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CHAPTER EIGHT

In Which Old Haunts Are Revisited

Perhaps Conrad should have stayed. Perhaps he should have brought his negotiating skills to bear, and brokered some sort of agreement between the squatters, the platform’s rightful owners, and the Constabulary who’d come pouring out of the fax gates a few minutes after the fighting had ended. Perhaps he should have let himself care. But in fact he did none of these things. Feck and Xmary knew the squatters better than Conrad did, and had also enjoyed more extensive contact with the Queendom bureaucracy. In some sense, they’d begun the negotiation process well before the actual skirmish—before Conrad’s revival had even begun—and he didn’t feel like playing catch-up.

Hadn’t he done enough already? Didn’t he have his own needs and wants? Indeed, far from helping Xmary help the kids, he tried to seduce her away.

“This so-called Basic Assistance is pretty hefty,” he said. “We can go places, do things. You’ve spent your life on spaceships, dear, and on worlds that might as well be spaceships. But here’s a place that offers wonders beyond the dreams of Barnard.”

They were sitting side-by-side on the steps outside the park dome, enjoying the night breeze off the ocean while the crowds chattered and shouted behind them.

“Sorry,” she said with a sheepish look he could just barely read in Sealillia’s night-light glow, “but the rest of us are already broke. We retraced our old footsteps in Denver and Tongatapu. Went to the moon, took a submarine ride. We’ve been here two weeks; we blew through our monthly allotment in one.”

“So get some money from your parents.”

She put her head on his shoulder and sighed. “They won’t see me, Conrad. They’re still livid about the Revolt.”

“Really? A thousand-year grudge?”

“You don’t know my parents.”

“Hmm.”

“Anyway, I think we can make a difference here. We should get back inside.”

“I’m sick of making a difference,” Conrad said, scanning the night sky for some sign of the moon, which he still hadn’t seen. “When I built the Orbital Tower, I felt like I was making a real contribution to Sorrow’s future. Not like a stadium or an apartment building; this was something that really helped. But it wasn’t enough; it didn’t save the colony. And everything else I try just ends up . . . I don’t know. It wasn’t so bad on the ship, but we’re among human beings again. And the thing about human beings . . . I just . . . It seems like wherever I go, people are fighting. And I can’t help them, and I can’t make them stop. Can’t I be tired of that? Is that okay?”

“Sure,” she said, hugging his arm. “For a while. But every now and then you poke your head up at just the right time, and it does help. Sometimes fighting is the right thing to do. We can get by without you here, so yes, go on ahead. Spend your allowance; have some fun. Just don’t turn your back when you are needed. There’s no point living forever if you don’t use yourself as a positive force.”

He made a smile she couldn’t see. “Aye, Captain.”

“I mean it, Conrad.”

“So do I.” But then he scratched an eyebrow, cleared his throat and said, “If we all did that, all across the Queendom and throughout the colonies, a hundred and sixty billion people using their lives as a positive force . . . That seems so overwhelming. How can everybody help everybody, when we’re crammed together like this, or dying out among the stars? I don’t know how to use my life.”

“Well, not by throwing people in the ocean.”

And that, at least, they could both agree on.

* * *

He had been to every corner of Barnard system, had crossed every millimeter of the space between Barnard and Sol. Twice! He knew the land and seas of Sorrow from pole to pole, and he had radioed personality snapshots to a dozen other worlds, and gathered back scores of self-aware replies which he’d folded back into himself. He was quite possibly the best-traveled person in history. But Saturn’s rings were a sight unequaled in the colonies, and Conrad had never seen them with his own eyes. So that was where he went first.

And God damn if it wasn’t the most stunning sight his eyes had beheld since the first time he’d seen Xmary naked. From a hundred thousand kilometers above the seething cloudtops, at a latitude of twenty degrees south, he found himself looking “up” at a ring structure that filled the center of his view, leaving only the edges black.

The planet itself was more striking than either of Barnard’s gas giants, Gatewood and Vandekamp. Unlike those blank turquoise spheres, Saturn’s blonde atmosphere was broken into subtle bands of light and dark whose edges blended together in little swirls and ripples that were probably the size of Earthly continents. Some of the lighter bands were split by very thin ribbons of dark, snaking north to south and back again, and a few of the dark bands were home to brunette specks and ovals that were darker still: storms, shearing and growing out of the boundary ripples. In his sailing days, Conrad had been a student of Sorrow’s weather, and had seen patterns like this in the thermal maps of her currents and trade winds. But not right there in the sky, all at once.

