Lost in Transmission

Chapter twelve. Messages, bottled and un-

In the twenty-fifth decade of the Kingdom of Barnard, in an orbital tower looking down upon the world of P2, the architect Conrad Mursk stands with a warm mug in his hand, staring across forty thousand kilometers of vacuum at his latest creation: the Gravittoir. This consists of a skyhook station, known artfully as “Skyhook Station,” suspended by three electromagnetic grapples “hooked” to Barnard, Gatewood, and Van de Kamp, as a triangular hammock might be slung between a trio of trees.

There will be times, alas—a few years out of every century—when these bodies will be poorly aligned, and will fail to support the station (being “beneath” it in a gravitational sense), and at these times the station will be forced to descend back to the planet's surface, and the citizens of Barnard will have to rely instead on the older and less elegant Orbital Tower, upon which Conrad presently stands.

A synchronous orbit for Skyhook Station—one which completed its turns at the same rate as the planet itself—would have been much better in this regard, but there are no such orbits here. With the star so close and the planet's rotation so slow, the altitude of an orbit like that would be well outside the planet's sphere of gravitational influence. Or so Conrad's gravity specialists have persuaded him: this is the best solution for the given environment, and will in no way reduce the esteem of Barnard's First Architect.

The purpose of the Orbital Tower is simple: to provide an elevator up out of the atmosphere. It was never intended as a permanent solution, and while the Gravittoir will be a great improvement, there is nothing permanent about it, either. Indeed, it's just another stopgap on the road to faxation; once the collapsiter grid is in place, none of this will be necessary. The Gravittoir is also simple: Skyhook Station has a weak gravity laser pointing downward, which creates a column of funny weather, but more importantly makes it possible for a properly designed spacecraft to be yanked off the surface of the planet and into space, where its thrusters can place it in orbit without drag or fuss.

Stand with Conrad, and see what he sees: the tower stretching down beneath you: a narrow, gleaming cone of impervium whose base is roughly the size of a soccer pitch, whose nearly cylindrical apex is, by coincidence, almost exactly as wide as the starship Newhope, which brought you here long ago. The interior of the structure includes a sleeve of diamond which is technically capable of supporting the tower's entire weight, but with almost no safety margin. Know that for practical purposes, the structure is held up by the pressure of electrons in quantum dots, and runs a serious risk of collapse in the unlikely event that the power ever fails. Feel the meaning of that in your boots, in the wellmetal deck beneath you. A temporary structure, indeed.

Because the tower is so purely vertical, and its base so distant beneath P2's tall atmosphere, you cannot see the foot of it. What you can see, if you strain your eyes, is the black line of a tuberail link joining the base of the tower with the city of Domesville, which even now is built in rings and circles—a concession to the domes that were never erected. It's a style; even the new construction falls into the same general pattern, so that from up here the city looks like a scattering of saucers and old-style shirt buttons around a pair of midsized dinner plates.

There are just over twenty thousand people down there (or fourteen thousand individuals with an average of 1.4 instantiations apiece, if you prefer to count it that way) going about their daily business, which mainly involves the maintenance and expansion of Domesville itself, the rearing and education of its growing ranks of children, and the planning and governance and sociopolitical groundwork for the much larger population which is to follow in the centuries ahead.

Then, running east from Domesville and perpendicular to the Tower Line, you can just make out the city's other tuberail, which runs thirty-five thousand kilometers east to Bupsville (officially Backupsville), the planet's only other major community. Not everyone lives in these two towns, and indeed, not everyone lives on the surface of the planet, or even anywhere near it. But together, the towns account for about ninety percent of the colony's population, and at least ninety-nine percent of its cultural output. If you squint, you can just make out Bupsville through a yellow-brown haze at the edge or “limb” of the planet. It doesn't look like much, just a gray discoloration, gleaming here and there with the bright orange-white of reflected sunlight. There is another tuberail line south from Bupsville, joining it to the Gravittoir's ground station, which, like the Orbital Tower, is located on P2's equator. But that line is far too thin and faint, too obscured by chlorine haze and water vapor and dust, to be visible from here.

The ground station itself is visible only because Conrad has asked the windows to mark it for him, with a reticle of glowing red. Another reticle—this one green—marks the position of Skyhook Station, which fortunately is visible, if only because it gleams in full sunlight, like a tight little cluster of stars.

