Lost in Transmission

Chapter eight. The unpacking

The target asteroid was nameless and would remain so, both because it was a minor body—smaller than Newhope—and because it was about to be destroyed. Or rather, reshaped and reborn. They pulled up alongside it on August 1 of the year Barnard 123, or Queendom 416, or—according to Robert, in a particularly pedantic mood—2680 by the old Christian calendar.

“Well,” Conrad said, cracking his knuckles, “it's finally time to unpack.”

But when he turned to Xmary, sitting beside him on the bridge, her face was misty rather than exultant.

“What's the matter? Cap'n?”

The corners of her lips twitched up for a moment, and then sank once more. “My ship,” she said sadly. “My beautiful ship. In a few minutes, we'll split open her belly, pull out her entrails, and feast upon her corpse.”

Robert looked back at them, clearly about to say something, but Conrad headed him off. On matters of crew morale, Conrad had clear jurisdiction, and concerning the emotional well-being of Xiomara Li Weng in particular, it was as close to absolute as these things ever got.

“It's not as bad as all that, ma'am. We're not pulling out Newhope's entrails, just, maybe, pumping her stomach. And, you know, going through her pockets. She'll never be the same, it's true: the clean, needle lines of her shape will be broken up a bit. To my mind, she's spreading her wings. Or perhaps she's a stork with four thousand babies to deliver, plus whole communities for them to live in, and infrastructure to support them. But Newhope, my dear, will live on. For a long time, I think.”

But Xmary was shaking her head. “She won't be aerodynamic, Conrad. She won't be properly equipped. She won't ply the starways ever again—not without a major overhaul, or unless we strip her down even farther. From starship to tugboat, in one vicious cut.” She dropped her voice to a murmur, so that only Conrad could hear her—although technically, the wellstone around them was more than capable of picking up her voice, amplifying and recording it, and since the fundamental programming had been laid down by Queendom engineers, one had to assume it was doing exactly that. But barring the unlikely return of said starship into the hands of said Queendom engineers, this mattered little.

It should also be noted that in the Queendom, belief in far-future “quantum archaeologists” was widespread and unshakable. People generally agreed, for whatever reason, that their actions, their imprints, their electromagnetic ghosts would be open to future scrutiny, even where the events themselves took place in the absence of witnesses. Information persists, people were fond of saying. This was a reasonable supposition, and in many ways provably true, for such archaeologists already existed in small numbers. But for the most part the belief sprang from the same irrational roots as the urban and rural and faery myths of earlier ages. And the queen's subjects could not know of the terrible changes in store for Sol and her planets—changes that would crush a great deal of this information completely out of the observable universe.

Be that as it may, the conversation was as private as it could reasonably be in a programmable environment, in a quantum universe, with live human beings all around. And so the two of them spoke and thought and emoted without artifice, without any thought of audience or posterity. Such exchanges are, when preserved, the rare treasures of quantum archaeology.

Xmary went on, in her quiet voice. “I hate this. I never wanted to be the captain of a tugboat. What kind of job is that, for a spoiled girl from Denver?”

For a moment, Conrad was surprised to hear her say this. Unpacking was good, right? Getting the hell out of this prison! But then, thinking about it, he supposed he too might feel some ambivalence about it if his role were about to shrink and shift so dramatically.

In point of fact, he was personally very excited, because once the initial colony structures were printed and assembled, there would be need—enormous need!—for the design of new buildings and support systems. The Kingdom would require an architect or two, and while Conrad had only ever designed and built one major structure, and that a mere school exercise which was torn down afterward to make room for another project, Conrad knew he had it in him to do the job. He was a decent matter programmer in the aesthetic sense, as the bridge's current motif of white gold and pearl could attest, and really a pretty good one on the materials science side as well.

