Lost in Transmission

Chapter twenty. The feast of permanence

The palace dining room was not large, as such things go. It held a single long table with seating for twenty, plus some additional wellstone chairs along the walls so that, Conrad supposed, people could come to watch their betters eat.

Well, maybe that was unfair. If he were going to sell that feature as part of a building design, he would call it “buffet seating,” good for informal parties and such. Which he supposed this gathering probably was. And this room was, he reminded himself, part of a building he had personally designed!

There were no decorations or lighting fixtures per se, because the walls and floor and ceiling were all made of wellstone. Light and windows could appear anywhere. But this by itself had become a rare thing on P2, and its novelty was not lost on Conrad now, especially since the programming was all new. The surfaces emitted a soft glow, with cleverly subtle spotlights shining down onto the table itself. Looking up at the ceiling he found it difficult to see precisely where they were coming from.

The shadows were carefully controlled as well, while stained-glass windows along the north wall admitted just enough natural light, in just the right mix of colors, to lend a picnic air to the proceedings. The windows were nonrepresentational, and shifted slowly from one pattern to another. This, too, was a quaintly decadent touch, and showed good taste. Princess Wendy's, apparently.

Brenda's stolen fax machine—a great, gray slab surrounded by exposed piping and circuitry—dominated one end of the room, with Bascal sitting before it at the head of the table. To his great surprise Conrad found himself seated at the foot of the table, a position of honor to be sure, and in spite of the manner of his arrival he could not help feeling flattered. At the king's left was Princess Wendy, and beside her, to Conrad's additional surprise, was Mack.

Conrad would never forget the initial meeting between those two: throbbing with subdued passion that seemed destined to burn itself out within a few weeks. He hadn't stuck around to see the end of that kiddie relationship, but he had never doubted that it would end. Until now. Funny; he'd traded a dozen messages with Mack over the years, checking up on his old business, his old protégé, but Mack had never once mentioned the princess. And yet the way he sat, the way she sat, the way they looked at each other . . .

“Hi, Boss,” Mack said to him, and though he smiled there might have been a bit of rebuke in his tone. For he still ran Murskitectura, the company Conrad had started in the early years of the colony. And he ran it alone.

“Hi, Mack. How's business?”

The smile became a smirk. “How do you think? The population's not expanding, there's no free capital for discretionary building, and your damned masterworks will last five thousand years if they last a day. We're getting margin work: adding a new housing wing here and there, in your name and style. You cast a long shadow, Boss.”

“Sorry,” Conrad offered sincerely.

But Mack just laughed. “Hey, I'm only a troll. What do I know, or need to?” He raised Wendy's hand in his own. “It's enough that I keep my lady in diamonds.”

This was a joke; diamonds were commonplace in the crust of P2, worth little more than quartz. But Wendy laughed, and seemed to find it witty.

“Welcome, First Architect,” she said, waving Conrad toward his assigned position.

Brenda was seated at Bascal's right, and seemed far more annoyed than flattered by the attention, while Martin Liss, the doctor from Domesville hospital, was seated to her right. Farther down the table sat a number of people Conrad didn't recognize, but then, in the middle, were Robert and Agnes M'chunu, whom Conrad hadn't seen in ages but who, by all reports, had made quite a good show of things after deciding to get married. They were light farmers or something, tending solar collectors and capacitor banks and selling power on the open market, but they also grew and sold vegetables. Conrad had a hard time picturing them grubbing in the dirt, although he supposed someone had to, or half the colony would be living on glucose and protein paste from crappy waste-disposal faxes.

They didn't need chairs; Robert and Agnes had joined the centaurs long ago. Galloping across the open countryside was perhaps not as glamorous as flight, but even so the centaurs were, in some sense, the realization of the angels' dream: speed and strength, with an empty world in which to test them. “We're the freest people who ever lived,” Robert had told him once. Now the two of them sat at the table on four folded legs, with dainty little prayer rugs under them to prevent their chafing against the wellwood floor. But they were still colored that same shade of bright, unnatural blue, from head to hoof to swishing tail. Even among centaurs, they were iconoclasts.

“Hello, sir,” Robert said to Conrad.

“Hi,” he returned. “You two are looking well.”

“Healthy as horses,” Robert said, then laughed at his own joke. “The country air does a body good, but I think by now you've learned that for yourself.”

