Lost in Transmission

Chapter nine. Worldfall

The probes were simple, thumbnail-sized dodecahedrons of wellstone, programmed with a titranium-impervium alloy for atmospheric entry and impact, and then filled in with whatever sensors and photovoltaics and telecom antennas their hypercomputers deemed necessary and appropriate for the conditions at their landing sites. Per the master plan, a thousand of them were dropped on the surface of Planet Two, while devices on the orbiting colony and a dozen other satellites scanned the planet's surface and subsurface from above with sensors of excruciating precision and subtlety.

This raw data—enormous quantities of it—was then fed into hypercomputer algorithms designed in the Queendom, which sifted it for differences and similarities and then statistically and chaotetically analyzed it for greater meaning. The orbiting colony where this work took place was officially known as Lilililitata, literally “boiling cap,” a Tongan neologism that meant “valve” or “relief”—a place where pressure was blown off. But that was too much of a mouthful even for Bascal, who laughingly approved a mistranslation in its place: Bubble Hood. Anyway, the place had a population of several hundred by now, most of whom were employed in the hands-on analysis of the results, and the filing of reports, and the forming and testing of hypotheses so that a picture of P2's inner and outer workings could emerge in something more than astronomical detail.

“My boy,” Bascal told Conrad expansively, “the synthesis of data is information, and the synthesis of information is knowledge. Knowledge is constructed, piece by piece, from loose, unkitted parts.”

Bubble Hood was a sphere two hundred meters across, and had originally been intended to revolve around a polar axis to produce half a gee of artificial gravity. Conrad had two problems with that, though: First of all, he wanted the bubble to be transparent, but the planet spinning by every forty seconds would—he knew from experience!—make people sick if they could see it. Second of all it was a waste of space, since the gravity vector would be “straight down” (that is, straight through the inward-facing floor) only at the equator. Everywhere else would be a hillside, broken into terraces by unnecessary “buildings” inside what was already a large, climate-controlled structure. So on a whim, Conrad had crossed the scheduled spin-up off his list and ordered his people to print up hundreds of gravity lasers and scatter them every which way throughout the structure.

The results were interesting to say the least, especially after their long imprisonment in the narrow tower of Newhope. This particular conversation found Conrad and Bascal in a maze of transparent surfaces, facing each other at right angles, with a sketchplate hovering uncertainly in the air between them while the khaki light of P2 glowered down motionlessly from “above.”

“Theoretically,” the king continued, “the next step is wisdom, the sum and synthesis of knowledge. But the more I think about it, the more I think that's a quality I've never seen. I'm sure it exists somewhere—there are sixty billion humans in the universe so far, and at least a few more arriving every day—but wisdom has a quality of mirage about it, retreating when inspected. Historical figures have the benefit of distance, and are incapable of making new mistakes, so we're free to see them as wiser figures than anyone contemporary. But there will be no new historical figures, will there? We are all of us contemporary, always and forever.

“And the wise woman is always a puffed-up biddy when you get to know her, isn't she? The wise man is a fretting gambler. If you guess right a hundred times, my boy, people will call you wise. But with all those billions of people kicking around, statistical narrowing demands that there be winners, even if all the decisions are random. There will be people who have always guessed right, every time in their lives. But it's meaningless, isn't it? Because if their next action is also a guess, it will have no more validity, no greater chance of success, than the cockamamie theories of a punk in some kiddie café. We most of us fail, Conrad, but we find our strength in numbers. If someone succeeds, if someone is wise, then civilization staggers forward, if not happier then at least a little bit richer, a little bit grander.”

“Kind of a harsh view, Highness,” Conrad said crossly. “Be useful for a minute. Focus. What can you tell me about the chlorine situation?”

Conrad had been a little unnerved, at first, when he realized he was the ranking officer for an entire planet, with hundreds of people answering to him. Technically speaking, space crews fell under the command and jurisdiction of the government of Barnard, hence of Bascal personally, and would eventually be reconstituted as some sort of Royal Barnardean Navy, but none of that long-term stuff had been unpacked yet.

The current government, such as it was, consisted of little more than conversations over lunch and dinner, mainly between himself and Bascal, and these were concerned as much with their old days at camp and in the Revolt as with anything contemporary. And since Bascal, with a Juris Doctor, three PhDs, and a ridiculous assortment of master's degrees, was taking a direct and leading role in the sensor analysis, this placed him, in a funny way, under Conrad's command.

Bascal was currently specializing in the biology of the native life-forms and their effects on the larger environment of the planet. But he required a certain amount of direction and had to be pumped periodically for information. For all his newfound age and gravity, he was a rather impulsive worker, selecting random tasks and attacking them for a while with battering-ram intensity, and then flitting on to something else, leaving a debris trail of half-completed projects behind him. The jellycells! The lidicara! The chlorine-producing algoids! The weather!

