To Crush the Moon

Chapter One in which the arrest of a drifter proves troublesome

The ship had seen hard use over long years; her sides were streaked with burns and gouges, with dead spots where the hull’s wellstone plating had given out, leaving man-sized squares of inert silicon. She was one of the old starships, no doubt about that: a round needle thirty meters across and seven hundred and thirty long, capped at either end by a faintly glowing meshwork of blue-green dots: the ertial shields—essentially a foam of tiny black holes, emitting weakly in the Cerenkov bands. The ship was otherwise dark, her running lights extinguished. There was no sign of her photosail; the compartments that should hold it were open to vacuum, their doors torn away. The streaking patterns suggested this had happened long ago.

But the worst of the damage looked slightly less ancient: a round, meterwide hole punched through the portside hull of the ship, just in front of the engines, and out again through the capside in a shotgun-patterned oval large enough to admit an elephant. Interestingly, there were some intact pipes and ducts visible through the hole, running right through the path of destruction. These were shiny in the middle, and looked duller toward the hole’s edges, as if they’d been grafted in place after the accident. Structural damage to the hull itself was minimal; the hole edges looked almost cauterized, suggesting the projectile had been very small and moving very fast—a sand grain flying through at 1% of lightspeed. The actual damage had been done by heat, and by plasmified hull material entrained in the particle’s wake.

The fact that the ship was tumbling end-over-end at 2.06 revolutions per second also supported this theory. Getting that much mass moving that quickly required a substantial momentum transfer.

“Visual contact,” said Bruno de Towaji into the microphones of his space suit helmet. “Running lights and station-keeping thrusters are inactive, but there are signs of… well, perhaps not life, but activity at any rate. Something on that ship survived the accident, at least briefly. The severed plumbing between the reactors and deutrelium tanks has been repaired.”

Here in the hundred and thirtieth decade of the Queendom of Sol, Bruno himself was aboard the grappleship Boat Gods, which had its own ertial shield and its own deutrelium reactor, plus gravitic grapples whose use would be illegal for 99.9999% of humanity. With these, Bruno could grab on to anything—moons, planets, the sun itself—to pull Boat Gods around the solar system. The grappleship was tiny as such things went, but its interior was nicely appointed, and filled of course with breathable atmosphere. Bruno’s space suit—actually a set of full battle armor, with high-domed helmet and thick wellcloth shielding all around—was strictly a precaution.

The starship whirled in his view like a fan blade, like a dizzying wheel of enigma and peril and his own damned confusion. Irritated by the blurring motion, he switched to a snapshot view that updated every five seconds. And in one of these frozen views, in bold red letters affixed to the ship’s port side in some ancient chemical paint he read: QSS NEWHOPE. Which made sense on the one hand, for this ship had come out of the constellation of Ophiuchus, just off the Snake Holder’s right shoulder. And Newhope was the name of the ship that the Queendom of Sol had launched, long ago, to Barnard’s Star, which lurked invisible to the naked eye in precisely that location. The first of the great colony ships, yes. But on the other hand it made no sense at all, because the Barnard colony had been silent for hundreds of years—presumed extinct—and the QSS Newhope had been reported destroyed hundreds of years before that, in some sort of freak collision during an ill-advised sun-grazing maneuver.

“Target identity confirmed,” he said. “She’s QSS Newhope, apparently out of Barnard. Carrying what? Carrying whom? This makes no sense.”

And while Bruno had always loved a good mystery, this one was a bit too personal, for his own son had been a passenger onboard this ship. Had been the King of Barnard, just as Bruno was, now and always, the King of Sol. And though it be foolish—there was no reason to suspect his exiled progeny had escaped the colony’s fall—the sight of those words on the hull of the ship were enough to bestir in Bruno a pathetic sense of hope. For he loved his pirate, poet son as dearly as any father must.

What must it be like in there? Could anyone have survived? Those repairs had probably been carried out robotically, and in an ordinary spaceship that centrifugal tumbling would produce, what, almost six thousand gee at the fore and aft ends? Enough to crush a human into broth, to rend any possible hull or superstructural material. Even impervium—that strongest of wellstone substances, that perfect arrangement of quantum dots and confined electrons—should have given way long ago.

But this wasn’t an ordinary spaceship; it was an ertially shielded starship. Even sweeping sideways through the ether, those ertial shields would have a deadening effect on the space around them. Absorbing and destroying the vacuum’s delicate resonances, yes, clearing a bubble of supervacuum and greatly reduced inertia. And the so-called centrifugal force was inertia, nothing more.

Were there habitable, ertial spaces within the ship? Were there safe (or quasi-safe) regions where he could dock, for search and rescue purposes? Mathematically speaking the situation was appallingly complex, but here before him was a cheat, a peek at the answer, for QSS Newhope had not flown apart in a haze of carbon and silicon and black-hole hypercollapsite. Having been a professor and a laureate and a declarant long before he’d been a king, Bruno knew something of these matters, and though he declined to slog through the formal calculations, it seemed to him that attaching at the center and poking around would be safe enough.

And if not—if he destroyed himself—Boat Gods would simply withdraw, and print a fresh copy of him from its onboard fax machine. Or perhaps it would be flung away in ruin, and a fresh Bruno would have to be printed on Earth. Either way, it promised to be an interesting ride.

“Attempting a docking maneuver,” he informed Traffic Control. For all the good it would do them; by the time they received the signal, he’d already be dead, or several hours into his rescue. Boat Gods and Newhope had encountered one another in the vast, cold wastes of the Kuiper Belt, where the sun was little more than a bright star, and the waste-ice dredging of a few dozen unpiloted neutronium barges was the only activity in some sixty thousand cubic light-hours of space. Civilization was a long way off.

Anyway, survivors or no, if he could stop this ship or change its course there was profit to be made, for the hypercollapsites used in ertial shielding were among the most valuable commodities in existence. And God knew the cash would be useful! Bruno would fax himself back home and return with the Queendom’s finest salvage teams. And then the derelict, stripped of any special spacetime properties, could be vaporized by any superweapon his navy (or rather, his wife’s navy) preferred.

Nor was this some trifling bureaucratic matter, for QSS Newhope was, alas, on a direct collision course with the sun. Her navigators, setting out from Barnard over six light-years distant, had done their job too well; aiming at Sol and driving their error sources to zero. So, in thirty-two days’ time the derelict Newhope—moving at 2,500 kps, nearly 1% of the speed of light—would come screaming into the Inner System, passing the orbits of Mars and Earth and Venus and Mercury and then plunging (if grazingly) into the photosphere of their mother star.

The results would not be pleasant; the sun would escape destruction—probably—and the 90% of Queendom citizens nestled beneath bedrock or planetary atmospheres should be safe enough. But the flares would be colossal, and the Vacuum Cities’ billion-odd residents would have to be evacuated as a precaution. And there was no bloody place to put them. Ergo, the naval response.

But first an investigation, hmm?

How the lords and ladies of Tamra’s court had struggled against that suggestion! Or rather, against his doing it himself, without assistance.

“Dear,” Queen Tamra had said to him, intruding upon his study in the way she almost never did, except in times of real trouble. “There’s a tumbling starship on a collision course with the sun.”

“Hmm?” he’d said, looking up from the equations and sketches on his desk. His mind was bursting with wormhole physics; he barely heard her. He barely noticed the storm outside, lashing rain and tattered palm fronds against his windows while the waves hammered the beach below. He was close—he was close—to understanding the dynamics of the throat collapse that had destroyed every one of his test holes. And this was as important politically as it was scientifically, for a functioning wormhole would solve nearly all of the Queendom’s problems. Nearly all!

But Tamra knew this, and would not have broken his concentration without good reason. She could have printed an alternate copy of him from the palace archive, and given it the news, and let the two of him reconverge later on in the day. For an ordinary emergency, she’d’ve done exactly that.

Ergo this was no ordinary emergency, so with some effort he processed her words. “A starship, you say? One of ours?”

“Presumably,” she’d answered testily, for no bug-eyed aliens had ever been detected out there in the void, whereas Sol had sent ships out to a dozen and one colonies. Still, the king could be forgiven his surprise; none of those ships had ever come back. “It’s traveling out of Ophiuchus.”

“Ah, the Barnard Express! Any sign of our boy?”

Unhappily: “No. The ship appears to be derelict; perhaps her crew is in storage. But Bruno, she’s ertial, and on a collision course with the sun. Thirty-nine days from now.”

“Ah. I see.” Bruno nodded at that. As a young man not yet to the century mark, he’d made his greatest fame by rescuing the sun from the fall of the first Ring Collapsiter, which would surely have destroyed it. He rose from his chair. “Well, I suppose I have work to do.”

At this, Tamra simply rolled her eyes. “Your swashbuckling days are over, darling. We have a meeting with the navy in fifteen minutes.”

And this was true; he’d been king for eleven hundred years, whereas he’d been a swashbuckling hero for barely more than a decade, and only then by accident. Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji! It seemed an improbable history now, even to him. Before that he’d been a teacher, a drunken lover, a layabout courtier, and a wilderness hermit. Ah, but like everyone in the Queendom, he had the immorbid body of a twenty-five-year-old; his soul might grow old, but his physical self could not. Was he less capable of heroism now? Surely not! So he had dutifully attended his meetings, dispensing judgments and calculations and recommendations while his wife faxed herself to the navy’s flagship, the QSS Malu’i—Tongan for “Protector”—and ordered her seat of government temporarily transferred there.

And yes, it might be the job of a woman to manage a fleet in time of disaster, and to rule over a Queendom in times of peace, but surely it was the job of a man to rush forward willy-nilly to survey the scene ahead of her.

“Let the navy handle this,” his courtiers had urged as he finalized his plans. “Your Majesty, we need you here.” Which was blatant flattery and foolish besides, for he was first and foremost an inventor, and impatient—after all this time!—with the fussy details of governance and the inane formalities of court. The courtiers and ministers needed him more as a symbol than as a living, breathing human, and what could be more symbolic than this?

“The navy hasn’t the proper expertise,” he’d answered. For that was true; almost no one in the Queendom truly understood the mathematics of ertial shielding.

“Then let the navy transport you,” they’d urged, as he fitted himself into his space armor, flexing and testing the joints one by one.

“They haven’t the speed,” he answered, for indeed the fastest interplanetary vessels were the ertial grappleships, and none were faster than Boat Gods.

“It’s bad for the Queendom if you’re hurt or killed,” they’d tried, as he’d powered up the ship’s systems and rolled aside the hangar roof to reveal, in a shower of loose palm fronds, the bright blue sky left behind by the storm.

“I’ve made my backups,” he told them sternly. “If anything happens, restore me and await instructions. That’s a command, good sirs and madams, from your king. Even from Earth, from these very islands, I can reach this mystery vessel three days ahead of the navy’s best picket boats out of Neptune, and five days ahead of Her Majesty.”

“May I come?” asked Hugo, his own pet robot, who’d been emancipated for more than a millennium but still chose to remain at home, learning how to be alive.

“Not this time,” Bruno told him. “I can’t spare the mass.”

“But Sire,” his manservant Adelade said cannily, “who’s to develop the wormhole in your absence?”

And that had almost stopped him. Almost. But if there was one thing he’d learned about the hard problems of physics, it was that they often yielded when the body and mind were otherwise engaged. And he missed this derring-do, and feared that his people—even his own servants!—thought him no longer capable of it. And anyway, blast it, saving the sun was his job. Not Tamra’s.

Almost as an afterthought he’d said to Adelade, “Will you take stewardship of the Earth, please, until Tamra’s or my return?”

“Er, well…”

“There’s a good fellow. Mind the impending holidays.”

He’d closed his hatch then, stoked his reactor, fired up his sensors and hypercomputers. Engaged his gravitic grapples, yes, latching them on to the crescent moon and yanking himself right off the Earth.

And in a rare moment of perspicacity, as the stars came alive around him and he wheeled the ship for a new, more distant grapple target, he had muttered under his breath, “Oh, yes, my friends, this vagabond heart lives on, smothered in census figures. None among you can refuse me now! Surprised though I am to say this, sometimes it’s good to be the king.”

Chapter Two in which a revolution is halted

There are moments for musing. Not moments of truth, but moments before the moment of truth, when the mind squirts sideways, time stretches, thoughts race. Insights leap across the gray matter like fleeing deer. For Bruno it went thusly:

Given the Nescog, that glittering network of black-hole matter which linked every part of the Queendom to every other, he could step through the print plate of the fax machine behind him and, in a few hours’ transit time which he himself would not perceive, step out through an equivalent plate in the palace foyer back on Tongatapu. Or anywhere else! The bulk of this journey would happen, alas, at Einstein’s lightspeed, although ring collapsiter segments—long, thin tubes of collapsium with high-speed supervacuum inside—would shave a few minutes off it here and there.

Ah, but with wormholes in place of collapsiters, the journey could be instantaneous! Not just to Earth, or to any other corner of the Queendom, but to the stars themselves. To the failed and failing colonies scattered among the nearby stars and dwarfs. Bruno and Tamra had sent too many young men and women out there to their deaths. Their deaths! But it was an error on which they could still, in some small measure, make good. If Bruno could just build a damned wormhole.

The whirling fan of Newhope expanded in his view, and expanded some more. Belatedly, Bruno pulled up a schematic of the ship from Boat Gods’ library, and then sketched an outline of the entry and exit wounds upon its hull. Presumably, the projectile had been stationary, at least in comparison to the starship’s own large velocity. And that meant Newhope had not been facing forward or backward at the time, as she should have been for safety’s sake, but rather broadside to the dust and debris of interstellar space. Oops.

So what had happened? From Boat Gods’ myriad sensors, a story began to emerge. The accident had occurred hundreds of years ago, the ship taking first a freak hit to its forward ertial shield, slightly off-center. The shield was hard to damage, and would have absorbed almost all of the kinetic energy, releasing it over several minutes as a blue-green flare of Cerenkov photons. A survivable event, yes. But compressive interactions had probably sent shockwaves and electrical surges all up and down the hull and superstructure, stunning the wellstone and preventing the navigation safety lasers from receiving power.

This much at least, the starship was designed to handle. But it had gotten unluckier; the collision tipped it slightly, and before the nav systems could recover or the lasers could vaporize it, a second particle—probably larger—had struck, and the resulting plasma had flashed straight through the hull at near-relativistic speed, sending her into a wild, chaotic tumble while her fuel supply squirted away into vacuum. And without its deutrelium the ship’s reactor had run down, and the ship itself had gone to sleep, perchance to wake at some future date.

Well, with any luck, that day was now at hand.

Bruno adjusted his grapples and set about the task of attaching himself to the center of the tumbling ship. The rest should be easy enough; Boat Gods was outfitted with a universal airlock and augmented with the Royal Overrides which guaranteed Bruno access to, and control over, any enlivened device designed or constructed in the Queendom of Sol. Which included QSS Newhope herself, yes. And although the starship had no matching airlock—no hatches of any kind in the region of concern—the mere feather-touch of his grapples stirred piezoelectric voltages in the wellstone there, bringing it to some weak semblance of life.

The ship exchanged handshakes and data packets with the airlock, accepted an automated welcome-home message, and requested an infrared beam from which it could draw additional power. Then, more fully awake, it prostrated itself before the Royal Overrides, and agreed to allow itself to be damaged. And although the tiny hypercomputers inside it would not pass a self-awareness screening, and were at the moment no more collectively intelligent than a frog, the wellstone did express a sort of relief at finding itself, after all this time, among properly enlivened programmable materials rather than the mere metals and ceramics of the Barnard colony. It was good, apparently, to be home.

Bruno felt a moment of dizziness as Boat Gods pulled itself toward the whirling baton that was Newhope. But he had, at various times in his youth, found himself trapped in the ertial supervaccum of a ring collapsiter, or standing on the windblown surface of the very first neutronium-cored planette, or falling into a hypermass somewhere. Hell, one of him had fallen into the sun itself, and never returned. A bit of spinning wasn’t going to stop him!

In the last few meters of closure, Boat Gods itself began to spin. And because it too was ertial, it matched the rotation of Newhope in no time at all, and with almost no sensation.

The airlock knew its business, too; once the two hulls had kissed, it commenced tearing an opening in the wellstone plates of Newhope, shuffling the atoms aside into a sort of docking collar. From the inside of Boat Gods, this activity sounded like the crack of billiard balls followed by a light rainfall. And when it came time to leave, the airlock could just as easily pull the atoms back again, restoring Newhope’s wellstone to something very like its original condition.

Bruno had invented this technique long ago. Bruno had invented a lot of things. Why, then, must something as truly useful as a wormhole generator elude him? Perhaps he was getting old and slow, alas. He didn’t even throw off his safety harness and fling open the airlock to see what lay behind it. Instead he studied his scans again, more intently.

The results were not encouraging; living people would show up as hot spots, of which he detected none. They would require atmosphere, of which he detected none. This was not surprising; at 29 Kelvin—barely above the four-degree cosmic background—every gas but helium would have condensed out as liquid or settled as a frost. But he didn’t detect liquids, either; the ship’s crew compartments had leaked or been deliberately evacuated. There might of course be stored human beings in a temporary fax buffer somewhere. These would show up as dense charge patterns in a wellstone matrix, and he found a few of those behind a structure that might be some sort of low-quality print plate. But over hundreds of years the cosmic-ray flux would have scrambled much of the data into total nonsense. If those were human patterns, the people they represented were dead. To survive the journey, any stored human images would need to reside in shielded memory cores, of which Bruno detected none.

What he did detect, in the cargo pods attached to Newhope’s midsection, just aft of the crew quarters, were cylindrical masses of water ice, roughly three meters long and one meter wide. Thousands of them; tens of thousands. The ice was shot through with complex organics which he couldn’t identify from here, and by tuning his sensors to a calcium channel he was able to pick out fine, solid structures within the cylinders. Human skeletons, surrounded by greasy envelopes of frozen human flesh, drowned in ice-filled tubes of glass and metal.

Twenty-five thousand frozen people. Interesting. Troubling. There would be a lot of bureaucrats busy on this one.

Freezing was not considered a lethal event in the Queendom of Sol, any more than heart failure or drowning were lethal events. A few people had even been reanimated after hundreds of years of cold storage. This was one of those “civic-duty” things Tamra had enacted in the Queendom’s earliest days—hunting down from the Age of Death all the frozen and mummified and pickled bodies which might conceivably be restored to life. Most of these efforts had been pro forma, mainly an archaeological exercise with little chance of medical success, but a few—twenty or thirty, Bruno thought—had been resurrected, and were brief celebrities in that heady time when anything seemed possible. Look, look! We can bring history itself to life!

Ah, but there were limits to human achievement. Painful limits, as Bruno and Tamra had learned through the blood and toil of their exiled subjects. Projects could fail; lives could end. Whole star colonies could suffer economic collapse so severe that the air tankers stopped running, their scattered habitats suffocating one by one while the Queendom stood helplessly by. Indeed, whole civilizations could lurch from seeming health to agonizing death in less time than the signals took to reach Mother Sol. Theirs was a hard universe, which granted no clemency.

In many cases, the only “survivors” of a colony’s demise were those who had managed, by hook or by crook, to have a summary of their neural patterns transmitted back to the Queendom. Hardly more than interactive mail—just a few petabytes, or a few hundred petabytes. They were not people, though they sometimes believed they were. But their transmission consumed precious energy and transceiver time which an ailing colony could ill afford.

And even if they were people, didn’t the Queendom have enough already? Was there room for more? Copy-hour restrictions had been tightened and retightened, to the point where most individuals—even those who’d once sent whole herds of themselves out into the world—counted themselves lucky to be plural at all. The waiting list for a birth license was now five hundred years long. And yet the cities grew taller and wider every year, encroaching not only on the precious primordial wildernesses of Earth, but the invented ones of Mars and Venus, which were far more delicate. Half the population was living in caverns and domes, dreaming in vain of fresh air. Should these very citizens be expected to fund the creation of an expensive new person from the tatters of a dead one?

So the messages remained, for the most part, in the limbo of quantum storage, against the day when resources might exist to birth and house them properly. If, indeed, such a day could be expected at all.

And here before Bruno was a similar question: what were the rights of a frozen, cosmically irradiated corpse from outside the Queendom? Doctors would have to be consulted before any decisions were made here—certainly before anything was vaporized by the navy. But why had someone gone to the trouble of bringing these corpses here, across the vastness of interstellar space? To be resurrected? Had the Queendom of Sol become a kind of afterlife, a dream of heaven for the children of the colonies?

Alas, there was almost nothing else onboard this ship. She was oversized for the job, her crew quarters mostly empty. The only other feature of note was a much smaller cluster of bodies—four, in fact—just forward of her engine control rooms, in a space that looked like a workshop or laboratory of some kind. For what? For whom? This ship had seen heavy modification in its long years abroad.

The chamber was not far from Bruno’s own docking site. And presently, the sound of rain ceased; the burrowing airlock had gently punched through. Bruno threw off his restraints and rose from his couch.

“Sire,” Boat Gods said, in a basso voice rich with gravitas. “You’ll want your helmet on.”

“Ah!” Bruno said, eyeing the transparent, nearly invisible dome tucked under his arm. “So I might! I’d’ve opened this hatch on hard vacuum.”

“Hardly, Sire.” The ship could not truly be offended, but it managed to sound that way. It would not have allowed the hatch to open.

“Well,” Bruno said, popping his helmet in place and listening to it crackle itself sealed, “do please open it now.”

