Lost in Transmission (16 page)

chapter twelve

messages, bottled and un-

In the twenty-fifth decade of the Kingdom of Barnard, in an
orbital tower looking down upon the world of P2, the architect Conrad Mursk stands with a warm mug in his hand, staring across forty thousand kilometers of vacuum at his latest creation: the Gravittoir. This consists of a skyhook station, known artfully as “Skyhook Station,” suspended by three electromagnetic grapples “hooked” to Barnard, Gatewood, and Van de Kamp, as a triangular hammock might be slung between a trio of trees.

There will be times, alas—a few years out of every century—when these bodies will be poorly aligned, and will fail to support the station (being “beneath” it in a gravitational sense), and at these times the station will be forced to descend back to the planet's surface, and the citizens of Barnard will have to rely instead on the older and less elegant Orbital Tower, upon which Conrad presently stands.

A synchronous orbit for Skyhook Station—one which completed its turns at the same rate as the planet itself—would have been much better in this regard, but there are no such orbits here. With the star so close and the planet's rotation so slow, the altitude of an orbit like that would be well outside the planet's sphere of gravitational influence. Or so Conrad's gravity specialists have persuaded him: this is the best solution for the given environment, and will in no way reduce the esteem of Barnard's First Architect.

The purpose of the Orbital Tower is simple: to provide an elevator up out of the atmosphere. It was never intended as a permanent solution, and while the Gravittoir will be a great improvement, there is nothing permanent about it, either. Indeed, it's just another stopgap on the road to faxation; once the collapsiter grid is in place, none of this will be necessary. The Gravittoir is also simple: Skyhook Station has a weak gravity laser pointing downward, which creates a column of funny weather, but more importantly makes it possible for a properly designed spacecraft to be yanked off the surface of the planet and into space, where its thrusters can place it in orbit without drag or fuss.

Stand with Conrad, and see what he sees: the tower stretching down beneath you: a narrow, gleaming cone of impervium whose base is roughly the size of a soccer pitch, whose nearly cylindrical apex is, by coincidence, almost exactly as wide as the starship
Newhope
, which brought you here long ago. The interior of the structure includes a sleeve of diamond which is technically capable of supporting the tower's entire weight, but with almost no safety margin. Know that for practical purposes, the structure is held up by the pressure of electrons in quantum dots, and runs a serious risk of collapse in the unlikely event that the power ever fails. Feel the meaning of that in your boots, in the wellmetal deck beneath you. A temporary structure, indeed.

Because the tower is so purely vertical, and its base so distant beneath P2's tall atmosphere, you cannot see the foot of it. What you can see, if you strain your eyes, is the black line of a tuberail link joining the base of the tower with the city of Domesville, which even now is built in rings and circles—a concession to the domes that were never erected. It's a style; even the new construction falls into the same general pattern, so that from up here the city looks like a scattering of saucers and old-style shirt buttons around a pair of midsized dinner plates.

There are just over twenty thousand people down there (or fourteen thousand individuals with an average of 1.4 instantiations apiece, if you prefer to count it that way) going about their daily business, which mainly involves the maintenance and expansion of Domesville itself, the rearing and education of its growing ranks of children, and the planning and governance and sociopolitical groundwork for the much larger population which is to follow in the centuries ahead.

Then, running east from Domesville and perpendicular to the Tower Line, you can just make out the city's other tuberail, which runs thirty-five thousand kilometers east to Bupsville (officially Backupsville), the planet's only other major community. Not everyone lives in these two towns, and indeed, not everyone lives on the surface of the planet, or even anywhere near it. But together, the towns account for about ninety percent of the colony's population, and at least ninety-nine percent of its cultural output. If you squint, you can just make out Bupsville through a yellow-brown haze at the edge or “limb” of the planet. It doesn't look like much, just a gray discoloration, gleaming here and there with the bright orange-white of reflected sunlight. There is another tuberail line south from Bupsville, joining it to the Gravittoir's ground station, which, like the Orbital Tower, is located on P2's equator. But that line is far too thin and faint, too obscured by chlorine haze and water vapor and dust, to be visible from here.