Why, at age seventeen he'd pulled the lining out of a midsized planette and fashioned it into a rigid one-way superreflector—the photosail of the good ship Viridity. He'd handled that ship's climate controls and waste disposal systems as well, and had even taught Xmary enough about programming to support two abortive mutinies. During his later studies, he'd even discovered a new material, which was named after him in the Encyclopedia of Elements and Compounds: Mursk Metal. It wasn't the strongest or the brightest or the most conductive of materials, but it had the interesting property of “intermittent optical superconductance as function of temperature.” From 84 to 104 Kelvin, and again from 200 to 231 Kelvin, the stuff was a pure insulator with an optical band gap of almost 10 eV. Opaque, yes, but at every other temperature it transmitted photons with zero energy loss, making it a new and unique member of the optical superconductor family. Conrad, all fired up to design his building, had intended the stuff to be used as window glass. To the best of his knowledge no one had ever used it that way except himself, but somebody at World University had later found an application for it in hypercomputer designs.

Conrad supposed he was still technically accruing royalties on that in his Queendom bank accounts. Twenty dollars a year? A hundred? The price of a good massage, anyway, or a couple of fax trips around the solar system. None of this meant much of anything by itself—probably half the adults in the Queendom earned occasional royalties on something or other—but it was a visible sign, something that Conrad could point to in an argument to defend his supposed architectural abilities. In fact, no such argument had ever come up, nor was it likely to. The point was simply that Conrad was going to do some designing, both in orbit around P2 and on its surface, and no force in the Kingdom could prevent him, or was likely even to try.

What he said to Xmary was, “I think it will be exciting. You never wanted to be a starship captain either, but you've been doing it for nearly half your subjective life now, and have grown nicely into the role. Right? And it seems to me there's a lot more to do on an interplanetary vessel than an interstellar one. For a hundred years you traveled in a straight line, and for twenty-three in a big spiral. Now you'll have a new destination every couple of months. A new cargo, a new mission. Maybe not as many lives will depend on you at any particular moment, but no civilization could possibly rise here without your efforts.”

That didn't seem to mollify her. She said, “Conrad, I want to live on a world. I want to stay with you. But then someone else would be Newhope's captain, and what would I be? A party girl? I will drive the tugboat. I'll stay here with Newhope, bumping around Barnard system, but you won't. I know you won't. You're going to Planet Two.”

And here was a thought which had honestly never occurred to Conrad, though surely it should have. In his mind, somehow, Barnard system was conceived as a single place. But in fact, of course, it was hundreds of light-minutes across, and consisted of many thousands of individual places, not even counting the surface of the planet, which was an infinity of places unto itself. None of which would contain Xmary.

Suddenly, he felt his own eyes grow misty, though he kept his voice brave. “Oh. Well. Not to worry, dear; you'll be stopping frequently at P2. I mean, I have to assume you will. As the main population center, it stands to reason it will also be the center of industry, and therefore the main destination for cargo. Right? So you'll pop down to the planet, or I'll come up, and we'll see each other nearly as often as we have on Newhope.”

“Not as often. Not nearly as often.”

Conrad sighed, because she was right. There was no sense kidding themselves about it. They had loved and fought, grown bored with each other in the perpetual sameness of Newhope and then rekindled their passions as Barnard approached. And every step—even the negative ones—seemed to make them stronger in the end. But here was a new challenge of an altogether different sort: time and space, unfettered.

“Well,” he said carefully, “maybe so, but it's only for a while. When we get the collapsiter grid installed, we'll be able to fax back and forth at leisure, and this whole ship will be just one more room in my big, beautiful house. We'll have the speed of light between us, and nothing more.”

“And when is that?” she asked sadly. “Twenty years from now? Forty? A collapsiter grid doesn't just grow, like a houseplant. It's built up from pieces of pieces of pieces.”

“Maybe,” he acknowledged. “Maybe that long. We'll see, I guess.”

But the time had come for personal conversations to cease; the target rock was in position, snared with electromagnetic grapples and pressors, and a team of gleaming humanoid robots was out there wrapping physical lanyards around it, to keep it from sliding around during passfax operations. The bridge was plastered with views from various points on the ship and a few—lurching sickeningly—from the robots themselves.

Xmary raised her voice to normal command levels. “Brenda, what is your status?”