“Aye, Sire.”

It would take a steady, hundred-kilowatt feed to wake up Newhope’s higher functions, and given the level of cosmic-ray scrambling and the long absence of functioning maintenance routines, the wellstone was inclined to take this process very slowly indeed. Still, unseen and unsensed by Bruno, the starship’s running lights came on, and its interior began, gradually, to warm.

When he stepped through the hatch, the head- and taillights of his battle armor came on automatically, casting pools of glare and gloom around a wedge-shaped compartment—a crew cabin—covered in frost, unused, undisturbed by anything but his own featherlight footsteps, crunching faintly against the jags and spines of frozen atmosphere.

By now, the wellstone’s awareness was no longer limited to a handful of lightly powered hull plates. Indeed, almost the entire structure had come alive, and was slowly charging itself, rearranging its electronic structure, becoming a proper starship hull and skeleton once again. And in its newfound powers the starship remembered its manners, and produced a soft yellow glow from the cabin’s frosted ceiling.

“Ah. Thank you,” Bruno said, though it wasn’t clear whether the ship could actually hear or understand him yet.

Bouncing lightly along the hoarfrost-crackling floor, he moved to the cabin’s only exit. He smiled, for here was an actual door, not some temporary aperture but an actual plate hung on mechanical hinges and enclosed within an actual door frame. There was even a little knob or handle which, if he recalled correctly, one had to turn in order to release the latching mechanism. He grasped the handle, turned it, and with delight felt something click and release between the door and its frame. He pushed, and felt a sort of crunching through the wellcloth of his armor as the frost-sealed door broke free and swung open. Marvelous!

Bruno himself had grown up in Old Girona, before the Queendom, at the very peak of the Catalan love affair with ancient habits and technologies and social mores. The Sabadell-Andorra earthquake had of course smashed that daydream—and Bruno’s own parents, and thousands of other human beings besides. It was the last great disaster of Old Modernity. But before then he had turned his share of doorknobs, uncorked his share of glass bottles, even knotted his shoes to his feet with laces of hand-woven cotton! He was careful not to overromanticize those days, but he wasn’t above the occasional reminiscence.

Outside the cabin was a circular hallway, linking six similar cabins around the ship’s circumference, and in the center of the floor was a steep ladder leading both up and down. Bruno had been on this ship once before, touring it with Tamra after its christening, but that was a thousand years ago, and bore no resemblance to the scene before him now. Nevertheless, from his scans he knew that the four corpses of interest, and the laboratory which held them, were two levels aft from this point. So he mounted the stairs, wrapping a hand around each rail, and glided down.

This proved a mistake, however, for the “gravity” at the bottom of the first flight of stairs was more than three times what it was at the top—very nearly a full gee! He staggered under sudden weight, collapsing to his armored knees at the bottom. The sensation of spinning was also more pronounced here. Picking his way around the staircase, he took the next flight more cautiously.

Two centimeters of wellcloth space armor massed twenty kilograms all by itself, with the solid helmet adding another two or three, but fortunately a properly designed suit would stiffen and relax in response to its wearer’s movements, lightening the burden. Carrying its own weight, as it were, and in heavy gravity it would do its best to carry your weight as well. God bless the stuff.

This level had the same circular corridor as the one above, but with only two hatches instead of six. Bruno chose one, and on the other side he found a ring-shaped chamber far less tidy than the rest of the level. Its floor was littered with hand tools, with dead wellstone hoses and sketchplates, with other items he couldn’t immediately identify. The air had frozen over these tumbled implements, and afterward nothing had moved. For centuries.

There were six support columns holding the floor and ceiling apart, and by these landmarks he circumnavigated the chamber, noting the position of the four corpses in their coffins of glass. And then, approaching one, he felt a dizzy wash of déjà vu.

“I know this man,” he muttered, and felt in his bones that he had said this before, on another spaceship somewhere, contemplating some other frozen corpse. During the chaos of the Fall? Life was long, and like any bounded system with finite variables it must repeat itself periodically. No matter how improbable the event.

Unless Bruno was badly mistaken, this crystallized starman had been a privateer during the Children’s Revolt. A revolutionary, a confidant of Prince Bascal, and later a builder of orbital towers on the face of Planet Two, better known as Sorrow.

“He is Senior Commander Conrad Ethel Mursk,” said a quiet voice in Bruno’s helmet. “First Mate of the QSS Newhope and First Architect of the Kingdom of Barnard.”

“Ah, so you’re awake,” Bruno said to the walls and bulkheads around him.

“Aye, Sire,” replied the QSS Newhope in some radio frequency or other, and in vaguely feminine tones. By tradition, machines had an accent of their own which set them apart from human beings, but the Barnardean mechsprach was slower and breathier than the Queendom’s own—almost comically so. “You honor us with your presence.”

“Us? Are these people alive, then?”

“These four were,” the ship said, “when I froze them after the accident. They were my crew.”

“Ah.” Curious, that. A crew of four for an entire starship?

“However,” the ship continued, “since reviving them is beyond my capabilities, the answer to your question rests upon your definition of the word ‘alive.’ There are bodies in my cargo pods as well, who died and were frozen before the journey began. So I will answer, guardedly, that four of these people are alive, and twenty-five thousand are dead but presumed recoverable.”

“I see. Thank you.” Bruno was about to ask for further clarification when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Gaah!” he cried, spinning in surprise and alarm. One did not expect to be touched onboard a ghost ship! But as he wheeled around, dizzy against the ship’s own spinning, what he saw behind him was no ghost or zombie but his own wife, Queen Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, in her own suit of space armor—royal purple trimmed with gold. She didn’t look happy, and flanking her on either side were an equally unamused-looking admiral and a burly midshipman, both in navy black. And behind them were a pair of superreflective Palace Guard robots—a reminder that Bruno himself was here, against laws and traditions and the insistence of his staff, without his own two guards. It had taken a Royal Override to dismiss them, but Tamra’s override trumped all others. Were these two for him?

Blast.

“Hello, dear,” he tried saying.

She crossed her arms, nodding once inside her helmet. “Darling. Malo e leilei. It was very kind of you to bring an active fax portal and network gate here. It saves us all kinds of time. Why, we can fax here directly from Malu’i, still en route.”

“Ah. Well, er, you’re welcome.”

“Were you planning on telling me any of this?”

“I told the house staff,” he said. “And Traffic Control.” But that sounded weak and plaintive in his ears. She might be the Queen of Sol, but he was the king, and her husband, and a grown man who had invented this sort of mad ertial errand during a time when all of humanity hung in the balance. “If you’re here to help, why don’t you send these navy lads down for about fifty barrels of deutrelium and some labor robots? On my personal account, if budgets are a concern. I’d like to fire up the reactors and halt this damned spin.”

Tamra favored her husband with a glare, then turned to the admiral. “Do as he says, please. And bring qualified assistants who can help him bring this vessel under control.”

Chapter Three in which the consequences of immorbidity are lamented

A trip through the fax was the treatment of first resort for any ailment or injury, but the Nescog morbidity filters were meant to repair the living. Clever algorithms examined the genome, along with its appendices and parity blocks, in a large enough sample of cells to screen out any accumulated mutations. Then, based on this corrected blueprint the system extrapolated what the body ought to look like—allowing of course for undocumented cosmetics—and then compared that ideal with the scanned body image itself, rearranging the cell structure as appropriate. All damage and signs of aging were wiped away in the process, rendering the subject “immorbid.”

This much was traditional, and nearly as old as the Queendom itself. Under their own strange forms of duress, though, the ailing colonies had piled whole suites of additional “healing” onto the process, weaving protective meshes and brickmails throughout the body, filling the cells with wellstone-fiber networks and organelles adapted from alien microbes. Even inserting active programs into the genome, to fight back disease and aging among individuals too poor to have regular fax access.

Via Instelnet radio downloads, the Queendom had imported some of these techniques as either quality-of-life enhancements or cost-cutting measures, so Bruno was no stranger to exotic biomods. But even so these four star voyagers’ bodies were something else altogether; something foreign, alien.

Two of the four were former Queendom citizens whom Bruno had known personally before their Barnard exile: Conrad Mursk and Xiomara Li Weng, the latter being Newhope’s captain. The two were lovers if Bruno recalled correctly, although Xiomara—“Xmary” to her friends—had nearly been Prince Bascal’s instead. Or so it seemed to the prince’s father, several paces removed from the actual intrigue. At the molecular level, though, neither of them much resembled their original childhood patterns.

The other man also checked out as a Queendomite: one Yinebeb Bragston Fecre, who had played a major role in the Children’s Revolt, prior to the founding of the colonies. The fourth body was female, and matched no Queendom records.

“Eustace Faxborn,” Newhope said of her. “Custom printed in the Barnard colony, one hundred standard days prior to this mission’s departure.”

“Custom printed?” Bruno asked. “Not born, but created for some particular purpose?”

“She is the bride of Yinebeb Fecre.”

“Ah.”

A barbaric custom, that: the crafting of “adults” specialized for… well, various purposes. Honorable marriage was one possibility, but by no means the only one.

At any rate, the legal status of the citizens was clear enough: they were entitled to revival. For the twenty-five thousand actual corpses the opposite was true; they were legally dead noncitizen strangers. Any revival would be an act of charity—of foreign policy, essentially. And this Faxborn woman fell somewhere in the ambiguous middle.

Alas, it seemed a moot point, for all four of the bodies were, according to Boat Gods’ fax machine, either not human or else irreparably damaged and in need of archival replacement. And since there were no archives available—no buffer copies or formal backups—the four would need that rarest of Queendom services: live medical attention.

So the four bodies were shipped to Antarctica, whose landscape was dotted with small hospitals experienced in the treatment of accidental whole-body frostbite. But the doctors there objected to the extensive radiation damage in these “corpses,” and in the end a team of specialists had to be faxed down from the moons of Jupiter, where radiation accidents were commonplace, and up from Venus, where genomic engineering was both high art and science.

All of this was charged to King Bruno’s accounts. No private charity or government agency seemed prepared to take charge of these people, for fear of an implied obligation to care for their thousands of shipmates. Even if those revivals were free—which they surely would not be—the housing costs alone would be considerable. There weren’t that many vacant apartments in the whole of Earth!

As for Newhope herself, the navy guided her—bodies and all—into a parking orbit in the lower Kuiper Belt. There to remain, like the Instelnet message-ghosts, until some brighter future should happen along.

“Appalling,” Bruno said to his wife as they lounged that night in their bed on Tongatapu. “Have we not wealth enough?”

“It’s more a matter of space,” she reminded him. “If we’re to have any wilderness at all, we must contain urban growth on the habitable worlds, and our own children—natural-born humans with no sins on their shoulders—must have the first pick of what growth we allow. Or do you propose a Queendom without children? I confess, I can’t see the point of that.”

“Mmm,” Bruno grumbled. “No one volunteers to die anymore. To make a bit of space.”

“Would you?” the queen asked with a bitter-tinged laugh.

“No,” he admitted. Not while the wormhole project remained incomplete. Indeed, he had dozens of incomplete projects which held the promise of a better life for all. “But we must do something, you and I.”

“Yes,” she agreed, taking his hand. “We must. This trickle of refugees has begun to add up. We could almost fill a city.”

“A floating city?” he suggested.

She made an unhappy face. “Not another one, dear. Please. The oceans need to breathe.”

“The oceans are vast. One more won’t hurt.”

“But a hundred more,” she said. “A thousand more. Where does it stop? Why don’t you revive your Lunar program instead?”

It was Bruno’s turn to laugh, stroking Tamra’s hand against the wellcloth sheets. “It was you, my dear, who ordered a halt to it. Too many displacements, you said. Too much economic disruption, including the loss of one of history’s greatest landmarks. And you were right: sparsely domed though it may be, the moon is proud home to four million people. Where shall I put them?”

“On a floating city,” she said, and sighed. “It’s like a puzzle. Slide one piece and the others have to move. To make an opening, you’ve got to close one. And yet, the alternative is death.”

“So say the Fatalists,” Bruno chided. “Do they lack imagination? Do we? ‘Everything has an end,’ they insist. ‘Let’s engineer it, peacefully and with love.’ By which they mean the vaporization of innocents, the sabotage of shielded archives. Bah! I say everything has a solution, and we’ve only to find it.”

Tamra kissed him firmly. “And I, my darling, say that everyone must sleep. Come, let’s have a bit of darkness.”

And suddenly, for no discernible reason, Bruno knew just what to do about his wormhole problem. “Egad!” he said, grabbing for the sketchplate he theoretically kept on his nightstand for moments like this. But theory and practice were only lightly acquainted; the sketchplate wasn’t there. Bruno searched the area for a second or two, but the idea was hot on the tip of his brain, and though his fatigue had vanished he was nevertheless terrified he would fall asleep or suffer some distraction, or that the idea would simply trickle away before he could record it.

In desperation, he slid to the floor and began scribbling there with his finger. The wellstone, long accustomed to such behavior, responded with trails of black obsidian in its surface of faux bleached wood. These rough figures arranged themselves into elegant numbers and symbols as the king’s finger raced ahead. “There’s a long axis,” he muttered. “Indeed, indeed. Where the mass distribution falls away as a function of Z, it drives an instability in X and Y. But it needn’t! We shall present the spherical opening with a cylindrical plug!”

Her Majesty Queen Tamra was also accustomed to these intellectual fits and spasms—her husband’s renowned mind was anything but linear—and she knew better than to disturb him in the midst of one. Indeed, she watched with sleepy interest for a few minutes as the obsidian equations spread upward along one wall, and were joined by holographic diagrams: spheres and cylinders surrounded by a forest of right triangles.

“Two spheres,” Bruno said to himself. “They’re one and the same—the real and imaginary component of a single object—but to an observer that’s not evident. How could it be? And the observer’s viewpoint is valid, yes? Or relativity be damned. Two positions in real space, connected by a line. By a cylinder.”

The queen was no mathematician, but she’d seen enough of her husband’s work to know he was trying—vainly trying—to sketch out some four-dimensional object or relationship in a 3-D image.

Fortunately their bedroom was a suite whose outer chamber could be sealed off from both the outside world and the bedchamber itself. And so, sighing, the Queen of Sol stooped to kiss her king upon the shoulder, then dragged her blankets from the bed and stumbled off to sleep on the couch. For the one message she could read clearly in the walls, albeit implicit, was, This will be a long night, dear. Don’t wait up.

When Conrad Ethel Mursk opened his eyes, he was astonished to see something other than the afterlife. There were no angels, no clouds, no twinkling stars, and certainly no God or devil waiting to judge him. Instead, there were green walls and white examination tables, and a young-looking woman with copper hair and eyes the color of jade, dressed in powder-blue medical pyjamas.

“I’m not dead,” he said, and was surprised by the clarity of his voice. He sat up, and was surprised by the pull of gravity. Not grav lasers or spin-gee but planetary gravity. Then he charmingly added, “Where the hell am I?”

The woman was fiddling with controls of some sort behind Conrad’s headrest, and in sitting up he had placed his viewpoint only centimeters from her torso, so that she appeared mainly as a pair of breasts. Still, he caught her smile.

“Welcome back, Mr. Mursk. How do you feel?”

“I don’t know,” he said, pausing for a moment to take stock of himself, to feel his body up and down for numbness or injury. “I suppose I feel all right, all things considered. Is this Sorrow?”

She chuckled. “This is Earth. More specifically, Frostbite Trauma Center in the city of Glacia in Victoria Land, Antarctica.”

“Oh,” he said, digesting that. “What year?”

She told him, and he heard a low, pathetic groan escape from his lips. He’d been gone a long time—so long that the numbers barely made sense. A thousand years? Forty childhoods? Fifty thousand episodes of Barnes and Manetti? The Queendom he knew was ancient history. And so was he.

“Shit,” he said. “Wow. How’s my crew?”

“All fine,” the woman assured him, now stepping back to give him a view of something other than her chest. “We’ve woken you last, since your reconstruction was the most difficult.”

“I was burned,” he remembered suddenly. “The coolant lines blew out. There was this swarm of damage-control robots, just pouring out of the fax machine, draining the mass buffers, hustling us down into storage and trying to stop the air leak. But the ship was coming apart, and somebody had to be last in line. I remember thinking, We tried. We did our best, but this is where it ends.”

“You were fortunate,” the woman said. “It could have been a lot worse.”

“Hmm,” he answered, mulling over the sheer obviousness of that. “It seems I’m in your debt. Or someone’s. What about the passengers? We had twenty-five thousand in cold sleep.”

Her expression shifted, and he had the sense she was choosing her next words carefully. “Well, yes. It should be possible to recover most of them at some point. But sleep is a generous term here, don’t you think? Some of those people were already partially decomposed when you froze them.”

“It was a rescue mission,” Conrad said vaguely. And right away he could see how stupid his plans had been, how pointlessly optimistic. The Queendom of Sol could help his countrymen, yes; it had the wealth, the technology, the notable absence of psychotic leadership and sociopolitical collapse. The Queendom of his dreams would have done exactly that. But the Queendom of the real, physical universe had problems of its own—didn’t every place? A pile of dead colonists would be a curiosity at best, an unwelcome intrusion at worst.

“I’m an idiot,” he said. And it was true; he’d come all this way on the theory that a faint hope was better than none. But if the faint hope didn’t pan out, then it was as good as none. Or worse.

“I doubt that,” the woman answered, offering him a handshake. “Angela Proud Rumson, Doctor of Medicine and Extrapolative Cosmetics.”

He examined her hand for a moment—it looked absurdly soft, like she’d never used it—and then shook it. It was soft.

“Conrad Mursk,” he said, and was about to add a title or two of his own. But what was the point in that? What status did he hold here? What he said instead was, “Refugee.”

“Very pleased to meet you.”

“Can I see my friends now?”

Angela Proud Rumson’s smile was reserved. “Tomorrow, if you please. They’ve gone to their temporary quarters already, and I’m expected to hold you for observation. Test drive the old nervous system, make sure we’ve done all the wiring correctly. Shall we say twelve hours?”

Chapter Four in which fatalism is confronted by action

Perhaps the event at Newhope’s lonely drydock was inevitable. Certainly, its cargo of dead human flesh invited public commentary: Are we responsible for these lives? For their premature ending, for their mere existence? If so, then aren’t these corpses likewise culpable in the demise of the Barnard colony? Do they then deserve a second chance, at our expense?

Or: Why’d they send us their bodies at all? Why not just their heads, their brains, their memories? If the medium is the message, this message stinks. Where exactly did we sign up? To salvage putrid alien flesh simply because it’s dumped in our laps is to play the chump.

Or: A species of promise was made in the Queendom’s banishment of morbidity—a statement of ultimate equality before God and Nature. Thou shalt not die. This was affirmed in the Fall, and has thereafter formed the defining aspect of our societal character. Such pains as result are ours by choice, and by example we endure them gladly, ever mindful of the alternative. That these folk are the get of our own miscreants is beside the point; by definition, any justice must exist for all comers, or it be no justice at all. Dare we, my brothers and sisters, choose death for those who have come in search of life?

And it was this, more than anything, which inflamed Fatalist sentiment, for if the so-called “right to life” could not be waived for the long-dead corpses of nonhuman noncitizens, then it could not be waived at all, and the Fatalist cause was utterly lost. But by its very nature, Fatalism could not take an armchair view of these matters.

Shall we imagine a deathist philosopher and Fatalist general? Call her “Starquake” or “Dark Cloud” or “Shiva.” Shall we imagine her followers, in their dozens or hundreds, or perhaps even thousands? Shall we describe the terrifying Death persona they crafted and physically instantiated, to loom cadaverously in their midst and remind them of their supposed duty?

This much is certain: a group of individuals held a meeting. Enormous care was taken to conceal their identities, as well as the meeting’s location. In theory this was both possible and legal, for the Queendom was not a tyranny. But it was astronimically difficult, for by its own nature the Nescog must store buffer images of the people passing through it; must log their movements and enforce their copy-hour limits. Too, nearly everything under Sol’s light was made from wellstone, or from other forms of programmable matter, and its nature was to record the commands—even subtly implied commands—that washed over it every moment of every day. Indeed, the universe itself was a witness to all of the events within it, and like any witness it could, with the proper inducements, be compelled to testify. And then, of course, there were the participants themselves, human and therefore corruptible.

To gather a “cluster house” or secret assembly from all corners of the solar system, whether virtually or in the flesh, and to leave no trace of having done so, was a work of great cleverness of which only a few thousand citizens were capable. And for no one to blab or squeal or accidentally invite a government informant would require not only an improbable degree of dedication, but also a meticulous attention to matters of psychology and logistics. Indeed, from this and other circumstantial evidence we may suspect that at least a few of the participants came from the highest echelons of bureaucracy and law enforcement, for such meetings had been going on for centuries, and none had ever been discovered.

The list probably also includes the most prominent and vocal right-to-death pundits and commentators of the day, as well as convicted murderers who had outlived their hundred-year “life” sentences. Surely they felt that life could be taken without consent, for some higher (or lower) purpose. Too, there may have been workers from the assorted and largely bygone deathist industries—the morticians and hospice orderlies, the coffin designers, the groomers and protectors of Earth’s historical graveyards. These were the people most displaced by the death of death, and also those most inclined, by general disposition, to see some value in its return.