Conrad is here because he's seen the Gravittoir, the latest of his children, from every other sort of angle, and wants to see it from this one before it goes online. Before the Orbital Tower becomes an afterthought, useful only for rustic vacations and cargoes of the very lowest priority. Before Domesville ceases to be the planet's main spaceport, and becomes instead merely its political capital.

Imagine yourself hovering invisibly beside Conrad, in a circular chamber at the tower's very top. All around you, the walls are transparent, though the ceiling has been opaqued to provide some shade from the noonday sun, and the floor has been similarly darkened to prevent vertigo, which from this vantage can be considerable. The launching tracks, running up along the outside of the tower, are also transparent (remarkably so, to your eye), and are only really visible if you know what to look for: four man-wide tuberails of wellstone spaced around the tower at ninety-degree intervals. Here and there, they catch the light in interesting ways, shooting rainbow-speckled sprays of it along the silver-gray wellmetal of the deck beneath your feet. It's rather cold here, and Conrad is bundled in a wellcloth jacket he brought with him from home, thinking ahead because he knows it's always cold here.

Outside of Domesville, all around it, is the Forest Not-Quite-Primeval (its actual name, yes), where the green of Earthly vegetation battles with the brown of P2's “natives”—very few of which are genuine, unmodified algoids. And with a careful eye you can even discern the two streams running through Domesville in a Y shape: Chokecherry Creek and King's Creek, which merge to become King's River before emptying out into the half-moon shape of Transit Bay, and thence to the Sea of Destiny. These off-dry ditches are generously named, visible only for the vegetation and housing crowding along their banks. They're not real rivers—just the handiest applicants for the job. But the sea and the bay are for real, and beneath their blue-green veneer they are themselves a battleground of green and brown and black vegetation.

The tower's structure is rigidized, actively controlled and damped to a degree that even Conrad finds astonishing, but nevertheless the floor transmits a vibration up through your boots. Or through Conrad's, more properly, since you aren't really here. This vibration, barely noticeable at first, quickly grows in intensity. A podship is coming up the rails. With a sudden smile, Conrad looks for it, leaning forward and pressing his nose against the transparent wellglass. He's rewarded by glimmers of light from below, shifting rapidly, and in another moment there is a sound like rain, and half the view is blocked for a moment as a C-shaped crew transporter, striped black and red, flickers past at seven kps, riding upward on two of the tower's four rails. The thrumming continues for another fraction of a second, and then suddenly quits as the podship clears the top of the tower and soars on up into vacuum.

God, you love it here. Or Conrad does. Or, more properly, Conrad did, for these events are long in the past.

After building the place, he used to sit up here for hours, just watching the pods go by. More traffic downward than up: there was a net flow of resources onto the planet, as it was easier to mine pure elements out of the asteroid belts than to rip them from P2's metal-poor crust. But the upward traffic—the outbound traffic—was in its own way more romantic, since it consisted largely of children in their twenties heading for their yearlong, not-quite-mandatory tour of duty on the space station or vessel of their choice. Seeing them roar by like that, Conrad was reminded of his own early days in space, as the unofficial XO of a pirate ship.

In many ways, these kids had it soft by comparison, although Conrad smiled to remember that Viridity had had its own medical-grade fax machine onboard, albeit restricted by stern software lockouts. There had been a pair of gleaming Palace Guard robots onboard as well, which had seemed very threatening and dangerous but had saved lives on more than one occasion. What days those had been! Not fun, but definitely thrilling.

The walls of the chamber chimed and said, “Incoming message.” The voice was soft and distinctly artificial, as Conrad preferred, and it was nice to see that the Tower still recognized him and knew his tastes after all this time away.

“Play message,” he said.

A man and a woman appeared before him, in very nice holograms projected and reinforced from both the ceiling and floor, with maybe a bit of fill-in from the walls as well.

“Yes?” Conrad said to them, then gasped as he realized just whom he was addressing: Bruno de Towaji and Tamra Tamatra Lutui, the King and Queen of Sol.