Conrad was disappointed, though truthfully not terribly surprised, to find Ho Ng seated at his own left. With effort, he managed to smile politely at his old nemesis. Though still a commander in the Royal Barnardean Navy, Ho was married now, too, and his wife (apparently printed only a few weeks before) sat at his elbow looking adoring and excited and terribly, terribly young.

“If possible,” Ho was saying, while his hands sketched cylindrical shapes in the air, “you want to fire along the target ship's longest axis, to rupture the maximum number of compartments. The Queendom's naval theoreticians have never fought a real battle, but their analysis is bang on.”

“Have you fought a real battle?” Conrad asked him, surprised.

“Two,” Ho said, looking him over. “Space pirates, out in the Lutui Belt. Where the fuck have you been?”

Conrad snorted. “Nice to see you, too, Commander.”

To Conrad's right were a pair of empty chairs, and presently their occupants appeared in the doorway: Feck the Facilitator and his noble captain, Xiomara Li Weng. Conrad lit up when he saw them.

“Xmary! Feck! So they tazzed you too, eh?”

“What?” Feck said, looking back at him blankly.

“Where's Money?” Conrad tried.

And Feck answered, “Living on Element Pit, if you can believe it. Still working the bugs out of that neutronium drip-line pump of yours. He's going to blow that place up, I swear.”

“Of mine? I had nothing to do with that.”

“Really? Your name is on the patent. And truthfully, Money's onto something. Even the Queendom is taking an interest, though of course they're years out of synch.”

Xmary just smiled and sat down beside him. “Hello, darling. I heard you broke your arm.”

“Oh, that? It was nothing,” Conrad assured her. The sound of her voice had arrested him; suddenly he was seeing nothing but her eyes, her cheekbones, the happy upward curve of her lips.

“That's not what I heard. Someone told me you almost froze to death.”

Conrad sighed, then smiled. “The world is full of spies, I suppose. Yes, I caught my shoe in a crack and broke my arm falling; then I had to walk two kilometers through blinding snow with no direction finder. Are you happy now?”

From the other end of the table, Brenda called down at them, “He won't be breaking it anymore, Captain. These latest filters weave wellstone and nanotubes into the bones, along with a cylindrical sleeve of brickmail.”

“They do?” Conrad asked, surprised. Brenda hadn't mentioned that at the time. There had been no consent forms, no permissions or fine print, just a casual step through the plate. He found the idea vaguely unsettling, though; brickmail was a three-dimensional array of interlocked benzene rings—carbon chain mail, some called it—and it was the strongest nonprogrammable material known to humanity, by a considerable margin.

It was porous, too, allowing gas molecules to diffuse through, and even small fluid molecules like water. Well, under the right conditions, anyway. It wasn't difficult to picture a honeycomb of that stuff inside his bones, propping them up, making them stronger and lighter than bones had any right to be. The idea of being indestructible was actually kind of appealing—he might even survive a bit of Security training—but of course he still had blood and marrow, internal organs and all that. If something really bad happened to him, they would find—intact!—these bits of artificial skeleton, with no Conrad attached to them.

Unless—and this was a crawly sort of thought—the changes ran deeper than that. His arm began, nonsensically, to itch.

“Am I still human?” he asked Brenda.

This provoked a hearty laugh from everyone at the table, most especially Mack.

“As much as ever,” Brenda replied, and then did something Conrad had never imagined her capable of: she winked. This brought more scattered laughter from the assembled diners, and Conrad had the distinct feeling there was some joke here that he wasn't in on. Spending the past few decades in such isolation had seemed like a good idea—most immorbid people seemed to do it sooner or later—but it did have its disadvantages. Even onboard Newhope, he'd been connected more or less directly with the machineries of government, and with the palasa, the bronze, the upper stories of Barnard's social pyramid. Not so on Snowflake, or in the Polar Well.

C'est la vie.

When dinner arrived, it pushed upward from the table's surface as if growing: bowls and mugs, plates and utensils rising into the light of existence. Conrad realized with a shock that the entire tabletop was an industrial-grade print plate, cleverly disguised. Good God! Here was a table he'd be sure to keep his elbows off of, lest it suck him in for raw material!

“Kataki hau o kai,” Bascal said in his best Tongan, marking the official beginning of the meal, though in fact more than one set of fingers had already pinched a morsel.

