Lost in Transmission (15 page)

“Whether it please Your Majesty or not,” Conrad replied, “I was born to build. I've got mortar in my veins.”

“And rocks in your head, yes. Bricks in your feet. Maybe a support beam up your ass.”

Suddenly they were laughing again, and Conrad would have carried the joke farther, reflecting it back on his monarch, if the showtime trumpets had not chosen that moment to begin blaring.

“Who's up first?” he asked instead.

“Steve Grush and Luca Elmer Rodhaim,” the king answered in a stage whisper as the crowds slowly quieted around them. “Odds are seven to five in Steve's favor, with a spread of three and an overage of .6. He's switched from dual tazzers to a net and spear, though, which may bring his favor down a point.”

From the wellwood stadium floor below, the sound of trumpets gave way to flat warning klaxons, and the “go” lights flickered from green to amber. The crowd went silent. Then the lights went red, and the welliron sally gates curled aside, and two nearly nude men sauntered onto the killing floor from opposite sides of the stadium. The crowd broke into a roar; this was going to be good.

On the left, coming in from the east gate, was Steve Grush, bearing the promised net of impervium fibers, and a wellwood spear with a wicked—probably atomically sharp—point. On the west was Luca Rodhaim, with the two-handed Ringing Sword that was fast becoming his trademark. In an ordinary bout that vibrating blade could be counted on to bi- or trisect the nearest opposing Security rep within twenty seconds of gates-up, but Steve was an unforgiving fighter, and a monstrously quick one, second only to Ho Ng in the rankings.

“I'll bet you five million dollars,” Bascal said as the two combatants closed and circled.

“On what?”

“On mayhem.”

Conrad was supposed to bet
against mayhem
? In the finals? “No deal,” he said. But then Steve threw his net, spiraling out on its weights like a miniature galaxy, and although it was impervium, the Ringing Sword slashed right through it, flinging it to the ground in two uneven pieces.

“Shit, wait,” Conrad backpedaled. “I'll take it! Clean kill.”

The move had been a feint; Steve was counting on that reaction, and followed up with his spear before Luca could bring the sword down and through and back up again. The thing was light, but not
that
light. And so the tip of Steve's spear lanced forward in a left-handed thrust that caught Luca just under the chin. And that was that.

Except that Luca didn't fall down. The spear wasn't even lodged in his throat; it had skated off to the side instead, tearing a red gash along his neck but apparently missing everything vital along the way.

“What the—”

And now Luca was bringing the sword around and over, and Steve was off balance and a lot farther forward than he ought to be, and the sword came down right on him.

Well, not precisely on him; he managed to jerk to one side at the end of the stroke, so that instead of cleaving his head in two it merely severed his right arm at the shoulder. The sound of the flesh parting wasn't audible over the gasping of the crowd, but Steve's scream of pain and rage certainly was.

And still the fight was not over! Staggering back in a spray of blood, Steve somehow managed to dodge a second blow, and then block a third one, though it cost him the front third of his spear. And then, amazingly, he contrived to clock Luca on the side of the head with the broken shaft, and then jab him in the stomach, and then whack him even harder across the side of the skull!

Now Luca was staggering back, bleeding from the nose, and Steve was falling back as well. But Steve had regained his equilibrium, and circled carefully in his retreat, putting the bright, mango-colored sun in Luca's eyes while he . . . while he . . .

Dropped the broken spear. And fished his severed arm up off the bloodstained killing floor. And hefted it like a club in his left hand, with the shoulder end forward. And charged forth to beat Luca across the head with it! Once, twice, thrice, dodging strokes of the Ringing Sword all the while!

The crowd went wild as Luca Elmer Rodhaim scrambled backward, tripped, dropped his sword clanging and ringing against the wellwood floor, and suffered an uppercut like an overpowered golf swing from Steve's severed arm. His head fell back against the wellwood of the killing floor.

And even then it was only over in the sense that Luca was out of the running. He wasn't going to win this. Actually beating him to death took Steve another full minute, and an ugly spectacle it was, particularly since Steve himself was bleeding out all the while, and afterward barely had the strength to raise his remaining arm in victory before he, too, collapsed and died.