A well-window appeared in the bulkhead, showing Brenda Bohobe in the aft inventory. She looked up and said with all seriousness, “Ma'am, the passfax clears every diagnostic I can push it through. It has been edge-on to the particle flux for most of our journey, and has suffered some cosmic ray streaking, which I've repaired, but no other serious damage or degradation. As far as I'm concerned, you can throw open the doors and begin operation.”

Xmary nodded, her demeanor once again professional and leaderly. “Information?”

“Nothing to report,” Agnes said.

“Systems?”

“Everything is nominal,” said Zavery.

“Engineering?”

When Money Izolo appeared, he said, “The door has three latches, ma'am, and I've opened them all singly, while leaving the others closed. They all function, no problem. I can't test the force on the hinge motors, but I can verify that the coils are working, so there is virtually nothing that can go wrong.”

“I've heard that before, mister. Are you prepared for unknown emergencies?”

There was a twinkling in Money's eye, and he said, “Tell me what the unknowns are, ma'am, and I'll tell you if I'm prepared for them. We're as ready as we can be, yah? Let's quit dawdling already, and unpack our bags.”

Robert, for once, was not queried. He'd done his job already, guiding the ship alongside this nameless rock, and as far as the unpacking operations were concerned he was nothing more than a spectator. He fidgeted under the strain of this, but did not offer any opinions. Nor did Bascal, who sat a good deal more regally in his “temporary” chair behind the captain's.

Xmary paused for a few moments, sucking her teeth and frowning, before saying, “Open the doors, please, and activate the passfax.”

Newhope's mass buffers were already full, stocked with the assortment of elements a fledgling colony was expected to need, although the more reactive atoms had been compounded with carbon or hydrogen and stored as small, inert molecules. But the colony structures were all stored as data, in the same shielded memory cores which held the colonists themselves, and to instantiate them all would take nearly ten megatons of raw material. Hauling that mass all the way from Sol—even within the confines of an ertial shield—would be wasteful madness. Might as well haul the artifacts themselves! Instead, Newhope was designed to live off the land, making use of the materials native to Barnard system.

In a sense, Newhope was a fax transaction unto herself: both the transmitter and receiver, and also the carrier of the signal. In fact she was the signal, packaged as small and as light as the Queendom engineers could cram her. All she carried were emergency supplies: the organics and alkalai metals and electrolytes of human bodies and foodstuffs, and the heavier metals and semiconductors of wellstone and other programmable materials. There was also a supply of basic industrial metals, heavy on titanium and gold, plus a contingency periodic table with at least a ton of every stable element, just in case. And some of this would no doubt prove handy—perhaps even priceless—in the metal-poor environs of Barnard.

“He's an elder star, our Barnard,” the king said to no one in particular. “Not one of the original Titans—the hydrogen supergiants that blew themselves to plasma in the first gigayear of creation—nor even one of their helium-swollen children the Olympians. He's safely removed from that bitter past, that stellar ice age when even lithium was still a dream. He tastes of metal, and it's a good thing or we'd've never come to see him in the first place! But he is not of Sol's young, fat lineage. He's a grandchild, this runt star of ours, not some great-great spoiled in a carbon-rich nursery. His parents sent him off starving with a half-empty purse. And here we are, raiding it! Thank you, old man! There are younger, hotter stars than Sol, and they'll burn out sooner, choking on the iron in their bellies, and then Sol herself will swell and die.

“But Old Man Barnard will still be here, whiling away the eons. He learned frugality at an early age, learned to plan and save for the long haul. By the time he breathes his last, the galaxy will be dark with collapsars and neutronium, with iron nebulae and calcium dwarfs. These ancient, red-orange stars will be the last to go, the fading lights of creation.”

“Shut up, Bas,” said Brenda's voice over the comm system. “Passfax contact in forty-five seconds.”

With no discernible noise, the middle third of Newhope's hull had split open and folded itself out, looking—as Conrad had said—like a pair of dainty insect wings. This exposed the passfax, which then extended bootward along telescoping mechanical rails until it was thirty meters clear of the hull. Conrad realized he'd never seen the passfax before, not even a recorded image, but it looked exactly like he imagined it should: a gigantic fax machine with shimmery gray print plates on either side, thirty meters wide and a hundred tall. Like a big, flat sandwich. Like a pair of pearly gray doors slapped together around a tangle of plumbing and machinery.

