To Crush the Moon Page 4

  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 p
rince'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.