“That's why he's still Luca's boss!” Bascal murmured admiringly as the gleaming medic robots danced out onto the field.

But here was an interesting point: could they really call it Security
training
if neither combatant survived to learn a lesson from it? If the medics were quick, he supposed, they might salvage some sensory impressions and short-term memory from the corpses. Maybe. But anyway, what was the story with that spear to the throat? Luca should have died right then!

“It wasn't a fair fight,” Conrad protested.

“Fairer than it would have been,” Bascal said quietly. “Luca had some armor plates under his skin. Why not, with fax machines at his disposal and stodgy Queendom proprieties suspended? And yes, I knew about it, and don't worry, I won't collect on our bet. I just wanted you to feel involved in the action. This is a nice stadium, by the way. Well designed, good acoustics. Much classier than crowding around like schoolboys while Security brawls in the streets. My cap is off to you, sir.”

“Thanks,” Conrad said, taking the compliment at face value. But pride was not among the emotions he felt just now. It did make a kind of sense for Security to stay sharp through dueling, and with a fax to print fresh copies of the dead and wounded, there was no particular reason for them to pull their punches. They weren't beating on innocents, here, and Conrad wasn't about to tell consenting adults what to do or not do with their own bodies. And yes, shamefully, it
was
exciting to watch these hard men and women fight for their lives.

But he could see right away that there'd be an arms race, with Security personnel beefing up their bodies in more and more elaborate ways. This wasn't about public safety at all. Had he really thought so? It wasn't even about scaring the public into a law-abiding stupor, although from Bascal's point of view that might be a nice side effect. Really, mainly, it was about violence for its own sake—a dark, repressed bit of human psyche dragged out into daylight celebration.

“You look aggrieved,” Bascal said to him, with a touch of genuine concern.

“Yeah,” Conrad said. But with effort he shrugged off these bleak feelings and said, “It isn't necessary for me to approve of everything people do in this colony.”

Bascal smiled and put a warm hand on Conrad's shoulder. “Indeed not, boyo, for such is the nature of freedom. If we were all restricted to your personal sense of propriety, then
you
would be king, and a tyrant, and the people would weep to have come so far for so little. The city already has its first filthy beggar, did you know that? It's Louis McGee, and I wish him well of it, for apparently that's the thing that makes him happy.”

Conrad snorted. That was a delicate face to paint on such an indelicate matter; there were still sporadic freakups whose perpetrators had to be cycled back into fax storage again until such time as the colony had resources to deal with them. But would such a time ever truly arrive? The neural balance filters were voluntary, as indeed they had to be; put that power in the hands of government, and where might it end? There were crazies back home, too—sad-eyed addicts and vagrants unable or unwilling to ask for help. They were the curse of any free society.

“Anyway,” Bascal continued, “a beggar does round the place out a bit—make more of a world of it. We have thousands of others to pick up the slack, and if things get too busy we can all double up. Print an extra copy: one to work and one to enjoy our hard-won freedom.”

“Meaningful work is its own reward,” Conrad countered, irritated at the thought of Louis getting a free ride. “After a lifetime without it, we should all be clamoring. Who needs extra copies?”

The king laughed. “Ah! Hoy! And we also have
you
, my friend, reaching for greatness in your own personal way; and this world, this star system, is the screen upon which your epic will be writ. You don't have to make me proud—you don't
have
to do anything—but I hope you'll find your potential, and live up to it.”

And here Conrad drew himself up and said, “On that, Your Majesty, you can bet the planet.”

Which is, in some sense, exactly what happened.

book two

the colonium

chapter eleven

on settling down

Even without improvisation for its own sake, there was
lots
of hard work to be done, and nearly everyone was busy nearly all the time. They could print extra copies of themselves to rest and relax, and then integrate that experience just to say they'd had it, but Conrad, like many colonists, elected not to. Hard work
was
refreshing. Their bodies were young and physically fit; they demanded the bliss of meaningful action. Conrad thought, perhaps, that he had never truly slept before in his life. But in those early years, in the building of a world, he felt both more awake and better rested than he'd ever known he could.