The ground station itself is visible only because Conrad has asked the windows to mark it for him, with a reticle of glowing red. Another reticle—this one green—marks the position of Skyhook Station, which fortunately
is
visible, if only because it gleams in full sunlight, like a tight little cluster of stars.

Conrad is here because he's seen the Gravittoir, the latest of his children, from every other sort of angle, and wants to see it from this one before it goes online. Before the Orbital Tower becomes an afterthought, useful only for rustic vacations and cargoes of the very lowest priority. Before Domesville ceases to be the planet's main spaceport, and becomes instead merely its political capital.

Imagine yourself hovering invisibly beside Conrad, in a circular chamber at the tower's very top. All around you, the walls are transparent, though the ceiling has been opaqued to provide some shade from the noonday sun, and the floor has been similarly darkened to prevent vertigo, which from this vantage can be considerable. The launching tracks, running up along the outside of the tower, are also transparent (remarkably so, to your eye), and are only really visible if you know what to look for: four man-wide tuberails of wellstone spaced around the tower at ninety-degree intervals. Here and there, they catch the light in interesting ways, shooting rainbow-speckled sprays of it along the silver-gray wellmetal of the deck beneath your feet. It's rather cold here, and Conrad is bundled in a wellcloth jacket he brought with him from home, thinking ahead because he knows it's always cold here.

Outside of Domesville, all around it, is the Forest Not-Quite-Primeval (its actual name, yes), where the green of Earthly vegetation battles with the brown of P2's “natives”—very few of which are genuine, unmodified algoids. And with a careful eye you can even discern the two streams running through Domesville in a Y shape: Chokecherry Creek and King's Creek, which merge to become King's River before emptying out into the half-moon shape of Transit Bay, and thence to the Sea of Destiny. These off-dry ditches are generously named, visible only for the vegetation and housing crowding along their banks. They're not real rivers—just the handiest applicants for the job. But the sea and the bay are for real, and beneath their blue-green veneer they are themselves a battleground of green and brown and black vegetation.

The tower's structure is rigidized, actively controlled and damped to a degree that even Conrad finds astonishing, but nevertheless the floor transmits a vibration up through your boots. Or through Conrad's, more properly, since you aren't really here. This vibration, barely noticeable at first, quickly grows in intensity. A podship is coming up the rails. With a sudden smile, Conrad looks for it, leaning forward and pressing his nose against the transparent wellglass. He's rewarded by glimmers of light from below, shifting rapidly, and in another moment there is a sound like rain, and half the view is blocked for a moment as a C-shaped crew transporter, striped black and red, flickers past at seven kps, riding upward on two of the tower's four rails. The thrumming continues for another fraction of a second, and then suddenly quits as the podship clears the top of the tower and soars on up into vacuum.

God, you love it here. Or Conrad does. Or, more properly, Conrad
did,
for these events are long in the past.

After building the place, he used to sit up here for hours, just watching the pods go by. More traffic downward than up: there was a net flow of resources onto the planet, as it was easier to mine pure elements out of the asteroid belts than to rip them from P2's metal-poor crust. But the upward traffic—the
outbound
traffic—was in its own way more romantic, since it consisted largely of children in their twenties heading for their yearlong, not-quite-mandatory tour of duty on the space station or vessel of their choice. Seeing them roar by like that, Conrad was reminded of his own early days in space, as the unofficial XO of a pirate ship.

In many ways, these kids had it soft by comparison, although Conrad smiled to remember that
Viridity
had had its own medical-grade fax machine onboard, albeit restricted by stern software lockouts. There had been a pair of gleaming Palace Guard robots onboard as well, which had seemed very threatening and dangerous but had saved lives on more than one occasion. What days those had been! Not fun, but definitely thrilling.

The walls of the chamber chimed and said, “Incoming message.” The voice was soft and distinctly artificial, as Conrad preferred, and it was nice to see that the Tower still recognized him and knew his tastes after all this time away.