It was hard to argue with this approach—King Bruno had invented collapsium in exactly this way, and in the following centuries had parlayed the discovery all the way to the Nescog, the collapsium-veined telecom network which permitted Queendom citizens to fax themselves anywhere at all, including everywhere at once. But Conrad did not have centuries to wait, and the analysis of P2 needed patience and focus far more than this lurching and somewhat playacted brilliance. So Conrad found himself growing increasingly—if inappropriately—bossy.

And while the King of Barnard was thirteen decades Conrad's senior by this point, the new relationship seemed to bother him not at all. He was enthusiastic and accommodating, as willing to take direction as to give it, and Conrad found himself, for the first time in years, feeling the old bonds of friendship come truly alive. Sure, the king had a bad case of the Fever, and spoke like a bad echo of his father. But as a rebel, the Prince of Sol hadn't needed any role models. By definition, almost, he'd been his own man. All he'd had to do was struggle against the status quo, without having to actually run anything himself! But as a king, what other lead did he have to follow? Who but Bruno had ever been the immorbid king of an immorbid people?

And to fit himself into that mold, Bascal had to be a scientist—in fact a demented genius of staggering proportion—who only reluctantly turned his attention to matters political and economic. This of course changed his whole definition—what it meant to be Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui—and even with the help of a fax machine there was only so much brilliance you could cram into your skull. Some things were still God's to grant. So Bascal was making up the difference by rote, simply memorizing an encyclopedia of facts and methods and then styling his hair and beard and mannerisms in an ensemble hypercomputed to enhance his credibility. Which Conrad supposed was how most scientists probably did it, or anyway the ones people trusted.

The resulting facade was, on the one hand, very impressive and imposing and yet also quite approachable: the kind of public face you might actually want for your king. But on the other hand, it was really just another half-baked scheme, a kind of moral power-grab that Bascal had rushed through during the period when everyone else was sleeping. It had taken him a century and more of grinding effort, yes, but it remained fundamentally an impulsive, impatient act. In a way this was sort of endearing, for it was a sacrifice on the entire colony's behalf, but even so Conrad enjoyed pricking the facade and watching the real Bascal twitch underneath.

“Chlorine?” The king harrumphed. “The situation is that we have some. Its release appears to be a defense mechanism of the sessile algoids, because there's sure as hell no energy advantage in the transaction. Well, usually none. As far as we can determine, they've been churning the stuff out for eight billion years. Chloride ions become chlorine molecules, and for four billion of those years, the lithosphere absorbed them. Very interesting geology, with chlorination weathering as well as oxidation playing a role.

“But once the lithosphere was saturated, once every rock had soaked up as much chlorine as it could hold, the gas had nowhere to accumulate except in the atmosphere. It finally reached equilibrium, coincidentally just below the level which would be toxic to the algoids themselves. Since then, the levels have been propped up by numerous feedback loops, including a weak geochemical cycle that churns it all back underground, and they've been stable for a long time. I say that with a scientist's precision: a long time.

“The concentration is more than enough to kill us, of course—one hundred twenty parts per million at sea level. Even the native multicelled eukaryotes have a hard time with it, and have evolved a number of interesting mechanisms for coping. The lidicara especially, which actually burn the chlorine as fuel. It's an interesting mutation, this chlorine business, since as far as I can tell, Barnard's ecosystem was seeded from the same primordial sources as Sol's. There's the same encoding—protein on top of DNA on top of RNA. And the same distinction between prokaryotic cells—the primitive ones, the bacteria and archaea—and the eukaryotes, with a clearly defined nucleus and an assortment of specialized organelles, which are themselves mostly subsumed prokaryotes. A party indeed.”

“Telling us what?” Conrad asked.

“Well, it tells us quite a lot, although it may not fit your definition of ‘immediately useful.' It's important because this places the origin of life on Earth and Barnard some four billion years and forty thousand light-years apart—the two stars were nowhere near each other prior to the current epoch. This means that the primordial source must be older still, and its children very numerous indeed. Life is durable, my friend, drifting in great spore clouds across the sweeping arms of the galaxy, sprouting wherever it lands and then freshly seeding the spaces around it. If I were a doctor trying to fight this infection, I'd be worried, because if you and I were to sterilize this planet right now, it would be teeming with unicells again within a million years. From the sky, my boy. From the very stars.”

Conrad nodded unhappily. “This is where the master plan breaks down. We're supposed to terraform—we're provisioned for it, anyway—but we would have to eradicate the biosphere to have any hope of a breathable atmosphere.”

“And we may, Conrad. We may yet. At this point I haven't decided, but when the world is mine to command, with the corruption of absolute power chewing away at my soul and the responsibility for millions of people pressing me to action, I may sign that extermination order. The natives can be archived and their ecosystem documented in detail, so that someday we can reconstruct it in a suitable environment, and they'll have lost nothing but time. Or perhaps we will leave them dead, and spare the galaxy a long, slow war between the microbial armies of halogenia and oxytopia. Chlorine is poison to more than just ourselves, so if we have to choose sides, we should obviously choose our own, and play to win. Barnard's spores could infect Sol, you know, or the stars of future colonies. Perhaps they already have, and that eons-long chemistry experiment has begun anew, barely measurable but slowly, steadily building. Poisoning worlds.”

