Lost in Transmission (14 page)

P2 had no moon; its tides were exclusively solar, and since it was so damned close to Barnard they were formidable indeed. Thanks to the planet's 3:2 tidal lock—three revolutions for every two orbits—they were also slow, following the 461-hour cycle of the “day” and to some extent the 691-hour cycle of the “year.” But though they were sluggish, the tides were far more powerful than those of Earth. A hundred times more powerful, in fact, though their effect on the actual water level was not quite so dramatic as that. For one thing, the land was higher near the equator, so the seas were up in the temperate zones—one in the northern hemisphere and one in the south—where Barnard's pull wasn't quite as strong.

And the fact that the seas themselves did not reach all the way around the planet limited how far and how well a tidal bulge could travel. Or so Conrad had heard, second- and third-hand. The survey had pegged the tidal range for this location at plus or minus thirty-one meters, with little variation over time.

Had a planet like Earth been at this position, with its thin skin of rock floating atop a sea of metal-rich magma, the
land
tides would have been plus or minus several meters, and daily catastrophic earthquakes would be the norm. Along with volcanoes, yes, bursting out through sudden rifts in the crust. Fortunately P2 was a stiffer world, with a much smaller and cooler liquid interior. But even so it had a few large, semiactive volcanoes.

“Which is good,” Bascal had insisted when the subject came up, “because this metal-poor world cannot prick itself and bleed. The radioactive heating of its interior is insufficient to drive tectonics or volcanism. Without the tides stretching and pulling at the core, raising blisters on the crust, there would be no renewal of the surface. It would smooth itself into a giant billiard ball, and the metals would all find their way to the bottom of the ocean and eventually be buried by sediment, and the biosphere would die.”

Hmm.

These were Conrad's last coherent thoughts, for as he scrabbled up the hillside, the ditches of the stream's delta grew deeper, their banks sandier and rockier and steeper. In studying the lidicara, he had thrust his hands into the stream's warm water, and failed at first to notice that its acidity was turning his fingernails yellow and burning at the edges of the flesh beneath. Only when he tore a fingernail right off on the river rocks did he finally pull his hands out. Seeing the damage then, he stood up in alarm.

Next, as near as Ho's investigation could figure it, he lost his balance and dug an arm into the stream's bank. There were no roots or grasses there to hold the bank in place, so it crumbled, and one or more large stones came down on his face, knocking the mask free and breaking his nose. Even this might not have been fatal if he hadn't taken a breath of native air, then coughed because of it, then coughed even harder from his own blood running down into his throat. Still not fatal, if he hadn't spasmed, falling face-first into the stream, and then gasped at the agony of its burning in the membranes around his eyes. But he did each of these things in turn, and so inhaled a small quantity of the water, which was not at all kind to the tissue of his lungs.

On the first sight of him lurching up the foreshore, Ho and Steve—ostensibly there to keep him safe—burst into laughter. They may be forgiven for this, since the state of Conrad's injuries was not apparent at the time, and the drunken stagger of his walk, combined with the mud on his face, really did present a comical image. Conrad himself said, “Boyo, it's a lucky thing
she
's not here to see you.”

Regrettably, the injured Conrad collapsed and died with these words in his ears. The surviving Conrad never did find out what he was doing in that stream, since there was no fax here to resuscitate him while his brain still lived, and since Bubble Hood and even
Newhope
lacked the facilities to read his dead memories. This sort of thing had happened to Conrad once before, back in Ireland a long, long time ago, and it did not occur to him now to interpret the event as any sort of omen. If it had, things might have gone very differently.

Instead, he was left only with an enigmatic to-do entry, which itself proved pivotal in the colony's history—indeed of colonial history in general. And while the idea—pantropy, the re-forming of themselves to suit this new world—would certainly have come up sooner or later, Conrad would wonder until the end of his days why
he
had been the one to raise it. There was a Tongan word for this feeling:
kuiloto mamahi
. Literally, “blind sorrow,” the mourning which occurred when one did not know precisely what had been lost. And this, too, would prove important, though the extent of it would not be apparent for hundreds of years.