Conrad hadn't seen them—even their images—in so long that he could scarcely remember what to do. He was tempted to drop to his knees, but remembered in time that he, too, was a friend of kings. He had never knelt for Bascal—well, never seriously—so why should he for Bascal's parents? He made an awkward bow instead, placing his right hand on his stomach and raising his left in the air behind him.

“Your Majesties! Welcome! I am . . . rather surprised to see you here. What can I do for you? Or have you perhaps arrived at the wrong address?”

Tamra laughed. “Malo e leilei. You're Conrad Mursk, yes? The architect? Then we've been forwarded correctly. We bring you greetings from the Queendom of Sol.”

And King Bruno, looking around him, smiled in wonder and said, “Good God, it's like stepping back in time. We had towers like this when I was a boy. Well, perhaps not quite like this. But we needed them, you see, because there was no collapsiter grid. No other way to get on and off the planet, unless you wanted to plow the air in a hyperjet. This place is beautiful, lad. Is it your own work?”

Conrad shrugged. “Largely mine, yes, about eighty years ago. I think it's held up rather well, given the haste of its construction and the heavy use it has seen since then.”

“No doubt, no doubt.”

Conrad cleared his throat. “Is there, ah, is there some reason for your visit, Sires?”

“A little reassurance, if you please,” the Queen of Sol said.

Conrad blinked. “I beg your pardon? Reassurance on what?”

“We get only the official Instelnet news and information channels from Barnard, plus a smattering of narrowband entertainments, and of course the personal messages from our son. But amid this clutter we find that something doesn't smell quite right.”

“The data,” Bruno added, “imply one or more hidden or neglected variables of great importance. Our analyses complain of being incomplete, and warn us not to rely on them.”

A bit of the old defiance fluttered in Conrad's heart, and he said, “You have no authority here. Sir, madam, I'm sorry, but it's true. We don't have to do things your way. We don't have to open our ports to your every scan. For that matter we needn't share information at all. Are you here as spies?”

“Should spying be necessary?” Tamra asked, with neither humor nor anger. “Our concern is for your welfare.”

“Naturally.”

King Bruno smiled, perhaps a little sadly, and said, “Let us be friends, lad. Let us speak frankly, and in our mutual interest. We mean you no harm—surely you know that.”

And here Conrad relented, unsure why he'd pressed the point to begin with. Because surely this was true: there could be nothing sinister in their motives. Just parental, condescending, and superior, as always. And from the safe remove of six light-years, he could forgive them for that. Couldn't he? He eyed the two holograms carefully and said, “You two are quite a large program, aren't you? Very detailed, very capable. You mean to have a real conversation.”

“Indeed,” the King of Sol confirmed. “We've been clogging your planet's receivers for days. We will pay, naturally, in intellectual property concessions, and perhaps this proves some measure of sincerity on our part.”

“But what is it you want?”

The queen stepped forward half a pace. “Just your thoughts, Architect. Your impressions. Do you sense anything amiss? Something in the ecology? The economy? Your resource allocations have been quite peculiar—one might almost say primitive.”

Conrad could only shrug. “We have a lot of work to do. We're trying to install an entire civilization from scratch, building up from bare rock. Metal-poor rock, I might add. Frankly, I think we're doing quite well. We've hit our stride.”

“Your population dynamics, then. Surely those peculiarities—”

“We have a labor shortage, madam. We've had one since the very beginning, and quite frankly, it gets lonely here. There's only so much time you can spend talking to yourself, talking to the same few people over and over. Surely you don't begrudge us our children?”

“No. Certainly not. But your methods—”

Methods, yes. There had been developments in that area, to speed the population growth along. Conrad said, “You find it unseemly.”

“Well, it's . . . pragmatic I suppose,” the king answered uncertainly.

“Aye. That it is,” Conrad agreed without humor. “We were intended to find our own way in this place, our own solutions to our own problems, and I believe we're doing that. I don't feel the need for children of my own—not now, at any rate—but I do feel strongly about the right to have them. In the manner of my own choosing, thank you.”

“Indeed. Indeed. It isn't our place to judge. But you're one of Bascal's friends. I assume you are still. If something were wrong—I mean seriously wrong—would he tell you?”

“Hmm. I don't know,” Conrad answered honestly. “He might. If he thought I could help him with it, then definitely, yes. But I haven't heard anything. I haven't spoken with Bascal in, oh, I guess it must be four years by now. And even that was just pleasantries. I suppose that happens as you get older: the bonds of friendship maintain themselves with less and less reinforcement. Anyway, these days Bascal is a lot older than I am. He doesn't seek my opinion quite so often.”