But it must be said that the Queendom government, following this same line of reasoning, applied particular scrutiny to these individuals without ever turning up a single conclusive lead. “Vast conspiracy” is an oxymoron in any era, but despite this movement’s scope and influence and funding, it held successfully to the shadows of a nearly shadowless society. From this we may conclude that the conspirators were in fact the cloistered copies of our suspect individuals, secretly created without their progenitors’ knowledge. Imagine our Shiva—officially deceased, perhaps a victim of the Fall—selecting the most trustworthy of her living friends, hijacking their fax traces and printing unauthorized copies. Briefing and drilling them, yes, scanning their loyalties in a hidden cavern somewhere and killing off the ones who presented even the slightest security risk. If five captains—call them the Reapers—each found five lieutenants, who found five sergeants, who found five corporals and privates and orderlies, then an army of thousands could be assembled in as little as six months. Across the centuries of known Fatalist activity, we can only guess at the true scope of their operations.

Still, in the absence of evidence we may safely imagine our Shiva banging her gavel or drumhead, calling the attendees to order. We may then suggest that words were spoken in praise of death, for death was an integral component of the “natural cycle” which dominated their philosophy. If they (or their progenitors) did not choose death for themselves, it was because their lives were necessary for the advancement of the cause of death—a higher-order effect. The reasonable deathists were long in their graves; these were diehard visionaries, and this much at least can be said in their favor: they were more likely stout game theoreticians than cowards or hypocrites. They knew what they were doing, and they did it well.

Little is known of their religion, although the public writings of the pro-death movement argue for a variant of the dominant animism: a megapantheon of small gods or kami ruling over the mundane articles and processes of life, both natural and technological. And a single God, yes, who either rules over these kami or is, in some information-theoretic sense, generated by them. An afterlife—involving both reincarnation and divine judgment—is strongly implied. Drum music apparently played a symbolic or therapeutic role, along with more obscure rituals. “Grounding and awareness techniques” and “energy circles” and “silent cheering” were enlisted to generate “an atmosphere of support and appreciation and joy.” That these phrases are difficult to reconcile with the movement’s coercive violence is, one assumes, a failure of our own empathy; the Fatalists clearly viewed themselves as heroes rather than villains.

In any case, we shall suppose that under the guidance of Shiva and the Stygian glower of Death, certain motions were proposed, debated, amended, and voted affirmative.

“We have a direct action opportunity,” Shiva may have said, “which combines the salubrious traits of an open target, a high symbolic value, and a higher-than-usual alignment between public sympathies and our own cause. We have carried too much for too long, we few, but this is energy work for the soul of Humanity itself. Power originates in freedom of movement, and the love that flows in this circle must be channeled outward in a strong and coherent way. Can you feel the presence of the Whirlwind? He is storm and revolution and fire, lord of wild transformations and sudden, chaotic change. Great forces are gathering here; great deeds will flow through this space and into the physical Queendom. Nature herself feels enraged at the continual violation. Our natural ally, Entropy, held long at bay, grows stronger and more insistent, and Rage rises over her sister Compassion. They will dance, comrades, with ourselves as their avatars.”

Or perhaps it went nothing like that. Perhaps there was no Shiva. But certainly there was a Death, for he was physically present among the Newhope strike force.

This much is a matter of historical record: fifty days after the delivery of QSS Newhope into her parking orbit, a nameless inertial fusion boat, stealthed, without running lights or identity beacons, appeared some three thousand kilometers off the boot of Newhope’s docking cradle, and matched velocities with a hundred-second blast from its motors. The boat then fired a cable lanyard which wrapped itself mechanically around Newhope, and shortly thereafter, nine space-suited figures emerged bearing rectangular wellstone bricks of unknown programming and purpose.

They were accompanied by Death, who apparently needed no space suit, and whose black cowl had been programmed to swirl about him in a picturesque and unvacuumlike manner. The precise nature of this Death figure is not known, but he (or it) appeared skeletal within the robe—in some images, starlight clearly showed through the chin and neck vertebrae—and his movements showed a humanlike purpose and articulation.

If the strike team had intended the mere destruction of Newhope, they needn’t have visited in person. Any bomb or missile or long-range energy weapon would have served, although to be fair, Newhope was reported to have survived at least one space battle. She was a tough old ship. At any rate, whatever plans the boarding party might have had fell apart moments after their debarkation, when the fax machine on Newhope’s docking cradle flickered to life and expelled both a platoon of vacuum-capable SWAT robots and a trio of human commanders.

This much should be said in favor of the Queendom authorities: they had little success in tracking or isolating or even comprehending the Fatalist organization, but they were masters of pattern recognition, and knew a tempting target when they saw one. The platform was a light-hour and more from the nearest naval or Constabulary outpost, and so would have had to wait two hours for a response to any distress signals it might have raised. But the docking cradle itself was intelligent and primed for trouble, as was the starship within it, and the troopers, along with other weapons, had been pre-positioned in its fax buffers and instantiated at the first sign of disruption.

In his deposition, Constabulary Captain Cheng Shiao said of the encounter, “Upon exiting the fax I established my bearings and took measure of the alleged intruders, of whom there were ten, clad not in stealth or inviz but simple optical black. On the citizens’ frequencies I pronounced them under arrest on suspicion of trespassing and read them their rights, which proved to be a formality when they opened fire with mass projectors. This was not unexpected, and although our armor was struck by multiple projectiles—five-gram impervium wirebombs accelerated to several hundred meters per second—the attackers’ aim was such that no serious damage was inflicted at that point. Our suits were not breached, and the SWAT robots were not disturbed from their duties.”

In the recorded testimony, Shiao sits very straight in his chair. His expression is placid, as though he finds his own story interesting but not upsetting. The other voice belongs to Hack Friesland, the Kuiper Belt district attorney, not visible in the frame.

“Did you fire back?”

“No, sir. I issued an order that the attackers were to be taken alive at all costs, on account of their distinctive nature. Observing two of them at close range, I noted that beneath the helmet domes their heads were hairless and earless and very pale, with two apelike nostrils taking the place of a normal human nose. Their eyes were gray and somewhat oversized. There is no direct evidence linking this attack with any known group, but these features are typical of suspected Fatalist operatives, who are believed to be disposable copies of the actual organization members, downloaded into physically and genetically identical bodies to baffle our investigators. The popular term for these avatars is ‘ghoul.’”

“We’re aware of the terminology,” says Friesland. “But how did you expect to capture one?”

Shiao’s testimony continues, “The attackers’ weapons were recoilless, sir, but as the projectiles obviously were not, we were forced to rocket ourselves upstream through a hail of them. We did succeed in overpowering nine of the attackers, although under the effects of sustained fire, four troopers and both of my sergeants were disabled. I later learned that they were killed. However, the nine attackers were in fact restrained.”

“But not arrested.”

“No, sir. At this point, a voice on the citizens’ frequency cut in, shouting, ‘All hands abort! Abort!’ And the faces of the attackers I could see fell immediately slack. There is a particular look on a human face, sir, when the animating consciousness behind it is erased. The lights go out, so to speak; there’s nothing ambiguous about it. Later scans showed that these individuals’ brains, skulls, and even their spinal columns and stomach nerves had been subjected to a complete quantum wipe. Similarly, all information in the bricks they carried was summarily destroyed.

“Our sensors can be quite astute, and some small fraction of these data were eventually reconstructed in spite of the attackers’ best efforts. We know, for example, that one of the attackers ate tea cakes on at least one occasion. Unfortunately, very little was uncovered that proved useful to our investigation.”

“I’m sure the physical damage to the evidence didn’t help?”

“An excellent point, sir. With the engagement apparently over, we would have called fresh robots from the fax, shipped the bodies to a Constabulary lab for immediate analysis, and moved in to search the suspect vessel on probable cause. That would be standard procedure. However, the vessel’s fusion reactor initiated a cascade overload, resulting in a kiloton-class explosion which scattered the physical evidence, obliterating some of it beyond hope of reconstruction. Newhope itself had grown the proper shielding, and was minimally damaged. I did not know any of this at the time, but I suspected it, as my helmet dome went superreflective and I was aware of a sharp physical impulse, very much like striking the ground after a fall. I felt my body tumbling, and when it was recovered six hours later, the autopsy revealed I had died shortly thereafter, from a combination of blunt trauma and gamma ionization. I recommended myself for disciplinary action, sir, but was refused.”

“That’s in the record, yes. Do you have any regrets about the encounter?”

“Many. Most notably, the skeletal figure was not apprehended during the scuffle, and no trace of it could be found afterward. This, too, is typical of our encounters with presumed Fatalists. We have yet to develop an effective tactic for arresting them.”

When asked what he did with the Medal of Conduct he’d won for his heroism, Captain Shiao replied, “It’s against regulations, sir, to wear such adornments on duty, or to wear them at any time on a garment other than a Constabulary uniform. There is one that I sometimes bring with me to state functions; this particular medal I placed in a locker with the others for safekeeping. It’s a great honor to serve the Queendom in this way, for the Fatalists are breaking the law. The awards themselves are of secondary importance.”

And when asked if he expected to die himself someday, Shiao frowned in thought before answering, “Permanently? Irretrievably? That would be a gross dereliction of my duties, sir. Unless a qualified replacement were found ahead of time, I should do my best to remain alive. However, if it happened that my services were no longer required, I suppose I’d consider terminating my life voluntarily, as an act of community.”

In response to this remark, Shiao’s wife Vivian, the beloved Director of the Constabulary, is reported to have offered a colorful rebuttal which history, alas, does not record.

Chapter Five in which innocents are imperiled

The doctor, Angela Proud Rumson, turned out to be only the first of a tag team of nonthreatening female civil servants paraded through Conrad’s room. There was P.J. the environmental technician—who thoughtfully interrogated him about the conditions of his “native” Planet Two. Was the light too bright for him here? Would he prefer a chlorine atmosphere?

“It was called ‘Sorrow,’” Conrad told her, “and I wasn’t born there. I’m from Ireland, originally.”

“Oh, how nice,” she said, sounding surprised.

“It wasn’t that much dimmer than Earth, just… yellower. And the chlorine was never more than a trace gas.”

Again, surprise. “Fatal concentrations, I thought.”

He shrugged. “To a regular human lung, sure, but it’s a minor biomod. I barely noticed it after the first couple years. The biggest difference between P2 and Earth is the length of the day; P2’s is a lot longer. And that’s not something a sane person would miss.”

And when P.J. was gone there was Lilly the nurse, and then Anne Inclose Ytterba, who was apparently some sort of famous historian.

“You want to know about life in the colonies?” he asked.

“Very much so,” she said, “but I’ve been asked to hold that conversation for another time. Right now I’m here to brief you on the past thousand years.”

Which turned out to be a really short conversation; the population of Sol had quadrupled, and nine of the thirteen colonies had gone offline and were presumed extinct. Nothing else of any real import had happened.

“We lost contact with Barnard in Q987—three hundred and three years ago. The circumstances were curious; there had been talk of a budget crisis, and then a cemetery crisis. No details were offered, and in your King Bascal’s final announcement no mention was made of them. The next message—the colony’s last—was from something called the ‘Swivel Committee for Home Justice’ announcing that King Bascal had abdicated his throne, and that the Instelnet transceivers were being temporarily shut down to conserve energy. This occurred on schedule, and no further transmissions have been received from Barnard since that time.”

“So they might still be alive?” Conrad asked, reeling under the news. He’d been born into a world without death, and the grim toll of life on Sorrow had never seemed normal to him. It was, fundamentally, the reason he’d braved the rubble-strewn starlanes once again: to bring thousands of children to a place where “dead” was a medical condition rather than the end of a universe.

“They might,” she agreed, “although the so-called budget crisis was really more of a food crisis. The population had just passed the one million mark, but the fax economy was declining asymptotically to zero, and agricultural production had not fully taken up the slack. Think of it as an energy shortage, if you prefer; insufficient conversion of sunlight into food.”

“The soil there was worthless,” Conrad said, with a tinge of bitterness. “Never enough metals. No matter how much organic mulch you throw down, plants just won’t grow without trace metals. But you can synthesize food in a factory, right?”

“And they did,” Anne agreed, “from air and ocean water and metals mined from the asteroid belt. But all that takes energy, too. Sunlight and deutrelium, and the technology to exploit them. To function smoothly, Barnard’s economy needed more people than it had the resources to support.”

“So they died.”

“The ones you knew, yes, very probably. I’m sorry. At the time of last contact, the average lifespan of a Kingdom citizen was just a hundred and ten years.”

“Jesus,” Conrad said. He had socks older than that.

“Still,” she offered, “Sorrow’s air is breathable. There’s water to drink, and some vegetation. It just grows slowly. By most estimates, using nothing but human labor the planet should support roughly one person for every twenty fertile acres. And it’s a big planet, right? There’s no telling what’s happened up there, but I’d be astonished if there weren’t someone still alive. Possibly hundreds of thousands of someones—the great-grandchildren of the people you knew and loved. They may even be happy.”

“Hooray,” Conrad said, managing in his distress to make an insult of it. The world you’ve left behind is gone. Everyone you know is dead.

Anne didn’t appear offended, but the interview was over; she began the process of gathering her things. “I don’t blame you for being upset, Mr. Mursk. I’m sure I would be. But most colonies aren’t as lucky. At Ross and Sirius and Luyten, they didn’t have the cushion of a habitable planet to fall back on. When their economies failed, the air trade failed with them, and most of the communities died out within a year. Maybe someday we’ll travel there, to find vacuum-preserved corpses by the hundreds of millions. A field day for people like me, I’m sure, but nothing alive. Nothing contemporary.”

“Nothing decomposed,” Conrad said. “You could just wake them all up.”

“Except for the radiation damage,” she answered. “The way I hear it, you were barely recoverable yourself. If we left right now to rescue them, those people might have a chance.”

“But the Queendom of Sol has its own problems,” he finished for her, “and isn’t going anywhere.”

“Unfortunately, yes. But consider this: you got out, along with thousands of your countrymen. And in light of recent events, there’s little doubt they’ll be revived. If the Fatalists hate you that much, most people will find some reason to love you.”

“What recent events?” Conrad asked, not liking the sound of that. “What Fatalists?”

Anne Inclose Ytterba, already stepping through the doorway, turned to offer him a look of sudden sympathy. Now she felt sorry for him. “Didn’t you hear? You’re all the targets of a secret society’s deathmark. It seems you’re emblematic of everything they’ve ever struggled against, and they want you expunged.”

“Really?” Conrad wasn’t exactly a stranger to conflict; he’d shot his way out of Barnard, and before that he’d been in the Revolt. If people would just be nice, just look out for each other and share the wealth along with the problems, he’d’ve lived long and peacefully without complaint. Hell, if life were short he’d’ve been happy enough to take over his father’s paving business in Cork, living and dying in the county of his birth. But rare indeed was a century without conflict, and this far-wandering Conrad Mursk had already slogged his way through the darkest hours of more than one. Shamefully, he held himself responsible for dozens of deaths—many of them permanent.

But his enemies, numerous though they were, didn’t usually take the trouble to swear out a formal deathmark. That was something one expected of Old Modern robber barons, or cartoon characters. The illegality of it paled in comparison to its sheer absurdity. They want to do what?

“We just got here,” he said to her, a bit defensively. “What could we possibly have done?”

And here Anne the historian cocked her head and laughed a strange little laugh. “You’re breathing the air, Mr. Mursk. Tsk tsk.”

After that charming encounter, Conrad enjoyed a few hours of darkness and sleep, and then another visit from still another civil servant: Sandra Wong the social worker.

“Look,” he told her, before she’d had a chance to say very much, “I just want to get out of here. I want to see my wife.” He was standing at the window, peering out through the frost and into the polar darkness. Except for the faint, shining curtains of aurora australis hanging over the wellstone lights of Victoria Land, it looked just like the view from Newhope’s observation lounge. The same damned stars, a bit less vivid. He hadn’t seen a sky in hundreds of years, but it was winter here; dry and cloudless. The sun wouldn’t be up for months.

“I understand—” Sandra began.

“I’m not sure you do,” he said, turning to glare at her. “We were in a terrible accident. We had to freeze ourselves, without any guarantee we’d ever be revived, and I haven’t seen her since. You people have been kind, and you offer every assurance that she’s fine, just fine. But since when is that a substitute for… for…”

“Warm flesh and a smile?” Sandra asked, looking down at her sketchplate and nodding. “I’m your last visitor, Mr. Mursk, and my job is to process you back into Queendom society. Technically speaking, you’re still a prisoner.”

“Eh?”

“For your role in the Children’s Revolt. You were banished, yes?”

“Oh, that. Yes.” It seemed such a long time ago. But these people were immorbid, and forgot nothing. Time passed for them like a kind of dream, a river without end.

“As your caseworker, I’ve filed a temporary motion to reinstate your citizenship with full privileges. This means, among other things, that you’re entitled to draw Basic Assistance. It’s not much, but it should get you on your feet until you’re able to find employment. What’s your area of specialty?”

“Uh,” Conrad answered brilliantly. Specialty? He’d kicked around from one profession to the next, mastering few tangible skills. Life in the colonies was like that; there was always more work to do than there were people to do it, and no one was really qualified. You just grabbed urgent-looking tasks and did them, and then you grabbed some more, and just kept on like that. Until you died. But how could he explain that to someone like Sandra, who’d probably had fifty years of schooling before her first lowly apprenticeship?

“Architect,” he finally said, for lack of anything better to attach his name to. He’d been First Architect of the Kingdom of Barnard, for whatever that was worth. A laugh, here, probably.

Indeed, Sandra’s expression was primly amused. “Architecture is a field, sir. I need a specialty.”

“You need one?”

“Every citizen needs one. If nothing else, it may win you Appreciator status, which would boost your assistance level.”

Conrad frowned. “You mean I’d be paid to walk around admiring buildings?”

“In a sense, yes.”

“Would I have to write anything?”

Again, that flicker of amusement. Sandra was trying not to smirk, not to condescend; she seemed like a nice person, and certainly her profession was one of understanding and tolerance. But Conrad was just too damned ridiculous: not just a refugee but a bumpkin, from a place so backward it had collapsed and died in its own filth, without building so much as a teleportation grid. Architect, indeed.

“Sir, that would make you a Reviewer. I’m not sure you’ve got the background for that.”

Ouch. “Hmm. No, I don’t suppose I do. I became a revolutionary because there was nothing else for me here. All the good jobs were filled with people too competent to ever leave them. And that was a long time ago. Today, I’m a thousand years more foolish!”

A faint smile acknowledged the joke, but then she said, “There’s nothing wrong with being an Appreciator, sir. It’s honest work. Most people don’t have the eye for it.”

“Hmm. Well. I suppose I’m flattered, then.”

“I do need to put something down for your specialty. Shall we say, residential architecture?”

“Oh, I’ve done residential,” Conrad said. “Single- and multifamily. Also industrial, civic, monumental, and certain infrastructure projects, including roads and tuberails. But lots of people were doing that. The only specialty I can claim is in transatmospherics. I once built an orbital tower a thousand kilometers tall.”

Sandra the social worker blinked at that. “Personally? With your own two hands?”

It was Conrad’s turn to laugh. “Yeah, I’m magic. I had a crew, miss. Twenty-five men and eleven hundred robots.”

She blinked again, then glanced down at her sketchplate and said, “Specialty: transatmospheric architecture with supervisory experience.” When she looked up, the condescension was gone. “You may qualify for more than Basic Assistance. It could take a few weeks to sort out, though.”

“I’m a patient man,” he said, “except where my wife is concerned. For that matter, I wouldn’t mind seeing my parents, whom I haven’t laid eyes on in a thousand years. And the sky, the wind. I tried to go outside, here, but the door wouldn’t open. It said I’d freeze to death in ten minutes. I said I’d be back in two. I’ve lived on polar caps before. But as you say, I’m still a prisoner.”

“We’ll be on our way in a few minutes,” Sandra assured him. “But first, shall we talk about your wardrobe options? The right appearance could make a big difference in your prospects.”

Conrad laughed again, pinching the hospital gown he’d been wearing since before they revived him. “Are you saying this is the wrong appearance? I’m shocked. Miss, we wore clothes in the Barnard colony, too. Give me a fax machine and I’m sure I can work something out.”

“You’ll have access to one,” Sandra said cautiously. “You won’t own it.”

“Good enough,” Conrad said. And then, with a burst of wonder: “I’ll be able to travel anywhere in the Queendom, won’t I? I can eat whatever I want, and I’ll never get sick or geriatric again. I’ll be immorbid. I’ll be rich.”

Sandra shook her head at that, and dutifully burst his bubble. “Don’t get your hopes up, sir. You’ll be living on Basic Assistance, in a Red Sun emergency shelter in one of the hottest, wettest climates on Earth. You’ll be in the bottom percentile for personal income, with sharp travel and plurality restrictions.”

“Plurality!” Conrad chortled. “I can make copies of myself. I can be twins, triplets!”

“You can be twins,” Sandra said, “but it just means your energy budgets will go half as far. There’s no way of knowing how long you’ll be on assistance, sir, and you need to prepare yourself for the reality of it.”

Conrad was a patient man, and a kind one, but this went too far. He’d had enough of these self-important children telling him what to do, what to think. “Miss,” he said coolly, “have you ever walked out of a blizzard with a broken collarbone? Have you spent a hundred years aboard a starship, or fought off a team of angry asteroid miners? I once watched my best friend’s daughter cut in half, while her image archive was permanently erased. I’ve stood knee-deep in the rot of a failed ecology, and handled a city’s worth of corpses. I’ve betrayed the trust of a king, and lived. So don’t tell me about hardship, all right?”