“Play message,” he said.

A man and a woman appeared before him, in very nice holograms projected and reinforced from both the ceiling and floor, with maybe a bit of fill-in from the walls as well.

“Yes?” Conrad said to them, then gasped as he realized just whom he was addressing: Bruno de Towaji and Tamra Tamatra Lutui, the King and Queen of Sol.

Conrad hadn't seen them—even their images—in so long that he could scarcely remember what to do. He was tempted to drop to his knees, but remembered in time that he, too, was a friend of kings. He had never knelt for Bascal—well, never seriously—so why should he for Bascal's parents? He made an awkward bow instead, placing his right hand on his stomach and raising his left in the air behind him.

“Your Majesties! Welcome! I am . . . rather surprised to see you here. What can I do for you? Or have you perhaps arrived at the wrong address?”

Tamra laughed. “
Malo e leilei.
You're Conrad Mursk, yes? The architect? Then we've been forwarded correctly. We bring you greetings from the Queendom of Sol.”

And King Bruno, looking around him, smiled in wonder and said, “Good God, it's like stepping back in time. We had towers like this when I was a boy. Well, perhaps not quite like this. But we needed them, you see, because there was no collapsiter grid. No other way to get on and off the planet, unless you wanted to plow the air in a hyperjet. This place is beautiful, lad. Is it your own work?”

Conrad shrugged. “Largely mine, yes, about eighty years ago. I think it's held up rather well, given the haste of its construction and the heavy use it has seen since then.”

“No doubt, no doubt.”

Conrad cleared his throat. “Is there, ah, is there some reason for your visit, Sires?”

“A little reassurance, if you please,” the Queen of Sol said.

Conrad blinked. “I beg your pardon? Reassurance on what?”

“We get only the official Instelnet news and information channels from Barnard, plus a smattering of narrowband entertainments, and of course the personal messages from our son. But amid this clutter we find that something doesn't smell quite right.”

“The data,” Bruno added, “imply one or more hidden or neglected variables of great importance. Our analyses complain of being incomplete, and warn us not to rely on them.”

A bit of the old defiance fluttered in Conrad's heart, and he said, “You have no authority here. Sir, madam, I'm sorry, but it's true. We don't have to do things your way. We don't have to open our ports to your every scan. For that matter we needn't share information at all. Are you here as spies?”

“Should spying be necessary?” Tamra asked, with neither humor nor anger. “Our concern is for your welfare.”

“Naturally.”

King Bruno smiled, perhaps a little sadly, and said, “Let us be friends, lad. Let us speak frankly, and in our mutual interest. We mean you no harm—surely you know that.”

And here Conrad relented, unsure why he'd pressed the point to begin with. Because surely this was true: there could be nothing sinister in their motives. Just parental, condescending, and superior, as always. And from the safe remove of six light-years, he could forgive them for that. Couldn't he? He eyed the two holograms carefully and said, “You two are quite a large program, aren't you? Very detailed, very capable. You mean to have a real conversation.”

“Indeed,” the King of Sol confirmed. “We've been clogging your planet's receivers for days. We will pay, naturally, in intellectual property concessions, and perhaps this proves some measure of sincerity on our part.”

“But what is it you want?”

The queen stepped forward half a pace. “Just your thoughts, Architect. Your impressions. Do you sense anything amiss? Something in the ecology? The economy? Your resource allocations have been quite peculiar—one might almost say primitive.”

Conrad could only shrug. “We have a lot of work to do. We're trying to install an entire civilization from scratch, building up from bare rock. Metal-poor rock, I might add. Frankly, I think we're doing quite well. We've hit our stride.”

“Your population dynamics, then. Surely those peculiarities—”

“We have a labor shortage, madam. We've had one since the very beginning, and quite frankly, it gets lonely here. There's only so much time you can spend talking to yourself, talking to the same few people over and over. Surely you don't begrudge us our children?”

“No. Certainly not. But your methods—”

Methods, yes. There had been developments in that area, to speed the population growth along. Conrad said, “You find it unseemly.”