“You're a romantic,” Conrad accused. “And a melodramatist. This is pent-up poetry, leaking out through the holes in your logic. I know you, Bas. I can see you wriggling inside that monarch skin.”

But Bascal shook his head, unamused. “We'll still be around in a million years, boyo. You and I, personally. These decisions carry palpable consequence, and the morality of it all is murky at best. Either action may brand me a monster or a fool, or both.”

Conrad stifled a sigh. “All right, Tui Barnarda, point conceded. But our concern at the moment is extremely narrow, extremely short-term. The oceans will burn our eyes and sear our membranes. That's bad. The air is poison rather than fire, but twenty minutes' exposure will kill us just as dead. And my real question is, what do we do about that? What protective measures will we need when we walk on the surface?”

“We needn't protect the skin,” Bascal said. “The skin is a protective measure, against all manner of chemical agents. Weak acids and other corrosives are precisely what the skin is there for. That, and foreign microbes. The body's weak points are its openings: the eyes and ears, the nose and mouth, the mucous membranes. At higher concentrations, we might also worry about the nail beds, and the anus and urethra, and in fact for immersion in the oceans that might be necessary.

“But we're really just talking about air pollution, here. Chlorine is the worst of it, but there are plenty of other noxious gases in the brew, and all of them appear, to a greater or lesser degree, in the atmosphere of Earth as well. This was especially true during the Industrial Revolution, but even our squeaky-clean Queendom produced irritants—especially in the mines and refineries of the Elementals, who formed the wellsprings of the supply lines of the Queendom's fax infrastructure. And of course, the Earth's biosphere produces waste products of its own, and the planet itself—with its volcanoes and rifts and mineral springs—produces still more.

“It's a matter of degree: here, a human being in good condition—and we are all in very good condition—will accumulate fatal lung damage over the course of about ten minutes, or possibly twice that long for certain individuals. For that damage to actually result in death may take another ten or twenty minutes, or longer if the source of further damage is removed.

“And we have the fax machine, don't we? The panacea of panaceas? So in some sense, we can get by with no protective measures at all. Just stay indoors as much as possible, limit exposure to the native air, and print a fresh copy if you feel yourself starting to cough. In a more practical sense, we can design filter masks which simply reject all but the oxygen and CO₂ and nitrogen our bodies expect. These masks would be passive and would have no consumable portions—no filters to clog, no power source to maintain or replace—so they'd last a good long while, possibly centuries. And they shouldn't need to, because you can fax a fresh one every morning, with your clothing.”

“Well we can't all,” Conrad reminded him. There were only six fax machines within the confines of Bubble Hood, and one of them was in Bascal's quarters, and another in Conrad's. Rank came with privileges, you bet. And there was another in the messtaurant, and a fourth in the inventory, one in the emergency center, and one on the exterior of the hull.

Most of Bubble Hood's citizens had spent at least a little bit of time onboard Newhope, and had gotten used to the idea that they must bathe every day, or else smell bad. This was mostly unnecessary in the technological ubiquity of the Queendom, where travel through fax plates and collapsiter grids cleaned and scented the body several times each day, but stepping into a shower for a few minutes was not so terribly different from stepping into a fax.

Nor did the people here generally print fresh clothing every day. Instead they gathered it in batches and stored it in their rooms. The dress codes had been relaxed, and while many people continued to wear Newhope uniforms (either out of habit or because they liked them, or because they lacked the imagination to dress themselves any differently), many others wore the clothing which for them was still fashionable: children's styles from the Queendom of 150 years before. Some others paid attention to the Queendom news feeds and sensoria, which were only six years out of date, and dressed in those styles instead, but already this had begun to seem like a quaint and vaguely boobish thing to do. Un-Barnardean. So in fact one needed a lot of clothing, and needed to pick it carefully.

Anyway, the point was that most people in Bubble Hood did not have ready access to a fax machine, not without waiting in line, and the same would eventually be true on the surface of P2. In fact, things would be much worse on the surface, because the number of fax machines coming out of storage would double or triple at best, whereas the population, finally unpacked from Newhope's memory cores, would increase tenfold. One of Brenda Bohobe's top priorities was therefore to establish a print plate factory, with all the elaborate machinery and supply chains that entailed. But that would be an enterprise of years, and could not even begin until a lot of other stuff had been unpacked.

Bascal chuckled a kingly chuckle. “Point taken. Also, point irrelevant. Who's digressing now? I can have the masks designed for you in a couple of hours. Probably sooner, actually.”

“And how do we know that's sufficient? How will we know they work? That they don't pinch, or leak, or whatever?”

“Oh ye of little faith! We'll have to test them, obviously, and while we could rig a special chamber here on Bubble Hood, we do eventually have to visit the surface. Go make a backup copy of yourself, boyo. I'm issuing my first royal proclamation: that you and I, Ho Ng and Steve Grush, will visit the planet next shift. Have your people prep a reentry vehicle. In fact, have them prep two, and print an extra copy of yourself to bring along. There may be unforeseen hazards, and a bit of redundancy never hurts.”