The queen strode to the transparent wall, looking for a moment as if she might press her face against it, as Conrad had done a few minutes ago. Of course, she wasn't really here, and had no face to press. “Let's begin with your ecology,” she said reasonably. “Magnifier, please.”

But the wall's wellstone did not recognize her as a person, merely as data, and so ignored the command.

“Magnifier,” Conrad told it, pointing to the spot where the queen had been looking. “Fifty times zoom, contrast filtering and color enhancement.”

“Thank you,” Her Majesty said. “One forgets one isn't real.”

“Well,” Conrad said, “let's hope your reply isn't lost in the mail. If it gets through, then these experiences will reach the real Tamra and Bruno, and thus you are real enough for practical purposes. Let's hope the gods of data communication are on your side.”

Per command, a magnification circle appeared in the wall directly in front of Queen Tamra. From Conrad's angle, behind the queen, it showed the top of the forest surrounding Domesville, with a flock of startled starbirds flapping up out of it in that weird, almost vertical way they had, like malformed bubbles rising in a glass of beer.

“The ecology isn't natural,” Conrad conceded. “How could it be? It was installed, yes, and I don't think anyone has ever let it settle down. Why bother? We call it ‘evolutionary extrapolation,' and here it's considered an art form. We compute—rigorously—the sort of creatures the native ecology might have produced, given enough time, and the ones which pass a popular referendum are instantiated. Whole herds of them. Whole flocks and bevies and swarms. We color them as we please, but as I understand it the selective pressures on the first few generations are pretty strong. So their final appearance is a compromise between what we give them and what works in the wild. And if they die out altogether, we tweak them and print more. Hell, even the atmosphere would change without our constant intervention.”

Indeed, the line of atmosphere processing stations—gigantic print plates for a very primitive sort of fax—ran alongside the tuberail link from Domesville to Bupsville, and even from here you could see a fine mist rising out of them, oxygen and nitrogen liberated from a soil buffer somewhere and reacting coolly with the native gases.

“But we aren't dependent on the ecology, Sires, or on the atmosphere. We can breathe the native gases, and as I understand it, we can eat a much broader range of foodstuffs than you can. In this sense, we haven't been human for a century or more. And if our reproductive methods reflect this, well, so be it. Times change.”

“Fair enough,” the queen said, looking over her shoulder at Conrad. “But those aren't real fax machines down there.” She turned farther and pointed a finger at the chamber's service fax, where Conrad's mug of red tea had been produced. “That's not a real fax machine either. It produces only simple chemicals, yes? We've seen the reports. That device could never fax a living creature, nor even a good semblance of a dead one.”

Conrad fought down his irritation and struggled to be polite. “I'm not sure what you mean by ‘real,' Your Highness. It isn't a medical-grade fax machine, no. But so what? Do we need one here?”

“Perhaps,” she said seriously. “One never knows until the time has come, and by then of course it's too late. For all of that, you're looking rather decrepit yourself. You have a paunch, young man, and a touch of gray at your temples. If there are ‘medical-grade fax machines,' as you call them, when was the last time you visited one?”

I can't quite remember, Conrad thought but did not say. “Listen, Bruno. Tamra. Parents of my friend, of my king. We're building a world here. Not your world, and certainly not the world we'd've picked for ourselves, if the choice were ours to make. But the result, like the animals, is a blend of what we want and what works.”

“If it works,” Tamra said coolly.

Bruno looked at the magnifier, at the fax, at the ceiling and the floor and the walls, at the planetscape spreading out beneath the tower. “All right, lad. You children have made some clever adaptations. Wait, my apologies: I shouldn't call you children. Each of you carries more responsibility than most citizens of Sol will ever experience. But yes, I can see there's nothing foolish about your methods, whether I personally agree with them or not.”

You're damn right, Conrad thought. And oh my goodness, is that a touch of condescension in your tone? What he did say was, “Majesties, are you sufficiently reassured? I have work to do, and not enough copies to do it.”