The dinner itself was an odd blend of old and new traditions. The main course was a Barnardean favorite: TVs. This consisted of dozens of little television holies composed of edible polymers and served in a bowl, chilled. The pictures on all the little screens cycled through some of the best-known scenes from the early Queendom and the late Tongan monarchy at the tail end of Old Modernity. There was sound, but it was turned down so far that Conrad couldn't make it out over the conversation around him.

Along with TVs there was a salad composed mainly of Earth plants that grew well on Planet Two: dandelion and collard, sweet potato and dwarf peanut. But it was seasoned with a bitter mash: tévé from the islands of Tonga, also known as “famine weed” for its habit of sustaining the Polynesian peoples when other crops refused to grow. Ironically, though, no one had ever come up with a strain of tévé that could survive for long in the open on P2. You could grow it in filtered hothouses or print it whole (and dead) from a high-end food machine, and that was about it. Its presence here could only be symbolic: a carefully orchestrated nod toward the deprivations outside.

There were other delicacies: red tea and iceberg soup, sugar blossoms and meatcakes, but these were fitted in like garnishes around the two main courses. Truthfully, it was a better meal than Conrad had seen in centuries, or maybe ever.

Conrad turned to Princess Wendy and said, around a mouthful of TVs, “It's very nice to see you again, young lady. I've just realized that I never did meet your mother.”

Wendy's smile was radiant, almost painfully beautiful. Conrad did not doubt that she was a constructed creature, the child of her parents but equally, obviously, tailored to some optimum, some royal ideal of humanity.

She said, “I rarely see Mumsy myself, First Architect. She is not after all a member of the royal family, and while you might hope such things would not come between a mother and daughter, or any two people really, the simple fact is that they do.”

She punctuated this comment by taking up Mack's trollish hand and squeezing it. Mack, for his part, seemed at ease, as though he did this all the time. They made an interesting pair, this princess and troll, for trolls were, by all accounts, unusually gifted in the arts of love, but had almost no sense of taste, culinary or otherwise. Ironically, this fit perfectly with Conrad's architectural style, making Mack a very good successor for him: passionate and direct, free of silly distractions. But when it came to subtler business, the finer things in life were said to slide right by a troll, unnoticed or taken for granted. Like this banquet? Like fair Wendy herself?

Still, in a world where death was possible, odd pairings like this might be the norm—might even be preferred. The pressure was perhaps not so much to find a soul mate for all eternity, but to find someone smart and funny and interesting, to keep you company for a few decades while entropy crept up from behind. In his mind this new world was like a dance floor, urgently beckoning: grab a partner and go, before the music stops!

“I was going to marry her mother,” Bascal chimed in with a leer. “Truly, I was. But things got more difficult after Wendy was born. It changed the dynamic, and our relationship never really did spring back. It was Nala herself who called it quits. She's a surveyor now, and happily married out in the Blackberry Belts somewhere. We wish her all the best”—he glanced at his daughter as if for confirmation—“but she resists contact, and we have for the most part respected that. Even on this fine occasion.”

A coarse, unamused laugh escaped Conrad's lips. “Funny, you didn't respect me when I resisted contact.”

And here, the king's expression darkened. “Is that so? Well. You could have been my most trusted adviser, Conrad. There was no one else for the job. But even before you left Domesville, your avoidance of me had been, I would almost say, pathological. It hurts my feelings, but more to the point, it deprives society of a trusted voice.”

“The voice of reason?” Conrad asked with uncharacteristic sourness. “Next you'll tell me that with my advice, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. As if I could have done anything. As if I know anything the rest of the world doesn't.”

To his credit, Bascal considered these words seriously before replying, “Fair enough. We're at the mercy of economic forces that are larger than any of us. But still, you could've helped. You could have tried.” He looked glum for a long moment, but then found a reserve of cheer somewhere inside himself and said expansively, “I am sorry about the kidnapping, old friend. Perhaps we should have asked, but this occasion, this one particular occasion, demands your presence. A bit of melodrama makes it all the sweeter.”

“And what occasion is that, exactly?”

“Why, Wendy's birthday,” Bascal said, sounding genuinely surprised. Another thing Conrad was presumed to know.

“I'm fifty years old today,” Wendy chirped. The look on her face was appallingly self-satisfied.

Conrad's own face fell into a gape of dismay. “You're fifty? That's impossible. After you were born, I spent a few year . . . a few dec . . . well . . .”

