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CHAPTER SEVEN

In Which Certain Difficulties Are Unmasked

“Your Majesty,” said Reportant Bernhart Bechs to the Queen of Sol, “this seems an awkward time for the king to be absent. Did you ask him to leave a copy behind?”

“No,” she said, not only to Bechs but to the other reportants here, clustered around her and her Palace Guards in a buzzing hemispherical swarm. Ordinarily her personal press cordon was set at eighty meters, with strict acoustic volume limits to discourage uninvited chitchat, but this was a press conference. Typically these would be handled by her press secretary or by some crisis-specific bureaucrat, but there was a lot going on this week, and she had dozens of copies working all across the solar system. Printing out one more was hardly a bother, and people were burning with curiosity anyway, so she had generously permitted the paparazzi to approach within ten meters of her physical person, and to ask—within the bounds of decorum!—anything they wished.

“The king,” she went on, “does not divide his attention when matters of science loom large. He is cloistered at his workshop on Maplesphere, and will remain there until his experiments are complete.”

“Does that mean weeks?” Bechs followed up. “Years?”

Bechs was, at the moment, a four-winged news camera only slightly larger than the queen’s pinkie nail. Strictly speaking this wasn’t necessary; they were in Chryse Downs Amphitheater on the northern lowlands of Mars, and Bechs’ physical self—one of him, anyway—was in a rental office just a few kilometers away. He could remote this bug; there was no need to be it, to run a shadow of his brain within it. Too, he was among the most respected reportants in the Queendom, and would be welcome at her side in his own human body. But old habits die hard, and Bechs was an old, old man. He was accustomed to interviewing Her Majesty in this way, and she, for her part, always recognized his signature wine-red cameras.

“Weeks, most likely,” the queen said. “If his problem is tractable he’ll solve it, and if it isn’t he’ll move on to something more immediate. It’s possible he’ll uncover new principles requiring much more detailed investigation, but if so he will delegate the problem—at least temporarily—to his technical staff. He’s aware that I have pressing tasks for him here, and he won’t lightly refuse.”

“Is it the wormhole physics again?” asked another of the cameras.

“I don’t discuss my husband’s work,” she reminded. But her tone was indulgent, for when Bruno retreated to Maplesphere, which happened three or four times each decade, he generally returned with treasures: the back-time processor, the quantum screw, the popular word-cypher game known as “Nickels.” Nothing could match the twin bombshells of his early career—collapsium and ertial shielding—but he remained the most inventive soul in a population of one hundred and sixty billion. Tamra would never blame her subjects for being curious about his current interests.

“What’s happening with the Barnard refugees?” asked someone else.

“The four living crewmates remain in Red Sun custody,” she said. “No decisions have been made about the others.”

“Has the attack on Newhope accelerated the timetable for their revival?”

“I repeat,” she said, less patiently than before, “no decisions have been made. Whatever we finally do here will set a precedent for all time hereafter. There is no reason to enter into it hastily.”

“What about radiation damage?” another reportant demanded, somewhat angrily. “You can’t leave them out there forever.”

“Steps are being taken,” the queen assured. “Whatever status these people are finally accorded, we will treat their remains with utmost dignity.”

* * *

Meanwhile, another Bernhart Bechs camera had found its way to Sealillia, to interview one Conrad Ethel Mursk. It would be the climax of a series; Bechs had already profiled the other three, whom he thought of as the Captain, the Comedian, and the Cactus. He’d even interviewed the ship itself.

In a lurid, voyeuristic sense, the Cactus was by far the most interesting of these; Xiomara Li Weng and her jokester second mate, Yinebeb Fecre, had been born in the Queendom and exiled in the Revolt. They’d had real lives, if sad ones, whereas Eustace Faxborn was created specifically for the interstellar return mission, stepping live and whole and nearly adult from a Barnardean fax machine. This custom had been commonplace out in the colonies, where—strange notion!—there was a chronic shortage of human beings. But in the Queendom this was considered one of the basest possible perversions.

Especially since people named “Faxborn” were, for the most part, sexually active from the word go. Indeed, if the refugees’ accounts were accurate—and Bechs had no reason to believe otherwise—Eustace Faxborn had married the Comedian shortly before the bloody surprise attack that was the mission’s unauthorized departure. She’d begun less as a member of Newhope’s crew than as part of its life-support system: a living sex robot for the otherwise lonely second mate. In this sense, she’d done quite well for herself, and Bechs was careful to say so in his profile.

“You could run that ship by yourself,” he’d said to her in the interview, echoing the words of the Comedian. “You could fix any subsystem. You’ve a quick mind, and quick hands to go with it, for you’ve been using them all your life.”

He’d meant it in the best possible way—most of his viewers had no such practical skills, and admired them greatly—but her reply was characteristically prickly: “Newhope ran for five hundred seventy-eight years without any crew. After the accident it repaired itself with no help from me. It’s smarter than a human being when it needs to be.”