In point of fact, he had no copies at all right now. Probably he should rectify that along with the slippage in his biological age. And make a damned backup, yes. Losing five-odd years of memory would be inconvenient at best. No, worse than that. There were some treasures in there—experiences that might never come again, no matter how long he lived.

Tamra said, “We are adequately reassured. For the time being, at least. Thank you for your time, Architect, and do say hi to Bascal for us when next you see him.”

And with that, quite suddenly, the two holograms vanished.

Conrad sighed, feeling self-conscious, feeling the scrutiny of his elders—his true elders—for the first time in many, many decades. Well, so be it. They did mean well, after all, and perhaps they had a point. About Conrad's appearance, if nothing else.

He glanced at the floor and said, “Elevator,” and obligingly, a disc of material separated from the floor and sank a few centimeters into it. A matching cylinder, so transparent he could barely see it, emerged from the ceiling, stopping just above the level of his head. He stepped under it, onto the recessed disc in the floor, and the cylinder lowered itself around him so that he was sealed in a sort of jar, and then the whole apparatus fell out beneath him.

He really should put a gravity laser in here sometime. He would have already, if the Gravittoir weren't making this whole structure obsolete anyway. Meanwhile, the elevator accelerated downward at half a gee, and his feet felt so tingly-light that it seemed they might slip out from under him at any moment. Not likely, given the impervium-toed traction shoes he normally wore on any construction site, and most other places besides. But it was unsettling nevertheless. Maybe he just needed more practice.

The walls of the elevator remained transparent, but other than the lightness in his feet and the fluttering of his stomach, there was no impression of actual movement through the core of the tower. If there were imperfections in the wellstone walls of the shaft, they were imperceptible at these speeds, smearing together into a featureless gray blur.

Anyway, the ride would take twenty minutes, so this was as good a time as any for a telephone conference. “Call Mack,” he said to the wall.

A rectangular hologram window appeared on the side of the elevator after a few seconds' delay, and there was the artfully homely face of Mack Duggins, the son of Celia Duggins and Karl Smoit.

“Yeah? Oh, hi Boss.” Mack was out in the street somewhere, walking briskly on his short legs, not quite huffing with the exertion. The holie's view followed right along with him as he walked, and Conrad imagined his own face, in a rectangular holie window of its own, following Mack along the street, along the facades of shops and homes and restaurants, growing and shrinking as it went, struggling to maintain a constant apparent size and range from Mack's point of view. Every now and then, people jostled past him, blocking the view, but despite the ongoing population explosion, Domesville remained a small town, without too terribly much foot traffic.

Any resident of the Queendom—or of the Earthly societies which preceded it—would be surprised by Mack's appearance: a meter and a half of dense muscle and even denser skin, dark green in color and as bumpy as the hide of a dinosaur. The nose was prominent in his squashed-pumpkin face, the eyes were large, and the teeth so sharp and numerous that his mouth seemed barely able to close around them.

Mack was a troll. There was nothing particularly unusual about this—the body form was optimized for the long days and nights, the bitter seas and tough native foods of Planet Two, and its subculture included nearly a thousand individuals in Domesville alone. These were mostly native children who had never seen the light of Sol except as a pinpoint in the night sky, and they wore their troll skins with proud defiance, as youngsters before them might have worn a jacket of rakish well-leather. Children had always had this talent: to pervert the practical into something symbolic. And truthfully, this had the desired effect in that Conrad was less inclined to trust a troll than he was a human being. Except for Mack, of course.

“You treat me like I look,” a young trolless had once accused Conrad, on a crowded street at Festival time.

Conrad's crime: stepping away from her so as not to loom. And his reply: “Obviously, miss. Our appearance is the first thing we say to the people around us, and yours is a scream of defiance.”

To her credit, the trolless had giggled at that, and winked an enormous eyelid, and melted back into the rear of the crowd to be among her friends, her own kind.

But in Mack's case Conrad knew the person beneath the skin—indeed, had known the person before the skin—and had long since stopped noticing the way he looked. In some sense this was the underlying message of Mack's appearance: that it was appearance itself that could not be trusted. Mack could be a wiseass without even opening his mouth.

“Hi,” Conrad said to him over the holie link. “I'm going to be late on the job site this afternoon. I'd like you to complete the survey on your own, if that's all right, and then get those damned foundation people out there. I want a slab of actual stone this time—preferably basalt, but I'll take what I can get.”