Conrad processed these words with mingled disappointment and relief. Suddenly, he was not in charge anymore. Bascal was resuming the mantle of leadership, establishing the early facets of civilian government, under which the military chain of command would fit. Fortunately, while Conrad had gotten used to his leadership role, he hadn't sought it, nor ever particularly relished it. His rebellious youth was still pretty fresh; if he stopped to calculate, he was probably thirty chronological years old, maybe even younger than that. Running a planet, or at least an orbiting colony above one, was an interesting experience, and educational, and most of his duties related to that would presumably continue for the foreseeable future. He would simply be answering to his king rather than himself or, via long-distance transmission, to Xmary. And that was a good thing, right?

He forced a smile, and then felt a genuine smile creep up underneath it, propping it up. “As you wish, Your Highness. Visiting the planet, wow. This is one of those historic events, isn't it?”

“Conrad, I wouldn't dream of doing it without you.”

Conrad's Bubble Hood quarters were considerably roomier, and more nicely appointed, than his quarters onboard Newhope. Here he had a bilevel apartment, with not only an exterior view through the hull, looking down on the beiges and browns and disconcerting blues of the planet, but also one looking out over the interior of the bubble itself. Keeping an eye on things, yeah, but more importantly he simply enjoyed the view. When he was finally permitted to quit his position as Newhope's first mate in absentia, and as a commander in what would become Barnard's navy, he would probably miss these privileges of rank. But he would hang onto this apartment!

His long-term plans, ever clearer in his mind, were painfully straightforward: he would be the Chief Architect of the Kingdom of Barnard. He probably didn't even need to make that a request, and if he did, it was difficult to imagine that Bascal would refuse him. And maybe that, in the long run, was a better rank, with a whole kingdom of privileges to choose from. It was certainly a pleasant, daydreamy sort of thought.

But when he entered his apartment, stepping through as the door recognized him and curled open, he found the ceiling flashing red—the signal he'd told the apartment to use when messages were waiting which required immediate attention, but which were not actual life-or-death matters worth interrupting him at work or tracking him down in a corridor somewhere. This drove all other thoughts from his mind.

“Play message,” he said.

He was expecting something from Bascal, some addendum or correction, but instead a hologram of Xmary appeared, hanging down from the ceiling in a column of not-quite-invisible light. He stepped toward it, and it retreated an equal distance, for if it didn't, its illusion of three-dimensionality would break down in a confusion of distortions. Still, it looked uncomfortably like Xmary was backing away from him in fear. And he didn't like that, so he stood his ground, and Xmary stood hers.

“Yes?” he asked the recording.

“Hello, Conrad,” the recording said. “You look well.”

“I feel well,” he answered. “We're about to visit the planet, Bascal and I. Visit the surface, I mean. It's very exciting. It's the culmination of a lot of waiting and effort, obviously, and I feel sorry for the four thousand people who don't get to go. But it'll be just like old times. Me and Bascal, Ho and Steve. Raising a little hell.”

The recording's smile had a strained quality. “That sounds nice. Conrad, I know I should tell you this in person. I know it's awful to send a recording, and I apologize for that. But there just isn't opportunity. It'll be months before I see you again, and this conversation can't wait.”

Conrad felt a sinking sensation in his gut. “You're breaking off with me.”

The recording looked at the floor.

“This,” Conrad said, “is where you say, ‘No, no, nothing like that.' This is where you reassure me.”

“I wish I could,” the recording answered, with simulated gloom. “I wish things were different, but they aren't. I can't live like this, and if you search your heart, I doubt you're really enjoying it either. We have to be fair to ourselves.”

“Especially to you,” Conrad said, with sudden, sullen bitterness. Had he been anything less than supportive and loving? He hated to use the word perfect, but hadn't he been exactly that? What could he possibly have done to deserve this? Nothing!

“I'm so sorry.”

“I told you you should leave a copy with me, Xmary, or I should leave one with you. These things are workable. Or is that not it? Is there someone else involved? Some new interest catching your eye?”

The recording shrugged. “I don't have that information, Conrad. I'm just a recording. Does it matter?”

“You're damn right it matters! Shit, the mating pool is pretty limited up there. Is it Money Izolo? Is it Peter? Or one of the kids, fresh from storage? Is he better for you than I am? Oh, my gods, you're breaking off with me to bunk with some career spaceman. How humiliating.”

“He's not a career spaceman.”

Conrad felt his eyebrows rise. “No? He's on the ship. He's not leaving, or you'd see the same problem with him that you claim to see with me. Anyway, I thought you didn't have that information.”

The recording shrugged. “I suppose I do. I'm not self-aware in the way that you are, Conrad. I'm not here to be interrogated.”

“Ah. I see. You're some measly petabyte avatar, here to insert your barbs and evaporate into the ether.”

Unhappily: “Something like that. I'm truly sorry, Conrad.”

