To Crush the Moon (5 page)

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 prince'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.

All of this was charged to King Bruno's accounts. No private charity or government agency seemed prepared to take charge of these people, for fear of an implied obligation to care for their thousands of shipmates. Even if those revivals were free—which they surely would not be—the housing costs alone would be considerable. There weren't that many vacant apartments in the whole of Earth!

As for
Newhope
herself, the navy guided her—bodies and all—into a parking orbit in the lower Kuiper Belt. There to remain, like the Instelnet message-ghosts, until some brighter future should happen along.

“Appalling,” Bruno said to his wife as they lounged that night in their bed on Tongatapu. “Have we not wealth enough?”

“It's more a matter of space,” she reminded him. “If we're to have any wilderness at all, we must contain urban growth on the habitable worlds, and our own children—natural-born humans with no sins on their shoulders—must have the first pick of what growth we allow. Or do you propose a Queendom without children? I confess, I can't see the point of
that
.”

“Mmm,” Bruno grumbled. “No one volunteers to die anymore. To make a bit of space.”

“Would you?” the queen asked with a bitter-tinged laugh.

“No,” he admitted. Not while the wormhole project remained incomplete. Indeed, he had
dozens
of incomplete projects which held the promise of a better life for all. “But we must do
something
, you and I.”

“Yes,” she agreed, taking his hand. “We must. This trickle of refugees has begun to add up. We could almost fill a city.”

“A floating city?” he suggested.

She made an unhappy face. “Not another one, dear. Please. The oceans need to breathe.”

“The oceans are vast. One more won't hurt.”

“But a hundred more,” she said. “A thousand more. Where does it stop? Why don't you revive your Lunar program instead?”

It was Bruno's turn to laugh, stroking Tamra's hand against the wellcloth sheets. “It was you, my dear, who ordered a halt to it. Too many displacements, you said. Too much economic disruption, including the loss of one of history's greatest landmarks. And you were right: sparsely domed though it may be, the moon is proud home to
four million people
. Where shall I put them?”

“On a floating city,” she said, and sighed. “It's like a puzzle. Slide one piece and the others have to move. To make an opening, you've got to close one. And yet, the alternative is death.”

“So say the Fatalists,” Bruno chided. “Do they lack imagination? Do we? ‘Everything has an end,' they insist. ‘Let's engineer it, peacefully and with love.' By which they mean the vaporization of innocents, the sabotage of shielded archives. Bah! I say everything has a
solution
, and we've only to find it.”

Tamra kissed him firmly. “And I, my darling, say that everyone must sleep. Come, let's have a bit of darkness.”

And suddenly, for no discernible reason, Bruno knew just what to do about his wormhole problem. “Egad!” he said, grabbing for the sketchplate he theoretically kept on his nightstand for moments like this. But theory and practice were only lightly acquainted; the sketchplate wasn't there. Bruno searched the area for a second or two, but the idea was hot on the tip of his brain, and though his fatigue had vanished he was nevertheless terrified he would fall asleep or suffer some distraction, or that the idea would simply trickle away before he could record it.

In desperation, he slid to the floor and began scribbling there with his finger. The wellstone, long accustomed to such behavior, responded with trails of black obsidian in its surface of faux bleached wood. These rough figures arranged themselves into elegant numbers and symbols as the king's finger raced ahead. “There's a long axis,” he muttered. “Indeed, indeed. Where the mass distribution falls away as a function of Z, it drives an instability in X and Y. But it needn't! We shall present the spherical opening with a
cylindrical plug
!”

Her Majesty Queen Tamra was also accustomed to these intellectual fits and spasms—her husband's renowned mind was anything but linear—and she knew better than to disturb him in the midst of one. Indeed, she watched with sleepy interest for a few minutes as the obsidian equations spread upward along one wall, and were joined by holographic diagrams: spheres and cylinders surrounded by a forest of right triangles.

“
Two
spheres,” Bruno said to himself. “They're one and the same—the real and imaginary component of a single object—but to an observer that's not evident. How could it be? And the observer's viewpoint is
valid
, yes? Or relativity be damned. Two positions in real space, connected by a line. By a
cylinder
.”