He had spent a lot of time out and away. In space, on the sea, in the quiet of the Polar Well. Maybe it had been fifty years. Jesus and the little gods, when Conrad was fifty he was already the architect of a world, and that was his third career! First he'd been a paver's boy, and afterward a space pirate. This little girl, this supposed child, had lived a natural human lifespan and then some. Conrad found himself looking her over, appraising her in much the same way that Brenda had appraised him earlier. He felt he should reassess her in some way, change his baseless opinions about her, but he didn't know where to begin.

Finally, he just forced a smile and said, “Goodness, how the years fly by. It's a curse of the immorbid, this putting things off, this plenty-of-time-for-that-later mentality. It causes us to miss the things that happen quickly, even important things that are right in front of our faces. Like the flowering of a delightful young woman. My apologies, Princess, and happy birthday.”

“Thank you,” she said, looking appropriately charmed.

“Really,” Conrad said, “I'm surprised you remember me at all. We saw each other, what, four times before I shipped out?”

“Six,” she replied. “But who's counting? Mr. Mursk, the people we meet in early life leave a powerful imprint. When the mind is still forming and the hormones rage, and everything is brighter and grander, a face is so much more than just an oval of skin. We remember them, oh yes, and though they stray apart from us, they never really leave.”

Conrad thought of his own parents, and of the King and Queen of Sol, and of Bascal and all the other boys he'd gone to camp with. . . . He hadn't seen some of them in a century or more, but they remained his friends, the best friends he'd ever had. He could not disagree with Wendy's point.

“I always thought,” Wendy went on, “that you were fleeing from me as well as from my father. The very sight of me seemed to drive you into a panic. As it did my mother. It's a curious thing, isn't it? Confronted with youth, we discover the lack of it in ourselves. We must face the things we used to be, and the things we dreamed of but never were, and never will be. Do I frighten you still?”

There didn't seem to be a lot of emotion riding on the question. She wasn't going to be upset one way or the other, no matter how Conrad answered. But she was honestly curious, and for this reason Conrad gave the question considerable thought. Other conversations began to spring up around the table, but finally he said over them, “I think part of it was just my own weakness, Princess. You wanted . . . something . . . which I feared I might actually provide. It would have been unseemly, and I didn't trust myself.

“But there's truth in what you say: you made me feel old, for the first time in my life. And now you're fifty, and I feel older still. You are a bit frightening, yes. Your father has always been a sort of mad genius, and the women he loves have been intelligent as well, and always . . . sharp, I guess you'd say. Hard-edged.” He cast a glance at Brenda and found her looking back at him with a blend of annoyance and curiosity.

“So you fear I'm a deranged genius as well?” Wendy asked. “A faha alapoto?”

Conrad gestured with his hands, not quite nodding, not quite agreeing. “I just . . . I remember how we were: determined to change things, determined to get into trouble. And we have, on both counts. This colony's entire population is paying for the indiscretions of our youth. With their own lives, as often as not.”

Here Bascal injected a comment of his own, in vaguely wistful tones. “Death has been a constant companion through every age. Our own parents faced it early in their lives, or believed they did. In fact, death has shaped us all; the process of apoptosis, or programmed cell death, is crucial in the growth of any organism, from the lidicara to your own self. It's what gives you your shape and structure. Without death, you'd be a mindless blob, as monstrous and misbegotten as anything that ever spilled out of a fax. With death written into our very programming, did we really believe it could be banished forever?”

“Didn't we?” Conrad shot back. “Shouldn't we? What's civilization for if not to protect the lives of its people?”

The king smiled and shook his head. “No, sorry. That's a nice theory, but the only thing civilizations act to preserve is their own continuity. That's a very different thing. Rome lasted a thousand years, with an average citizen's life span of just twenty-five. Think about that. Lives were fleeting; it was ideas and institutions that mattered. Perhaps we have something to learn from their example.”

“How to die?” Conrad asked. “No, thank you. They didn't have a choice about it.”

“We may not, either,” Bascal said unhappily. “What are we to do, evacuate the planet? Newhope was meant to carry a hundred live people, plus cargo modules, including memory cores. Do we put everyone in storage? We can't, because the cores are full, and making more would tie up our best remaining faxes, further exacerbating the shortage.”

“We could freeze the living,” Conrad suggested half seriously. “Ship them in coffins.”

But Bascal rebutted that at once, and firmly. “Frozen bodies take up ten times more volume than the core space for a scanned human image. Captain Li Weng, how many coffins can your ship hold?”

Xmary shrugged, clearly reluctant to take Bascal's side over Conrad's. “I don't know. Properly containerized, I suppose it would be thousands.”