There were basalts in P2's metal-poor crust, but they were buried very deep, and approached the surface only at Belladonna Canyon in the Southern Lowlands, where a robotic quarry with no permanent human (or troll, or other humanoid) residents turned out a meager and sporadic supply of cobblestone and foundation slab. And without tectonics raising ocean floors into mountain ranges every now and again, P2 didn't offer much in the way of sandstone either. Mostly, Conrad had to make do with pumices and granites, or even, in a pinch, blocks of poured concrete. These days he was using wellstone only as needed, as its price seemed to be pegged to the colony's population numbers and was therefore rising steadily.

And come to think of it, maybe that was the kind of warning sign the King and Queen of Sol were asking about. Certainly, in an optimal economy the goods and services should grow at least as quickly as the consumer base. Right?

“All right,” Mack said uncertainly. “I can handle that. Should I stop short of threatening violence?”

“Please,” Conrad confirmed. “But not too far short. We can't keep building on pumice—not if we're going to live forever.”

“Understood. I hope you don't mind a bit of curiosity though; what's so important all of a sudden? Not another woman, I hope.”

“No. Well, fifty-fifty chance, I guess. I'm going to see a doctor.”

Mack slowed a little, then resumed his quick pace. “Anything wrong?”

“Just a tune-up,” Conrad assured him. “It's been a while. We mustn't neglect these things—the delicate machineries which support the soul.”

“Noted,” Mack said. “Shall I expect you later?”

“Just play it by ear. Your ears are big enough for that, I should think. Anyway, I'm not quite sure how the hospitals work anymore, or how long it takes. Don't expect me until you see me.”

Mack seemed satisfied with that, but it was hard to tell for certain, because trolls usually looked satisfied. “All right, then, Boss. Have fun.”

Mack took instruction very well, needing little in the way of hand-holding or micromanagement, and in Conrad's experience that was a very good sign indeed. The best leaders were also, for whatever reason, the best subordinates. Mack was a bit, well, green for a leadership position just yet—only ten years old by the calendar, possibly twenty or twenty-five if you counted adult-equivalent experience, for his childhood had been brief. But Conrad was grooming him, and when the time came, he hoped to hand over a lot of his day-to-day labors to this enterprising young man, freeing himself up for certain big-picture issues, like why his materials were getting so damned expensive.

Bother it, maybe he should have taken Bruno and Tamra a bit more seriously. He cleared his throat. “Mack, I've heard a . . . rumor, I guess, that we might have some economic troubles lurking in the background. Not us personally—I mean the whole colony. Would you keep your eyes and ears open for me?”

“Sure, Boss. What sort of troubles?”

“If I knew, I'd tell you. But we're already facing price increases which affect our ability to do business, and that may have something to do with it. Just be aware.”

“There has been some gossip, I guess.”

Conrad raised an eyebrow. “Yes? Like what?”

And here Mack showed what a disturbing thing the smile of a troll could be. “Sir, if I repeated it, I'd be gossiping. But I can try to get some details for you. Should I ask around?”

“Not overtly,” Conrad said, after thinking about it for a moment. “It may be nothing. It's probably nothing. But if you see any signs that things are maybe not going so well, let me know.”

“All right,” Mack said with typical pragmatism. “Will do.”

And he would. Mack was a man of his word, and reasonably creative to boot. The funny part was, neither of Mack's parents—both of them human—had ever displayed much initiative or leadership, or even a good work ethic. But when you mixed them together just so, you got something more than the apparent sum of the parts. It couldn't be anything in the way he was raised, because Mack wasn't “raised” at all in the usual sense. Like most of the children of Barnard, he was born in a fax machine, as a weighted random mixing of the genes and generic memories of his parents. He had entered the world at the physiological age of fifteen, knowing how to speak and walk and tie knots, and with the vague sense that he'd had a childhood somewhere, though the specific details were muddy.

He had joined Conrad's crew only five years later, already a productive member of society, and with a rather disarming acceptance of anything his elders might choose to tell him. One of the first on-the-job lessons Conrad had tried to impart was to question everything—especially authority—because if a child didn't know at least that much, what great things could you really expect of him? And so, Mack had dutifully joined the trolls, not merely in shape but in habit and thought.