“I’m… sorry,” she said.

And before she could say anything else he nodded once, trying hard to squelch his anger. “Thank you. Your apology is accepted. Now take me to my wife, please.”

Chapter Six in which a community is overrun

Faxing from one place to another had been a perfectly ordinary feature of Conrad’s youth. He’d done it several times a day, with no more thought than he’d give to stepping through an ordinary doorway. Sure, the body was destroyed and then reassembled as an atomically perfect copy, but what of it? The atoms in your body were temporary anyway—constantly churning, moving, departing and being replaced. This thing called “life” was just a standing wave in a flowing river; it endured across the smaller patterns that came and went. Only a deathist would obsess about the higher meaning of it all.

But that was a long time ago. Conrad had last seen a medical-grade print plate in the autumn days of Sorrow, and the last person to step through it—Princess Wendy de Towaji Lutui Rishe—had paid a high price, dying elaborately from an undiagnosed glitch in the system. Even that memory felt remote, far removed from this time and place, but its lessons lingered in the bones. Sandra led Conrad to the nearest fax machine with no further difficulty, only to find him balking at the threshold of the gray-black, vaguely foggy-looking rectangle of its print plate.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

And what could Conrad say, who’d just gone on about his impatience, his courage in the face of hardship? “I’m… fine, thank you. It’s just been a long time since I traveled this way.”

“It doesn’t feel like much,” she said, shrugging. “Just a little tingle as you go through.”

“I know, dear, but there’s more to it than that. I’ve been to the stars and back, and I’ve lost little bits of myself here and there along the way. One grows…” Cautious? That was hardly the word for a man who’d defied martial law, who’d stolen Barnard’s single most tangible asset, who’d plowed a course through rubble fields and smacked head-on into trouble, bringing his closest friends along for the ride. “One thinks about these things more and more. Right and wrong, life and death, freedom and servitude. Every decision kicks up these consequences that follow along for the rest of your life. Which is forever, right? It sometimes pays to take a moment and think.”

Sandra had apparently seen her share of wackos on the job, and took this comment with equanimity. “I can arrange for other transport, sir. If your beliefs require it, I may even be able to waive the associated fees.”

“No,” Conrad said, for his eagerness outweighed his caution by several orders of magnitude. “I’m done thinking. Let’s go.”

But still, he let Sandra walk through the plate first. It was like watching someone step through paint; the surface parted around her with a faint crackle, and a glow not unlike the southern lights in the cold Antarctic sky. She shrank into it and was gone. Well, here was the heaven he’d bought for Sorrow’s dead; taking a breath, he stepped in after her.

And truly, there was no real feeling to it. It was a bit like falling and a bit like drowning and a bit like a static shock all over his body, but mostly it was nothing much. Stepping through paint would at least have been cold and sticky. And there was this to be said for the process: on the other side there was sky.

He came through, right behind Sandra, in an open-sided, glass-domed atrium the size of a soccer field. There were no trees, but there were people sprawled out on blankets, as in a park. And like a park, the dome’s floor was covered in short grass of a green so bright it hurt Conrad’s optic nerve. There was nothing like this in Barnard; Sorrow’s vegetation favored dark browns and ambers, with the occasional splatter of deep olive, under a sun much redder than Sol. The skies of Sorrow ranged from aquamarine to yellow-gray, and its clouds were hazy or feathery or even striped as the warm, slow jet stream skipped on and off of the cooler, denser layers underneath.

But the sky here was as blue as the grass was green, with the yellow-white sun shining brightly through an arch of puffy cumulus clouds. Did the soul ever forget this stuff? Did the body, independent of the intellect, feel the allure of its natural home?

“Oh my,” said Conrad, his eyes agog, his heart aflutter.

And almost as quickly, with his first few steps, he felt a sort of brightness in his own body as well. His flesh had been optimized by the best morbidity filters the Barnard colony could devise, and Barnard was (or rather, had been) the clear leader in that field. He was very difficult to injure—on Newhope it had taken a propylene glycol explosion, the boiling liquid jetting out so hard it had smashed him right through a wellmetal railing. And he’d survived even that, long enough to get down to the cryo tubes.

And for the same reasons, his body aged slowly. In the colony’s waning days, when Conrad and Xmary had stolen Newhope and spirited away the frozen dead, Barnard’s elite classes had spoken half-seriously about outliving the coming dark age. Hoarding the last of the medical-grade faxes, they planned across the millennia while the proletariat lived and died around them. According to some of the models, a single optimization might carry a careful person through a thousand years of life. Or more. Ah, but Conrad and his fellow traitors had been so long on that ship, that damned, cramped tower of a ship. With limited exercise, limited stimulation, an industrial-grade diet of recycled organics and minerals. Ordinary human beings would surely have cracked under the strain. They were a hundred and forty-six years into the voyage when disaster finally struck, and Conrad, without realizing it, had felt every day of that in his bones!

But the Frostbite Trauma Center had lifted those years away, and now that he was out in the world, in the fresh air and sunshine, he felt light as a pillow and springy as a sapling. Indeed, he’d last felt the tug of Earth at the age of twenty-five—absurdly long ago—and being back here now made him feel almost that young again.

“We’re near the ocean,” he said, for the air smelled of salt. Not the grotty acid smell of Sorrow’s lightly briny oceans, but something cleaner and heavier. Almost edible, a kind of stew. And then, feeling a slight rolling motion in the ground beneath his feet, “We’re on the ocean. A floating platform?”

Sandra nodded. “This is Sealillia, an emergency shelter owned by Red Sun Charities and deployed in times of crisis. I think the last time it was used was during the Amphitrite habitat failure on… one of Neptune’s moons. I forget which one. Twenty thousand people came streaming through these fax portals”—there were three of them here, side-by-side along one edge of the grassy field—” and stayed here five weeks.”

Ah. Interesting. “This place can hold Newhope’s passengers, then.”

She grimaced slightly. “Well, in principle. Right now there’s a bit of a squatter problem.”

Indeed, there were two dozen people sprawled out on the grass, wrapped in blankets and apparently sleeping. This was no real surprise; open real estate with any sort of facilities access—such as the fax machines here—had attracted the indigent even on Sorrow, where indigence tended to be fatal and therefore self-limitingly rare. But as he stepped over one of the sleeping bodies, he saw a woman with painted nails and wellgold earrings, her immaculately coiffed hair only slightly smooshed by its contact with her pillow. A hobo-ish backpack lay at her feet, but she was outwardly young and certainly well dressed, in a peach-colored wellcloth pyjama adorned with moving circles of metallic gold. Her blanket was the reverse: circles of peach roaming a cloth-of-gold surface.

The others around her, men and women alike, looked comparably respectable, though they seemed inordinately fond of wellgold jewelry. And that was interesting, because the indigent people of Conrad’s time had been hairy and smelly, antisocial and unadorned, and that wasn’t the sort of fashion that ever went out of style. The ones in the old days were mostly men, too, whereas these people were about a fifty-fifty mix.

“They’re overgrown children,” he said, recognizing their type at once. Here were fully ripened citizens of, he would guess, anywhere from twenty to a hundred years of age, who could not for the life of them find the employment, the wealth, the respect accorded a true adult. And how could they, when the self-appointed adults of the Queendom refused to grow old and die? The positions of power and influence were all filled long ago, before the colonies were founded. That was why there were colonies. That was why there’d been a Children’s Revolt to inspire their hasty founding.

“Yup,” Sandra agreed. “They just show up. Tired of living with their parents and too poor to afford places of their own, they just sort of drift around the Earth like a vapor, condensing on any flat surface.”

Conrad laughed; he hadn’t realized his caseworker had a sense of humor under that bureaucratic exterior. He realized suddenly that the mere fact of her being an obstacle in his path, and a tool of the government he’d once rebelled against, did not in any way prevent her from being a likable person.

She laughed as well, but then added, “It’s only funny until the eviction crews show up. The Amphitrite evac was fifteen years ago, but Red Sun is required to maintain a state of readiness. It needs this place for the next refugee crisis, whenever that may be. Probably you guys; probably soon.”

“And the kids can’t use it in the meantime?”

“The kids have a way of messing things up, Mr. Mursk. The platform spends most of its time folded up somewhere—probably in the waters off Tonga—to prevent exactly this from happening.”

“Hmm. Well. How big is this thing?”

Instead of answering, she led him off the grassy field and out through one of several arch-shaped openings in the dome. As they approached a railing, he saw that the dome was built atop the die of a circular plinth or podium two hundred meters across, which sat in the center of a six-petaled raft of some gray, cementlike material. Covered end-to-end in black-roofed, three-story wellwood dormitories, Sealillia was a kilometer-wide flower on the surface of a featureless ocean. Around it was a low ring, projecting half a meter out of the water; the sea outside was blue and nearly waveless, but within the ring the water was distinctly greenish in hue, and teeming with laughing, splashing humans in various states of undress.

“It’s a model city,” Sandra answered finally. “Larger versions dot the equator from Galapagos to Kiribati, where hurricanes fear to tread. Probably twenty million people altogether. At the moment, I believe we’re a thousand klicks north of the Marquesas, or forty-five hundred northeast of Tonga.”

“Fascinating,” Conrad said, meaning it. Nothing of the sort had been necessary in his own time. In fact, he suspected it would’ve been illegal, as there was a push at the time to shrink the Earth’s population and expand its wilderness areas, by pushing people off into space. Apparently, this hadn’t gone well. Still, he wasn’t here to admire the scenery, or even the architecture. “Where are my friends?”

“This way,” she said, pointing, motioning for him to follow as she approached the staircase that ringed the central plinth. “They’ve got a pair of apartments in Building One.”

If that was Building One there at the foot of the stairs, then Conrad could see right away that something was going on; there were kids everywhere, but here they were clustered. Here they were all facing the same direction: toward a second-floor balcony on which three people stood. Xmary, Feck, and Eustace.

Conrad’s heart leaped at the sight—they looked fine! In fact they looked beautiful, much better than they ever had onboard the starship. Over the years of that bitter journey Eustace in particular had grown into a fine, clever, resilient woman, with no way to express or define herself except in terms of the mission. But there she was, standing out over a crowd of strangers like she’d been doing it all her life. Xmary, by contrast, had started as a socialite and become a spacer mainly by accident. She looked even better, even more at home, even more smugly pleased with herself. Mission accomplished!

The three of them were dressed in wellcloth togas of superabsorber black—“sun cloth” it was sometime called, for it could absorb and store many kilowatt-hours of solar energy, and then release it at night to warm the wearer and light her way. Their hair had been cropped close, in a way that gracefully emphasized their age somehow. Conrad felt immediately self-conscious about his own unruly mop, but at least he had combed it. At least he’d let Sandra pick out a pair of pants and a shirt for him—plain, but tasteful.

“If you insist on putting yourselves in harm’s reach,” Xmary was calling down to a crowd of hundreds, “you should at least prepare yourselves for what’s to come. That’s just my advice, but you’d do well to listen. You need to study this group’s tactics. Does anyone here have combat experience?”

No hands went up, although many a nervous foot was shuffling on the cement.

“What’s she doing?” Sandra asked quietly, turning a funny look on Conrad.

“Preparing a defense,” Conrad said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. Which of course it was; if they truly had been marked for death, then he and his friends had best gird their loins for battle. And with these young’uns hanging around, there were only three options: evict, recruit, or watch them die in the crossfire. Drowned, most likely; the easiest thing to do with a platform like this was to sink it with all hands aboard, then pick off the survivors as they swam. Would Fatalists discriminate between targets and bystanders? It seemed unlikely.

“But that’s the Constabulary’s job,” Sandra protested. “Or the local police for this jurisdiction.”

“Then where are they?” Conrad asked. “If they want to help, that’s fine, but we’re not going to sit around waiting.” And then it dawned on him that that was exactly what Sandra—what the Queendom authorities and probably the Fatalists themselves—expected the refugees to do. He laughed and said, “In the colonies, miss, one learns to take care of problems as early and as thoroughly as possible.”

“But—”

Whatever she was about to say, it got cut off when Xmary noticed Conrad at the back of the crowd. Her stern face brightened immediately, and she whooped, then put her hands on the railing and vaulted over.

The crowd fell back a step, gasping. The fall was only four meters, and Xmary’s bones and joints were woven through with wonders. She could fall twice that far without serious injury. On Earth, with its higher gravity and thinner atmosphere than Sorrow, the terminal velocity was higher as well, but if she didn’t mind a repair trip through the fax she could conceivably survive a fall from any height. So could a squirrel; there was nothing especially miraculous about it.

Nor was Xmary particularly reckless, or athletic, or consumed by the need to show off. She just didn’t like to waste time. Especially now that they were off the ship, and time actually meant something again. She wanted her husband! The real irony was that Barnard’s morbidity filters had been exported to the Queendom; most of these kids were probably as indestructible as she was. Had they never tested their limits? Did they even know what was inside them?

In any case, they parted like water as Conrad’s wife fell toward them, her toga flapping up, clearly exposing her navel, her black underpants, her navy tattoo. She landed heavily on her sandaled feet, dropping into a crouch with one hand down in front of her and the other up in the air, for balance. “Hello, darling,” she said, grinning.

“Hi there,” he returned, stepping up to offer his hand. “I like what you’ve done with your hair.”

The kids enjoyed that; their silence fell away into cheers and hoots and catcalls. They liked it even better when she rose to a standing position, reached for the ruff of Conrad’s shirt, and pulled him in for a kiss. Then, pulling away, she looked around and addressed them all again. “Let’s reconvene in an hour. Right now I have more pressing business.”

And who, in an immorbid society where hormones raged in young and old alike, could fail to understand that? With a smile so wide it must have hurt, Xmary took Conrad’s hand and pulled him toward the building’s entrance. The crowd cheered.

“But weapons are illegal,” Sandra Wong was saying. She was in one of the apartments—Conrad’s, apparently—standing primly while Conrad and Xmary, Eustace and Feck sprawled on the bed. A dozen of the kids, whom Xmary had identified as potential leaders, sat on the tables and chairs and floor, watching the exchange with interest. Sandra gestured at the small fax machine built into one of the walls. “This thing won’t even print them for you. And why should it?”

“Anything can be a weapon,” Feck pointed out reasonably. And Conrad had to smile, because Yinebeb Fecre—aka Feck the Facilitator—had improvised his way through more sudden skirmishes than Sandra could possibly imagine. Like Conrad, he had sent his share of bodies to the Cryoleum, and to the even more final crematorium of Barnard’s stellar furnace. “We could stage an impromptu golf tournament. I don’t know about you, but my aim with a golf ball is pretty good. I suspect our collective aim, with hundreds of golf balls, is even better.”

“But why would you do such a thing?” Sandra wanted to know.

“To stay alive?” Feck suggested.

“But your patterns have been safely archived. Everyone’s have. All you’d be doing is disturbing the crime scene, making it harder for the authorities to determine what happened.”

“We’re supposed to let them kill us?” Eustace Faxborn asked, more in confusion than genuine horror. “We’re supposed to trust our lives to a backup system that we haven’t personally tested? I’m sorry, miss, that’s nonsense.”

Eustace had spent virtually her entire life aboard Newhope, trusting nothing, testing everything, and fixing whatever she could. She was a no-nonsense kind of gal; when their nav solutions were corrupted and they’d suddenly realized they were drifting into a dust shoal, she’d hardly batted an eye. When the nav lasers were overwhelmed, and then damaged, and then ground to dust themselves, she’d shrugged and run diagnostics on the ertial shield. And when the ship was holed and tumbled and coming apart, she’d simply called out, “Cryo tubes,” because that was the final backup. When all else fails, leave a good-looking corpse.

“There’s no law against self-defense,” Xmary told Sandra Wong. “I looked it up. In fact, under maritime law, which applies here, you’re even allowed to defend a stranger’s life ‘with all necessary force and means.’”

“But that’s crazy,” Sandra said. Like Eustace, she seemed more perplexed than upset at the misunderstanding. “I think each one of you needs to consult with your own caseworker and hash out an activity path that leads away from violence.”

Xmary was about to object, but really, Sandra Wong was the ranking authority here. And while Conrad had no particular awe for authority—he’d led his share of mutinies and rebellions over the years—he did at least know enough to work with them, until such time as you were working against them.

“That’s probably wise,” he said to Sandra, and was satisfied with the surprise on her face. “Could I trouble you to send for them? We have no intention of breaking the letter or spirit of the law; we just want to present our enemies with a discouraging target.”

He sat up and looked at the kids assembled here, feeling for a moment that he could barely tell them apart. Here in the Queendom, modifying your mind or body required an alteration permit, and those were hard to get. As a result, these were some of the purest humans he could recall ever seeing.

It was too bad, in a way; Conrad was used to reading people’s character in their bodyforms. Troll? Centaur? Self-created jumble of anatomical talents and handicaps? Gorgeous human of near-mathematical perfection? Here they were all just kids, and to the extent he could read them at all, it was in their clothing and posture, their coloration and adornment, their facial expressions and manners of speech. And these things were easily changed, easily imitated. They didn’t require the bodily commitment that even, say, backward-bending knees would require.

More or less at random, he singled out one of the young men seated on the table. Like many of his fellows, the kid was shirtless—clad only in a pair of loose trousers and a thrice-looped wellgold necklace that flashed improbably in the room’s dim light. But his skin was chlorophyll green, lightly striped with darker tones, and Conrad liked that, taking it as a sign of personality.

“You,” he said, “what’s your name?”

“Raoul Handsome Green,” the kid answered.

“Handsome Green? Really?”

“Yes, sir. That’s the name my parents gave me.”

“Hmm. Good one. And when did they give it to you? How old are you?”

“Fifty-one, sir.”

“Do you have a specialty?”

“I do. I’m an art appreciator. Mostly Late Modern photography, although I admire the painting and sculpture of that period as well.”

“Hmm. I see. But you have other skills, right? Can you swim?”

“Yes.”

“Hold your breath?”

“Sure. For five minutes, maybe… I dunno, maybe six or seven minutes.”

“Really? Good,” Conrad said. “Very good. Why don’t you find some other swimmers and go print up some gill-diving gear? If we’re attacked, I’ll bet you four-to-one it comes from underneath.”

Raoul Handsome Green had no response to that.

“Is something wrong?” Conrad asked him.

At least Raoul’s face was expressive; his look combined the sullenness of a frown, the helplessness of a shrug, and the pointed amusement of a smirk. “I don’t know how to do those things, sir. Who do you think I am? Who do you think you are? We don’t become interstellar heroes just because you walk into a room.”

There were scattered sniggers at this from the other kids.

“You’re all staying here illegally,” Feck pointed out, fluttering his hand in annoyance. “What I would say is, who’s taking care of you if not yourself?”

“There are libraries here,” Conrad said, “right? You can pick up a block of wellstone and start asking questions. They still teach that in the schools, I assume? Research?”

Raoul shrugged. He wasn’t going to commit to an answer one way or the other.

“Anyone else?” Conrad tried.

It went on like that for a while, and Conrad eventually decided there were three separate problems here. First there was the obvious ignorance of these people. He found this personally disgusting and offensive—how could they look themselves in the mirror?—but in all fairness they simply had no practical experience. Doing anything. Nor did they need any in the eternal lives the Queendom had mapped out for them.

They were drowning in knowledge, but actually absorbing some, actually learning a skill, was something they did for amusement, not for money or survival. Their minds simply didn’t work that way. Of course, they’d all been born on Earth. If this conversation were taking place in a Lunar dome or asteroid warren, a planette or a spin-gee city in interplanetary space, he might have better luck. Presumably, ignorance could still be fatal in places like that, and would be discouraged.

Secondly, though, there was the problem of authority. Conrad and Xmary didn’t have any. They had surprised the crowd with their leaping and prancing, and yes, their status as returning star voyagers did carry a certain shock value. These kids had never met anyone like them; nobody had. They were clearly impressed. But it didn’t mean they would listen.

And there was a third problem which perhaps overshadowed the other two.

“Maybe the platform needs sinking,” one kid suggested at one point.

“I’m happy to risk my life,” said another. “And I don’t even have current backups.”

“What point are you trying to make with this self-defense crap?” asked a third, with genuine puzzlement.

And finally Conrad understood: these kids were deathists. Not Fatalists, perhaps, but not the sworn enemies of Fatalists, either. The philosophy of random mass murder did not strike them as obviously wrong. “There are too many people,” they’d said several times already. “There’s no purpose for any of this. Maybe there used to be, but we’ve never seen it.”

And it was a strangely difficult point to argue with; Conrad had groaned under the same burdens in his own youth. The answers had been different then, but the questions had not. And yet, life—any life—was full of challenges. Could it really be so different here?

“You may feel a greater urgency,” he suggested, “when death is actually imminent.”

Chapter Seven in which certain difficulties are unmasked

“Your Majesty,” said Reportant Bernhart Bechs to the Queen of Sol, “this seems an awkward time for the king to be absent. Did you ask him to leave a copy behind?”

“No,” she said, not only to Bechs but to the other reportants here, clustered around her and her Palace Guards in a buzzing hemispherical swarm. Ordinarily her personal press cordon was set at eighty meters, with strict acoustic volume limits to discourage uninvited chitchat, but this was a press conference. Typically these would be handled by her press secretary or by some crisis-specific bureaucrat, but there was a lot going on this week, and she had dozens of copies working all across the solar system. Printing out one more was hardly a bother, and people were burning with curiosity anyway, so she had generously permitted the paparazzi to approach within ten meters of her physical person, and to ask—within the bounds of decorum!—anything they wished.

