Lost in Transmission (21 page)

“At least let me do the exterior. Just let me reprogram the tiles.”

“Conrad, I said no. The hardest thing an artist has to learn is letting go of his creations. Poetry taught me that much. You have it for a while, this little piece of love and bloodsweat, but sooner or later you kick it out into the world, and then it
belongs
to the world. Hands off, you understand?”

“Yes, Sire,” Conrad answered grumpily. “You're one to talk, though. We haven't seen a poem from you in a long, long time. That's one way to avoid loosing something on the world that could later embarrass you. But it's not a good way.”

The king studied his fingernails. “We've all got our jobs to do. I get busy as well. And I just haven't found the . . . inspiration. Perhaps my muse was the Queendom of Sol itself. Or perhaps not, but in any case the muse doesn't seem to have followed me here. I haven't felt her at my elbow, urging me onward, begging to see the next line. I don't know why, really. I suppose I've just moved on. In a way, the ‘Song of Physics' kind of closed things out for me. After that, there just hasn't seemed to be much of importance left to say.”

“Well, that's a shame,” Conrad said, though in truth he felt much the same about the Orbital Tower. Of all the projects in his past, that was the only one he still dreamed about. Part of him seemed to wish that job had never ended, or even—perversely!—that he'd died after completing it. His crowning achievement, his denouement, his swan song. But with an infinite future ahead of him, there was no reason to think that was truly his finest hour. The best was, almost by definition, yet to come.

He picked up his wine goblet and drank from it, savoring its atomically perfect bouquet and finish. Oh, for a medical-grade fax machine of his own! “I always liked your poetry. I still do. Is it your muse, by the way, that keeps you from naming the planet? Are we stuck with ‘P2' forever?”

“Ah, that. Hmm. Yes, well, it may be my muse,” Bascal answered. “Or perhaps I'm just waiting for the right confluence of events. I don't want to give this world the
wrong
name just because you're impatient. As an immorbid, I won't be forced, I won't be rushed. But no, it won't always be Planet Two. That's not a home. It doesn't speak to the soul.”

“Well, don't wait forever. More than two-thirds of the current population was born here. It
is
their home. You'll reach a point where the old name just sticks.”

“Maybe so.”

The idea seemed to sap some of Bascal's energy. Which of course made Conrad feel guilty for raising a sensitive issue. Some friend he'd turned out to be.

“Listen,” he said in a lighter tone, “you seem to have a spare copy of yourself, or if not you can print another. And I'm free. Mack has the construction site for the day, so if you'd like to raise a few glasses, or ingest some other recreational substance, I'm at your disposal.”

“Yes?” Bascal arched an eyebrow. “Truly? Well, that's historic. The first architect, come to visit these humble artless walls for something more than business? We'd better get started, then, boyo. With years to make up for, you'll have to be carried home by Palace Guards. You dislike them, I know, but nothing spells ‘party' like having them cart off the unconscious bodies.”

And the trouble was, Bascal was serious about that. Conrad would never shake the memory of those Guards: monsters of gleaming impervium, at least as graceful as household servants and yet also deadly, packed with weaponry, full of suspicion, and always keyed up for violent action. He would never love them, even for saving his life.

One of the most symbolic things Bascal had done as king was to send his Guards away. No more would they loom behind him, following him, logging his every move, and every move by anyone else within harm's reach. But here in the palace, visible or not, they were only a fax away from instantiation. For practical purposes they were waiting behind that print plate as if it were no more than a curtain. Bascal really did use them to toss out drunks, and to escort people back to their residences if they'd worn out their welcome. And Palace Guards were not known for their gentleness.

“Sounds like a good time,” Conrad said, forcing a smile. And hell, he did need a night off, and the company of an old friend. And for that matter a good drugging—one which didn't involve the seduction of some tender young morsel who hadn't the sense to know better. How long had it been since he'd just gotten stupid, for no reason and with no goal in mind? More sincerely, he said, “In fact, my liege, it sounds like a better time than I've had in years.”

chapter fifteen

the king's ransom

Sixty-six months later almost to the day, Conrad was in the
study of his home, inloading mental notes on the latest crop of nonprogrammable materials the southern factories were turning out. Inloading other people's notes could be a real problem—some people got sick, got headaches, sometimes even went crazy and needed to fax a fresh body before they could think clearly again. But the process had never bothered Conrad. He was not a brilliant man, and at times there were real advantages in this.

