Lost in Transmission

Chapter eleven. On settling down

Even without improvisation for its own sake, there was lots of hard work to be done, and nearly everyone was busy nearly all the time. They could print extra copies of themselves to rest and relax, and then integrate that experience just to say they'd had it, but Conrad, like many colonists, elected not to. Hard work was refreshing. Their bodies were young and physically fit; they demanded the bliss of meaningful action. Conrad thought, perhaps, that he had never truly slept before in his life. But in those early years, in the building of a world, he felt both more awake and better rested than he'd ever known he could.

And as this was happening, the second of the great colony ships arrived at its destination: Alpha Centauri, aka Rigel Kent, aka the Republic of Kent. An actual republic, with no monarch at all! And Conrad had thought he was rebellious.

Next came the Kingdom of Wolf, which had requested a copy of Bascal at departure time, to be its own king as well as Barnard's. The other Bascal, though, was printed from a pattern that had languished in storage since Newhope's departure. He'd awakened off balance, a century and a half out of his proper time, and had then meekly followed his ship's storage program rather than spending the transit time in solitary study.

Not that he'd've had a century to fatten his brain anyway, since the QMS Glover Gailey was twice as fast as Newhope, with better braking protocols besides. By the time he got to Wolf, the noveau-Bascal had found the good grace to recognize himself for what he was: a divergent archive, now wildly different from the legally recognized individual. Therefore, he changed his name from Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui to Edward Bascal Faxborn, and named the original—the King of Barnard—his cousin rather than some alternate aspect of himself.

The following year, the Queendom of Lalande was established. They had requested a copy of Tamra Lutui as their queen, but were refused on the grounds that she did not wish to leave her native Sol, nor her husband (who had not been elected Lalande's king), nor to have more than one Queendom to spread her love between, nor to deny the young colonists the chance to find their own way into the future. Instead, the Lalandans resorted to one Bethany Nichols, who by the cherubic age of thirty was both a successful playwright and a prize-winning athlete, as well as a darling of the telereception circuit.

Conrad realized with some shock that this young queen had been born in Sol system well after his own departure from it. She was, in some sense, from his future, or from some sort of parallel universe. And this was a telling point: society was far larger than just the place he had left and the place he had come to. Society was not—what a shock!—about Conrad Mursk at all.

In the decades that followed came the Queendoms of Sirius, Luyten, Ross, and Eridani. None of these star systems were especially suitable for colonization, but they were the ones that God had made available in Sol's immediate neighborhood. Wolf and Lalande at least had life-bearing planets, though decidedly un-Earthlike ones, but the other stars were sterile. The spores of life would land anywhere, bloom anywhere with even approximately the right mix and balance of elements, but these blasted systems had little more than cinders and ice, debris fields and cold, moonless giants.

Terraforming these places—even hollowing them out or doming them over, squashing them to planettes or spinning them into habitable rings—promised lifetimes of toil. Immorbid lifetimes, with dubious payoff at best. Their colonists were predominantly volunteers, too, which made Conrad wonder just how bad things had gotten back Solways. How stifling, how crowded and hopeless did things have to get before a lifetime on bare rock seemed preferable?

Then again, perhaps the younger Conrad would have leaped at the chance. Perhaps his experiences here and on Newhope had made him overcautious, stodgy, old. He didn't know what to think about that.

In any case, the Queendom of Sol seemed to pause then, drawing its breath, and it was rumored that the next wave of colonization would be aimed at brown dwarf stars, tiny and nameless and cold, too dim to be visible even from their own outlying planets. This sounded even more miserable to Conrad—even farther from the ideals of Ireland or Tonga, or any of the other scattered paradises of Earth.

But many of these dwarfs—failed stars or oversized planets, simmering in the warm fusion of their own deuterium—were closer at hand than the genuine star systems, and more promising in certain other regards. The light of the blue giant Sirius, being high in ultraviolet, was lethal to an unprotected human, as indeed the light of Sol could be even on Earth. And at least a brown star, dim as a fireplace coal, did not have that strike against it. Close enough to feel its warmth, you could stare right at it and never be blinded.