“Hundreds of thousands?” the king pressed. “Our entire population?”

“No,” she admitted, plucking a final morsel off her plate and popping it into her mouth. “Not nearly.”

Conrad had no reply to that, and the king's next words were gentler. “The answer is to live well, Conrad, to take joy in every day that remains. That has always been the answer. Do you know much about economics?”

Glumly, Conrad shook his head. “Not beyond what it takes to run a construction company, no. Why would I? I never thought I'd need it.”

“Well,” the king said, “it never hurts to know what fate has in store. I'll summarize for you, if you don't mind. Do you know what a free market is?”

“Sure,” Conrad said. In the same way he knew what a guillotine was, or a printing press. Contrivances of the Old Modern era, or perhaps even earlier, before even electricity had been tamed, when the world stank of horse manure and burning wax.

“Don't look so disdainful, my friend; free markets were elegant, self-correcting systems. With supply and demand driving the cost of goods directly, pathological outcomes—the razing of forests, the overvaluation of trivial commodities—were uncommon and brief. Most of the horror stories come from partially free markets, distorted by ill-considered policy. In fact, it's been shown mathematically that unregulated markets were two-thirds as efficient as perfect-knowledge monarchies. Without hypercomputers to guide them, the Old Moderns learned—painfully, to be sure!—that nature was better left to take its course.”

“Why are you telling us this?” asked one of the young men Conrad didn't recognize.

“In your case, Titus,” the king answered coolly, “because you happen to be here. As a bonus, you're also ignorant and in sore need of enlightenment. Others are merely curious.”

“‘Monarchy is the mathematical optimum of governance,'” Conrad quoted.

“Yes,” Bascal agreed, “but only with sufficient computing power to back it up, and only if the monarch himself is sensible. This is in large part why we retain the anachronism of a Senate, to whom formal power is nominally assigned. It's a check against my own potential for error. They have their own analysts, their own computers, and they're free to overrule my judgments if they deem it necessary.”

And if they don't value their careers, Conrad added silently. Bascal was well known for arranging the dismissal of senators who failed to share his vision.

“What I'm getting at,” the king said, “is that we can, in some actual tangible sense, prepare ourselves for what lies ahead. Quantum mechanics demands that the future be uncertain, but not infinitely so. Finite uncertainty, you see? Which is the same thing as a tiny bit of certainty. And as it happens, our productivity curves do not appear to crash to zero. Indeed, with finite certainty they seem to skirt it and rise again into prosperity. We have a long, dark night ahead of us, but if we can maintain that continuity of civilization, with labor-driven industries and children born the old-fashioned way, as actual babies from actual wombs, then our morning will eventually come, and with it perchance the revival of our dead.”

“Maintain it how?” asked the young man named Titus.

Bascal smiled at him. “Has it occurred to you, boy, that I'm addressing someone other than yourself?”

“Oh,” Titus said, dropping his gaze. “Well. My apologies, Sire.”

“Accepted,” Bascal answered dismissively. “Now do shut up.”

Toying with his mug, Conrad cleared his throat and said, “Why, uh, did you take this fax machine, Bas? As a birthday present? It belongs to a hospital.”

“I know very well to whom it belongs, boyo. They'll receive it in due time—probably within a few days—but in the meanwhile it has an official state function to perform. Namely, the archiving of the critical personnel here assembled. Backups have been sporadic since the palace machine went down, but continuity requires not only the right people, but also some synchrony among them. I can't have a five-year-old copy of my finance minister collaborating with a fifty-year-old copy of my security chief! Therefore a hard cable, surrounded by layered insulation of almost geological dimension, has been laid from here—from this very room wherein we dine—to the Southland Data Morgue where the memory cores are stored.

“And yes, never fear, I'll be updating the records of more than just you few; over the next few days we'll be cycling over a thousand people through these opalescent gates. Notices are going out as we speak.”

A thousand people. Barely half a percent of the colony's population. Conrad wasn't so dense as to require an explanation: Bascal could not save everyone, so he would save—literally save, archive, store—the people he deemed most valuable to the colony. Death would come, yes, but not for all. The imperfect promise of freezing and eventual revival would be reserved for the proletariat, the rabble, the serfs and peasants, while this immorbid elite feasted its way through the crisis.