“You're sorry? I thought you weren't self-aware. Listen, Ms. Recording, this is a very small community we live in. I'm going to hear this person's name sooner or later, and I'd rather hear it from you.”

“Would you? Are you so certain of that?”

His lip curled. “Don't get smart with me. If you're not Xmary, you have . . . no right to talk to me like that. I want a name.”

The recording sighed. “It's Feck.”

“Feck?” Conrad gaped. “Yinebeb Fecre? Feck the Fairy? Again?”

Now the recording managed to look annoyed. “That's not what they call him, Conrad, and you know it.”

And that was true. He was “Feck the Facilitator,” hero of the August Riots and proud explorer of Xmary's pants. And he was . . . not a bad fellow. Damn it.

“How can Xmary do this to me? How, exactly, can she feel this is justified?”

“I'm sorry, Conrad.”

“Who does she think she is? Does she think she has the right to treat someone like this? She said she loved me. Was that just a lie? We've been together for, what? Fifteen subjective years? Even longer for you. For her. This is what I get? What I somehow deserve?”

“I'm sorry, Conrad.”

“Shit. Shit. Are you going to say anything else?”

“Is there anything else to say? I'm sorry, but I'm really not equipped to have a discussion with you about this.”

“Well, piss off, then. Tell Xmary . . . Tell her . . . shit. Just tell her good-bye.”

After the recording had mailed itself back, Conrad said some other things which are best not repeated.

“You're late,” said one of the Bascals, in the ferry hangar. “And you've been crying. Both of you. What's wrong?”

This question was at once leaderly, medical, and deeply personal, for tears occurred very rarely in the Queendom of Sol, and were regarded with utmost seriousness.

“Xmary,” said the two Conrads together. They were freshly printed, and hadn't had much of a chance to diverge yet. Their potential responses were limitless, but bounded by identical experience. They wouldn't always say or do exactly the same thing, but until their thoughts got off on different tracks, the responses would be pretty close.

Bascal's features—not at all boyish despite their youthful construction—melted in sympathy. He held up two sets of arms, and embraced both Conrads warmly. “Ah, my friend, the vagaries of love and loss are the curse of the immorbid. Even in the Queendom, two hundred years ago and more, they were saying these first marriages, first relationships of any kind don't last. Ask a woman what animal she feels like and she will say ‘cat,' a creature as playful and graceful and cruel as God himself! Ask a man and he'll say ‘pig,' with no apology, and how long can a cat dance with a pig before somebody's paw gets hoofed?

“My parents are perhaps a reminder that true love can be found and kept, but they had—both of them!—been around the world a few times before falling in together. And they did break off for thirty years, you'll recall. Perhaps there are additional fallings-out in their future, or it may be that they're locked together by their positions as king and queen. Each was duly elected in isolation from the other, and their divorce would not—could not—change their joint monarchial status. They are as trapped by circumstances as we ourselves.

“Ah, but these are words of gloom, when you need cheer! Of empty misogyny when you need companionship! Take a cue from Plato, my boy. He said, ‘Being is real. Becoming is an illusion.' This moment is nothing but a snapshot, a sort of hologram laid out beside the happier moments before and after. Let's end it and move on. Come to the planet with me, hmm? It's the start of a new relationship, a new love affair. And if she treats us as well and as badly as our women have, then we shall have an interesting time of it indeed, and revel in our successes while they last.”

It was a nice thing to say, or mostly so, and Conrad should have been nice in return, but instead he scowled and said, “I'm not in the mood for pomposity, you fuffer. My parents are still together as well, but what difference does that make? What bearing does it have on me, on this day, right here? Just leave me alone, all right?”

At that moment, two copies of Bertram Wang sidled up. “I think we're ready to fly,” one of them said.

At Conrad's look, Bascal explained, “Bertram here is the only person in the entire colony, in or out of the memory core, with any experience piloting actual reentry vehicles. It's such a rustic way to fly—not a skill that most of us maintain, although in retrospect the jailers probably should have taken it out of the simulator and made it a part of our physical training. The ferries should fly themselves, more or less, but it never hurts to have an experienced hand aboard.”

“Of course,” Conrad said. “Nice to see you, Bert.”

“Hi,” Bert acknowledged.

There were six ferries in the bay—half a year's output from the Martin Kurster Memorial Shipyard, consuming a costly stream of crushed asteroidal rock. Each ferry could comfortably carry twenty humans, or up to a hundred if you stacked them in bunks, which was exactly what they would do when it came time to really populate the planet. And yes, it was inconvenient. Even when there were fax machines installed on the surface, there was no easy way to land the memory core itself. For that you'd need some sort of railroad, reaching vertically through the planet's atmosphere.

Or teleportation, yeah, but it wouldn't be possible to fax live humans to the surface from Bubble Hood until there was at least one telecom collapsiter in orbit around the planet. And that would require a collapsium manufactory—rather beyond their means right now—and something like fifty or a hundred gigatons of raw material. Dozens of neubles; little spheres of di-clad neutronium, pressed from a fleet of neutronium barges. Or from one really busy barge, perhaps, over a long period of time. And the Kurster Memorial Shipyard just wasn't big enough to produce a craft that large. Like so many other things in their nascent economy, neutronium barges would have to wait.