“The king,” she went on, “does not divide his attention when matters of science loom large. He is cloistered at his workshop on Maplesphere, and will remain there until his experiments are complete.”

“Does that mean weeks?” Bechs followed up. “Years?”

Bechs was, at the moment, a four-winged news camera only slightly larger than the queen’s pinkie nail. Strictly speaking this wasn’t necessary; they were in Chryse Downs Amphitheater on the northern lowlands of Mars, and Bechs’ physical self—one of him, anyway—was in a rental office just a few kilometers away. He could remote this bug; there was no need to be it, to run a shadow of his brain within it. Too, he was among the most respected reportants in the Queendom, and would be welcome at her side in his own human body. But old habits die hard, and Bechs was an old, old man. He was accustomed to interviewing Her Majesty in this way, and she, for her part, always recognized his signature wine-red cameras.

“Weeks, most likely,” the queen said. “If his problem is tractable he’ll solve it, and if it isn’t he’ll move on to something more immediate. It’s possible he’ll uncover new principles requiring much more detailed investigation, but if so he will delegate the problem—at least temporarily—to his technical staff. He’s aware that I have pressing tasks for him here, and he won’t lightly refuse.”

“Is it the wormhole physics again?” asked another of the cameras.

“I don’t discuss my husband’s work,” she reminded. But her tone was indulgent, for when Bruno retreated to Maplesphere, which happened three or four times each decade, he generally returned with treasures: the backtime processor, the quantum screw, the popular word-cypher game known as “Nickels.” Nothing could match the twin bombshells of his early career—collapsium and ertial shielding—but he remained the most inventive soul in a population of one hundred and sixty billion. Tamra would never blame her subjects for being curious about his current interests.

“What’s happening with the Barnard refugees?” asked someone else.

“The four living crewmates remain in Red Sun custody,” she said. “No decisions have been made about the others.”

“Has the attack on Newhope accelerated the timetable for their revival?”

“I repeat,” she said, less patiently than before, “no decisions have been made. Whatever we finally do here will set a precedent for all time hereafter. There is no reason to enter into it hastily.”

“What about radiation damage?” another reportant demanded, somewhat angrily. “You can’t leave them out there forever.”

“Steps are being taken,” the queen assured. “Whatever status these people are finally accorded, we will treat their remains with utmost dignity.”

Meanwhile, another Bernhart Bechs camera had found its way to Sealillia, to interview one Conrad Ethel Mursk. It would be the climax of a series; Bechs had already profiled the other three, whom he thought of as the Captain, the Comedian, and the Cactus. He’d even interviewed the ship itself.

In a lurid, voyeuristic sense, the Cactus was by far the most interesting of these; Xiomara Li Weng and her jokester second mate, Yinebeb Fecre, had been born in the Queendom and exiled in the Revolt. They’d had real lives, if sad ones, whereas Eustace Faxborn was created specifically for the interstellar return mission, stepping live and whole and nearly adult from a Barnardean fax machine. This custom had been commonplace out in the colonies, where—strange notion!—there was a chronic shortage of human beings. But in the Queendom this was considered one of the the basest possible perversions.

Especially since people named “Faxborn” were, for the most part, sexually active from the word go. Indeed, if the refugees’ accounts were accurate—and Bechs had no reason to believe otherwise—Eustace Faxborn had married the Comedian shortly before the bloody surprise attack that was the mission’s unauthorized departure. She’d begun less as a member of Newhope’s crew than as part of its life-support system: a living sex robot for the otherwise lonely second mate. In this sense, she’d done quite well for herself, and Bechs was careful to say so in his profile.

“You could run that ship by yourself,” he’d said to her in the interview, echoing the words of the Comedian. “You could fix any subsystem. You’ve a quick mind, and quick hands to go with it, for you’ve been using them all your life.”

He’d meant it in the best possible way—most of his viewers had no such practical skills, and admired them greatly—but her reply was characteristically prickly: “Newhope ran for five hundred seventy-eight years without any crew. After the accident it repaired itself with no help from me. It’s smarter than a human being when it needs to be.”

Which was partly true and partly her own sort of modesty, but mostly it was an uncomfortable and vaguely hostile evasion. The Cactus seemed at ease only when reciting facts, or describing the emotions of others. Her own self, her own feelings, were a troubling subject she didn’t care to examine. And why should she? She’d lived her life in a microcosm, with only two other people besides her husband. Plus the ship itself, yes, which could spin out robots and specialized personality constructs to suit any whim or need. But it wasn’t human.

“I regret the accident,” the ship had said to Bechs in its own interview, conducted at distance over the Nescog voice channels, with hours of signal lag between question and answer. “I was aware of the divergence in the navigation solution, but I was unable to formulate a response. I failed to realize the debris shoal was within our position envelope, and failed to imagine the resulting collision. I was caught off guard.”

“What did you imagine?” he’d asked in response.

And the ship had replied: “Very little, sir. Imagination is an inductive trait, and difficult to mechanize.”

Of course.

At any rate, Bechs had buzzed and flitted his way back here on the news that the ship’s first mate—the captain’s husband—had finally been released from hospital. Bechs would round out his story and then rerelease the whole thing, with commentary, to a curious public.

Unfortunately, several dozen other reportants had beat him to it; he found Mursk seated at his apartment’s tiny dinner table, swatting angrily at a cloud of them.

“Shove off, parasites. I’m done. I’m eating!”

And so he was: fax-fresh plibbles and bran flakes, steaming blood sausage and curried potatoes, with miso soup and the nutrient paste known as “mulm,” which Bechs had never seen eaten by anyone but navy crews and merchant spacers. It was far more food than a human stomach could hold, and there were three nearly full beverage mugs in front of him as well. Here was a man who hadn’t tasted for decades. Not enough, anyway, or not the right things.

But still the cameras pestered him, spitting out questions, stepping all over each other in a haze of white noise. Most people had no idea how to run a press conference, even if they’d called it themselves.

“Welcome back to civilization,” Bechs said to him, raising his voice above the din. He could do that; he had a special volume license, along with other privileges. “You do realize, I hope, that you can order these cameras outside? They can’t invade your home, nor peer through your windows, without permission.”

“Ah!” Mursk said. “Then my permission is revoked. Off with you pests. Off!” To Bechs he said, “Thank you.”

“Quite welcome,” Bechs assured him, while the others buzzed sullenly away. “I wonder if I could speak with you when you’re finished, though. I’ve already interviewed your friends, and I’m hoping to round out my set.”

“You’re Bernhart Bechs,” Mursk said.

“Yes.”

“I remember you from when I was a kid.”

“Do you?” Bechs was surprised, and pleased. “That was a long time ago.”

Mursk laughed. “You’re telling me? But you did that thing on the history of Europe, and the one about the plight of juvenile commuters.”

“God, I barely remember it myself. When can I return, Mr. Mursk? I don’t mean to trouble you.”

Conrad looked down at his food, then up again at the maroon bug that was Bechs. He seemed disappointed. “You know, truthfully, I’m already full. What would you like to know?”

Conrad Mursk turned out to be very nearly an ideal interviewee, whose life story could, Bechs sensed, fill volumes of its own. Nearly everything Bechs asked was met with a long, detailed answer which neither rambled nor lacked a point. A longtime spacer, Mursk had as much vacuum lore as any of his crewmates—and quite a bit more than Eustace Faxborn. But unlike the other three, Mursk had done a lot of additional things with his life, spending more than a century of it on the ground, and decades more on the sea and on the ice of Planet Two’s small polar cap.

He was never a politician—he made that abundantly clear—but he had nevertheless been a member, if unofficially, of King Bascal’s inner circle. He’d been remotely consulted on several occasions by the King and Queen of Sol, and seemed to have been present at almost every major turn in Barnard’s history.

“I’m a trouble magnet,” Mursk said at one point. The admission seemed to sadden him, which only heightened his aura of thoroughness and thoughtfulness. If he had a single great fault, it was a kind of self-doubt that bordered on self-loathing. To hear him tell it, he’d done little good in his life. Still, Bechs sensed through these deep layers of modesty and guilt that nearly every calamity had involved his attempting to, often against terrible odds.

“Our departure helped collapse the Barnardean economy,” he would say. Or, “I shortened the Children’s Revolt through an act of blatant treachery.” Or, “I never convinced the government to soften its punitive measures, and in terrorizing the miners into ending their rebellion I gave my de facto approval to their indenture.”

But from these statements Bechs extracted the unspoken corollaries: I’ve risked my life to preserve innocents. I know when to cut my losses. I know how to broker a deal. I am unspeakably interesting. Bechs could have questioned this man for days, for months; but as fate would have it, the two had only been talking for twenty or thirty minutes when a commotion rose up outside. Not the buzz of reportant cameras but the actual shouting of live human beings, transmitted through the paper-thin, almost tentlike wellstone of the dormitory shelter.

“Excuse me,” Mursk said, a look of worry blooming on his face. He rose from his chair and moved to the wall, murmuring “Window” to it just as though he’d been in civilization all his life. And when the window appeared, he said, “Oh, brother.”

Conrad had been expecting trouble since before he’d even arrived here, and he’d spent much of his time huddled at a library in the apartment’s wall, learning what he could about Fatalist tactics. But what he saw outside was a surprise nonetheless. There was an attack of sorts under way, but the invaders coming down the staircase were not gray-skinned Fatalist ghouls or skeletal Death avatars, but ordinary men in blood-colored jumpsuits trimmed with white.

Conrad had spent time in four different Barnardean services, and had a fine eye for uniforms. These were neither military nor medical; they looked more like a mechanic’s coverall than anything else. They had names stenciled in black across the left breast, but no indications of rank or functional specialty. Indeed, the only insignia was a white rectangle on each man’s left sleeve, bearing a blood-red circle surrounded by five outward-facing triangles. A sunburst, highly stylized.

Conrad counted twenty men, two of them with bullhorns and all of them carrying objects he recognized immediately: contact tazzers, capable of dropping any human being in his or her tracks with the merest brush of their business end. The tazzer was a humane weapon as such things went, but the people who’d actually been struck by one—Conrad included—tended to give them a wide berth. In the words of the poet Rodenbeck, “Being tazzed is like being stepped on by an electric elephant.”

The other surprise was that the half-dressed kids at the bottom of the stairs—nearly a hundred of them—were holding their ground rather than falling back or scattering.

“What’s happening?” Bechs asked, buzzing up beside Conrad for a look.

“It’s the Red Sun eviction team,” Conrad answered. Then, in a much louder voice: “Feck! Xmary!”

He stepped out onto the balcony, prepared to vault over its railing as Xmary had done, or at least call down advice to the children and warnings to the Red Sun security. But the surprises just kept on coming.

“We are not taking names,” said one of the bullhorn carriers in an amplified but outwardly reasonable tone. “No one here will be punished. We simply request that you vacate these premises so they can be put to humanitarian use.”

But the kids—boys and girls alike—were forming up into battle lines as though they’d been training for it all their lives. Their wellgold necklaces and earrings flashed and flickered in the sunlight, not merely reflecting but in some way modulating the glare. Passing notes in class, oh my, in their own secret language. Did they feel it as taps upon their skin? As nerve inductions? As sights or sounds?

They couldn’t change their bodies, but clearly they could use their brains. And whatever they were passing, whatever they were saying to each other, the Red Sun workers seemed oblivious to it until it was too late, and their fate was sealed. When the mob had self-assembled into five clean ranks, they rushed their attackers. Silently at first, as rows one and two launched into motion, but then rows three and four let out an ululating yell, while row five raised its fists in defiance.

Nor were these kids afraid to absorb some hurt; the first two rows were sacrificial, simply throwing themselves against the Red Sun line—in some cases right up against the tazzers. This put the Red Sun workers off balance—literally—so that the third and fourth lines could sweep them off their feet, wrenching the tazzers from their hands. This was also sacrificial, as most of the kids involved went down twitching and grunting. But the fifth line swept over them without opposition, taking up the tazzers and hurling them away, without even bothering to use them against their owners.

Instead, the Red Sun people were hauled up by their armpits and threaded into cunning arm- and neck- and headlocks that made optimum use of the strengths and weaknesses of human anatomy. The guards, like everyone else, must be terribly hard to injure, but against overpowering leverage they had little recourse.

“Here now!” one of them said.

“This activity’s unlawful,” tried another.

But more kids were streaming into the area, and the ones already here were finding their voices. “We’re not hurting anything! Why are you on us like this? Leave us the hell alone!” And then, in a rising chorus: “Into the drink with you! Swim for it! Swim for it! Swim for it!!”

“Excuse me,” said the camera of Bernhart Bechs, buzzing down for a closer view.

Conrad didn’t know what to feel. Barely fifteen seconds after the first commotion, the kids were dragging their captives toward the platform’s edge, at the juncture between two of its flower petals, and they really were going to throw them in the water.

“Stop!” he shouted after them. “There are… there… shit. There are smarter ways!”

But nobody was paying attention to an old man’s babbling, and if he jumped down there to intervene, in all likelihood he’d just be going for a swim himself. Damn! Whatever faults these kids might have, helplessness was clearly not among them. And Conrad had seen this all before, had lived it all more than once—the anger, the spontaneous order and chaos, the pent-up need for action. Alas, Utopia, Rodenbeck had written in the wake of the Children’s Revolt, thou retreatest from immorbid grasp as a cricket from fractious children.

And yea, verily, Conrad could feel it in his bones: the dream of a better life never ended, even when all sense said it should. And so the Queendom of Sol—forged with the loftiest of intentions by the best minds in history—was poised, once again, at the brink of revolution.

“Eternal life,” Conrad observed though no one was there to hear him, “is a tuberail car that won’t stop crashing.”

Chapter Eight In which old haunts are revisited

Perhaps Conrad should have stayed. Perhaps he should have brought his negotiating skills to bear, and brokered some sort of agreement between the squatters, the platform’s rightful owners, and the Constabulary who’d come pouring out of the fax gates a few minutes after the fighting had ended. Perhaps he should have let himself care. But in fact he did none of these things. Feck and Xmary knew the squatters better than Conrad did, and had also enjoyed more extensive contact with the Queendom bureaucracy. In some sense, they’d begun the negotiation process well before the actual skirmish—before Conrad’s revival had even begun—and he didn’t feel like playing catch-up.

Hadn’t he done enough already? Didn’t he have his own needs and wants? Indeed, far from helping Xmary help the kids, he tried to seduce her away.

“This so-called Basic Assistance is pretty hefty,” he said. “We can go places, do things. You’ve spent your life on spaceships, dear, and on worlds that might as well be spaceships. But here’s a place that offers wonders beyond the dreams of Barnard.”

They were sitting side-by-side on the steps outside the park dome, enjoying the night breeze off the ocean while the crowds chattered and shouted behind them.

“Sorry,” she said with a sheepish look he could just barely read in Sealillia’s night-light glow, “but the rest of us are already broke. We retraced our old footsteps in Denver and Tongatapu. Went to the moon, took a submarine ride. We’ve been here two weeks; we blew through our monthly allotment in one.”

“So get some money from your parents.”

She put her head on his shoulder and sighed. “They won’t see me, Conrad. They’re still livid about the Revolt.”

“Really? A thousand-year grudge?”

“You don’t know my parents.”

“Hmm.”

“Anyway, I think we can make a difference here. We should get back inside.”

“I’m sick of making a difference,” Conrad said, scanning the night sky for some sign of the moon, which he still hadn’t seen. “When I built the Orbital Tower, I felt like I was making a real contribution to Sorrow’s future. Not like a stadium or an apartment building; this was something that really helped. But it wasn’t enough; it didn’t save the colony. And everything else I try just ends up… I don’t know. It wasn’t so bad on the ship, but we’re among human beings again. And the thing about human beings… I just… It seems like wherever I go, people are fighting. And I can’t help them, and I can’t make them stop. Can’t I be tired of that? Is that okay?”

“Sure,” she said, hugging his arm. “For a while. But every now and then you poke your head up at just the right time, and it does help. Sometimes fighting is the right thing to do. We can get by without you here, so yes, go on ahead. Spend your allowance; have some fun. Just don’t turn your back when you are needed. There’s no point living forever if you don’t use yourself as a positive force.”

He made a smile she couldn’t see. “Aye, Captain.”

“I mean it, Conrad.”

“So do I.” But then he scratched an eyebrow, cleared his throat and said, “If we all did that, all across the Queendom and throughout the colonies, a hundred and sixty billion people using their lives as a positive force… That seems so overwhelming. How can everybody help everybody, when we’re crammed together like this, or dying out among the stars? I don’t know how to use my life.”

“Well, not by throwing people in the ocean.”

And that, at least, they could both agree on.

He had been to every corner of Barnard system, had crossed every millimeter of the space between Barnard and Sol. Twice! He knew the land and seas of Sorrow from pole to pole, and he had radioed personality snapshots to a dozen other worlds, and gathered back scores of self-aware replies which he’d folded back into himself. He was quite possibly the best-traveled person in history. But Saturn’s rings were a sight unequaled in the colonies, and Conrad had never seen them with his own eyes. So that was where he went first.

And God damn if it wasn’t the most stunning sight his eyes had beheld since the first time he’d seen Xmary naked. From a hundred thousand kilometers above the seething cloudtops, at a latitude of twenty degrees south, he found himself looking “up” at a ring structure that filled the center of his view, leaving only the edges black.

The planet itself was more striking than either of Barnard’s gas giants, Gatewood and Vandekamp. Unlike those blank turquoise spheres, Saturn’s blonde atmosphere was broken into subtle bands of light and dark whose edges blended together in little swirls and ripples that were probably the size of Earthly continents. Some of the lighter bands were split by very thin ribbons of dark, snaking north to south and back again, and a few of the dark bands were home to brunette specks and ovals that were darker still: storms, shearing and growing out of the boundary ripples. In his sailing days, Conrad had been a student of Sorrow’s weather, and had seen patterns like this in the thermal maps of her currents and trade winds. But not right there in the sky, all at once.

Even the limb of the atmosphere was interesting; against the blackness of space he could easily pick out three separate cloud layers—call them blonde, brunette, and redhead—floating above the general murk. You saw nothing like that when you were this close to Vandekamp, and at Gatewood it was too damned dark to see anything at all.

Conrad had seen—not personally but through the eyes of a holographic avatar—tidally locked planets like Gammon and Wolf, whose surfaces were as banded and stratified as any gas giant’s atmosphere. The sun never rose or set; the melting point of water was a geographic location. That was kind of pretty, if inconvenient for the inhabitants. But for sheer visual impact it was nothing compared to the Eridanian world of Mulciber, where clouds of tin spilled as rain into quicksilver oceans, in countless craters smashed down by cometary impact. From its dusty moon—the only safe place to view it—the planet looked like an iron ball decorated with hundreds of circular mirrors.

Conrad had seen his share of ring systems, too, but here was the true majesty of Saturn; its rings were young, still nursing their original complexity. He could barely take his eyes off them. According to the hollie windows in the dome of the observation platform, each of the three main rings was wider than the Earth, and the innermost one began almost exactly one Earth diameter away from Saturn’s visible edge. These were nice amaze-the-tourist facts, but from this vantage point Conrad couldn’t really tell where the “three” rings were supposed to be; he counted at least a hundred, of so many different colors and thicknesses and brightnesses that they each, like mountains or oceans or cities, seemed to have a distinct character all their own.

The observation platform itself was interesting, too. He shared it with five other gawkers who’d come through the fax at the same time. And to keep them all from barfing in surprise as they sailed out through the print plate, there was gravity; not from a finicky graser but from actual Newtonian mass. Within its soap-bubble dome the platform was a flat triangle of diamond sitting atop another flat triangle, with a neuble’s worth of neutronium squashed between them. A billion tons of matter: a fifty-fifty mix of protons and neutrons, with a haze of electrons shimmering around them, giving the substance a pearly appearance. The heart of the structure was, in essence, a single gigantic atom, pressed flat and oozing superfluidly into the corners of its prison.

Conrad had come to see the planet, but as the minutes stretched on, he found his attention drawn more and more to the floor beneath his feet. He’d learned a fair bit about neutronium during his brief tenure as a gravitic engineer, and had been fascinated by its liquid qualities. The theory of it all was far beyond him, but he’d gotten surprisingly far by thinking of neutronium as a kind of oil, impossibly slippery and impossibly dense.

There were whole worlds of this stuff out there in the wider universe: neutron stars. Atoms the size of Earth, with the mass of two or three suns, held together not by nuclear forces but by their own enormous gravity. In his more romantic moments, he sometimes dreamed of seeing one up close. What would it look like? What color would it be? If immorbidity meant anything at all, surely he must someday have the chance to find out?

In any case, between the extremes of hydrogen nuclei and neutron stars lay the man-made neuble: a two-centimeter atom held together by pure human stubbornness. They had only two uses: they could be squeezed into the tiny black holes from which collapsium was made, or they could be exploited architecturally for their intrinsic gravity, which was considerable.

In free space, the pull of an ordinary spherical neuble could break a person’s back, could fold a person’s limbs around itself in a bone-snapping, rib-crushing embrace that admitted no hope of escape, or even breath. He’d heard of accidents like that, where it took a team of specialists and superstrong robots a week and a half to pry the body off. Not for any sentimental reason, but because burning it off could ignite or destabilize the diamond shell, releasing the tremendous pressure it enclosed. Bang.