The stuff that was personal, tied up with the feelings and memories of the individuals who recorded it, he was able simply to ignore. It didn't jam its way into his head or anything. It didn't confuse him. The rest of it, the factual side, well . . . he mostly forgot that as well, but it left behind general impressions, so that if he ever needed a particular thing, a material or product or specialized idea, he would at least know whether it existed or not, and where he might go to look it up.

Still, the process was tiring, and after a few hours he gave up, set the neural halo aside, and just sat there at his office table, sipping from a mug of red tea and looking out the window, down over the shops and homes, the apartments and warehouses sloping down to the bay. It was late in the afterpids; the sun was setting behind him, behind the mountains, and its ruddy glare on the smog-colored clouds was arrestingly beautiful. Perhaps his brain was sorting what it had learned, or perhaps it needed some quiet time to recover its faculties, or perhaps Conrad was simply lazy. Whether he sat there for twenty minutes or an hour he never knew, as the sun moved only a hair's width in the sky. The long day on P2 rivaled even that of Venus, and its sunset was a long, drawn-out affair. But at some point along the way the house interrupted him with a visitor chime.

He looked up. “Hmm? What?”

“A visitor,” the house said, daring to speak.

“Oh, well, show her in.”

It did not occur to him that the visitor might be male, and in this he was neither surprised nor disappointed, because his front door opened, and his study door opened, and a lighted walkway appeared in the wellstone of the floor, with moving colors indicating the proper direction of travel, just in case his visitor was painfully stupid. She appeared in Conrad's doorway: a young woman with blonde hair, brown eyes, and skin the color of almond shells. Her only garment was a skin-tight wellcloth leotard, colored bright green and stretched over her with quite obviously nothing beneath. Conrad felt a shock of familiarity on seeing her, but he couldn't quite place the face. Or the body.

“Oh, hello,” he said. “How are you this evening?”

The woman looked him up and down, saying nothing.

“I've, ah, misplaced your name.”

“I haven't given it,” she said, with the vaguely superior air that young people had when they thought they were being smart. Conrad peered at her more closely, studying her features. Something about her made him think of Bascal, and he asked her, “Are you the king's girlfriend? Nala Rishe, the lobbyist?”

The young woman's laugh was cool and self-assured, more amused than friendly. “No, sorry. Do you want me to be?” She ran her hands down her body in a suggestive but rather exaggerated way, and Conrad realized she was younger than he'd thought at first. Hers was not the body of a twenty or twenty-five-year-old, like most of the people in the kingdom who were current in their fax ups. On closer inspection, he supposed she had never yet seen her twenties. She was still in the bloom of adolescence, burning with hormones and yet lacking the experience to deploy them wisely. He rethought his conversational approach, and said, “I've been reading for hours, young lady, and I'm in no mood for riddles or parlor games. Who are you, exactly?”

“Princess Wendy de Towaji Lutui Rishe,” she said through a smirk, in tones suggesting he should've known this before she even walked through his door.

Conrad blinked. He blinked again. “Princess. Bascal's
daughter
? He never told me about . . . he never said . . . my goodness. How old are you, girl? When were you born?”

“Yesterday,” she said, as though it were a point of pride.

Conrad digested that. Yesterday? Little gods, the faxwise birthing of fully formed teenagers had always seemed sensible enough to him—why bother with the awkward preliminaries, just because nature commanded it? His own early childhood had been mostly dull—he could barely remember it now—and anyway lots of other animals were born mature, able to walk and eat and communicate. It was only an accident of biology that the human birth canal was so much narrower than the fully grown human brain.