The Conrads and Bertrams and Bascals split up, each team going to one of the prepped ferries. Ho and Steve were already aboard, laughing about something and punching the seats. In this context they were not Security per se, but simply muscle. A pair of strong backs and reasonably obedient minds, in case there was real work to be done. There were probably better choices for that particular assignment, but Conrad understood the king's impulse; Ho and Steve had been with them from the very beginning, from that first exploratory riot at Camp Friendly. And although they were jerks, they were his jerks, as close to him in their own way as Conrad was. And yes, close to Conrad as well, in that way that old adventures had of binding people together.

Like Conrad and Xmary, for example.

“Settle down, men,” he told them crossly. “Steve, you're out of uniform.”

In fact, Steve was wearing a fishnet shirt and a pair of improbably shiny black trousers, with matching boots and cap. Hardly the best ensemble for exploring the surface of a hostile planet.

“Yes, sir,” Steve said with a smirk. He reached for a jacket draped over one of the seats, and it slithered up his arm and onto his body. It was a Newhope uniform—a Navy of Barnard uniform—done up in that same shiny material. Conrad looked it over with a stab of irritation, but decided he'd had enough friction for one day.

“All right, then. Let's buckle in, shall we?”

Bertram of course took the pilot's seat, and Conrad was ready to cede the copilot's to Bascal, but the king demurred, saying, “You're in charge of this flight, Mr. Mursk. I merely own the planet.”

And for some reason, that ground on Conrad's nerves as well. He nearly said something nasty, just because he could, and bit it back only with considerable effort. He tried to force himself to be cheerful. This was a day he'd remember all his life, even if he lived to be a million, and why remember being a shit when he could simply remember being unhappy?

He thumbed a warning toggle on the wellstone control panel, and moments later red lights were flashing all over the hangar bay, and nameless workers—mostly people Conrad had never met—were scurrying for the airlocks and the safety of the two control booths.

“Bay Boss,” Bertram said into the panel, “we are go for departure. Diagnostics nominal. You may open the doors when ready.”

“Bay Boss here,” said an unfamiliar female voice. “Go for departure, acknowledged. Depressurizing in five, four, three, two, one . . . now.” Outside the winged ferry, there was a sound like a sigh, trailing to whispers, and then total silence. The pumps were some serious quantum-scale hardware which paid the entropy cost and yanked out every molecule which touched them. In about a second and a half, the bay's interior pressure dropped to hard zero: five balls after the decimal.

When the pressure was off them, the ferry bay doors did not so much open as curl aside, like theater curtains, and Bertram had to negotiate with his other self to determine who would go first, so they didn't both crowd each other on the way out. The ferries themselves were smart enough to avoid any true accident, but it would be bad form to rely on them for it, and the Bertram in this particular shuttle won the bit toss anyway, and so they went, lighting their engines and shooting out into starry blackness.

The brownish light of P2 flooded in through the windows, both virtual and real, and then the world itself hove into view, a swirling sphere of yellow-white clouds, of isolated blue-green oceans and vast, amber-colored continents.

P2's plant life, such as it was, relied on something darker than chlorophyll, something chestnut-brown which drew its energy mainly from infrared light. Conrad would miss Earth's greenery in the open spaces, but the multicelled algoids were not without their own special charm. All across the planet, in dense patches between the deserts, the probes had shown chest-high forests of the stuff, waving in the breeze like translucent blades of wheat.

And Conrad, realizing he was about to see this sight with his own two eyes, felt his heart leap. To hell with Xmary. If she thought she could do better than him . . . Well, she wasn't stupid. Maybe she could. But he was here, and she was not, and this really was an important moment in both their lives.

“Living large is the best revenge,” Bascal murmured behind him, as if eavesdropping on his thoughts.

Conrad looked over his shoulder and said, “Sire, that is possibly the most intelligent thing you've said all day.”

The way that Conrad got horribly killed was sort of funny in retrospect.

They had set the ferries down beside a shallow but steep-banked stream, almost a waterfall really, cutting down along the equally steep bank of the seashore. The ferries were at the crest of it, on flat ground, but the sand dropped away sharply to the east, along a contour that was neither “beach” nor “cliff,” but something in-between which the site survey had named a “subcritical intertidal embankment” or “depositional foreshore bluff.” Such features were, apparently, typical of the shorelines where they weren't vertical cliffs of granite bedrock.

The planet's two oceans were completely isolated from each other, and this was the larger of the two. Overall it was slightly wider than Earth's Pacific Ocean, though it covered a much smaller fraction of the planet's oversized surface, so Bascal had insisted it was properly a sea, and had named it the Sea of Destiny.