For this reason, neubles were rarely encountered in free space, and the builders who employed them were very careful about surrounding them with protective structure. Their gravity fell away rapidly; two and a half meters away it was Earthlike, and at twenty-five you could barely feel it. Squashing one flat like this was a neat trick that spread the mass and gravity around, allowing you to get closer without getting killed. But it also struck Conrad as surprisingly risky for the staid old Queendom of Sol; he’d only ever heard of circular platforms being fashioned in this way. Squares and triangles had a nasty habit of concentrating stress at the corners.

“How old is this platform?” he asked the wall.

And one of the hollie windows replied, “A very intelligent question, sir. It has been in service as a tourist destination since Q20.”

The very earliest days of the Queendom, in other words. “Huh. And who designed it?”

“Declarant-Philander Marlon Sykes, sir.”

Ah. A man so comfortable with risk that he’d very nearly destroyed the sun, very nearly murdered the king and queen. He had murdered thousands of others, if incidentally, and he was a torturer, too—a closet sadist exposed only at the very end of his days. The Queendom had never imposed a death penalty, but in Sykes’ case it had made something close to an exception, firing him off into the void at the speed of light, in a cage of collapsium that sealed him off forever from the universe of decent people.

A difficult man to admire, yes, but Conrad had studied architecture, and that was a subject one simply could not discuss without frequent invocation of that accursed name. Sykes had invented superreflectors and a hundred other common things, and was responsible for some of the most striking and innovative structures in human history. Including, arguably, the Nescog, which had been built amid the ruins of King Bruno’s original collapsiter network. Bruno had designed the Nescog as well, but he’d had Sykes’ own Ring Collapsiter, ill-fated but undeniably ingenious, to draw upon for inspiration.

“Hasn’t anyone complained?” Conrad asked. “Aren’t people afraid to come here? Why not just build a new platform?”

“Excellent questions,” the hollie window congratulated him. “I don’t have the information here, and the speed of light is such that I may not locate it for several hours. But I will research these issues and forward the results to you.”

“Um, okay. Do you need my name?”

“I have your name, sir,” the window informed him proudly. “It’s an indelible part of your fax trace, and also encoded in your genome.”

Ah. Of course. Conrad had grown up with all this, and it was slowly coming back to him. There was something vaguely unsavory about it—he’d never been crazy about machines that watched his every move, talked secretly among themselves, and also enforced such laws as they were able to. In what way did that advance the causes of freedom and human dignity? But at the same time, he felt a part of him melting with relief. On Sorrow there was no backup, no supervision, no help. If you got into trouble, you got yourself out or you died. Conrad and his friends got out; Bascal and his friends had apparently died. But no more. Here, that kind of death simply wasn’t possible.

But Conrad’s parents were Irish, and in spite of his best efforts they had managed to imprint him with a certain degree of superstition. He had seen a ghost once, no shit, and he looked around now, suddenly realizing all the other tourists had filed away without his noticing. He was here alone with the machines, on a platform designed by the very cleverest of history’s monsters.

“I think I’ll go to Denver,” he said to the fax machine, and hurried to fling himself through the plate.

But Denver, where arguably his own involvement in the Children’s Revolt had begun, was all wrong. Most of it hadn’t changed at all; the old skyline was still there, instantly recognizable. The streets were still bursting with children—for this was a Children’s City—and with buskers and athletes and pedestrians, for this was also an Urban Preservation District where short-range faxing was severely discouraged.

But though the old Denver was still visible beneath, today the city had a lot of extra grown-ups pushing their way through the streets of downtown, and a lot of robots scurrying daintily through morning errands. And the downtown district itself lay in the deep morning shadow of six enormous towers—not orbital towers, but simple pressurized stratscrapers capable of holding a million people each. Taller than the mountains to the west, taller even than the Green Mountain Spire which had once been the city’s signature landmark, they… they ruined it. They made the city look small and artificial and old.

“How long have those been there?” he asked a passerby, pointing up at the monstrosities.

“Huh?” said the man, looking for something out of the ordinary and not finding it. His breath steamed in the October air.

“The towers,” Conrad said, huddling into the warmth of his wellcloth jacket again, for he had not been cold in many decades. “The big ones. How long?”

“Oh, a long time. Hunnerds of years,” the man said. Then, looking Conrad over, he brightened. “Hey! You’re that feller from Barnard, aren’t you? Returned from the stars to back here whence you were born.”

“I am,” Conrad admitted, “though I haven’t been to ‘whence’ yet. I’m from Ireland.”

“Eh? Well, welcome back to society, just the same. Does it feel good? Does it feel right?”

“I don’t know,” Conrad answered. “I only lived here for twenty-five years. I’ve been gone for a thousand.”

And yet, those twenty-five loomed very large in his memory. At the time, they’d been one hundred percent of his life’s experience, whereas Barnard, even at the end, had never been more than ninety percent. And hell, thinking back now it didn’t feel like much more than half. A lot of important things had happened to him out there—shaping his character, informing his judgment—but the trajectory of his life had been determined here. Literally: right here on this very street, on a warm July night, with the Prince of Sol at one elbow and Ho Ng—a man Conrad would one day murder—at the other. Denver was the crucible to a lifetime of rebellion; the cannon from which he’d been fired.

“It looks smaller,” he said. “It feels crowded and weedy and gone-to-seed. But that’s a funny thing, because nothing has really changed. Aye, and maybe that’s the problem.”

“Well, good luck to yer,” the man offered, grabbing and pumping Conrad’s hand, then dropping it and moving on.

Ireland should be the next stop: a ritual visit to his parents, whom he loved and missed. They had raised him well enough; his vagabond life could hardly be blamed on anyone but himself. But this was a funny thing, too, because where Denver still felt recent to him, his life with Donald and Maybel Mursk seemed impossibly remote. And those had been the same time.

So he didn’t feel quite ready. He needed to steep in the thin dry air of Denver awhile, before he could face the damp chill of Cork. Instead he found a seat in a nearly full restaurant, where the wellstone was working overtime to cancel out the crowd noise and leave each table in its own bubble of quiet. Eventually a human waiter appeared, and offered him a choice between ten different meals. Conrad selected the least Barnardean of these—a spicy egg sandwich with blue corn chips on the side—and settled back with a mug of bitter red tea.

The waiter just laughed when he tried to pay. “The walls know, sir. Who you are, what you can afford. Food is free, right? The door wouldn’t open unless you could pay for service.”

Ah. And service didn’t come cheap. Not here, not anywhere. He asked the wall, “Excuse me, um, hello. How much money have I got?”

And the wall answered immediately, in that fast, clipped accent of Sol’s machines: “Twenty-seven trillion dollars, sir.”

Wow. There must have been some mean price inflation here in the Queendom, because the last time he’d been here a trillion dollars was enough to pay ten thousand workers for ten thousand years.

“That’s to three significant digits, sir. Do you require greater precision?”

“Uh, no. Thanks. But how much is my lunch? A few billion?”

“No, sir. Two hundred and six dollars, sir.”

“Two hundred? Dollars? But that would mean…” He was rich? He: an exile, a vagabond who’d rebelled against two governments? He’d had money for a while in Barnard, but he’d squandered it all on secret schemes and silly interstellar messages. And even if there was a bit left over, what value would a few Barnardean dollars have here, when Barnard itself was just a dream? He’d had a Queendom bank account as well, holding trivial sums when he’d departed, but even compound interest couldn’t account for such an explosion. In an immorbid society, interest rates were very low indeed!

“I’m afraid you’ve made some sort of mistake,” he told the wall. “My name is Conrad Ethel Mursk. I’m a refugee.”

“Possibly, sir,” the wall agreed. “But your bank records are quantum entangled with the physical universe, and thus incapable of error.”

He laughed. “Are they, now? I’ve never seen a system incapable of error. Where would I get so much money?”

“It isn’t my place to know, sir, but I can find out for you.”

“Um. Yeah, okay. Do that.”

Why not? He was intrigued. And half a minute later, the wall answered, “Sir, the greater bulk of payments into your account have been from Mass Industries Corporation, with a minority share from World University. I also detect one deposit from the Office of Basic Assistance, in the amount of one thousand dollars.”

Conrad mulled that over. Mass Industries was King Bruno’s neutronium company, whose dredges gathered up the stray dust and gravel of the solar system and squeezed it into billion-ton neubles. Conrad had once helped to hijack one of their ships, but that was the closest he’d ever come to a business relationship with them. And his connections with World University were even more tenuous than that.

“That doesn’t make sense,” he said.

“I wouldn’t know, sir. I’m just a wall. Two messages have just arrived for you, sir. Shall I play them?”

“I don’t know. What are they?”

“The first comes from Ring Observation Platform Two. Seven hundred eighty people have complained, sir, and the number who are afraid to go there is not known. The platform—the only one of its kind—remains in service as a historical landmark. The other message is a request for a job interview on Maplesphere at your earliest convenience.”

Job interview? Already? Hmm. Maybe that Appreciator thing had come through. “That’s odd. What’s the address?”

“Maplesphere is the address, sir. Just speak it to any fax machine. Would you like to hear the complete message?”

“It sounds like I just did. All right, look, I’m going to eat my breakfast, and then I’m going to visit my mom and dad. Hold my calls, if you would, until further notice.”

“I will inform the network,” the wall said dutifully. “And I must say, sir, it’s been an honor working with you.”

“Likewise,” Conrad said, unsure whether to grumble or chuckle at that.

The meeting with his parents, when it finally came, was sadder and louder than he’d expected. He didn’t fax straight to the house, but to the northern edge of downtown Cork, which lay in the late-afternoon shadow of another million-body stratscraper, and had pedestrian and robot crowding issues of its own. Nothing else had changed, although the landscape seemed tired somehow—the leaves a bit droopier, the grass and hedges just as orderly as ever, but in some way less emerald. Here was a place that had simply been walked on too much.

And yet, and yet, his hairs stood at attention, craning their follicles for a view. He knew this place as he’d known few others: in his bones. And Donald Mursk’s roads were in excellent repair, and in his soft Queendom shoes Conrad followed them home without difficulty.

Or rather, to the place where his home should be. But the trees and hedgerows were gone, replaced with a smooth low carpet of grass, and the house was gone, and the tall, skinny mansion that took its place sat twenty meters farther back from the road. Egad. It had never occurred to him that his parents might have moved in the millennium he’d been away. But he walked up just the same, and the house said to him, “Master Conrad! You are most welcome, sir. Do come in, do. Your mother is leaping from her chair as we speak, and while your father is away, I’m printing a fresh copy of him to meet with you.”

Indeed, Conrad was still an arm’s reach from the gray front wall when a wooden door appeared in it with a crackle of wellstone, and immediately swung open to reveal Maybel Mursk, who flew out weeping and laughing. “My son! My son is here!”

Conrad’s father was not far behind, and when the hugging and backslapping and handshaking were done, and they were dragging Conrad back inside, he couldn’t help a wash of guilt. “Come on, now. Mom, Dad, I barely wrote to you.”

“Sure,” his mother said, “and we missed you all the more for that. Sit down! Sit! Can I get you a drink or something? We’ve found a fine beer that we’re quite fond of these past two centuries. Oh, look at you. Look at you! Not a boy any longer but a fine, proud soldier.”

Conrad should have taken that in the spirit it was meant, as a pure compliment. But surely he looked the same as ever, a fit twenty-five, just as Donald and Maybel Mursk surely looked, to their own eyes, too young to be the parents of a grown adult. Much less a thousand-year-old. They’d been born into a morbid world, expecting to live a childless life and die before the century mark, poor and ignorant. Conrad, like immorbitity itself, had seemed a constant source of amazement for them. “Look,” they would say, “we have a boy who rides a bike! Look, he’s a space pirate now! Look, he’s a thousand years old and returning from the stars!” Conrad’s only “soldier” time had been as a security thug in the Royal Barnardean Navy, pushing around the miners and ’finers and wranglers of interplanetary space. It was a period in his life he’d just as soon forget, and even the thought of it had the power to bring out what venom he possessed.

To his shame he blurted, “That’s a bit presumptuous, Mom. You knew me for two decades out of what, a hundred and twenty?”

And of course his mother started crying at that, and his father said, “Oh, now, what do you go and say a thing like that for? Breaking your poor mother’s heart. Have you had any children yourself? Well, then, I don’t expect you know too much about it. You pour your soul into a child, lad. How could you not? And it doesn’t pour back. It wanders off. It gets surly and insults its mother. Now come on, you, tip a glass with us and we’ll speak no more about it. You owe us the tale of your many adventures, and don’t think you’ll escape from here without it. I don’t care how old you are; in this house you’ll listen to the pair that gave you life.”

And then Donald Mursk started crying as well.

Chapter Nine in which a self-deceit is exposed

When the Mursk boy finally showed up, Bruno was elbow-deep in wormholes. Not literally, of course—he’d lost more than one arm that way already—but in the figurative sense; he’d scratched self-solving calculations on nearly every flat surface in his study, and was no closer to a meaningful answer than he had been twelve hours ago. Bah. He hated ceding his concentration to outside disruptions. If he didn’t, he’d be at home right now, basking in the company of his dear wife! But he was old and wise enough to recognize an empty rut, and when Mursk announced himself with a toppled chair and a clatter of spilled sketchplates, Bruno’s irritation was leavened with relief. It was time for a break, yes.

“Hello?” Mursk called out, from the cottage’s small atrium.

“Hello,” answered the voice of Hugo the Robot.

“Excuse me,” said Mursk. “Is this Maplesphere?”

“I don’t know,” Hugo answered flatly. And why should he? He wasn’t part of the systems here, nor a guest, nor precisely a resident. If he was anything at all, he was a dim-witted friend or a particularly intelligent and loyal pet.

But the answer did seem to throw Mursk for a moment.

“This is Maplesphere,” Bruno called back, then allowed his chair to raise and flatten and dump him on his feet. “Door,” he said to the scribbles on his study wall. A rectangular seam appeared and, almost too quick to see, filled in with knotted oak shod and hinged in black iron. The door creaked open, revealing a vaguely disheveled young man, framed in a ray of sunlight.

Today’s fax filters could clean and straighten and press the clothing of a body in transit, could scrub the toxins from every corner and give the DNA a thorough proofread. A glow for the cheeks, a twinkle for the eye… They could even compensate, to some extent, for lack of sleep, and restore the mental and physical equilibrium that a night on the town had depleted. But Bruno was the son of a restaurateur, and had been a shameless drunk for three decades of his early childhood. He’d given that up even before the people of Sol had made him their king, but one never really lost the eye for it.

To the very slight extent that Queendom technology permitted, Conrad Mursk was hung over.

“Welcome,” Bruno said with mild amusement. “I see you’ve met Hugo.”

“Good God,” Mursk replied blearily, looking Bruno up and down. He was amazed, yes, to find himself face-to-face with the King of Sol. This was a common reaction among the commoners, and elicited no surprise in Bruno himself. He barely noticed such things anymore, although truthfully, when one was summoned to Maplesphere one ought to expect an encounter with its sole inhabitant.

“I thought this…” Mursk stammered. “I was asked…” He glanced out the window, at the round, shady curve of the planette: a miniature world domed over with the blue haze of a miniature sky. Something in the view seemed to stabilize him. “What is this, about a fifteen-thousand-neuble core? Three-hundred-meter lithosphere? Those sugar maples run their roots deep. You must have the lining layer about four meters down from the surface.”

“Four and a half,” Bruno agreed. He stepped out into the daylight and then quickly thought better of it. However perfect his eyes might be, strong light still made them ache when he’d been working too long. He retreated to the study instead, motioning for Mursk to follow. “Clear off a chair and sit, if you like.”

Mursk’s eyes ran along the floorboards, taking in the zero-elevation curve where floor met wall. On a planette this small, a surface could be either “level” like Bruno’s floor—hugging the shape of the ground—or “flat,” pleasing the eye but spilling and rolling every loose object into its center. Mursk opened his mouth as if to comment, but then noticed the scrawled equations and came up short again.

“Wormhole tensors,” Bruno said apologetically. “An arcanum even by mathematical standards. I’ve been tempted, these past three centuries, to recast general relativity in matrix notation, just to make sense of the damned arithmetic.”

Having no response to that, Mursk shrugged blankly and cleared off a seat. “This is a job interview?”

“It is,” Bruno confirmed. And though a part of him squirmed with impatience, with the burning need to get back to his equations, he had other curiosities which burned even brighter. He’d known this lad who’d known his son, and he would wade through any pleasantries necessary to get the full data dump. What had Bascal really done out there in the colonies? And yes, in truth Bruno was hungry for company as well. He could always put a copy of himself back to work if necessary. “But there’s no hurry. I thought we could chitchat, you and I.”

“You want to know about Bascal,” Mursk said, with no particular emphasis.

“I want to know about everything.”

“He was a good king,” Mursk lamented, examining his fingernails as if the dust of Sorrow might still somehow be lodged there. “He really was, for hundreds of years. A builder, a visionary. He foresaw the economic collapse, long before anyone else did. He took steps to avert it, then to mitigate it, then to ride it out. But apparently it was bigger than he was.”

“You were friends,” Bruno prodded.

“The best. No matter where I went or what I did, I always ended up in his dining room. It’s hard for me to think that won’t happen anymore.”

“But you and he had your differences, yes?”

“Philosophical,” Mursk said with a dismissive wave. “We all have differences. Your son was a brother to me, and we squabbled like brothers.”

Bruno shifted in his chair, feeling it adjust beneath his weight. Was this refugee telling the full truth? Was he telling King Bruno what he thought King Bruno wanted to hear? With a sudden stab of impatience, he stood up again. “Come with me, lad. We’ll have a walk around the planette.”

“I’ve seen planettes before,” Mursk said, though he stood and followed Bruno out.

Maplesphere was a large world as such things went, and Bruno used little of its space except as, well, space. On the far side, the obligatory lake was small, crowded by trees. Bruno’s maple forest covered half the remaining land area, blocking the view of the too-close horizon, making the pocket world seem that much bigger. The trees also damped reverberation, so that the daylight squawking of a bluejay would not disturb the nighttime slumber of a squirrel on the world’s other side, which after all was only a kilometer’s walk away. Even the miniature “sun”—a fusion-powered sila’a or pocket star—was only forty kilometers distant.

“A laser-cooled tropopausal barocline,” Bruno said, pointing up at the cloud-strewn sky, “allows this world to retain a nitrox atmosphere, without heavy nobles cluttering up the gas balance. The weather itself serves as a backup system, cooling the upper atmosphere so its molecules have a harder time escaping into space. Moist air rises, radiates its heat to the vacuum, and then falls as rain. Maplesphere is the rainiest planette ever created, and thus the most meteorologically stable.”

“Interesting,” Mursk said, with apparent sincerity.

“Alas, ‘most stable’ does not mean ‘actually stable.’ Day by day, year by year, the planette loses gas to the wilds of space. Without replenishment, I’d have a pure vacuum at ground level within two hundred years. If the power failed, I’d have it much sooner than that. And as the colonies have shown us, sooner or later the power always fails. If civilization is to ride out its gloomier moments, we’ll need a larger class of planette—one that can hold its atmosphere indefinitely.”

“Is this place serviced by tankers, then?” Mursk asked.

“Rarely. I’ve designed a tertiary system which is capable of bleeding mass from the neubles at the planette’s core.”

“Hmm. Clever.” They passed from the cottage’s grassy meadow into the green gloom of the forest itself.

“Lad, I want you to level with me. No sweeteners, no half-truths. You fled the Barnard colony with guns blazing, in the midst of what proved to be a total collapse. What happened?”

“A disagreement.”

“With Bascal?”

“Aye, with Bascal. Who else? He was in charge, Sire. Of everything.” Now Mursk was angry.

“Gently,” Bruno said, fearing he might not get an answer at all if he pressed too hard, or in the wrong way. “It’s all in the past, and I’ll not prosecute misdeeds which took place outside my dear wife’s jurisdiction. You understand? The chips have fallen; the cards are on the table, and I call. I just want to know.”

Behind them, the sun set through the branches and canopy of the forest. On the world’s other side—currently its night side—it was the crickets, not the birds, that chirped. Such was life on a planette: you could walk to any time of day you liked.

“People were dying,” Mursk said. His tone begged no forgiveness, offered no apology. “Your son’s plans were rational, but they weren’t humane.”

“And yours were,” Bruno said.

“Aye. But not rational. And not loyal. Your son put his faith in me, and I betrayed him.”

Bruno could hear the pain in Mursk’s voice, and he supposed it was all true; this man did love Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. As a friend, as a brother. As a traitor—squirming under the bootheel of oppression—loves his country and his people. Bascal had always been, in his father’s sad opinion, more a user than a developer.

“Sometimes opposition is loyalty,” he offered, though it must be cold comfort indeed.

“Maybe. You should know, Sire, that there’s a partial copy of Bascal in Newhope’s comm archives. Not a whole person by any means, but a valid memory nonetheless. I promised him that when we got here, I’d transmit it back to Barnard.”

“Promised him? Even after he tried to erase you from the colonial sky? My goodness. Lad, the worst evil is the kind we feel fondly toward. I understand your reluctance to condemn him, truly. But you must be honest with yourself, and with me. Do you know who my best friend was?”

“Marlon Sykes,” Mursk answered, for every schoolchild knew this.