The queen was no mathematician, but she'd seen enough of her husband's work to know he was trying—vainly trying—to sketch out some four-dimensional object or relationship in a 3-D image.

Fortunately their bedroom was a suite whose outer chamber could be sealed off from both the outside world and the bedchamber itself. And so, sighing, the Queen of Sol stooped to kiss her king upon the shoulder, then dragged her blankets from the bed and stumbled off to sleep on the couch. For the one message she could read clearly in the walls, albeit implicit, was,
This will be a long night, dear. Don't wait up.

When Conrad Ethel Mursk opened his eyes, he was
astonished to see something other than the afterlife. There were no angels, no clouds, no twinkling stars, and certainly no God or devil waiting to judge him. Instead, there were green walls and white examination tables, and a young-looking woman with copper hair and eyes the color of jade, dressed in powder-blue medical pyjamas.

“I'm not dead,” he said, and was surprised by the clarity of his voice. He sat up, and was surprised by the pull of gravity. Not grav lasers or spin-gee but
planetary gravity
. Then he charmingly added, “Where the hell am I?”

The woman was fiddling with controls of some sort behind Conrad's headrest, and in sitting up he had placed his viewpoint only centimeters from her torso, so that she appeared mainly as a pair of breasts. Still, he caught her smile.

“Welcome back, Mr. Mursk. How do you feel?”

“I don't know,” he said, pausing for a moment to take stock of himself, to feel his body up and down for numbness or injury. “I suppose I feel all right, all things considered. Is this Sorrow?”

She chuckled. “This is Earth. More specifically, Frostbite Trauma Center in the city of Glacia in Victoria Land, Antarctica.”

“Oh,” he said, digesting that. “What year?”

She told him, and he heard a low, pathetic groan escape from his lips. He'd been gone a long time—so long that the numbers barely made sense. A thousand years? Forty childhoods? Fifty thousand episodes of
Barnes and Manetti
? The Queendom he knew was ancient history. And so was he.

“Shit,” he said. “Wow. How's my crew?”

“All fine,” the woman assured him, now stepping back to give him a view of something other than her chest. “We've woken you last, since your reconstruction was the most difficult.”

“I was burned,” he remembered suddenly. “The coolant lines blew out. There was this swarm of damage-control robots, just pouring out of the fax machine, draining the mass buffers, hustling us down into storage and trying to stop the air leak. But the ship was coming apart, and somebody had to be last in line. I remember thinking,
We tried. We did our best, but this is where it ends.
”

“You were fortunate,” the woman said. “It could have been a lot worse.”

“Hmm,” he answered, mulling over the sheer obviousness of that. “It seems I'm in your debt. Or someone's. What about the passengers? We had twenty-five thousand in cold sleep.”

Her expression shifted, and he had the sense she was choosing her next words carefully. “Well, yes. It should be possible to recover most of them at some point. But sleep is a generous term here, don't you think? Some of those people were already partially decomposed when you froze them.”

“It was a rescue mission,” Conrad said vaguely. And right away he could see how stupid his plans had been, how pointlessly optimistic. The Queendom of Sol
could
help his countrymen, yes; it had the wealth, the technology, the notable absence of psychotic leadership and sociopolitical collapse. The Queendom of his dreams would have done exactly that. But the Queendom of the real, physical universe had problems of its own—didn't every place? A pile of dead colonists would be a curiosity at best, an unwelcome intrusion at worst.

“I'm an idiot,” he said. And it was true; he'd come all this way on the theory that a faint hope was better than none. But if the faint hope didn't pan out, then it was as good as none. Or worse.

“I doubt that,” the woman answered, offering him a handshake. “Angela Proud Rumson, Doctor of Medicine and Extrapolative Cosmetics.”

He examined her hand for a moment—it looked absurdly soft, like she'd never used it—and then shook it. It
was
soft.

“Conrad Mursk,” he said, and was about to add a title or two of his own. But what was the point in that? What status did he hold here? What he said instead was, “Refugee.”

“Very pleased to meet you.”

“Can I see my friends now?”

Angela Proud Rumson's smile was reserved. “Tomorrow, if you please. They've gone to their temporary quarters already, and I'm expected to hold you for observation. Test drive the old nervous system, make sure we've done all the wiring correctly. Shall we say twelve hours?”