Even the limb of the atmosphere was interesting; against the blackness of space he could easily pick out three separate cloud layers—call them blonde, brunette, and redhead—floating above the general murk. You saw nothing like that when you were this close to Vandekamp, and at Gatewood it was too damned dark to see anything at all.

Conrad had seen—not personally but through the eyes of a holographic avatar—tidally locked planets like Gammon and Wolf, whose surfaces were as banded and stratified as any gas giant’s atmosphere. The sun never rose or set; the melting point of water was a geographic location. That was kind of pretty, if inconvenient for the inhabitants. But for sheer visual impact it was nothing compared to the Eridanian world of Mulciber, where clouds of tin spilled as rain into quicksilver oceans, in countless craters smashed down by cometary impact. From its dusty moon—the only safe place to view it—the planet looked like an iron ball decorated with hundreds of circular mirrors.

Conrad had seen his share of ring systems, too, but here was the true majesty of Saturn; its rings were young, still nursing their original complexity. He could barely take his eyes off them. According to the hollie windows in the dome of the observation platform, each of the three main rings was wider than the Earth, and the innermost one began almost exactly one Earth diameter away from Saturn’s visible edge. These were nice amaze-the-tourist facts, but from this vantage point Conrad couldn’t really tell where the “three” rings were supposed to be; he counted at least a hundred, of so many different colors and thicknesses and brightnesses that they each, like mountains or oceans or cities, seemed to have a distinct character all their own.

The observation platform itself was interesting, too. He shared it with five other gawkers who’d come through the fax at the same time. And to keep them all from barfing in surprise as they sailed out through the print plate, there was gravity; not from a finicky graser but from actual Newtonian mass. Within its soap-bubble dome the platform was a flat triangle of diamond sitting atop another flat triangle, with a neuble’s worth of neutronium squashed between them. A billion tons of matter: a fifty-fifty mix of protons and neutrons, with a haze of electrons shimmering around them, giving the substance a pearly appearance. The heart of the structure was, in essence, a single gigantic atom, pressed flat and oozing superfluidly into the corners of its prison.

Conrad had come to see the planet, but as the minutes stretched on, he found his attention drawn more and more to the floor beneath his feet. He’d learned a fair bit about neutronium during his brief tenure as a gravitic engineer, and had been fascinated by its liquid qualities. The theory of it all was far beyond him, but he’d gotten surprisingly far by thinking of neutronium as a kind of oil, impossibly slippery and impossibly dense.

There were whole worlds of this stuff out there in the wider universe: neutron stars. Atoms the size of Earth, with the mass of two or three suns, held together not by nuclear forces but by their own enormous gravity. In his more romantic moments, he sometimes dreamed of seeing one up close. What would it look like? What color would it be? If immorbidity meant anything at all, surely he must someday have the chance to find out?

In any case, between the extremes of hydrogen nuclei and neutron stars lay the man-made neuble: a two-centimeter atom held together by pure human stubbornness. They had only two uses: they could be squeezed into the tiny black holes from which collapsium was made, or they could be exploited architecturally for their intrinsic gravity, which was considerable.

In free space, the pull of an ordinary spherical neuble could break a person’s back, could fold a person’s limbs around itself in a bone-snapping, rib-crushing embrace that admitted no hope of escape, or even breath. He’d heard of accidents like that, where it took a team of specialists and superstrong robots a week and a half to pry the body off. Not for any sentimental reason, but because burning it off could ignite or destabilize the diamond shell, releasing the tremendous pressure it enclosed. Bang.

For this reason, neubles were rarely encountered in free space, and the builders who employed them were very careful about surrounding them with protective structure. Their gravity fell away rapidly; two and a half meters away it was Earthlike, and at twenty-five you could barely feel it. Squashing one flat like this was a neat trick that spread the mass and gravity around, allowing you to get closer without getting killed. But it also struck Conrad as surprisingly risky for the staid old Queendom of Sol; he’d only ever heard of circular platforms being fashioned in this way. Squares and triangles had a nasty habit of concentrating stress at the corners.