“They're raw. They just seem to have it closer to right,” he'd told Conrad at the time. And what could Conrad—himself a childhood rebel—say to that?

With its wide-open spaces—empty land totaling five times the Earth's own surface area—P2 also had centaurs, who could cover a lot of ground in a day. They were “indolent, snooty fuffers,” in Mack's opinion, and you didn't tend to see them much in the actual cities. They needed to stretch their equine legs, and tended to stay in the farm country and the wilderness beyond it.

Of course, there was more to society than just these two groups; while a majority of people preferred a human skin, fully twenty percent of the colony had gone troll or centaur. Another five percent had taken even more exotic turns—like the semiaquatic gillmen and four-armed vishni—or had fit themselves into body plans of their own unique design. Some of the forms were beautiful—hell, a few were glorious—and their owners claimed to have viewpoints as unique and valuable as the skins around them.

“I can think in shapes,” one young man had told Conrad in a job interview, through a mouth that seemed little more than a slit in the pimple-like protuberance of his head, on a body covered in smooth yellow scales. “I can smell an improper angle.”

Which was probably true. Probably. But the boy could barely walk, and couldn't look up at all, and Conrad had advised him to seek employment in some industry where his death by falling debris was not quite so bloody likely. The fact remained that the human form had been refined through a million generations of primate evolution, where these one-off experiments had not. Any architect could tell you that new features—especially glorious ones—exacted their cost somewhere else in the system. There were trade-offs aplenty, but no free lunches, or even cheap ones. And the consequences of random experimentation could be awfully severe.

Indeed, many of the self-made were lurching, shambling disasters—the failed “angel” subculture being the most prominent example. In the unlikely event that Conrad ever decided to shed the humanity that Donald and Maybel Mursk had given him, he would probably stick close to an established body form for exactly this reason: because a thousand boisterous kids couldn't be too far wrong. If nothing else, they knew what felt good.

“Anything else?” Mack asked.

“No, thanks, that's all for now. I'll see you. End call.”

The holie window winked out, leaving Conrad alone.

There was no doubt about it, of course: Mack was his surrogate son. As he'd told the monarchs of Sol, he'd never yet felt the desire to procreate. Oh sure, he made copies of himself, but he'd never found anyone that he felt comfortable mixing them with, to create an entirely new person, as different from Conrad as Mack was from Karl Smoit.

It wasn't that he lacked for women in his life, either. In fact, the breeding program had been accelerated for that most carnal of reasons: the colony had had more men than women, and the gender imbalance was pleasing to no one. So the faxes of Domesville and especially Bupsville had cranked out hundreds—and eventually thousands—of custom-built women into the waiting arms of the colony's men. And maybe, if Conrad thought about it, that was part of the problem: the word “children” to him meant “other people's children,” whom he might hire, or ask out on a date, or engage with in more specific recreational activities.

But to breed with one of them, to use a child to produce another child, well . . . that did strike him as unseemly. This probably marked him as an eccentric or even—God forbid—a naturalist in the eyes of the children who knew him. But a man had to have his limits, and know them, and stay within them if he wanted his own respect.

And anyway, the dating pool of women his own age was pretty damned sparse, and he'd worked his way through most of it—the bits he cared for, anyway—in the colony's first century. And with this reflection, it occurred to him with some surprise that he was probably waiting for the wheel of his life to make another big turn and give him a shot at Xmary again. He wasn't her first love, nor probably her longest, but she was his on both counts. That meant something, and though it seemed a complex task to bring his life back in line with hers, well, he did have forever in which to accomplish it.

And this thought, in turn, brought a rare burst of sympathy for his ancestors, for the thousands of human generations who had lived and died in the distant past, never dreaming of this moment. If he were one of them, he'd've dropped in his tracks a long time ago and never had his second chance, or even known that he'd wanted one. “Life is short,” they used to say. Ha!

And goodness gracious, on the heels of that came still another realization: if the future really was infinite, then his second shot at Xmary, like the first, was doomed to fail. And then, perhaps, to succeed again. And again, and again, in a never-ending cycle he could neither change nor wish to escape from. And he felt in that moment, for the first time in his life, what it truly meant to be immorbid. And for some reason, the idea made him shiver.