Life is like that sometimes, all the more so when it lasts forever.

chapter ten

the red badge of security

Two years later, the occasion of the Security training finals
found Conrad and Bascal in the bleachers at Victory Stadium, in the burgeoning town of Domesville, surrounded by fellow colonists in an atmosphere of gaiety, complete with hurled confetti and the joyous tinkling of glass shattered on slabs of landscape-friendly wellrock.

“I still say you should have a private skybox,” Conrad opined, for the stadium was brand new—this was its inaugural show—and he'd designed it with such improvements in mind. “It would only take a few days to install.”

Right now the stadium held two thousand people—nearly half the population of P2—but it could easily hold three times that many, and could be expanded upward—someday
would
be expanded upward—to accommodate up to thirty thousand.

This was Conrad's eighth original building—small gods be praised, he really was an architect, no longer tweaking the designs of Queendom engineers!—and like the others this one had been designed with one foot firmly in the future. The colony would grow and change, yes, and he'd be damned if that obvious truth would come back to bite him on the ass later.

In his first months on the planet's surface, Conrad had waited around for some sense of normalcy to assert itself. Then, when the first year had passed, he thought perhaps things would settle down in the second. But so far the level of chaos remained on a steady increase: more buildings, more change, and above all, more people. The resources of Bubble Hood limited the number of kids they could pull out of fax storage in any given month, but the more that were out, the louder the hue and cry became to release those few who remained. The sleepers had missed quite enough of humanity's greatest adventure, thank you very much.

Still, even the most pessimistic projections showed the memory cores emptying out within another five months, or eight Barnardean days if you wanted to count it that way. A less experienced Conrad might've been tempted to pick that moment—finally—as the true start of Barnard's history, but increasingly he had the sense that history never really started, or was always starting. There was enough work to keep everyone busy for decades, or maybe forever, and truly decisive moments, with whole futures hanging in the balance, had always been rare. And that was a good thing, right?

The years of the colony were Earth years, by the way. P2's seasons, its cycles of day and night, were just too strange and inconvenient to warrant a calendar of their own. If not for the “Barnardean hour,” ever so slightly shorter than a standard one, even the day itself would be an adversary: 461 hours long—a prime number, indivisible by anything useful. As it was, the day stood at 460 hours, and the official clock had 20 hours on it, breaking the day into 23 “pids,” each consisting of two 10-hour “shifts.”

So a “shift” was kind of like an Earth day or night, except that the sun barely moved during its span, while the 20-hour “pid” was second cousin to an Earthly solar day. Except, again, that the sun barely moved. It was kind of like living at Earth's poles, where summer was eternal day and winter was eternal night, except that the winters here weren't appreciably cooler than the summers, and anyway the Barnardean day was closer to an Earthly
month
in duration.

What a mess. In Conrad's opinion, these shifts were about four damned hours too long, and the pids four hours too short. But the planet's peculiar orbit could not be argued with, and despite widespread grousing no one had come forward with a better clock. He wondered if he'd ever get used to sleeping in the daylight, and he hated working in the dark even more. His job sites were lit up like crime scenes! But all that seemed to do was blot out the stars, making the sky seem that much blacker.

Once the clock was in place, mandated and prototyped and programmed into the walls of every office and residence, Bascal had studied the calendar possibilities for 20 pids before throwing them out in disgust and mandating the Queendom's own Greenwich Mean Proper Date—uncorrected for light lag—as the standard Barnardean calendar. “We needn't rebel against
that
,” he'd said at the time. “P2's ‘year' is of no use to us.” And indeed, Conrad figured the people of Barnard were confused enough. Better to hang onto a few precious shreds of the culture and planet that had spawned them. At least you would know when your birthday was.

“Skybox? What nonsense,” Bascal replied for at least the third time that month. “Do I deserve a better view than my countrymen? Your efforts are appreciated, my boy, but I'm quite pleased to watch the action from here.”