And as this was happening, the second of the great colony ships arrived at its destination: Alpha Centauri, aka Rigel Kent, aka the Republic of Kent. An actual republic, with no monarch at all! And Conrad had thought
he
was rebellious.

Next came the Kingdom of Wolf, which had requested a copy of Bascal at departure time, to be its own king as well as Barnard's. The other Bascal, though, was printed from a pattern that had languished in storage since
Newhope
's departure. He'd awakened off balance, a century and a half out of his proper time, and had then meekly followed his ship's storage program rather than spending the transit time in solitary study.

Not that he'd've had a century to fatten his brain anyway, since the QMS
Glover Gailey
was twice as fast as
Newhope,
with better braking protocols besides. By the time he got to Wolf, the noveau-Bascal had found the good grace to recognize himself for what he was: a divergent archive, now wildly different from the legally recognized individual. Therefore, he changed his name from Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui to Edward Bascal Faxborn, and named the original—the King of Barnard—his cousin rather than some alternate aspect of himself.

The following year, the Queendom of Lalande was established. They had requested a copy of Tamra Lutui as their queen, but were refused on the grounds that she did not wish to leave her native Sol, nor her husband (who had not been elected Lalande's king), nor to have more than one Queendom to spread her love between, nor to deny the young colonists the chance to find their own way into the future. Instead, the Lalandans resorted to one Bethany Nichols, who by the cherubic age of thirty was both a successful playwright and a prize-winning athlete, as well as a darling of the telereception circuit.

Conrad realized with some shock that this young queen had been born in Sol system well after his own departure from it. She was, in some sense, from his future, or from some sort of parallel universe. And this was a telling point: society was far larger than just the place he had left and the place he had come to. Society was not—what a shock!—about Conrad Mursk at all.

In the decades that followed came the Queendoms of Sirius, Luyten, Ross, and Eridani. None of these star systems were especially suitable for colonization, but they were the ones that God had made available in Sol's immediate neighborhood. Wolf and Lalande at least had life-bearing planets, though decidedly un-Earthlike ones, but the other stars were sterile. The spores of life would land anywhere, bloom anywhere with even approximately the right mix and balance of elements, but these blasted systems had little more than cinders and ice, debris fields and cold, moonless giants.

Terraforming these places—even hollowing them out or doming them over, squashing them to planettes or spinning them into habitable rings—promised lifetimes of toil. Immorbid lifetimes, with dubious payoff at best. Their colonists were predominantly volunteers, too, which made Conrad wonder just how bad things had gotten back Solways. How stifling, how crowded and hopeless did things have to get before a lifetime on bare rock seemed preferable?

Then again, perhaps the younger Conrad would have leaped at the chance. Perhaps his experiences here and on
Newhope
had made him overcautious, stodgy, old. He didn't know what to think about that.

In any case, the Queendom of Sol seemed to pause then, drawing its breath, and it was rumored that the next wave of colonization would be aimed at brown dwarf stars, tiny and nameless and cold, too dim to be visible even from their own outlying planets. This sounded even more miserable to Conrad—even farther from the ideals of Ireland or Tonga, or any of the other scattered paradises of Earth.

But many of these dwarfs—failed stars or oversized planets, simmering in the warm fusion of their own deuterium—were closer at hand than the genuine star systems, and more promising in certain other regards. The light of the blue giant Sirius, being high in ultraviolet, was lethal to an unprotected human, as indeed the light of Sol could be even on Earth. And at least a brown star, dim as a fireplace coal, did not have that strike against it. Close enough to feel its warmth, you could stare right at it and never be blinded.

At first, contact between the eight colonies was routed through Sol and was therefore exceedingly slow, but with the erection of a giant antenna farm at Bascal's insistence and Conrad's day-to-day direction, Barnard was able to join a lightspeed telecom network which connected the colonies directly. The Instelnet: a chatter of new societies, independent of the richer, fatter networks of the old Queendom. Later, redesign of the antennas boosted data rates by a factor of ten, and the addition of three more antenna farms, plus several dedicated power stations, increased it by still another tenfold. But that was the best they could do without telecom collapsiters, and even the Queendom of Sol couldn't afford to string those between the stars.