“Those are the largest print plates ever constructed,” Bascal said to Brenda, as if somehow she wouldn't know this. “They are the largest single objects on the ship—the largest that could fit inside her. Any wider and they'd have to be assembled here on station, but I've never heard of a print plate with seams. That would be a tough assembly problem.”

“Contact in fifteen,” Brenda said in a louder and more irritable voice. On the well-window viewscreens, the gray-black asteroid—looking for all the worlds like a gigantic turd wrapped up in spiderwebs—approached the port face of the passfax.

“Not a problem without solution, one presumes, but surely expensive to implement? I wonder. I do miss our technical discussions, Brenda.”

“Shut up! Contact in five, four, three, two . . .”

There was the tiniest flicker of light where carbonaceous stone met the quantum machineries of the print plate, and then the asteroid was slipping—centimeter by centimeter—into the fax machine, for disassembly into individual atoms. But Newhope's mass buffers were full. Or nearly full, at any rate; a few tons might fit in here or there, to replace the mass of printed humans and robots and other equipment, but there was certainly no room for three megatons of disassembled rock. Instead, finished pieces spilled out the passfax's other side: metal beams, rolls and blocks of wellstone, clear panes of monocrystalline diamond.

Such a thing had never been attempted before: the real-time assembly of so many pieces, from so large a mass, with so little buffering. Nothing like the passfax had ever been needed before; this one was the prototype, the first of its kind. It had performed as intended, meeting requirements and passing diagnostics, so the infant Newhope—itself a prototype—had been constructed around it.

“It would be nice,” Bascal mused, “if we could simply extrude the whole, finished structure in one go. As it stands, we'll have that robot swarm crawling over the wreckage for hours, fitting the puzzle pieces together. And when they're finished, we'll see that primal eldest symbol of civilization here, within the borders of our Kingdom. A shipyard!”

“Your Highness,” Xmary said impatiently, “we're all excited. But could you tone down the commentary, please? Or do it somewhere else?”

“Ma'am, I believe His Highness is recording for posterity,” Robert protested.

“I don't care if he's recording for God himself. This is a work environment, in the middle of a delicate operation.”

“Ouch,” Bascal said. “Two ex-girlfriends telling the king to stifle himself. Let him eat cake! Or at least, let him stuff his cakehole with something soundproof and chewy. Very well, my dears, your sovereign will slink to the privacy of his quarters, there to contemplate the future of his future. And yours.”

His tone was jovial enough, but as the king left his seat and leaped for the downward spiral of the ladder, Conrad was pretty sure he caught a gleam of teardrops at the corner of those royal brown eyes. This was perhaps an emotional moment in more ways than one, and for more people than just Xmary and Conrad.

“Wow,” said the newly awakened Zavery Biko from his seat at the Systems Awareness console, when the king was safely out of earshot. “He seems different. Has he gone a little bit crazy?”

Conrad would have answered in spite of decorum, but Xmary saved him the effort, speaking almost the very same thoughts that were poised on his own tongue. “Bascal Edward was always crazy, Zav. Brilliant and impulsive, vaguely unhinged. He's an interesting man to stand beside, and I mean that in the Chinese-curse sense. Life in his shadow will never be dull.”

Conrad had long since stopped thinking in terms of planetary seasons and times of day, but it seemed like a long, lazy afternoon as the swarm of gleaming robots, over a period of six or eight hours, assembled the pieces extruded from the passfax. With his father, Conrad had many times helped to assemble vehicles in precisely this way, from kitted parts. When you were working on a road, or more properly, watching with bored eyes while your father worked on one, sometimes you found yourself in a remote location where the nearest public fax just wasn't big enough, or didn't have enough capacity in its midbuffers to extrude a complete machine. The machine's designers understood this, though, and so the machines rolled out in five or six easily mobile, easily connected pieces. And when you were done, you simply popped the pieces apart again, and fed them back into the fax. There were, of course, self-assembling kits whose parts were intelligent enough to get around on their own, but Donald Mursk had always disdained these, insisting that the ritual of assembly and disassembly was educational, fostering an intimate familiarity with the machinery, with the subtleties and intricacies of its operation.