“How old is this platform?” he asked the wall.

And one of the hollie windows replied, “A very intelligent question, sir. It has been in service as a tourist destination since Q20.”

The very earliest days of the Queendom, in other words. “Huh. And who designed it?”

“Declarant-Philander Marlon Sykes, sir.”

Ah. A man so comfortable with risk that he’d very nearly destroyed the sun, very nearly murdered the king and queen. He had murdered thousands of others, if incidentally, and he was a torturer, too—a closet sadist exposed only at the very end of his days. The Queendom had never imposed a death penalty, but in Sykes’ case it had made something close to an exception, firing him off into the void at the speed of light, in a cage of collapsium that sealed him off forever from the universe of decent people.

A difficult man to admire, yes, but Conrad had studied architecture, and that was a subject one simply could not discuss without frequent invocation of that accursed name. Sykes had invented superreflectors and a hundred other common things, and was responsible for some of the most striking and innovative structures in human history. Including, arguably, the Nescog, which had been built amid the ruins of King Bruno’s original collapsiter network. Bruno had designed the Nescog as well, but he’d had Sykes’ own Ring Collapsiter, ill-fated but undeniably ingenious, to draw upon for inspiration.

“Hasn’t anyone complained?” Conrad asked. “Aren’t people afraid to come here? Why not just build a new platform?”

“Excellent questions,” the hollie window congratulated him. “I don’t have the information here, and the speed of light is such that I may not locate it for several hours. But I will research these issues and forward the results to you.”

“Um, okay. Do you need my name?”

“I have your name, sir,” the window informed him proudly. “It’s an indelible part of your fax trace, and also encoded in your genome.”

Ah. Of course. Conrad had grown up with all this, and it was slowly coming back to him. There was something vaguely unsavory about it—he’d never been crazy about machines that watched his every move, talked secretly among themselves, and also enforced such laws as they were able to. In what way did that advance the causes of freedom and human dignity? But at the same time, he felt a part of him melting with relief. On Sorrow there was no backup, no supervision, no help. If you got into trouble, you got yourself out or you died. Conrad and his friends got out; Bascal and his friends had apparently died. But no more. Here, that kind of death simply wasn’t possible.

But Conrad’s parents were Irish, and in spite of his best efforts they had managed to imprint him with a certain degree of superstition. He had seen a ghost once, no shit, and he looked around now, suddenly realizing all the other tourists had filed away without his noticing. He was here alone with the machines, on a platform designed by the very cleverest of history’s monsters.

“I think I’ll go to Denver,” he said to the fax machine, and hurried to fling himself through the plate.


But Denver, where arguably his own involvement in the Children’s Revolt had begun, was all wrong. Most of it hadn’t changed at all; the old skyline was still there, instantly recognizable. The streets were still bursting with children—for this was a Children’s City—and with buskers and athletes and pedestrians, for this was also an Urban Preservation District where short-range faxing was severely discouraged.

But though the old Denver was still visible beneath, today the city had a lot of extra grown-ups pushing their way through the streets of downtown, and a lot of robots scurrying daintily through morning errands. And the downtown district itself lay in the deep morning shadow of six enormous towers—not orbital towers, but simple pressurized stratscrapers capable of holding a million people each. Taller than the mountains to the west, taller even than the Green Mountain Spire which had once been the city’s signature landmark, they . . . they ruined it. They made the city look small and artificial and old.

“How long have those been there?” he asked a passerby, pointing up at the monstrosities.

“Huh?” said the man, looking for something out of the ordinary and not finding it. His breath steamed in the October air.

“The towers,” Conrad said, huddling into the warmth of his wellcloth jacket again, for he had not been cold in many decades. “The big ones. How long?”

“Oh, a long time. Hunnerds of years,” the man said. Then, looking Conrad over, he brightened. “Hey! You’re that feller from Barnard, aren’t you? Returned from the stars to back here whence you were born.”

“I am,” Conrad admitted, “though I haven’t been to ‘whence’ yet. I’m from Ireland.”

“Eh? Well, welcome back to society, just the same. Does it feel good? Does it feel right?”