The traffic was mainly compressed data, plus a few audiovisual channels carrying entertainments and news. It was, of course, impossible to transmit human beings. One needed a true collapsiter grid for that. However, with sufficient time and money and energy, it was possible to transmit intelligent, self-aware messages. Soon there was a steady diplomatic traffic as the various heads of state sent idiot snapshots of themselves back and forth for meetings and even staged dinners. And in the way of such things, the practice became a kind of vice for the wealthy, into which class Conrad found himself unexpectedly thrust.

He had done little to encourage this process, and felt gnawingly guilty about it. Egalitarianism was the new default, with no one citizen rising too high above the others—in theory. But when a hundred people pooled their resources to hire a building design, each giving Conrad a tenth of his or her rational wage, the wealth didn't take long to accumulate.

On the other hand, money was kind of meaningless out here; food and clothing were as plentiful and nearly as cheap as they had been in the Queendom, most land was literally free, and Conrad did his best to see that buildings were not expensive either. Materially speaking, there wasn't a whole lot else you could buy.

So he traveled, visiting Xmary and her lover Feck a few times up at Gatewood Station. And later he visited Xmary and some guy named Floyd Limpwick, whom she fell desperately in love with for a while, at their temporary quarters on the Lutui Belt Provisional Mass Crusher. But while Conrad was glad to see her, and she him (or so it seemed), they had never truly made that transition into friendship. He always felt a tinge of bitterness toward her lovers—even Money Izolo, who
was
his friend as well as hers. And really, they couldn't be happy to see him either. So the visits came less and less frequently, and Conrad found himself at the Instelnet Transceiving Station more than once, burning a decade's worth of savings to send his own little software homunculus to the stars and back.

The hard part was finding a pen pal—someone to whom he could address his messages. At Wolf he could count on Edward Bascal, who still considered him a childhood friend, but it took some patient digging in the lower-bandwidth channels to find willing partners in Lalande and Sirius, Ross and Luyten. And the paid replies, when they came back, included partial sensorium: the sights and sounds of a foreign place, almost as though he'd been there himself.

It was a bit like traveling, and as extravagances of the hyperrich go, this one garnered more interest and amusement than envy. At parties especially, people would ask Conrad about his journeys to the stars, and he would regale them with stories. Pale dusty rings arching above a world of ice; a sky with three suns; an aurora sizzling with stellar-flare protons, and beneath it an ocean thick and slimy with black vegetation, and lurking mountains of flesh which had been known to gobble unwary humans along with their normal grazing.

Alas, his second reply from Luyten was lost in transmission, garbled beyond the ability of even a telecom hypercomputer to repair, and he mourned its vanished impressions and experiences almost as he would mourn a true copy of himself. But even that made for a good anecdote, and spiced his character with a fashionable tinge of melancholy.

In this way Conrad became, over time, a seasoned and cosmopolitan adult, a galactic citizen who was widely seen, with only the mildest of envy, as rising above the inherent provinciality of this little province—humanity's first extrasolar experiment.

One thing Conrad never did, though, was send himself to Sol. He'd already been there, after all, and while it might be nice to see his parents and some of the casual friends he'd known who had not themselves become colonists, he never felt any true need to send them more than text messages, or the occasional video monologue. And even that was expensive, by colonial standards. Too, as with Xmary, he had less and less in common with them as the years rolled on. The messages became dutiful rather than warm, and as terse as his sense of duty permitted.

But of course Conrad's fate was intertwined with the Queendom of Sol, and could not be so easily separated. And he had twice received his own visitors from the sky, pen pals writing back to him with animate messages of their own, and so in the fullness of time he was only a little bit surprised to find the Queendom of Sol coming to visit him, as a mountain had once allegedly called upon the residence of the prophet Mohammed.