“Correct,” Bruno said. “And as you say, we fought as only brothers of the spirit can fight. With absolute conviction, with love and honor and hatred. To the death.” And even after all these centuries, the wound still felt fresh, still brought an angry mist to Bruno’s eyes. Rational and inhumane, indeed! Marlon had been a brilliant creator as well as a villain, and if the two traits could have been separated somehow, then perhaps Bruno might not have pulled that switch, and sent his friend packing in a cage de fin, on a one-way journey to the end of time. But the damage that hidden monster had caused—the sheer scale of it—boggled even Bruno’s imagination. Some offenses simply overflowed the dams and levees of any possible compassion.

“That must be quite a load for you to carry, Sire,” Mursk said to him, as starlight broke through the trees.

“Quite,” Bruno agreed. And they finished the walk in silence.

“I don’t know anything about wormholes,” Mursk admitted. “You’re making them? Here?”

Seated once more in his comfortable study, Bruno spread his hands. “Trying to, yes.”

Sensing an appropriate moment, Hugo appeared with a pipe and lighter, which Bruno accepted gratefully.

“Thanks, old thing.”

“You’re entirely welcome,” Hugo answered, sounding truly pleased with himself, albeit that stale, arithmetic sort of pleasure to which emancipated robots were given. “May I walk around the yard a bit?”

“You’re supposed to do as you please, my friend.”

“It pleases me to serve,” Hugo said, and wandered off.

With the ease of much practice, Bruno ignited the home-grown, home-cured weeds in the pipe’s ceramic bowl, and drew a puff of their smoke into his mouth. The natural drugs involved, passing through the tissues of his cheeks and into his bloodstream, were mild and crude and beside the point. It was the anachronism of the act itself that Bruno savored; the loops and whorls of rising smoke connected him to Einstein, to Edison, to all the great thinkers of the Mortal Age, of whom he was the last. Connecting him, indeed, to the fireside musings of primal humanity itself.

“What are they for?” Mursk asked. “You intend these wormholes as a substitute for fax gates?”

“Ideally, yes. There may yet be time to prop up these failing colonies, if I can just—”

“Make it work?”

Bruno laughed around the stem of his pipe. “Yes, make it work. Clever lad. Alas, I fear I’m not up to the task. These old chalkboards are getting white.”

“Eh?”

“Chalkboards. Blackboards. Ah, what do you children know?” The cloud around him thickened with his huffing, and he waved it away. “In the tradition-heavy wilds of Catalonia, where I cut my first set of teeth, the last vestiges of the stone age lingered very nearly until the rise of the Queendom. A chalkboard was a slab of hard, dark slate onto which you would scribble with little cylinders of soft, white chalk. Really! We had one in every classroom, every kitchen. You’d erase the board with a rag, you see, and write in a new batch of lessons or chores or ingredients. But sometimes you’d misplace the rag, and you’d have to scribble around the margins of what you’d already written. If you let this go on long enough, eventually the board would get so white with scribbles that you couldn’t read it anymore. And so we learned: too much knowledge is as bad as none at all. We forget how to forget. But this lesson itself seems to have fallen from our collective memory. Our civilization grows too brilliant to brush its own teeth.

“At any rate, yes, I’m battering my head against this problem, and what progress I’ve made has been more tantalizing than helpful.” Bruno didn’t generally present his works-in-progress—too embarrassing—but in a sudden fit of hospitality he added, “I can show you, if you like.”

“Sure,” Mursk said, shrugging. “It sounds kind of fundamental to our future.”

This irritated Bruno. The lad meant well enough, surely, but a king could grow very tired of his people’s unreasonable expectations. “Only if luck is on our side, lad. The universe is under no obligation to please our petty whims, and I have failed many times to throw a harness round its neck.”

The trick with a pipe was not to puff on it too much, lest its smoke turn sharp and acrid—or too little, lest it fade to the dull flavor of ashes. But Hugo was back again, this time with Bruno’s ashtray, which he whisked onto the desk in front of him before dancing back out of the study again with too-quick, too-perfect fluidity.

“Nice robot,” Mursk said, with less than total conviction.

“He saved my life once, in battle. He’s quite brave.” Bruno set the pipe down in the ashtray and began tapping at his desktop controls. “Now, the first trick in wormhole dynamics is to develop your standing gravity wave very, very rapidly. It’s not at all like collapsing a neuble into a black hole. Second, you’ve got to dump in twice as much power as theory predicts you ought to. I’m still figuring that one out.”

While he spoke, the writing vanished from every surface, zipping into archive space. Glittering green-black bullseyes took their place on two opposite walls. The lights dimmed, and though it wasn’t apparent from here in the windowless study, the sun itself dimmed as well, focusing fully eighty percent of its output in a single strand of violet laser. Bruno’s eastern photovoltaic array, hidden away in a forest glade, took the beam head-on and fed its power directly into the gravity lasers. The air in the study began to shudder, then to twirl itself into fist-sized eddies that popped and lashed their way around the room.

“The third trick,” Bruno said, raising his voice above the hiss, “is to ram a cylindrical mass through the wormhole throat, to stabilize the two openings.” Leaning, he dragged a half-meter iron bar out from under his desk and held it up for Conrad Mursk to see.

“Is this experiment safe?” Mursk wanted to know. The air devils were whipping at his hair, driving him back, blinking and puffing, against the door frame.

“Not particularly,” Bruno called back, “but your image is archived in my fax buffer.”

And then the time for talk was past, for a pair of rippling distortions appeared like lenses in the air between the two men. The spherical wormhole mouths: each displaying a funhouse-mirror view of the photons striking the other. Their instability was apparent even to the naked eye; they wandered and quivered, orbiting one another in a slow spiral that would, within seconds, bring them swirling together in a flash of canceling energy.

Bruno’s initial tests had taken place in vacuum, ten kilometers from Maplesphere and with the trillion-ton mass of the planette between himself and the relativistic action. It was only by accident—literally—that he’d discovered the radiation of a wormhole’s collapse was nonlethal. Or not immediately lethal, anyway; the flux of photons and virtual particles would surely wreak lasting havoc on a body with no access to fax repair.

“Watch!” he instructed, hefting the bar and jabbing it at one of the holes.

There was no preferred direction of travel between the two wormhole mouths; each point on one sphere—or vector through it—corresponded with a point or vector on the other. Bruno’s aim wasn’t bad, but even a glancing blow would have done the trick. The bar slid silently and effortlessly into the nearer sphere, its far end emerging just as cleanly from the other. The two halves of the bar were pointing in wildly different directions, but within moments the two mouths were sliding and rotating into the minimum-energy configuration, wherein the bar was straight. They missed on the first swooping pass, and again on the second, but the oscillations tightened until suddenly the vectors locked.

The spherical distortions vanished. The whirling air devils quieted. The bullseyes faded from Bruno’s walls, and his equations returned, and the lights came back up, and the sun resumed shining, and somewhere in the distance a bird chirped uncertainly.

“Jesus,” Conrad Mursk said.

“Indeed,” Bruno could only agree. He held up the bar for Mursk’s inspection. The two ends were perfectly intact, not damaged in any way, but the distance between them was more than twice what it had been. And the center of the bar…

The center of the bar wasn’t there at all. Or rather, the center existed in two places. The bar existed in two halves, with half a meter of empty space in between. Bruno waved the thing around, demonstrating to a goggle-eyed Mursk that the metal was in fact contiguous; each end moved with the other, just as though it were all one piece. Because it was one piece. It just had a gap in the middle, a kind of elongated four-dimensional wrinkle.

“The state of the art,” Bruno said, “in mass-stabilized wormholes.”

A string of quite astonishing curse words tumbled from Mursk’s gaping mouth, and Bruno had to remind himself that the lad was, among other things, a sailor.

“Forgive me, Sire,” Mursk added finally. “I’ve just… I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“Nor I,” Bruno said, “until a few weeks ago.” He tossed the bar behind him, clanking onto the heap with the dozen or so others he’d created thus far. “And it’s certainly not what I had in mind. We need tunnels, from one point in space to another.”

Mursk thought that one over. “Can you drill through the center of the bar? Make a hollow tube of it?”

“One would think so,” Bruno told him. He tugged at his beard, mulling and fretting over it. “But every attempt thus far has pinched off the wormhole, cutting the bar in half. Nor have I been able to prop the throat open with wellstone, or wood, or any other material. There’s something about the crystal structure of a solid metal, or the free electrons roaming through it, that allows the wormhole throat to stabilize. Something mysterious, you see? With the unified field equations in hand, it should be possible to derive any result, to describe any physically demonstrated system. But the math can be unimaginably complex, and it’s not always clear how to express a physical system in those terms. I’ve tried to approximate this one by various methods, but so far nothing has come close to describing what we see here.”

“And you think I can help?” Mursk asked, sounding surprised and perhaps even vaguely offended.

The question surprised Bruno as well. “With this? I think perhaps you could,” he said carefully, not wanting to drive off this man whose services he hoped to secure, “with your background in gravitic engineering.”

“My what?”

Mursk seemed genuinely puzzled. Had there been some mistake? Bother it, Bruno didn’t need yet another digression! But just the same, he pulled up a window on the surface of his desk, while the desk tilted itself toward him to improve the reading angle.

“Have I erred in some way? Your name came up at the very top of my search. Have I perhaps summoned the wrong Conrad Mursk? No, here it is: according to your employment profile, you invented the ‘pinpoint drip’ style of matter condenser.”

“The what?” Mursk frowned for a moment, and then seemed to have a dull epiphany of some sort. “Oh, that. Squeezing neutronium with a small black hole, right?”

“And pumping it,” Bruno agreed, “and storing it in a metastable reservoir until there’s enough to neubleize. It’s quite a clever invention, which has streamlined our mass dredging operations considerably. Do you have any idea how much money you’ve saved me over the years?”

“Not I,” Mursk said, with a sudden laugh. “That machine was invented by Money Izolo, in the wake of an industrial accident on Element Pit. I had nothing to do with it.”

Nothing, eh? Bruno prodded harder. “I examined the patent document myself, lad. There was an Izolo listed as coinventor, but your name appeared first. You also built a… Gravittoir, was it? A system for pulling heavy payloads off a planetary surface?”

If anything, that suggestion made Mursk uneasier than the first one had. He cringed and fidgeted. “I didn’t build it myself, Sire. I mean, I headed the team…”

And here, seeing what was going on, Bruno summoned his most regal glare and turned it full-force upon Conrad Mursk. “False modesty,” he said, “is a form of lying, and I have very little patience with it. I’m going to ask you some questions, and I require you to answer simply and truthfully. And if I have reason to doubt your answers, lad, I will copy your brain and dissect it alive until I find what I’m looking for. Is that clear?”

In point of fact, Bruno would do no such thing, and indeed he wasn’t even sure it was possible. But he saw that Mursk really had lived in a tyranny, for he believed it at once, and looked afraid. And Mursk really had rebelled against that tyranny, too, for on the heels of his fright he swelled with such anger that the cottage summoned a Palace Guard to glide up silently behind him. Just in case.

“Very clear, Sire,” Mursk said tightly.

Bother it. Why had the people of Sol made an inventor their king, who could scarcely maintain his end of a civil conversation? Bruno adored the people of Sol, and he understood exactly why they adored his wife, their first and only queen. But he had never understood their love for him, and feared at times that it was nothing but spillover. If Tamra loved him then so must they, by extension if not by inclination. But Conrad Mursk had been away for so very long.

Bruno had learned, through long bitter practice, never to retract or apologize for anything he said. A king simply wasn’t permitted this courtesy. But he did soften his stance, adding, “The labors of coercion are never as useful as the labors of willing gift. There are still assaults in the Queendom, every now and again, and I often suspect their perpetrators have simply never felt the touch of kindness. For if they had, then the fumbling of a cornered victim could hardly measure up. Here’s what criminals fail to understand: in a civilized world there is nothing left to steal. There are no goods or commodities they can carry away with them, nor services of value they can commandeer. Even a beggar has better odds than a thief.”

“Meaning what?” Mursk demanded, relaxing only slightly.

Bruno spread his hands. “I want your help. Not with wormhole dynamics, if that’s what you’re thinking, but with a project whose distractions threaten my delicate concentration. I need to be free to retreat here to Maplesphere at any time, so I dare not manage this project myself. And in this queendom of third-order specialists, I dare not turn it over to an unqualified leader, for my terraformers know nothing of gravity. My graviteers know nothing of DNA. My architects and planette builders are craftsmen, unacquainted with the needs of a large project, and my megaproject managers know nothing about anything. I need generalists, of a sort which Sol has simply stopped producing. On Sorrow you built the Orbital Tower, yes?”

Bruno could see Mursk contemplating some hedge around the correct answer, but in the end all he said was, “Yes. It’s one of the few things in my life I’m unequivocally proud of.”

“Aha. And you discovered the wellstone substance known as Mursk Metal?”

“Um. Yeah.”

“Well, then, you may be interested to know it’s a key component of today’s gravity lasers. You’ve also personally operated a variety of construction equipment, from bulldozers and cranes to neutronium barges and asteroid bores. True?”

Reluctantly: “True.”

“And you’ve worked as both an ecological engineer and a climatologist?”

“Well, a wildlife surveyor and a weather station monitor.”

“All right, fair enough. But on a world in the midst of terraforming operations. Indeed, you’ve lived most of your life in extreme environments. Spaceships, polar wells, desolate alien landscapes. Would you agree?”

“I… suppose.”

“And you’ve been the captain of a ship.”

Mursk balked at that one. “What? Oh, an ocean ship. Yes. But only for sixteen years.”

Bruno tapped a thumb on his desk, feeling himself grow restless again, impatient with this young man’s aggressive modesty. He needed yeses, not maybes, if they were to finish this quickly. But he pressed onward, reading his way down the profile. Fortunately the thing had been assembled by hypercomputers delving back into Queendom records and archived Barnardean transmissions, for if Mursk himself had written it, it would be all of ten words long. “Good. Now, you were present at the Sealillia riot a few days ago. Ordinarily I wouldn’t hold that against you, but given your history…”

“We were bystanders,” Mursk said, with convincing irritation. “If those kids had listened to us, it would have gone very differently. Peaceful protest, maybe. I don’t know.”

“So you tried to organize them? Pacify them for their own good?”

Defiantly: “Sure.”

“That’s good,” Bruno said, looking up briefly to meet the boy’s gaze. “Most people wouldn’t. Now, if I understand your records correctly, you were briefly in charge of the entire planet of Sorrow?”

“Um. Well, very briefly, yes. Before the terraforming had started, before we’d done much of anything. There were only a few hundred people orbiting it at the time, and no one on the surface.”

“There will be a few thousand on this project,” Bruno said to him. “Perhaps ten times as many as you’ve previously managed. Would this present a problem for you?” Then he thought better of that phrasing, and amended, “Do you have some intellectual or emotional defect which would prevent you from attempting it?”

“Uh, well, I don’t think so. I mean, I could certainly try.”

“Then you’re hired,” Bruno said.

And suddenly Mursk was backpedaling, taking back some control over the interview. “Hold on, now, I haven’t agreed to anything. You haven’t told me anything. Location, duration… I suppose pay rates would be good to know. I’m trying to imagine a job for which my name comes up first, and I’m sorry, but I’m blanking. What exactly is this project?”

And here Bruno smiled, because he knew he had his man. “It’s a terraforming, lad. We’re going to crush the moon.”

Chapter Ten in which worlds are critiqued

In a crazy-ambitious kind of way, Conrad could see it made sense: the moon was too small and light to retain an atmosphere of its own. But the moon’s gravitational attraction—like that of any object—dropped off with the square of the distance from its center, so that compressing the surface down to forty percent of its current elevation would sextuple gravity’s pull there. Yielding an Earth-normal gravity of 1.00 gee, and ensuring that the atmosphere was truly stable, even over geological spans of time. Talk about terraforming!

Fortunately Luna did not lack for oxygen, and as for the light metals which life required, why, Luna’s crust was richer than any of the colony worlds—richer even than Earth itself. For organic molecules to exist, there would of course need to be a huge importation of hydrogen and nitrogen and carbon. But once this was done it would be possible to construct a soil so deep and so fertile that the new world—with a surface area equal to that of China or Australia—could easily support a billion people even at a colonial-or-worse level of technology.

Moreover, thanks to conservation of angular momentum, reducing the moon’s diameter would also speed up its rotation, so that its “day” would shorten from 29.5 Earth days to a more hospitable 4.92 days. Indeed, Conrad immediately suggested crushing just a wee bit less, so that the day would work out to exactly 5.00 Earth days, or 120 hours. He’d had his fill of goofy clocks and calendars on Sorrow, and the decrease in surface gravity that would result—a mere 0.02 gee, according to Bruno’s office wall—would inconvenience no one.

“An excellent suggestion,” the king said, with approval and relief in his voice. “I see we’re in good hands. In any case, the way is paved for such an endeavor by the engineering of large planettes, by the terraforming of Mars and Venus, and of Sorrow and Gammon and Pup. And in truth a squozen moon is more suitable than those colony worlds in a variety of ways. Locked tight against their red-dwarf stars, those three are metal-poor and radiation-rich, and their days are very long. We can do better by design than by astronomical accident. But I forget myself. I don’t have to tell you this, who have seen it all firsthand.”

He was leading Conrad toward the fax gate, and at first Conrad assumed he was being dismissed. Bruno had what he wanted—a leader for this bizarre project—and now he was getting back to his own work. But apparently, the sales pitch wasn’t over quite yet, for the king murmured something to the fax gate and stepped right through it alongside him.

They came out on a warm, windswept mountaintop under a sprawling canopy of stars. This was some kind of scenic overlook at a mountain’s summit: a flat, circular depression lined with a wellstone emulation of the surrounding rock. A winding stone staircase led downward, to a cluster of wellglass buildings ringing the mountain farther down. There were no other peaks in view, and a few hundred meters below the buildings was a layer of cloud that hid the ground, making it impossible to tell how high this mountain was.

Not very, Conrad thought at first, from the dry thickness of the air and the dim, twinkly look of the stars. Must be close to sea level, or even… But no, the air was too thick, and didn’t smell right, and it occurred to him suddenly that this was Venus, not Earth.

Nor was that his only surprise. The fax had produced two Palace Guards along with the bodies of Bruno and Conrad—one in front of them and the other appearing behind as they stepped away from the print plate—and when Conrad turned his head and saw them he nearly yelped out loud. He shouldn’t be surprised to find the king traveling in the company of his royal bodyguards, but there’d been Palace Guards in the Barnard colony as well, and in the events leading up to the Children’s Revolt, and they had certain… unsavory associations for Conrad. That hulking silhouette was a symbol of danger, of impending unavoidable pain.

A curse rose unbidden to his lips, and though he managed to keep it silent, his heart rate jumped. Damn!

“Venus,” Bruno said, spreading his arms as if he owned the place. Which he did, Conrad seemed to recall, as majority shareholder or some such. “The day is long here as well—fully twenty-eight hundred hours from dawn to dawn—and this world is also a geological nightmare which periodically liquefies broad swaths of its own crust. There is no way to curb its immense volcanic activity, its immense and continual outpouring of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. Thus, terraforming has become an unending process, which will never make anything but the highest mountaintops habitable to humans unless we engineer a special Venusian strain.”

That’ll be the day, Conrad thought, for the Queendom, unlike the colonies, expressly forbade biomods until they’d been thoroughly studied and vetted, their full consequence plumbed. “Tinkering produces monsters,” the Queen had said on more than one occasion, “who cannot grasp the humanity they’ve lost. Can the fall of the colonies be completely unrelated to this truth? If we’re to be free and happy, it’s necessary that we avoid such self-destruction.” Rather an extreme position, Conrad thought, but there you had it.

“Anyway,” Bruno said, “the sun is damnably hot here during the long days. As a result, people venture outdoors mainly at night, if then. And does this not undermine the very purpose of terraforming? Immorbidity does not imply omnipotence, alas. We were ambitious in ever thinking this place could be tamed by such as we.”

“Maybe Venus could be crushed,” Conrad suggested. “That would speed up its rotation. You’d have to remove a lot of mass to keep the gravity tolerable, but you could make a moon with it. Hell, you could get two viable planets out of it, and if you set up the eclipses properly they’d shelter each other from the noonday sun.”

“Ho!” Bruno chortled dryly. “What have I pulled from this hat of mine? An architect of worlds, indeed! Your ambition does you credit, lad, but there isn’t money enough in all the universe for a scheme as mad as that. If you can imagine such a thing, I’m actually running short of funds. I, yes! I’ve built thirteen starships out of my own pocket, and each of them cost as much as the entire Nescog and provided not one penny in returns. Some corners of society may be richer for the investment, but I myself am not.

“My coffers have slowly recovered from the shock, but your squozen moon will set me back a thousand years. Think of the energies we must deploy, the masses we’ll shift! And here you speak to me of lifting half the weight of a planet, against the planet’s own gravity, and then crushing it all! That’s twenty times the project you have before you, lad, and the project before you is the largest since Marlon’s Ring Collapsiter.”

He paused a moment, though, tugging his beard and pinching his chin, and finally said, “Still, the suggestion has merit. Someday, perhaps. Meanwhile I have more to show you, for Venus has not been our only disappointment.”

The fax took them next to a low hilltop overlooking a village in the middle of a rusty plain, with steep red cliffs rising up on either side, just beyond the horizon.

