Lost in Transmission

Chapter three. In which a wake is keenly felt

Queen Tamra-Tamatra Lutui and her king, Bruno de Towaji, stood on the balcony of their Summer Palace on the island of Tongatapu. Above them, the stars of the night sky were washed out by a single pinpoint of indigo, painfully bright. That was Newhope's sail, illuminated by the launching lasers, racing past the Earth's orbit at one-twentieth of the speed of light and still accelerating madly. The ship was actually quite far from the Earth itself: nearly as far from it as the sun. But even so, the laser light reflected from its sails—bright as a hundred full moons—was painful to behold against the blackness.

It made Bruno's heart stir with pride, because even by Queendom standards, the energies at play here were enormous. Newhope's ertial shields—among the largest hypercollapsites ever constructed—had consumed the entire output of Mass Industries Corporation for eleven whole months, single-handedly tripling the price of collapsium on the futures markets. The launching lasers were sacrificial—trillion-dollar platforms that were melting themselves down and pushing themselves up out of the Queendom as they fired. Like slow-motion bombs, exploding in a highly directional way over a period of ten days.

Fortunately, that was the most complex piece of hardware involved, and while its construction was exacting, it took no great genius or mathematical insight to operate. The starship's internal technology was generally quite crude—open faxes and enclosed reactors, with tanks and plumbing to shuttle material around, and wellstone plating and cabling to control the flow of information and the semblance of matter. And crude was good, for it was safer that way, and cheaper, and gave the wayward children of Sol their best chance of success. The boys and girls were on their own now, separating themselves from the Queendom across the widening chasm of lightspeed communications.

The king and queen had thought to send a historic transmission, a final message. And here the moment was at hand, the microphone waiting expectantly in the balcony's railing, grown a few minutes ago for expressly this purpose. But tears had begun to spill from Tamra's eyes, trailing down her walnut cheeks, and she seemed at a loss to make any sound at all. Choked up, as it were. Mute with grief. For who had conceived and imposed this sentence, if not Tamra herself?

In the end, it was Bruno who leaned down to the microphone and murmured, “Godspeed, children. May every chance be in your favor, and if love makes any difference, be assured you have ours in abundance.”

Now Tamra was sobbing aloud, and the king felt his own eyes grow misty. He put an arm around her shoulder and hugged her, offering what comfort he could. Their only child, perhaps the only child they would ever have, was gone now to seek his own way.

“His heart's desire has been granted,” Bruno said. “He is a king, duly elected by people who love and admire him.”

“Barely.”

“Ah, so you've found your voice.”

“Barely,” she repeated, with a laugh and a cry.

It was true, though: Bascal's election had been somewhat less than a landslide. Only thirty-nine percent of the transportees had actually voted for him, while a shocking twenty-four percent had voted for alternative political systems: republics and democracies and communist utopias long discredited. Bascal's camp friend, Conrad Mursk, had gleaned fifteen percent of the vote himself, as had Xiomara Li Weng. Xmary.

Bruno wondered if Bascal regretted letting that girl escape into the arms of his friend. Perhaps not; perhaps they hadn't been suited for each other and were wise enough to recognize the fact. But she would make a formidable woman. She was a formidable woman, the captain of mankind's greatest adventure.

“He's got good friends at his side.”

“And bad ones,” the queen said matter-of-factly. “More than enough bad ones. I wish we could separate them out somehow.”

“True. True enough. But none are in positions of significance.”

The queen declined to respond to that. Instead, she tossed her hair back and said, “You like little Xmary. In her little captain's uniform.”

“I do, yes. She's a formidable young woman. And her young man, this Conrad Mursk, has been a better friend than Bascal deserves. I say that as a pained and disappointed father.”

“Mursk is a coaster, though a likeable one. Or his peers seem to think so, at any rate; he took second and third place in a lot of the voting. He could almost have been the captain, or the engineer. He might even have been king. Gods, what a thought.”

“I don't know,” Bruno mused, running a hand along the balcony rail. The damned thing had a sense of drama; his fingers left a wake of pseudogold in its wellstone surface, fading to trails of some gray-black material like coal ash, which finally faded again to whitewashed iron. “There's something of substance about that lad. Not intelligence, not charm; his talents are modest in both regards. But he gets his way nonetheless, eh? We could send our boy packing in far worse company. And we've backed these children up, every one, with copies in deep, safe storage. If they all died tomorrow, it would be as though they never left.”

“And if they die in nine hundred years?” she asked, misting up again. “What will their childhood backups mean then? Their adult selves will die and be reincarnated here, minus the wisdom their adventures should have taught them. They'll have to take our word for it, or else live the same mistakes all over again.”

“So gloomy,” Bruno said, moving his hand up to stroke her chin. “Our first decade together seemed to last forever. That first century was long, and often beautiful. But the time blurs, doesn't it? The racing by of years has nothing to do with mortality. It's something in the wiring, part of our essential definition as human beings. These ten centuries, my dear, will hustle by like a spring morning. And if our son chooses not to return at the end of it, why, we'll go and visit his new family. Granny and Grandpa, driving out for the holidays.”

The queen smiled at that, and for a moment Bruno caught sight of his reflection in her eyes. Here was a man who had invented collapsium, had invented ertial shielding, had laid out the telecom networks that were the Queendom's very backbone. He was the richest man who'd ever lived, and by most accounts the smartest (although he personally would never believe it). He had fought great battles, even rescued the sun from destruction, this former Declarant-Philander of Spanish Girona. But there was nothing complicated about him.

“Never change,” she instructed. “Bruno, Bruno, you are my anchor. By which I mean, you drag me to the bottom and hold me there until my struggles cease, while the waves break overhead.”

“Ah. And are you drowned yet? Have I filled your lungs with the bright saline of hope?”

She didn't answer for a while. On the railing, her own fingers left trails of glittering diamond, hard and clear, which refracted the light of Newhope's sail, and of its rippled twin in the ocean's broad mirror. And when she finally spoke, all that came out was, “You must fill me with more than that.” For she had the body of a twenty-year-old and the grieving heart of a mother, and neither could be soothed by words alone.