. Chlorination weathering, maybe. If these stones came from the mountains above—and they must have—then some of the bedrock up there, properly quarried and polished, would make for interesting facades. The really raw thing was the way the different layers of it striped the ridge's face in such wildly different colors. Not just browns and yellows and reds, but actually some greens and even blues as well. Or so his eyes had told him up there, through the yellow haze of fifteen kilometers of atmosphere.

Looking down again, he noticed movement in the stream's clear water, between the stones.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, my. Will you look at this.”

No one was paying attention to him at that moment, and he was too rapt to notice or care. He leaned closer, watching the wriggling forms. The “animals” of Planet Two were, he'd been told, extremely primitive. Denizens of the water—never the air or land—they possessed only five cell types, loosely grouped into three layers: skin, gut, and muscle. There was no nervous system, no immune system, and no real digestive system other than a simple holding chamber—the gut. Nutrients and wastes simply sloshed through the spaces between the cells, and the creatures' metabolisms—stunted by chlorine and starved by low oxygen levels—supported movement which was very sluggish indeed by Earth standards. Most were tiny—pinhead-sized or smaller—and drifted along with the ocean currents, feeding on bacterial mats and occasionally on each other, though never on the chlorine-spewing algoids, large or small.

One creature, though—the lidicara—was different. Conrad couldn't help but know this, because it was nearly all the biologists could talk about. How fascinating! How surprising and raw! Most days it was hard to get their minds on anything else. But seeing it now, seeing a hundred of them swirling around his boots like animate snowflakes, he understood what all the fuss was about. Here was a thing that moved with purpose, with ambition. An actual alien creature! The other animals were radial forms—tiny urchin/starfish with little to distinguish them—but the pale lidicara jetted around fast enough to need some streamlining, some architectural finesse. The thing even had a cluster of sensory cells or something at its front end. “
Cephalization!
” the biologists screamed when the subject came up. “
The thing is growing a head!
” Slowly, of course—the fossils of seventy million years ago looked much like the creatures here at his feet—but even to Conrad it sounded like an important development.

The lidicara's shape was like nothing ever seen on Earth, and at a glance, on his hands and knees with his masked face hovering right above the water, Conrad could see how it had come about. The creature had started out as just another seven-armed starfish, but somewhere along the way its “front” arms had shortened and thinned, becoming feeding appendages or something, while the other limbs had slid toward the back, fitting together into a kind of teardrop shape, with one elongated limb at the back serving as a kind of tail.

Right there and then, Conrad discovered an interest in biology which he had never once suspected. Wow. There were only a few hundred cells in these animals, right? As opposed to the trillions in his own body? And he found himself wondering what happened inside, down in the DNA, to permit—to create?—such changes as these. And it occurred to him, with a prickle of excitement, that he—that this particular Conrad Mursk—could abandon all other responsibility and simply pursue this question, reintegrating with the “real” Conrad, the navy's Conrad, at some future date.

Hell, with the mass restrictions lifted—with a whole planet of buffer mass at his disposal—he could spin off as many copies as he wanted. Even the Queendom's plurality restrictions—twenty-five hundred copy-hours per person per month under normal circumstances—needn't apply here, not unless Bascal wrote a proclamation about it or unless the Senate, when it was elected and holding regular meetings, decided to pass a law.

“Conrad!” he called to his other self, thirty meters up on the sandy bank. “The lidicara are beautiful! We've got to preserve them, share the world with them. . . .” His voice trailed away when he realized the other Conrad wasn't listening. To himself he said, “Got to share the world.”

He studied the dancing forms, admiring the way they not only tolerated the poison in the air, but actually souped themselves up with it. Would a bit more oxygen in the atmosphere hurt them? Would it supercharge them even more? If life here really was related to life on Earth—and Bascal insisted that it was—then maybe the lidicara's chlorine-breathing structures—halochondria, they were called—could be imported into Earthly cells? He pulled out his ever-present sketchplate and said to it, “To do: investigate fax modifications to adapt humans to chlorine atmosphere. Discuss with Brenda: Can we change ourselves instead of the planet? Or in addition?”

The ocean waves here were tiny—at least for the moment—and he felt them lapping pleasantly at his heels, slowly working their way up the stream as the tide came in. “Be aware of it,” the site surveyor had warned them over the radio link. “The tide will be in the middle of its range, rising steadily at ten centimeters per hour.” Was that a lot? It didn't seem so here and now. As his shoes grew damper and saltier Conrad simply moved uphill a step, and then another, following the channels of the stream's mouth, crawling up along the foreshore's steep bank.