“I don’t know,” Conrad answered. “I only lived here for twenty-five years. I’ve been gone for a thousand.”

And yet, those twenty-five loomed very large in his memory. At the time, they’d been one hundred percent of his life’s experience, whereas Barnard, even at the end, had never been more than ninety percent. And hell, thinking back now it didn’t feel like much more than half. A lot of important things had happened to him out there—shaping his character, informing his judgment—but the trajectory of his life had been determined here. Literally: right here on this very street, on a warm July night, with the Prince of Sol at one elbow and Ho Ng—a man Conrad would one day murder—at the other. Denver was the crucible to a lifetime of rebellion; the cannon from which he’d been fired.

“It looks smaller,” he said. “It feels crowded and weedy and gone-to-seed. But that’s a funny thing, because nothing has really changed. Aye, and maybe that’s the problem.”

“Well, good luck to yer,” the man offered, grabbing and pumping Conrad’s hand, then dropping it and moving on.

Ireland should be the next stop: a ritual visit to his parents, whom he loved and missed. They had raised him well enough; his vagabond life could hardly be blamed on anyone but himself. But this was a funny thing, too, because where Denver still felt recent to him, his life with Donald and Maybel Mursk seemed impossibly remote. And those had been the same time.

So he didn’t feel quite ready. He needed to steep in the thin dry air of Denver awhile, before he could face the damp chill of Cork. Instead he found a seat in a nearly full restaurant, where the wellstone was working overtime to cancel out the crowd noise and leave each table in its own bubble of quiet. Eventually a human waiter appeared, and offered him a choice between ten different meals. Conrad selected the least Barnardean of these—a spicy egg sandwich with blue corn chips on the side—and settled back with a mug of bitter red tea.

The waiter just laughed when he tried to pay. “The walls know, sir. Who you are, what you can afford. Food is free, right? The door wouldn’t open unless you could pay for service.”

Ah. And service didn’t come cheap. Not here, not anywhere. He asked the wall, “Excuse me, um, hello. How much money have I got?”

And the wall answered immediately, in that fast, clipped accent of Sol’s machines: “Twenty-seven trillion dollars, sir.”

Wow. There must have been some mean price inflation here in the Queendom, because the last time he’d been here a trillion dollars was enough to pay ten thousand workers for ten thousand years.

“That’s to three significant digits, sir. Do you require greater precision?”

“Uh, no. Thanks. But how much is my lunch? A few billion?”

“No, sir. Two hundred and six dollars, sir.”

“Two hundred? Dollars? But that would mean . . .” He was rich? He: an exile, a vagabond who’d rebelled against two governments? He’d had money for a while in Barnard, but he’d squandered it all on secret schemes and silly interstellar messages. And even if there was a bit left over, what value would a few Barnardean dollars have here, when Barnard itself was just a dream? He’d had a Queendom bank account as well, holding trivial sums when he’d departed, but even compound interest couldn’t account for such an explosion. In an immorbid society, interest rates were very low indeed!

“I’m afraid you’ve made some sort of mistake,” he told the wall. “My name is Conrad Ethel Mursk. I’m a refugee.”

“Possibly, sir,” the wall agreed. “But your bank records are quantum entangled with the physical universe, and thus incapable of error.”

He laughed. “Are they, now? I’ve never seen a system incapable of error. Where would I get so much money?”

“It isn’t my place to know, sir, but I can find out for you.”

“Um. Yeah, okay. Do that.”

Why not? He was intrigued. And half a minute later, the wall answered, “Sir, the greater bulk of payments into your account have been from Mass Industries Corporation, with a minority share from World University. I also detect one deposit from the Office of Basic Assistance, in the amount of one thousand dollars.”

Conrad mulled that over. Mass Industries was King Bruno’s neutronium company, whose dredges gathered up the stray dust and gravel of the solar system and squeezed it into billion-ton neubles. Conrad had once helped to hijack one of their ships, but that was the closest he’d ever come to a business relationship with them. And his connections with World University were even more tenuous than that.

“That doesn’t make sense,” he said.

“I wouldn’t know, sir. I’m just a wall. Two messages have just arrived for you, sir. Shall I play them?”

“I don’t know. What are they?”