But then again, Conrad was usually introduced to these fax children in their fifth or eighth or tenth year of actual physical life. Newborns belonged at home, right? Confronted with one now, a baby already in the full flower of sexual maturity, he found himself offended on her behalf. Something important, if intangible, had been denied this girl. This thought was not to his credit, surely—it would mark him a naturalist pig in some circles—but there it was.

His voice was careful. “What can I do for you, Princess Wendy? Shouldn't you be at home studying entry-level humanities? Dressing, hygiene, that sort of thing? Gathering up the love of your new parents?”

“I do what I want,” she said simply. “The job of youth is to shake things up, and I can't do that from home. All my life I've felt a higher purpose calling, and when I heard Father complaining about you, it just felt right. It seemed important that I meet you. You're a space pirate; you defied the Queendom of Sol.”

It was Conrad's turn to laugh. “That was centuries ago, little girl. I'm an architect now. The greatest architect in the world, owing to there being so few people in it. I challenge society through my work, striving for that perfect balance of beauty and strength and functionality. And always on a limited budget. It's been a long time since I shook things up any other way.”

She was looking him over again, studying every detail of him with weird intensity. Behind her eyes Conrad could sense a hungry brain, frustrated with its own limitations and absorbing knowledge through every available channel, however imperfect. And there was, yes, a sexual component to her scrutiny as well. The clumsy sexuality of a child, laid open for him to see. He felt ashamed at that, as though she were naked and didn't even know it, and he had not found the decency to avert his eyes.

“It sounds as though I've arrived just in time, then,” she cooed. “It sounds like you need a little shaking up yourself.”

“Stop right there,” Conrad said, holding up his hands. “No one has taught you how to behave, and how could they? But my dear, this isn't proper. There will be no touching, no attempts at clever innuendo. Believe me, this scene will later embarrass you if you don't quit it.”

She studied him some more, looking wounded but brave, and very quietly angry. Finally, after uncomfortably long, she said, “What do you know about death?”

“Death?”

“Death.
Maté.
The end of life.”

“It's to be avoided,” Conrad said carefully. “I've died a couple of times myself, and it's always a wrenching experience. You lose a great deal, and the worst is that you never know exactly what you've lost. Precious things, surely. Irreplaceable.” And thinking of her, he added silently,
You can lose things you've never even had, baby girl, and miss them all your life.

But she was shaking her head. “No, I mean real death. The kind where you don't wake up.”

“Aren't you a little young to be thinking about this?”

“I'm a good judge of what's important,” she lectured. “I've been listening to my father, and I hear the worry in his voice. He's building some kind of freezertorium down in the south, on the Peninsulum Pectoralis. For bodies. Dead bodies.”

“But only one person has died,” Conrad pointed out. “Why would we need a ‘freezertorium'?”

“One person? Is that what he told you?” Now her laugh was knowing, and raw with the sting of his rejection. “It's more than one person, Mr. Greatest Architect in the World.”

“Really?” he asked skeptically. “How many, exactly?”

She didn't answer, and he took that as a sign that she didn't know. Kids were always spouting off, trying to sound important. It didn't mean a damned thing.

Then a bit of plaintiveness crept into her voice. “Don't you want this body?” She cupped her breasts, her crotch. “It's fresh. It's
intact
. You have a reputation, sir, and a girl has needs.”

Conrad shuddered. “My dear, I may be a womanizer. I may even be a cradle robber, but I do have my limits. My scruples. For God's sake, you were born yesterday. And anyway you're the daughter of my best friend, which in polite society means no fuffing of any kind. You'll understand things like this when you've had more time to . . . take your bearings.”

That made her angrier, but there was an impotent quality to her glare. She couldn't force the issue, and she knew it. “I'm too much for you anyway. And you're a naturalist pig.”

“I'm calling your father,” Conrad told her. Then said to the ceiling, “Call Bascal.”

Evidently, the king was busy; it took nearly half a minute for the call to patch through. When it did, the king answered with a full hologram, appearing like a saintly vision in the space between Conrad and Wendy.

“Yes? Ah, Conrad. Good to hear from you. You haven't seen a young girl wandering around by any chance, have you?”