“Savage Mars,” Bruno said, “turns out to have none of Venus’ rages and sorrows, and in truth human beings have discovered no gentler world anywhere, except the Earth. He needed a bit of air, a bit of warmth to get him going again, but Mars never forgot how to live. Thriving, though, has always eluded him, for he’s a scarred old soldier whose energies are long spent. The warmth of Sol touches this place with a quarter of its Earthly intensity, and the core of the planet is dead and cold and solid. Nor is there enough heavy hydrogen in the poles for economical fusion. So deutrelium is imported, and solar power stations throughout the Queendom beam their energies here. Without this input, this net inward flux of foreign energy, the cities of Mars would grind to a chilly halt. It’s a fine world for poets and dilettantes, gardeners and gamers, but industry must look elsewhere for its shelter and comfort.”

The king eyed Conrad curiously. “Unless you’ve, er, got some suggestions for this place as well?”

Conrad shrugged. He wasn’t exactly a font of spontaneous genius. He said to the king, “There’s always tidal heating, right? On Sorrow it was the only thing keeping the core molten. If Mars had a large, close moon… Well, wait a minute. Imagine a water moon, larger than the planet itself, with no solid surface or center. It doesn’t weigh as much as rock, but it could still exert a strong tidal force. And it would act as an enormous lens, gathering light from the sun and heating up. It would radiate in the infrared, and Mars’ gravity would pull it into a teardrop shape that should direct more than half the emissions toward the planet. Right?”

“Hmm,” Bruno said, thinking about that. “Possibly. But would it be stable over geologic time? I suppose it might!”

“Or we could move the planet,” Conrad added lamely. “Closer to the sun.”

The king laughed at that. “I see thinking small is not among your faults. Long ago, I’d thought to give the squozen moon project to Bascal, but in truth he was never suited. He was a political creature, and started a revolution instead.”

So did I, Conrad answered silently. For he was just as guilty as Bascal, or nearly as guilty, in getting the Children’s Revolt moving.

“And he clawed his way to the stars,” Bruno mused, staring down at the village and the red desert plains beyond it, “through my pocketbook. And there he met his end.”

At that poignant sentiment, Conrad asked, “Sire, what will you do with the image of Bascal? The one in Newhope’s memory?”

“I don’t know,” the king answered. “If my son is dead then this thing, this recorded entity, must be more a caricature than a copy. We could overlay it on his childhood fax archives and see what happened, but…”

“But tinkering produces monsters?”

“Indeed. And so does hardship, of which you had plenty out there in the dying colonies. I’m sick with guilt about that, lad, and I’m not eager to compound my past errors. Some people are more inclined to monsterdom than others. But I do mourn for the little boy, the Poet Prince who used to putter around Tongatapu on that noisy little scooter of his. What a happy lad, what a joy to behold! Already containing within him the sprouts of wickedness, or poor judgment. Even before the time of Newhope’s departure, he’d become a stranger to us. A dangerous one.”

“You’re going to let him die? Your own son?” Conrad couldn’t help feeling a little bit horrified, after he’d gone to the trouble of preserving that damned message. If it was the only record of Bascal’s adult life… God, it must be a wrenching decision. If it were up to Conrad, what would he do?

“We don’t know his fate,” the king said sadly. “We only suspect it. And this so-called cousin of his, this Edward Bascal Faxborn, is an alternate expression of the boy I raised. ‘King Eddie of Wolf’ they call him, in tones of true friendship. I’ve never met the man outside a self-aware transmission, but is he not also my son? A better version? A different set of choices?”

The king moped for a few seconds, the Martian breeze twisting in his long hair. “Someday, perhaps, when we’ve universe enough to contain him, we can dare to unleash that spirit again. But for now I suspect we’re better off leaving him where he is. If it’s a kind of murder to postpone his resurrection, I’ll invite you to join in the conspiracy. Will you do me the favor, Architect, of forgetting this conversation? I don’t want his mother finding out.”

Conrad’s next stop was Luna itself—specifically the small domed city of Copernicus, nearly dead-center on Nearside, which was to be the site of his temporary headquarters, until by his command the ground started shaking and cracking and falling in on itself and the surface became uninhabitable.

“How exactly do we accomplish this?” he’d asked the king, for there were already detailed cross-sectional blueprints of the squozen moon, showing exactly where the surface must lie, and how the dense subsurface must be layered in order to maximize the world’s utility to its future inhabitants. Toxic metals were to be buried deep—the moon had an excess of nickel and arsenic—and useful ones were to wrap the planette like foil, in layers easily accessible from surface mines. Deeper, a third of the way down to the core, there’d be a layer of di-clad neutronium supported by pillars of monocrystalline diamond.

“How?” the king asked, as though the question had never occurred to him. “I should think you would tell me.”

Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be any huge hurry; Conrad was given two hundred years to complete the task, and a budget of trillions to get it started. Still, Bruno’s tour around the solar system, ending back in the remoteness of Maplesphere far out in the Kuiper Belt, had been a long one. Subjectively they were gone for just a few minutes, but the speed of light was the speed of light, and most of the Nescog was incapable of exceeding it. Invisibly, the journey had chewed up nearly a day in transit times, during which the evacuation orders had been broadcast to Lunar citizens, along with Conrad’s name and face.

As a result, his materialization in the Copernicus town square was greeted by no small number of shouts and dirty looks from the hundreds of people assembled there. Ah, yes: the people of Luna.

The moon’s gravity was too low for the planet-born and too high for the space-born. Too high also for practical low-gee manufacturing, and the place couldn’t compete with Mercury for solar energy, or with the asteroids for mineral accessibility, or with anyplace for remoteness from the traffic lanes and comm chatter of Earth. So industry here was even scarcer than on Mars, and with no carbon or hydrogen of its own, Luna wasn’t exactly a garden spot.

And yet, in Conrad’s day it had ironically been one of the most expensive places to live in all the Queendom. As a result, it attracted a small population of fierce eccentrics who loved its vast lifeless spaces, its laissez-faire attitudes, its quaint little crater-domed towns. People who could afford to pay! Lunatics, yes, who looked down on the crowded Earth with thumbed noses. Oh, how happy they would be at the news of their eviction!

“Developer,” one woman called out to Conrad as he exited the fax. On her lips, the word was definitely a curse. “Trillionaire! Dirty robber baron,” said someone else.

Looking around, Conrad decided that the Lunar domes, too, held a lot more people than they used to. The only uncrowded place he’d yet seen was Maplesphere itself—hardly representative of society as a whole.

“What’s wrong with the moon we have now?” demanded a red-haired man in reedy tones. And with a shock, Conrad realized he was looking at humanity’s greatest playwright, Wenders Rodenbeck, who had penned such classics as Uncle Lisa’s Neutron and Past Pie Season. Under other circumstances, Conrad would have been pleased to shake the man’s hand, to sit down with him over a mug of hot tea and chitchat about the ways of the world. But Rodenbeck—a noted opponent of terraforming—had brought an angry mob with him, and Conrad figured this might not be the best time. In a glance around the square, half a kilometer beneath the town’s domed roof, he could even swear he saw the hooded, translucent figure of Death out there at the back of the crowd. When he looked again, though, the apparition was gone.

“I didn’t start this project,” Conrad called out to the mob, for all the good it would do. “Your king has simply hired me to take a look at it, to alleviate the crowding problems and provide a home for billions.”

That went over well. The crowd groaned and shouted and cursed.

“Listen,” Conrad said. “You’ll be compensated for the fair value of your property here, and as far as I’m concerned you can continue to occupy it for as long as it’s safe—probably several years, while we’re getting the project logistics in order.”

“Go back to Barnard!” someone shouted, and Conrad answered angrily, “I wish I could, sir. How very rude. How many of your friends have died forever?”

Presently, a group of men in heavy but helmetless space suits pushed their way to the front of the crowd, and Conrad, fearing violence, briefly wished the Palace Guards were here. Or at least the local police, who on Luna were renowned for their courage and skill. But the leader of the men said to him, “Mr. Mursk, I’m Bell Daniel, the president of Lunacorp Construction.”

“You’re hired,” Conrad said at once. “Your first assignment is to find me an office, away from this mob.” Then, thinking about it, he added, “It might also be a good idea to start digging a hole.”

“Um, okay. What sort of hole, sir? How deep?”

“All the way through,” Conrad told him.

Only much later would it occur to him that he had missed his chance to see the moon—the old, the original moon—in the skies of Earth, before King Bruno’s proclamations had begun the long, slow process of crushing it.

“Call Xmary,” he told the wall of his new office, just as soon as he stepped inside. The network took a few fractions of a second to figure out whom he meant, and the light of his signal itself took a second and a half to reach the surface of Earth. But presently her face appeared, framed against clouds and sky, green grass and oceans.

“Conrad,” she said, “where have you been? Three days you’ve been gone, and no message?”

“Sorry,” he told her. “A lot has happened. It turns out I’m a trillionaire. Also I met the king, and I have a job. Oh, and my parents say hi.”

Xmary nodded impatiently. “That’s nice, dear. We’re under attack.”

Chapter Eleven in which death comes wrapped in cellophane

So was Conrad, as it turned out. He heard a really loud noise, like a glass battleship crashing down outside his building, and a moment later his ears popped, and his building’s exterior doors and windows were closing and vanishing, locking the place down.

“I’ll call you back,” he said to his wife, then rushed to find Bell Daniel.

Fortunately, Daniel was caught just this side of the front door, and was sealed in rather than out. “The dome came down!” he shouted in the overloud voice of a deafened man. “Blew up and came down. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s the Fatalists, sir—I saw Death outside, with his arms up in the rising air and the falling wellglass. There were space suits, too, stealthed in inviz. That was before the dome broke.”

Conrad uttered a curse that even Barnardean spacers considered obscene. Fortunately, Daniel didn’t hear it, and everyone else in the building was shouting and running around, or trying to call out on the Nescog. Or fleeing toward the fax machine, yes, but already the early arrivals were turning back, fleeing elsewhere.

“The Nescog is down!” someone said.

And that was impossible. It would take a huge calamity to bring down the entire network—even the shock fronts of a supernova would take hours to reach the solar system’s remotest corners—and the fact that these people were all still standing here put sharp upper limits on the violence of what might’ve happened. But you could cut off a planet’s access to the network. Conrad had done this himself, during the Children’s Revolt, and he imagined a sparsely populated world like Luna could be serviced by as little as a few hundred hardware gates. How difficult would it be to smash them all?

“Window,” he said to the wall in front of him.

“Not authorized,” the wall replied.

“Excuse me?”

The wall cleared its imaginary throat. “Regrettably, sir, I’m observing disaster protocol, and am required to maintain a superreflective exterior. There could be hazardous radiation outside, or bioinformatic viruses, or visual imagery which could damage you psychologically. I’m incapable of allowing any harm to come to you, sir.”

“Override,” Conrad told it impatiently.

“Not authorized, sir. I can be overriden only by badged emergency personnel, government officials, and members of the royal family.”

“Yes?” Conrad snapped. “Really? Because I’m the chief architect of this fuffing planet, and I need to look outside.”

“I have no way to confirm that, sir.” The wall now sounded uneasy, and willing perhaps to hedge its bets. “Would you settle for a low-resolution cartoon, assembled from sensors on my exterior surface?”

Conrad waved a hand. “Whatever. Yes. Show me what’s out there.”

Without further ado, the wall produced a hollie of the buildings outside, rendering them as hypersmooth, two-color fantasies. Broken walls were shown as stylized zigzags, and the shards of wellglass littering the streets were little isosceles triangles of translucent white. The worst of it, though, were the piles of bodies—the people who’d been caught out in the street and either explosively decompressed or taken down by flying debris. These, the cartoon represented as bright yellow, pillowy-looking figures with oversized heads, big black eyespots, and grinning half-circle mouths. A big heap of happy dolls, indeed.

But moving among the dolls were other happy figures—these in gray—and one very tall, very thin humanoid that seemed to be put together from marshmallows and sealed in a wrapper of black cellophane. That one was the happiest of all, with a toothy grin taking up the vast majority of its polished white cranium.

“Tactical analysis,” Conrad demanded of Bell Daniel, forgetting for a moment that they were both construction workers.

But the wall thought he was talking to it, and annotated its cartoon with little tags saying TO BE REVIVED for the dead yellow dolls, and POSSIBLE ACTIVIST over the gray smiling figures. For Death, it seemed at a loss, and marked the figure with a message saying only, INCONSISTENT READINGS.

And to his credit, Bell Daniel replied as well, saying, “Um, well, it looks like they’re searching house-to-house.”

And indeed, the gray dolls had a tool or weapon of some sort—shown in the cartoon as a smiling padded fish—which opened perfectly rectangular doorways in the buildings, from which little cartoon swirls would emanate. The air escaping, the people inside suffocating. And when the swirls had stopped, a platoon of the gray smiling dolls would prance inside, only to prance back out again a minute or two later to join the rest of their darling little army.

“They’re probably looking for you,” Daniel said to Conrad. And Conrad felt a sinking feeling, because the same thought had just occurred to him.

“On Sealillia, too,” he said. “And probably in Cork, where my family lives.”

“Are they backed up? Your family?” Daniel wanted to know.

But instead of replying, Conrad turned and ran for the fax machine, shouting, “Space suits! Battle armor! Weapons! Now!”

And while he had no official standing as yet, and the building truly didn’t know him from any other Tom, Dick, or Herzog in the Queendom—nor, for that matter, from the gray fuzzy attackers outside—it must be said (a) that the building was not stupid, (b) that every society recognizes a right to self-defense, and (c) that Conrad’s authority-figure routine was neither self-conscious nor marked by any physiological signs of deception or duplicity. So it is not entirely surprising that when the Fatalists broke through the building’s exterior, exposing its interior to the harsh Lunar vacuum, they were met not by corpses but by a dozen armed men and women and the withering rain of six tripod-mounted wireguns.

It was not easy to kill a Fatalist ghoul in full battle armor, but a combination of surprise and determination can accomplish much, and Conrad emerged from the building a minute later with five of his people still alive.

“Are you all right?” he asked Bell Daniel.

“I surely am,” the man replied angrily. “You will find, sir, that my way is like the toilet: when people go in it, they feel better, but when they get in it, they’re shat on and flushed.”

“You’d’ve made a good sailor,” Conrad said to him, on the strength of that comment alone. And together they launched the counterattack.

“This cannot be,” said the King of Sol.

Altogether, in four separate attacks, the Fatalists had killed eleven hundred instantiations of eight hundred and twenty different people. More tellingly, they had coupled the assault with antimatter attacks on two of the great, secret archives where long-term human backups were stored. The aim was clear: to catch key people while they were dead, and delete their archival patterns. In this they were unsuccessful, since all of the deceased persons had either living instantiations elsewhere in the Queendom, or backups stored in other facilities. But in some cases, years of precious memory were lost, irretrievably.

Damn. Bruno had adored the Queendom’s long peace, and hated to see it shattered like this.

“In a way it’s reassuring,” said Cheng Shiao of the Royal Constabulary, “for with its death toll of zero, this is still the most successful Fatalist attack in Queendom history. If they pre-position their assets for these offensives—and surely they must—then we may suspect that this one has cost them dearly, and bought them nothing.”

“Except a lot of fear and suffering,” Conrad Mursk said, clutching at his wife’s hand and glancing meaningfully at Bruno. Or rather, at the contingency copy of Bruno that had been instantiated at the start of this crisis. The “real” me is still on Maplesphere, Bruno thought, blissfully undisturbed. Or perhaps Mursk was staring at the Palace Guards, which (Bruno had already figured out) made him uneasy.

Well, he’d best get used to it. Before the dust had settled, even before the last of the shooting had stopped, Bruno had ordered these two Barnardeans hauled into protective custody at Constabulary headquarters on Tongatapu.

“If they’re not safe there,” Tamra had remarked, “then no person is safe anywhere in the universe.”

She would later have cause to regret those words, but for the moment they seemed true enough, so that Mursk, in Bruno’s opinion, most likely felt confined rather than endangered. A choice of two evils.

Bruno had placed himself in police custody as well, albeit at the head; he was known to involve himself from time to time in legal matters, when the mysteries were sufficiently compelling and the stakes sufficiently high. Could a scientist-king do any less?

Women ran the worlds from the household level on up to the monarchy itself, keeping track of schedules and finances and subtle balances of mood that perhaps trumped all else. He supposed they had always run things, or nearly always, even in the ages of supposed male dominance. But was their universe fully constructed? Fully invented? Were there no discoveries to be made, nor evildoers to be caught and punished? If women consolidated and civilized, surely it fell to men to build and fight, to push the boundaries within which their women ruled.

“On the contrary, my old friend,” Bruno said to Captain Shiao, “our Fatalist adversaries have exactly what they want. They’ve decohered an uncertainty, nailing a message to the collective lintel of our civilization. And the message is death. Whether or not anyone has actually been expunged, they’ve succeeded in reminding us all that true death is still possible, even here. Thus, they have altered the context of future debate, and furthered the cause of their deathist allies in polite society.”

“No doubt you’re right, Sire,” Shiao said with utmost diplomacy, “but I would rather face an enemy who reminded me of death, than one who was actually capable of producing it.”

They all shared a laugh at that—except Shiao, who stood ramrod straight and seemed poised to leap into action at any moment. Indeed, Bruno would expect no less of him, for the universe required vigilant defenders for whom humor was a rare extravagance.

“They may still be capable,” Mursk said finally, studying the gloomy activity around him. They were standing in the Constabulary’s Intelligence Control Unit, twenty meters underground. All around them were workstations occupied by grave-faced men and women examining graphs or holographic images or lines of scrolling text, or else listening to focused audio streams no one else could hear. In fact, the most talented among them were doing all of these things at once.

“Possibly, sir,” Shiao allowed, “but how? Wherever antimatter or fissionable materials are stored there is always neutrino leakage. Suspects will occasionally try to shield their contraband behind opaque condensates, but the shadow stands out clearly in our nasen-beam searchlights, which run continuously. This also allows us to track the absorption spectrum of explosives and toxins and fusionable materials. Neubles of course store a tremendous energy which can be released if they’re broken, but fortunately they produce the sharpest echoes of all. So at least on the planets themselves, we know the locations of every gram of material capable of meaningful destruction.”

“Not all, clearly,” said Xmary Li Weng, in starship-captainish tones.

“All,” Shiao insisted. “And if we find one that isn’t licensed we drop a team on it immediately. This morning’s attacks were unusual, in that they employed positronium-in-wellstone fuel bricks which the targeted facilities had actually ordered for their backup power systems. Positronium cannot be faxed, and must instead be couriered, because it’s two percent antimatter by volume. The suspects are presumed to have intercepted the shipments and tampered with their programming in some way, so that the containment fields would decay at a preset time. We’re investigating that, and we’ll be looking more closely at all such shipments in the future.

“Meanwhile, although the attackers themselves have been wiped beyond hope of interrogation, we do know that they were produced from the buffer memory of several off-network fax machines. Since we know the locations of every single print plate within Queendom space, we will systematically scan their memories for all forms of contraband and all traces of proscribed activity. New filters will be installed in every machine, with or without their owners’ permission. No one will harm another person in this way, ma’am, ever again.”

“Then in some other way,” she said, looking around the room as if probing for weaknesses. “Have you ever been in a battle, Captain? A real one, against powerful enemies?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Shiao replied stiffly. “Several times, ma’am.”

“And did the enemies’ weapons never surprise you?”

“They always did, ma’am. I once battled with Marlon Sykes himself, and his methods were anything but conventional. I daresay I could never have beaten him alone. But then, as now, I had the king on my side.”

Hoy, Bruno didn’t like the sound of that. He remonstrated, “The king is fallible, Captain, and he will thank you to remember it.”

“Yes, Sire,” Shiao said unconvincingly.

“Eh? What’s that? Do I need to request a thousand push-ups?”

“No, Sire.”

Bruno didn’t enjoy making trivial threats, but he knew Shiao enjoyed receiving them. Like many of the best police and soldiers, Shiao was a masochist at heart, and could not feel truly loved without at least the suggestion of pain.

And here, in truth, was the secret heart of Queendom power: treating people not as they asked to be treated, but as they truly wished, in their secret heart of hearts. Invasively, yes, for perfect rule required perfect knowledge, and in matters of state the Queendom recognized no right to silence or privacy. In unguarded moments, Bruno occasionally wondered whether this dictum applied to him as well, who had been dragged kicking and screaming to his own coronation.

To Conrad and Xmary he said, “Will you come with me, please?” He led the two Barnardeans toward a conference room, with the Palace Guards trailing warily behind. He said, “I should apologize for placing you two—and your friends—in harm’s way, but the simple fact is that harm would find you whether you were helping the Queendom or not. As in Barnard, you symbolize much that our enemies despise. I shall not release you from the service you’ve promised, Mr. Mursk. And as for you, Ms. Li Weng, my wife has declared you the provisional mayor of Grace, the next floating city, until its population stabilizes and a proper election can be held.”

The Barnardeans grumbled at that, though not loudly. They hadn’t heard the worst of it, though. “Both of you will be attended by robotic guards until further notice. Not Palace Guards”—he saw Mursk relax visibly at this—“but Law Enforcers, which are nearly as capable.”

“We can take care of ourselves,” Mursk pointed out, with only a trace of sullenness. “We have, for a thousand years. We didn’t have robots when we escaped from Barnard.”

“No,” Bruno agreed, “but you needed them to survive your midcourse accident. And at any rate you work for me now, which is more dangerous than you seem to imagine.”