The men were all outside milling around on the sand, beneath a sun that looked remarkably like Earth's own—no larger or smaller or dimmer, and only very slightly redder. And the filter masks were working just fine; Bascal had even engineered the surface properties so they didn't fog up on the inside. But there was room for improvement, because breathing in the masks was kind of like sucking chowder through a straw. You could do it, no problem, but the comfort factor wasn't quite there. The air that did get through felt thick but somehow unsatisfying. Not enough oxygen.

Anyway, Bascal was beside himself with glee—literally—and the two of him were pointing and gesturing wildly. “The city's Main Street will run right here, east-west, from the shore to the first ridgeline of the mountains, and perhaps beyond. Forty meters wide, and lined with domes on either side.”

The other nodded. “Yeah, great! Put the palace right here on the beach, like proper Tongans. Matatahi Falehau, the Beach Palace. But tall, yes? Looming over the city, as a proper palace should.”

“Really? I thought perhaps over there, so the ridgeline doesn't hide the sunset. Not tall, but hugging the rocks like it's been there a million years. So perhaps the city should be farther south, over there a ways.”

“Hmm. Interesting. Lemme think about that a minute. Our own planet, Your Most Regal Majesty! You know how excited I am.”

“Indeed I do!”

The two Conrads had diverged by this time, no longer quite identical, and while one of them hovered by the Bascals, absorbing their plans and injecting the occasional comment, the other one was down below at the waterline, hunched over, studying the river stones lining the mouth of the stream. They were mainly granite, as near as he could figure, but they had a funny sort of sheen that was new to him. Chlorination weathering, maybe. If these stones came from the mountains above—and they must have—then some of the bedrock up there, properly quarried and polished, would make for interesting facades. The really raw thing was the way the different layers of it striped the ridge's face in such wildly different colors. Not just browns and yellows and reds, but actually some greens and even blues as well. Or so his eyes had told him up there, through the yellow haze of fifteen kilometers of atmosphere.

Looking down again, he noticed movement in the stream's clear water, between the stones.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, my. Will you look at this.”

No one was paying attention to him at that moment, and he was too rapt to notice or care. He leaned closer, watching the wriggling forms. The “animals” of Planet Two were, he'd been told, extremely primitive. Denizens of the water—never the air or land—they possessed only five cell types, loosely grouped into three layers: skin, gut, and muscle. There was no nervous system, no immune system, and no real digestive system other than a simple holding chamber—the gut. Nutrients and wastes simply sloshed through the spaces between the cells, and the creatures' metabolisms—stunted by chlorine and starved by low oxygen levels—supported movement which was very sluggish indeed by Earth standards. Most were tiny—pinhead-sized or smaller—and drifted along with the ocean currents, feeding on bacterial mats and occasionally on each other, though never on the chlorine-spewing algoids, large or small.

One creature, though—the lidicara—was different. Conrad couldn't help but know this, because it was nearly all the biologists could talk about. How fascinating! How surprising and raw! Most days it was hard to get their minds on anything else. But seeing it now, seeing a hundred of them swirling around his boots like animate snowflakes, he understood what all the fuss was about. Here was a thing that moved with purpose, with ambition. An actual alien creature! The other animals were radial forms—tiny urchin/starfish with little to distinguish them—but the pale lidicara jetted around fast enough to need some streamlining, some architectural finesse. The thing even had a cluster of sensory cells or something at its front end. “Cephalization!” the biologists screamed when the subject came up. “The thing is growing a head!” Slowly, of course—the fossils of seventy million years ago looked much like the creatures here at his feet—but even to Conrad it sounded like an important development.

The lidicara's shape was like nothing ever seen on Earth, and at a glance, on his hands and knees with his masked face hovering right above the water, Conrad could see how it had come about. The creature had started out as just another seven-armed starfish, but somewhere along the way its “front” arms had shortened and thinned, becoming feeding appendages or something, while the other limbs had slid toward the back, fitting together into a kind of teardrop shape, with one elongated limb at the back serving as a kind of tail.

Right there and then, Conrad discovered an interest in biology which he had never once suspected. Wow. There were only a few hundred cells in these animals, right? As opposed to the trillions in his own body? And he found himself wondering what happened inside, down in the DNA, to permit—to create?—such changes as these. And it occurred to him, with a prickle of excitement, that he—that this particular Conrad Mursk—could abandon all other responsibility and simply pursue this question, reintegrating with the “real” Conrad, the navy's Conrad, at some future date.

Hell, with the mass restrictions lifted—with a whole planet of buffer mass at his disposal—he could spin off as many copies as he wanted. Even the Queendom's plurality restrictions—twenty-five hundred copy-hours per person per month under normal circumstances—needn't apply here, not unless Bascal wrote a proclamation about it or unless the Senate, when it was elected and holding regular meetings, decided to pass a law.

“Conrad!” he called to his other self, thirty meters up on the sandy bank. “The lidicara are beautiful! We've got to preserve them, share the world with them. . . .” His voice trailed away when he realized the other Conrad wasn't listening. To himself he said, “Got to share the world.”