“To use a thing properly, lad,” he had said one time, “you've got to know how it's put together.” And then, with a wry Irish grin he'd added, “That applies to women as well as machines. Keep that in mind for the future, eh? The study of anatomy is the best friend love ever had.”

Here in Pule'anga Barnarda, the Kingdom of Barnard, it was simpler to send robots out to do the actual assembly work. They were faster and stronger than human beings, more versatile than smart components, and of course they didn't complain. This particular kit—the Martin Kurster Memorial Shipyard, named for some old astronomer—consisted of several hundred distinct pieces that had to be rotated and translated in three dimensions in a particularly large and cunning geometry puzzle.

It was slow work, but fun to watch as it unfolded. For this reason, pretty much everyone on the ship was either on duty or in the observation lounge, and the number of people who were ostensibly on duty, but found themselves in the lounge anyway, was more than Conrad could count on the fingers of one hand. Still, except for Engineering and Information, Systems, and Stores, there were no critical assignments today, so Conrad was inclined not to notice.

As it came together, the shipyard proved every bit as large as the plans had promised, first equaling and then exceeding and finally dwarfing the outlines of Newhope beside it. The structure was mostly empty space, of course, but in Conrad's experience, most things were. Anyway, because of its great size, the project was visible from half the ship, and as it turned out, the view from Conrad's quarters was nearly as good as the ones from the bridge and lounge. So when their overlapping shifts had ended and the bridge was turned over to Robert, that was where Conrad and Xmary found themselves, looking out through the hull, which they had made transparent for this purpose.

“It'll be done soon,” Xmary said, with that wistfulness in her tone again. “Tomorrow we install the shipyard's own fax machines and pipe over some deutrelium and some mass from the buffers. My buffers. And after that, I'm off to Gatewood to pull a deutrelium refinery out of my ass. Well, out of Newhope's ass.”

She was crying now. Conrad rocked her in his arms, not knowing what to say or do. Were humans ever meant for stresses like these? Did situations like this occur naturally, over the course of human evolution? Prolonged and painful separations? He supposed they must have, and he supposed they had always been hard.

Over the later years of their journey Brenda had been building voluntary neurochemical balancers into the fax filter, and it occurred to Conrad that Newhope's crew might have gone into massive freakup a long time ago—gone murderous and suicidal, despondent and bitchy—if the “medicine” of the fax were not constantly propping them up. Conrad had gotten in the habit of printing a fresh copy of himself every couple of days, and sometimes more often than that, but still, even in a state of chemical balance, you could feel overwhelmed.

Maybe this was what it was like, back in the Old Modern days, when friends and family members and neighbors would suddenly drop dead without warning, never to be seen again. That would be harder, right? Or did an immorbid future of infinite possibility simply short-circuit the grieving process, without truly eliminating the need? For all he knew, he and Xmary might never see each other again.

What he said was, “And then, with a belly full of deutrelium, you'll return here and tow this yard to P2, where I'll be waiting. You'll leave the passfax with me, and with it I'll produce an orbital colony with a nice little corner to call our own. A place for you to come home to.”

“This is my home, Conrad. Right here, on Newhope. I never would have believed that, but it's true. I have no other skills or ambitions, no other place to go, unless I change the . . . the definition of myself. If I don't do that, I lose you, and if I do do it, then I lose myself, and everything else that matters. Either way, nothing can ever be the same again.”

And what could Conrad say to that? What was the purpose of revolution and exile, of starting fresh, if not that exact thing? She was supposed to feel uprooted. He tried to put words to this feeling, this dichotomy, but he was no Poet Prince. He didn't know a damn thing, not really. What came out of his mouth was a simple, stupid complaint: “This wasn't supposed to be painful. By gods, it wasn't. I've seen the master plan, and that wasn't in it.”