“The first comes from Ring Observation Platform Two. Seven hundred eighty people have complained, sir, and the number who are afraid to go there is not known. The platform—the only one of its kind—remains in service as a historical landmark. The other message is a request for a job interview on Maplesphere at your earliest convenience.”

Job interview? Already? Hmm. Maybe that Appreciator thing had come through. “That’s odd. What’s the address?”

“Maplesphere is the address, sir. Just speak it to any fax machine. Would you like to hear the complete message?”

“It sounds like I just did. All right, look, I’m going to eat my breakfast, and then I’m going to visit my mom and dad. Hold my calls, if you would, until further notice.”

“I will inform the network,” the wall said dutifully. “And I must say, sir, it’s been an honor working with you.”

“Likewise,” Conrad said, unsure whether to grumble or chuckle at that.


The meeting with his parents, when it finally came, was sadder and louder than he’d expected. He didn’t fax straight to the house, but to the northern edge of downtown Cork, which lay in the late-afternoon shadow of another million-body stratscraper, and had pedestrian and robot crowding issues of its own. Nothing else had changed, although the landscape seemed tired somehow—the leaves a bit droopier, the grass and hedges just as orderly as ever, but in some way less emerald. Here was a place that had simply been walked on too much.

And yet, and yet, his hairs stood at attention, craning their follicles for a view. He knew this place as he’d known few others: in his bones. And Donald Mursk’s roads were in excellent repair, and in his soft Queendom shoes Conrad followed them home without difficulty.

Or rather, to the place where his home should be. But the trees and hedgerows were gone, replaced with a smooth low carpet of grass, and the house was gone, and the tall, skinny mansion that took its place sat twenty meters farther back from the road. Egad. It had never occurred to him that his parents might have moved in the millennium he’d been away. But he walked up just the same, and the house said to him, “Master Conrad! You are most welcome, sir. Do come in, do. Your mother is leaping from her chair as we speak, and while your father is away, I’m printing a fresh copy of him to meet with you.”

Indeed, Conrad was still an arm’s reach from the gray front wall when a wooden door appeared in it with a crackle of wellstone, and immediately swung open to reveal Maybel Mursk, who flew out weeping and laughing. “My son! My son is here!”

Conrad’s father was not far behind, and when the hugging and backslapping and handshaking were done, and they were dragging Conrad back inside, he couldn’t help a wash of guilt. “Come on, now. Mom, Dad, I barely wrote to you.”

“Sure,” his mother said, “and we missed you all the more for that. Sit down! Sit! Can I get you a drink or something? We’ve found a fine beer that we’re quite fond of these past two centuries. Oh, look at you. Look at you! Not a boy any longer but a fine, proud soldier.”

Conrad should have taken that in the spirit it was meant, as a pure compliment. But surely he looked the same as ever, a fit twenty-five, just as Donald and Maybel Mursk surely looked, to their own eyes, too young to be the parents of a grown adult. Much less a thousand-year-old. They’d been born into a morbid world, expecting to live a childless life and die before the century mark, poor and ignorant. Conrad, like immorbitity itself, had seemed a constant source of amazement for them. “Look,” they would say, “we have a boy who rides a bike! Look, he’s a space pirate now! Look, he’s a thousand years old and returning from the stars!” Conrad’s only “soldier” time had been as a security thug in the Royal Barnardean Navy, pushing around the miners and ’finers and wranglers of interplanetary space. It was a period in his life he’d just as soon forget, and even the thought of it had the power to bring out what venom he possessed.

To his shame he blurted, “That’s a bit presumptuous, Mom. You knew me for two decades out of what, a hundred and twenty?”

And of course his mother started crying at that, and his father said, “Oh, now, what do you go and say a thing like that for? Breaking your poor mother’s heart. Have you had any children yourself? Well, then, I don’t expect you know too much about it. You pour your soul into a child, lad. How could you not? And it doesn’t pour back. It wanders off. It gets surly and insults its mother. Now come on, you, tip a glass with us and we’ll speak no more about it. You owe us the tale of your many adventures, and don’t think you’ll escape from here without it. I don’t care how old you are; in this house you’ll listen to the pair that gave you life.”

And then Donald Mursk started crying as well.


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