“Climate controlled,” Conrad said, by way of temptation. But it was a silly offer, a joke; Domesville was right on the coast, and so far as their two years' stay had yet revealed, the climate didn't seem to fluctuate all that much. It rained, but mostly at night, and while Barnard made a warm, bright, shockingly ordinary sun to fill their daytime sky, you had to work pretty hard to get a sunburn from it. There just wasn't enough UV. In fact, if not for the impoverished soil, the poisons in the air and water, and the absurdities of clock and calendar, this place would be damned close to paradise.

So they laughed together at that, until Conrad broke into a most embarrassing fit of coughing. Embarrassing, because like a lot of people he still wasn't really used to breathing human-lethal concentrations of chlorine and carbon dioxide. His cells, filled by the fax with halochondria and carbon reducers and half a dozen other new organelles, could process the air without difficulty, but it just didn't
feel
right. It smelled funny (truthfully it smelled like semen), and it tickled slightly in the lungs. The
talematangi
or halogen cough occurred in a minority of the population—less than twenty percent, these days maybe even less than ten—but its sufferers were the butt of more than their share of jokes.

“We're still thinking about the air composition,” Bascal said, as if apologizing for the planet. “More oxygen would be nice, for one thing. This period is just one more stage in a long, slow unpacking. If a world has been birthed, alas, for the moment it remains an infant, suckling from the plans laid down for it by Mother Sol. But someday, my boy, we'll control the very air. We'll have print plates larger than this stadium, ringing all around the city and continually adjusting the gas balance.”

“Not on my account, I hope,” Conrad said, clearing his dry throat. “I'll adjust. We all will.”

“No doubt,” Bascal agreed. But he flagged a passing vendor—some freshly thawed Earth kid Conrad had never seen before—and ordered a chilled red tea “for my flimsy friend, here.”

“Immediately, Sire,” the vendor replied with bright humor, jamming his fingers through the print plate of his vendory and hauling out a glass cup. “We mustn't have our VIPs fainting on opening day.”

“Indeed not.”

And here was another bit of ribbing: the men and women who put Domesville together naturally felt a bit superior to those who merely inhabited it. The newly awakened, moving into their assigned apartments and neighborhoods and jobs on the planet's surface, naturally resented this—such condescension had after all been a major driver of the Revolt. But they found it uncouth to say so. And in turn, the builders of Domesville denied any sense of envy toward the arrogant bastards who'd puffed the first air into Bubble Hood. As for
Newhope
's transit crew, well, who didn't resent them? Too old, for one thing, and too closely associated with the power structures they were supposed to be fleeing.

The term “VIP”—Verily, Important Personage—smacked enough of Queendom pomp and foofery that it could not properly be given as a compliment. Nor received as one.

Making faces at this punk who had seen so little and knew so much, Conrad raised a warning backhand that was only half in jest. “You want to work in the Lutui Belt, kid? If chlorine doesn't make you cough, try vacuum.”

But he accepted the tea just the same. It
was
good—a blend of sugars and electrolytes, vitamins and flavinoids, with a hint of glycerine to improve fluid absorption, plus assorted stimulants and euphoriants and anti-inflammatories to improve the outlook of the person drinking it. “Good fer what ails ye,” as the slogan said, and indeed it was just the thing to soothe away the
talematangi
. Here was Barnard's first true culinary innovation—nothing at all like the astringent red teas of the Queendom—and Conrad saw no shame in enjoying it on its own terms.

Even the container had a colonial flair: a narrow cone of glass with the pointy end flattened to form a stand. Glass because the scarcity of metals here, coupled with energy costs rather higher than they'd enjoyed in the Queendom, made gold or wellstone a bit too pricey for disposable cups. Technically, of course, the cups were recyclable, and would simply be hurled back into the fax when the show was over and the robotic cleanup crew swept the stadium's litter all the way down to the molecular level. But already there were sounds of breakage all around; these glasses were fun to smash.

Such practices would be unthinkable in the Queendom, but that was the point of striking off on your own, right? New ideas, new traditions, new solutions shaped and limited by a fresh environment.

“Better?” the king asked him, supplementing the question with an elbow to Conrad's ribs.