“She's here with me now,” Conrad said.

“Hi, Daddy.”

Bascal's translucent image turned, eyebrows arching with surprise. “
Malo e leilei,
Wendy. You must tell us before you leave the house like this, all right? You had us worried, and we don't like to worry.”

“Don't try to control me, Daddy. I do what I want.”

“Hoy!” the king said. “Do you indeed? We'll just see about that, girlie. We shall just have to see about that.”

“Oh, Daddy. You can't hold on forever. I've got business to attend to, a pair of wings that need spreading. Don't make me hate you, please.”

Bascal turned to Conrad with an exasperated look. “They grow up so fast, don't they? Keep her there, please, if you would. I'm sending the Guards to fetch her. In fact, scratch that. I'll come with them. I complain that you don't visit me enough, but when was the last time I came to see
you
? Give me about fifteen minutes.”

The hologram winked out. It would've been nice if he'd
asked
to come over, but Conrad supposed a king—even the tin-pot king of a pair of overgrown villages—was not accustomed to having to ask. Where in the world would he be unwelcome?

In the ensuing silence, Conrad and Wendy looked at each other, neither one knowing what to say.

“You make me feel old,” Conrad offered finally.

“You are old,” she replied without venom. “I checked.”

“Did you? Very enterprising. With proper maintenance, the energy of the body never fades, but I suppose the energy of the soul is a different matter. I can feel the verdant fires burning inside you from all the way over here.”

Warily: “Is that a compliment?”

The glib answer would have been yes. But was it true? Deciding there was little point in lying to children, he answered, “I don't know. Just an observation, I guess.”

And then for some reason her lower lip was quivering. Her eyes began to redden, to leak tears, and in another few seconds she was bawling. “I just wanted to go out . . . I just wanted . . .”

Conrad had seen reactions like this often enough in the women he loved, and through long practice he knew the correct response: he spread his arms wide. And then, when she didn't step into them, he moved forward and pulled her into a hug.

“Shush. Shush. It's all right, Wendy. Nobody knows what they're doing—not really. There isn't a script for us to read from. There has never been a person exactly like you, or a situation exactly like this, so how could you know what to do? We just make it up, every time, every day of our lives.”

She made a token struggle but did not pull away. She badly needed a hug, whether she could admit it or not. They stood like that for several minutes, and yes, she did manage to calm down, so he pulled some chairs out and they sat. He offered her a mug of red tea then, and she accepted, and they sat there at the table, staring out the window, across the city and down toward the sunlit waters.

The distant world of Van de Kamp hovered near the horizon, visible even now in broad daylight, its pinpoint glare twinned by a reflection in the calm waters of the bay. Gatewood was sometimes visible in the daytime, too, but you had to know where to look.

“Nice view,” she told him, with apparent sincerity.

“Some people say I stole the best spot in town, before the streets were even laid out. I suppose it's true. You should see the lights at night. Or the stars, or the sunrise. Or a thunderstorm, with mist devils twirling out on the water. It's always beautiful here.”

He watched her drink that in, her eyes lighting up with imagination. “Did you design the house yourself? Especially for this site?”

“Yeah. A long time ago. Really long.”

“It's nice.”

“Thank you very much. Coming from someone with so little basis for comparison, a compliment like that can come only from the heart. You have a good heart, don't you, Wendy?”

She shrugged, looking uncomfortable again. “I guess so. I mean, how would I know?”

Conrad laughed. It was a good question—exactly the sort that was supposed to pop out of the mouths of young children. “Put it this way,” he told her. “I think you would know if you didn't. For all your tough talk, you do seem to have a sense of social duty. That's a good sign, especially for a princess.”

A bit of anger stole back into her features. “A permanent princess. I'll never be the ruler of anything.”

He shrugged. “I don't know. Your father used to say the same thing, but life is long and full of surprises. Anyway, is being a queen such a great job, really? Your, uh, your grandmother claims otherwise. Maybe you'll meet her someday, and she can tell you all about it.”