Conrad sighed, feeling a bit more of the fight drain out of him. He could see the logic—even the inevitability—of this approach. But he and Bascal had been faced with such decisions before, in the very darkest of their pirate days, and Conrad had insisted at the time that they seek volunteers, that they draw straws, that death be accepted only as a voluntary sacrifice, not imposed as a sentence upon weeping innocents. And he'd been overruled.

Still, honor demanded his next words, which he stood to deliver. “Sire, I thank you sincerely for this honor, but I must decline. I wouldn't feel right about it.”

Bascal gave him a hard look, then finally an unhappy shrug. “Suit yourself. I think it's a mistake, and I'll invite you to reconsider. The colony needs its founders, its senior members, its most talented and insightful. But Jesus, Conrad, that tazzing was a joke. For old times' sake, you understand? And for my daughter's birthday. I'm not a monster, boyo. I'll not force anyone.”

This answer was unexpected, and Conrad was somewhat unbalanced by it, like a man who throws his weight against a wall only to discover it's really a curtain. To add lack of insult to this lack of injury, Bascal then rose from his seat—a signal to the other diners that the formal part of the dinner was over, that casual chitchat and milling around were duly authorized. This of course broke the spell of Conrad's gesture, leaving him no room to reply unless he raised his voice. And that would make him look like an ass, if he didn't already.

Damn.

“You're always showboating,” said Ho Ng, standing now at Conrad's elbow. His voice was quiet, more amused than menacing. “Imagining we're all, like, waiting to see what you'll do. Like we give a shit. So you'll be dead and frozen while the rest of us pull things back together. How dramatic. Is that supposed to make you a hero?”

Ho's wife, looking on from the sidelines, seemed rapt at his words. Or maybe just honestly in love. That couldn't be a bad thing, could it? Even if the man she felt it for was a shitheel? She seemed so young, so innocent. Maybe she'd be good for him.

“I may last longer than you think,” Conrad told Ho, and surprised himself by sounding amused. “Apparently I'm made of brickmail.”

Ho sneered. “Join the club, fuckwipe. I can see in infrared and breathe carbolic acid. You could shoot fifty holes in me without breaking my stride.”

“And you're charming, too,” Conrad told him.

“Oh, Conrad,” Xmary said, touching him on the arm. “Don't be like this, please. I want you safely stored, and not just for your sake or mine. It's the right thing to do. You are important to the colony.”

“He may be stored already,” Brenda said, sidling up around a knot of chatting youngsters. “I wasn't in the room when the cables went live, but Conrad's image was in the fax machine's buffer. If they flushed it rather than scrubbing, then he'd've gone straight to the Data Morgue.” Then she addressed Conrad directly: “I don't know what the fuss is about, anyway; you've never been deleted off the original personnel core. Some copy of you is kicking around down there, younger and snottier than you are today.”

“See?” Ho chimed in gleefully. “Showboating. Thinks he's something special. Better than the rest of us, certainly, when really he's just some old fuck hiding out in the countryside. Counting snowflakes.”

And that was rather an artful jab for someone as coarse and uncomplicated as Ho. Conrad felt he should choose his next words carefully. But just at that moment, the other end of the table rang with the clear, bell-like tones of dinner spoons on wellstone mugs, and a knot of admirers around Princess Wendy were shouting “Ten thousand years! Taha mano ta'u! Ten thousand years!” and hauling her in the direction of the fax machine.

“Wait,” she laughed. “I have to relieve my bladder; I have to fix my hair.”

But her friends were having none of that. “Fix it in the future!” they teased her. “You need some flaws to break the symmetry; store the real you!” And with a slingshot hold on her arms, they hurled her forward against the print plate.

“No! Not so hard!” Brenda shouted at them, but it was too late; the princess had gone ballistic, still on her feet but stumbling forward with one arm stretched out before her and the other trailing behind. To her credit, the last expression on her face was one of simple joy: the birthday girl enduring her mandatory ritual punishments in the spirit with which they were delivered.

The fax, alas, was not so accommodating. Accepting Wendy's careening mass, it flashed and sparked and groaned and then went dark; and with a smell of scorched meat the back half of that young, royal body rebounded from the print plate, flailed upright for a boneless moment, and then collapsed in a squirting heap upon the floor.

The sight of it was, for a moment, too alien for Conrad's mind to process. He did not, in that first second or two, have any idea what had happened, and all he could think—literally all he could think—was that young women really did shriek in horror, like extras in a bad movie, when something hot and red was splashed upon their gowns.