He studied the dancing forms, admiring the way they not only tolerated the poison in the air, but actually souped themselves up with it. Would a bit more oxygen in the atmosphere hurt them? Would it supercharge them even more? If life here really was related to life on Earth—and Bascal insisted that it was—then maybe the lidicara's chlorine-breathing structures—halochondria, they were called—could be imported into Earthly cells? He pulled out his ever-present sketchplate and said to it, “To do: investigate fax modifications to adapt humans to chlorine atmosphere. Discuss with Brenda: Can we change ourselves instead of the planet? Or in addition?”

The ocean waves here were tiny—at least for the moment—and he felt them lapping pleasantly at his heels, slowly working their way up the stream as the tide came in. “Be aware of it,” the site surveyor had warned them over the radio link. “The tide will be in the middle of its range, rising steadily at ten centimeters per hour.” Was that a lot? It didn't seem so here and now. As his shoes grew damper and saltier Conrad simply moved uphill a step, and then another, following the channels of the stream's mouth, crawling up along the foreshore's steep bank.

P2 had no moon; its tides were exclusively solar, and since it was so damned close to Barnard they were formidable indeed. Thanks to the planet's 3:2 tidal lock—three revolutions for every two orbits—they were also slow, following the 461-hour cycle of the “day” and to some extent the 691-hour cycle of the “year.” But though they were sluggish, the tides were far more powerful than those of Earth. A hundred times more powerful, in fact, though their effect on the actual water level was not quite so dramatic as that. For one thing, the land was higher near the equator, so the seas were up in the temperate zones—one in the northern hemisphere and one in the south—where Barnard's pull wasn't quite as strong.

And the fact that the seas themselves did not reach all the way around the planet limited how far and how well a tidal bulge could travel. Or so Conrad had heard, second- and third-hand. The survey had pegged the tidal range for this location at plus or minus thirty-one meters, with little variation over time.

Had a planet like Earth been at this position, with its thin skin of rock floating atop a sea of metal-rich magma, the land tides would have been plus or minus several meters, and daily catastrophic earthquakes would be the norm. Along with volcanoes, yes, bursting out through sudden rifts in the crust. Fortunately P2 was a stiffer world, with a much smaller and cooler liquid interior. But even so it had a few large, semiactive volcanoes.

“Which is good,” Bascal had insisted when the subject came up, “because this metal-poor world cannot prick itself and bleed. The radioactive heating of its interior is insufficient to drive tectonics or volcanism. Without the tides stretching and pulling at the core, raising blisters on the crust, there would be no renewal of the surface. It would smooth itself into a giant billiard ball, and the metals would all find their way to the bottom of the ocean and eventually be buried by sediment, and the biosphere would die.”

Hmm.

These were Conrad's last coherent thoughts, for as he scrabbled up the hillside, the ditches of the stream's delta grew deeper, their banks sandier and rockier and steeper. In studying the lidicara, he had thrust his hands into the stream's warm water, and failed at first to notice that its acidity was turning his fingernails yellow and burning at the edges of the flesh beneath. Only when he tore a fingernail right off on the river rocks did he finally pull his hands out. Seeing the damage then, he stood up in alarm.

Next, as near as Ho's investigation could figure it, he lost his balance and dug an arm into the stream's bank. There were no roots or grasses there to hold the bank in place, so it crumbled, and one or more large stones came down on his face, knocking the mask free and breaking his nose. Even this might not have been fatal if he hadn't taken a breath of native air, then coughed because of it, then coughed even harder from his own blood running down into his throat. Still not fatal, if he hadn't spasmed, falling face-first into the stream, and then gasped at the agony of its burning in the membranes around his eyes. But he did each of these things in turn, and so inhaled a small quantity of the water, which was not at all kind to the tissue of his lungs.

On the first sight of him lurching up the foreshore, Ho and Steve—ostensibly there to keep him safe—burst into laughter. They may be forgiven for this, since the state of Conrad's injuries was not apparent at the time, and the drunken stagger of his walk, combined with the mud on his face, really did present a comical image. Conrad himself said, “Boyo, it's a lucky thing she's not here to see you.”

Regrettably, the injured Conrad collapsed and died with these words in his ears. The surviving Conrad never did find out what he was doing in that stream, since there was no fax here to resuscitate him while his brain still lived, and since Bubble Hood and even Newhope lacked the facilities to read his dead memories. This sort of thing had happened to Conrad once before, back in Ireland a long, long time ago, and it did not occur to him now to interpret the event as any sort of omen. If it had, things might have gone very differently.

Instead, he was left only with an enigmatic to-do entry, which itself proved pivotal in the colony's history—indeed of colonial history in general. And while the idea—pantropy, the re-forming of themselves to suit this new world—would certainly have come up sooner or later, Conrad would wonder until the end of his days why he had been the one to raise it. There was a Tongan word for this feeling: kuiloto mamahi. Literally, “blind sorrow,” the mourning which occurred when one did not know precisely what had been lost. And this, too, would prove important, though the extent of it would not be apparent for hundreds of years.

Life is like that sometimes, all the more so when it lasts forever.