“Much,” Conrad agreed, with answering jabs of his own. “
Thank
you for the
drink,
Your
High
ness.” In Sol, a harmless action like this would have drawn the ire of the unshakable Palace Guard robots, earning Conrad a painful tazzing at the very least. But here they simply earned him the wrath of the king himself, who grabbed Conrad's left arm and made as if to twist it.

“Be a loyal subject,” the king warned, “or you may go home a fractured one.”

“Ow,” Conrad said. “All right, quit it.” And then, when Bascal had released him: “Miserable tyrant. So how's this wildlife program going? I heard you were almost ready to release some animals.”

Here the king grew more serious. “If by ‘animals' you mean ‘millimeter-sized burrowing insects,' then yes. We need them to condition the soil for the next wave of plant life. The modified lichens are taking off nicely, spreading out across the landscape in the spaces between the algoids. Now we're introducing more complicated root systems. But there's a lot of debate on this point, and I'm reluctant to impose a solution by fiat.”

“Debate on what?”

“What to use to fill that niche,” Bascal said. From his tone, the question both amused and annoyed him. “Our libraries are full of Earth organisms, dozens of which could do the job handily once halochondria are introduced into their cell structure, but I've got people arguing that that wouldn't be fair to the lidicara. The native peoples, you see? All squidgy and helpless and stupid. Even if we leave the Sea of Repose completely alone—just isolate it from a terraformed Sea of Destiny and all the waterways we care about—the changes around it will still have an effect. If we introduce a lot of Earth life, and fuff around with the atmosphere in addition, we could extinct the little bastards in their own ecosystem.”

“So, then. What'll you do? Engineer some lidicara ambassadors?”

Conrad hadn't meant the question seriously, but Bascal answered it that way. “Something like that, yes. A modified form, specialized for burrowing and toughened up for a life outside the water. We're still wrangling over the details. Obviously we've got to release
some
Earth life if we want to support human beings on this ball, but first we may broaden the native ecosystem. Give it some of the resilience it might've developed with another hundred megayears of evolution.”

“Compressed into what, a single year of engineering?”

“Oh, no, Conrad. Much longer than that. We mustn't fall prey to any false sense of urgency; there's plenty of time to do it all slowly and well. Do it right. There's no death, no deadline, no pressure. Anyway my father would tell you that time itself is an illusion. There is no forward or backward, just an infinity of moments, like paintings in a gallery. And most of the paintings are nonsense! Strange as it seems, we simply pick the ones we like, and string them together into a story.”

“You said as much in the ‘Song of Physics,'” Conrad mused.

But the face Bascal made was sour and puckery. “Oh, hell. Let's not bring art into it, all right?”

“You're the one who mentioned painting, Sire. Is that no longer considered a form of art?”

That didn't quiet the king one bit. “It's not that I'm blocked, if that's what you're thinking. Truly, it isn't. My moments are simply filled, or else jealously protected in their empty state. There's no reason to insist on fresh poetry
right now
. The illusion of relentless movement through time is an aspect of consciousness. It
is
consciousness. The one to pity is the mortal human off thataway, in our past, ever plummeting toward his extinction and yet expected, somehow, to be cheerful! I, sir, have no such extinction in my plans, and can afford to take a few decades out to—oh, I dunno—build a civilization? Remake this world as God might have done it, and then invade it afresh with our own troops?”

“So we're ethical conquerors, then,” Conrad said. “You tamper with nature in nature's own image, while I build the human world—from native rock as much as wellstone—to look as though it's always been here.”

“You personally?” Bascal asked, now sounding a bit offended for some reason. “Everyone else is just a consumer, eh? A population with no purpose but to be housed by you, brick by brick with your own two hands? Conrad Mursk, First Architect of Barnard. Never mind all these robots, these work-study programs for the newly awakened, these fax copies we all have running around, busy every moment of the day. I would never have given you that title, boyo, if I'd known it would go to your head like this. Second Architect! Third Architect! Paver's Boy, for crying out loud. If I had it to do over again . . . But no, then you'd feel a need to prove yourself, to be worthy of more. Sometimes I think you were born to grind me.”