Lost in Transmission

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.”

“Great. That's a great comfort to me, Mr. Mursk. You really know how to cheer a girl up.”

“Okay,” he said, sighing. He'd just met this newly minted person, and should not presume to solve her problems for her. Like his own long-ago teenage angst, it had a solid basis in reality. And unlike the brash young Conrad, Wendy had no real context for judging her circumstances. It was all new to her; she was waking up and looking around, finding the world not entirely to her liking but having no idea what to do about it. Welcome to life, baby girl.

Like a solar sailor in a difficult turn, he shifted his mirrors and tried a different approach. “Listen, Wendy, you should come by my office sometime. Just ask directions from any block of wellstone; the place is no harder to find than this house. I'll introduce you to a nice young man, and maybe he'll show you around. He's not too nice, you understand—he has his own way of doing things. But I gather that won't be a problem for you. It must be . . . very exciting, seeing everything for the first time like this.”

She shrugged again. “I guess. It all seems kind of normal.”

Ah, youth. A child could grow up in the fires of hell itself and still consider it normal.

“Take my word for it, then. This is a magic time which will never be repeated no matter how long you live. In later years you'll look back and wish you had treasured it more.”

She looked at him for several seconds, then asked, “Why do old people always say stuff like that?”

Conrad thought for a while before answering. “Because it's true, I suppose. Because we hope to be listened to, though we know we will not.”

Was he really as old as all that? Did it show? Had he dug himself into so deep a rut that any break in the routine was this unsettling? He was philosophizing, for crying out loud. Conrad Mursk, the ne'er-do-well space pirate and summer camp hooligan! But no, that was hardly fair to the original Conrad Mursk, who had never asked to grow up into . . . what? A man who worked hard all the time, never playing, decade in and decade out?

It was a troubling thought, and it panicked him so greatly that when Bascal finally arrived, the first thing Conrad said to him as he stood in the doorway—flanked by a pair of looming Guards—was, “I need a new job, Bas. Your Majesty, Sire, I need to be someplace far away. Your daughter here—who by the way you should've told me about!—has persuaded me that my life needs shaking up. And she's correct. How did I not see this? Why didn't you tell me?”

“Um, I did,” the king said, blinking. “Didn't I?”

“Can you get me out of here? Bas, I need adventure, or anyway I need change. Sudden, dramatic change—the kind that keeps a person young.”

“But you're the greatest architect in the world,” the king protested. “You're building a world for the rest of us to inhabit. It's what you always wanted, right? You had to come six light-years to achieve it!”

“I wanted it, yes, but not forever. Not some unchanging rut to last me all through eternity. Have I never thought this through before? There has to be something next, doesn't there? Or my life is over, and the fact that I'll never die becomes an actual liability.”

“May I come in?” Bascal asked with mock impatience.

“Oh. Sorry, yes.” But Conrad, lost in his thoughts, continued to block the doorway. “You've said it yourself: there are other architects. I don't have to build the whole world. If I'm going to live forever then I should be out there, experiencing things. Right? Maybe my childish ambitions are something I'm supposed to outgrow. We used to be pirates, for crying out loud. Every day a new adventure.”

Laughing, Bascal nudged Conrad out of the way and stepped inside. One hulking Palace Guard trailed in behind him. “That wasn't what you said at the time, boyo. You were a miserable mutineer who never stopped trying to get us out of that business. And you were successful in the end, if I recall correctly. We were caught and punished. Did you forget that part? Or sleep through it?”

“I was a fool, then. Just get me away from here, away from myself, so I can't fall back into this habit. Send me somewhere. Make it an order, a proclamation.”

“Okay, okay. Calm down.” The king pulled out a chair and sat down next to Wendy. “As it happens, I know of a job which just opened up, for which you're uniquely qualified. Yesterday I wouldn't have dreamed of asking, but it seems the situation has changed. How would you like to work in space again?”

“Perfect,” Conrad said, seizing on it and nodding vigorously. “The stars, the vacuum . . . When do I start?”

“Four days. Actually, ninety-seven pids. Fuck I hate this planet's clock. It's three months from now, all right? On December first.”

“You designed the clock, Bas.”

“God designed it, my boy, to keep this place from ever quite feeling like home.”

“Hey, what about me?” Wendy protested from the kitchen. “Mr. Mursk, you said you had a young man for me. You said you'd show me around, or he would, or something. You just got done telling me how that pirate stuff was all in the past. What were you, lying?”

Bascal looked from Conrad to Wendy and back again. “It sounds as though I missed something. Perhaps something better missed, something a good father ought not to want to know. Wendy, fear not, I will order Conrad to keep his promises to you, provided they are honorable. And Conrad, with this Guard as my witness, I do hereby legally request your presence at Skyhook Station at the top of the Gravittoir, there to travel to Bubble Hood, for rendezvous with your ship. I can't make it an order, much as I'd like to, but my suggestions have considerable impact on those who disregard them.”

“Fine,” Conrad said, allowing himself to relax. The situation was fixable. In fact, he had all of eternity to fix it, and this was just the first step. “What's the job?”

Bascal smiled wickedly. “Why, first mate of the QMS Newhope. She's got a systemwide procurement tour coming up, and I need someone onboard I can trust to speak for me. The captain is an old girlfriend of yours, I'm afraid, but that's just the sort of problem we immorbids have to put up with in life. So? What do you think?”

Conrad mulled it over for about a tenth of a second before saying, “With this Guard as my witness, Sire, I accept.”

And thus was sealed the fate of a planet.