At first, contact between the eight colonies was routed through Sol and was therefore exceedingly slow, but with the erection of a giant antenna farm at Bascal's insistence and Conrad's day-to-day direction, Barnard was able to join a lightspeed telecom network which connected the colonies directly. The Instelnet: a chatter of new societies, independent of the richer, fatter networks of the old Queendom. Later, redesign of the antennas boosted data rates by a factor of ten, and the addition of three more antenna farms, plus several dedicated power stations, increased it by still another tenfold. But that was the best they could do without telecom collapsiters, and even the Queendom of Sol couldn't afford to string those between the stars.

The traffic was mainly compressed data, plus a few audiovisual channels carrying entertainments and news. It was, of course, impossible to transmit human beings. One needed a true collapsiter grid for that. However, with sufficient time and money and energy, it was possible to transmit intelligent, self-aware messages. Soon there was a steady diplomatic traffic as the various heads of state sent idiot snapshots of themselves back and forth for meetings and even staged dinners. And in the way of such things, the practice became a kind of vice for the wealthy, into which class Conrad found himself unexpectedly thrust.

He had done little to encourage this process, and felt gnawingly guilty about it. Egalitarianism was the new default, with no one citizen rising too high above the others—in theory. But when a hundred people pooled their resources to hire a building design, each giving Conrad a tenth of his or her rational wage, the wealth didn't take long to accumulate.

On the other hand, money was kind of meaningless out here; food and clothing were as plentiful and nearly as cheap as they had been in the Queendom, most land was literally free, and Conrad did his best to see that buildings were not expensive either. Materially speaking, there wasn't a whole lot else you could buy.

So he traveled, visiting Xmary and her lover Feck a few times up at Gatewood Station. And later he visited Xmary and some guy named Floyd Limpwick, whom she fell desperately in love with for a while, at their temporary quarters on the Lutui Belt Provisional Mass Crusher. But while Conrad was glad to see her, and she him (or so it seemed), they had never truly made that transition into friendship. He always felt a tinge of bitterness toward her lovers—even Money Izolo, who was his friend as well as hers. And really, they couldn't be happy to see him either. So the visits came less and less frequently, and Conrad found himself at the Instelnet Transceiving Station more than once, burning a decade's worth of savings to send his own little software homunculus to the stars and back.

The hard part was finding a pen pal—someone to whom he could address his messages. At Wolf he could count on Edward Bascal, who still considered him a childhood friend, but it took some patient digging in the lower-bandwidth channels to find willing partners in Lalande and Sirius, Ross and Luyten. And the paid replies, when they came back, included partial sensorium: the sights and sounds of a foreign place, almost as though he'd been there himself.

It was a bit like traveling, and as extravagances of the hyperrich go, this one garnered more interest and amusement than envy. At parties especially, people would ask Conrad about his journeys to the stars, and he would regale them with stories. Pale dusty rings arching above a world of ice; a sky with three suns; an aurora sizzling with stellar-flare protons, and beneath it an ocean thick and slimy with black vegetation, and lurking mountains of flesh which had been known to gobble unwary humans along with their normal grazing.

Alas, his second reply from Luyten was lost in transmission, garbled beyond the ability of even a telecom hypercomputer to repair, and he mourned its vanished impressions and experiences almost as he would mourn a true copy of himself. But even that made for a good anecdote, and spiced his character with a fashionable tinge of melancholy.

In this way Conrad became, over time, a seasoned and cosmopolitan adult, a galactic citizen who was widely seen, with only the mildest of envy, as rising above the inherent provinciality of this little province—humanity's first extrasolar experiment.

One thing Conrad never did, though, was send himself to Sol. He'd already been there, after all, and while it might be nice to see his parents and some of the casual friends he'd known who had not themselves become colonists, he never felt any true need to send them more than text messages, or the occasional video monologue. And even that was expensive, by colonial standards. Too, as with Xmary, he had less and less in common with them as the years rolled on. The messages became dutiful rather than warm, and as terse as his sense of duty permitted.

But of course Conrad's fate was intertwined with the Queendom of Sol, and could not be so easily separated. And he had twice received his own visitors from the sky, pen pals writing back to him with animate messages of their own, and so in the fullness of time he was only a little bit surprised to find the Queendom of Sol coming to visit him, as a mountain had once allegedly called upon the residence of the prophet Mohammed.