Which was partly true and partly her own sort of modesty, but mostly it was an uncomfortable and vaguely hostile evasion. The Cactus seemed at ease only when reciting facts, or describing the emotions of others. Her own self, her own feelings, were a troubling subject she didn’t care to examine. And why should she? She’d lived her life in a microcosm, with only two other people besides her husband. Plus the ship itself, yes, which could spin out robots and specialized personality constructs to suit any whim or need. But it wasn’t human.

“I regret the accident,” the ship had said to Bechs in its own interview, conducted at distance over the Nescog voice channels, with hours of signal lag between question and answer. “I was aware of the divergence in the navigation solution, but I was unable to formulate a response. I failed to realize the debris shoal was within our position envelope, and failed to imagine the resulting collision. I was caught off guard.”

“What did you imagine?” he’d asked in response.

And the ship had replied: “Very little, sir. Imagination is an inductive trait, and difficult to mechanize.”

Of course.

At any rate, Bechs had buzzed and flitted his way back here on the news that the ship’s first mate—the captain’s husband—had finally been released from hospital. Bechs would round out his story and then rerelease the whole thing, with commentary, to a curious public.

Unfortunately, several dozen other reportants had beat him to it; he found Mursk seated at his apartment’s tiny dinner table, swatting angrily at a cloud of them.

“Shove off, parasites. I’m done. I’m eating!”

And so he was: fax-fresh plibbles and bran flakes, steaming blood sausage and curried potatoes, with miso soup and the nutrient paste known as “mulm,” which Bechs had never seen eaten by anyone but navy crews and merchant spacers. It was far more food than a human stomach could hold, and there were three nearly full beverage mugs in front of him as well. Here was a man who hadn’t tasted for decades. Not enough, anyway, or not the right things.

But still the cameras pestered him, spitting out questions, stepping all over each other in a haze of white noise. Most people had no idea how to run a press conference, even if they’d called it themselves.

“Welcome back to civilization,” Bechs said to him, raising his voice above the din. He could do that; he had a special volume license, along with other privileges. “You do realize, I hope, that you can order these cameras outside? They can’t invade your home, nor peer through your windows, without permission.”

“Ah!” Mursk said. “Then my permission is revoked. Off with you pests. Off!” To Bechs he said, “Thank you.”

“Quite welcome,” Bechs assured him, while the others buzzed sullenly away. “I wonder if I could speak with you when you’re finished, though. I’ve already interviewed your friends, and I’m hoping to round out my set.”

“You’re Bernhart Bechs,” Mursk said.

“Yes.”

“I remember you from when I was a kid.”

“Do you?” Bechs was surprised, and pleased. “That was a long time ago.”

Mursk laughed. “You’re telling me? But you did that thing on the history of Europe, and the one about the plight of juvenile commuters.”

“God, I barely remember it myself. When can I return, Mr. Mursk? I don’t mean to trouble you.”

Conrad looked down at his food, then up again at the maroon bug that was Bechs. He seemed disappointed. “You know, truthfully, I’m already full. What would you like to know?


Conrad Mursk turned out to be very nearly an ideal interviewee, whose life story could, Bechs sensed, fill volumes of its own. Nearly everything Bechs asked was met with a long, detailed answer which neither rambled nor lacked a point. A longtime spacer, Mursk had as much vacuum lore as any of his crewmates—and quite a bit more than Eustace Faxborn. But unlike the other three, Mursk had done a lot of additional things with his life, spending more than a century of it on the ground, and decades more on the sea and on the ice of Planet Two’s small polar cap.

He was never a politician—he made that abundantly clear—but he had nevertheless been a member, if unofficially, of King Bascal’s inner circle. He’d been remotely consulted on several occasions by the King and Queen of Sol, and seemed to have been present at almost every major turn in Barnard’s history.

“I’m a trouble magnet,” Mursk said at one point. The admission seemed to sadden him, which only heightened his aura of thoroughness and thoughtfulness. If he had a single great fault, it was a kind of self-doubt that bordered on self-loathing. To hear him tell it, he’d done little good in his life. Still, Bechs sensed through these deep layers of modesty and guilt that nearly every calamity had involved his attempting to, often against terrible odds.

“Our departure helped collapse the Barnardean economy,” he would say. Or, “I shortened the Children’s Revolt through an act of blatant treachery.” Or, “I never convinced the government to soften its punitive measures, and in terrorizing the miners into ending their rebellion I gave my de facto approval to their indenture.”

But from these statements Bechs extracted the unspoken corollaries: I’ve risked my life to preserve innocents. I know when to cut my losses. I know how to broker a deal. I am unspeakably interesting. Bechs could have questioned this man for days, for months; but as fate would have it, the two had only been talking for twenty or thirty minutes when a commotion rose up outside. Not the buzz of reportant cameras but the actual shouting of live human beings, transmitted through the paper-thin, almost tent-like wellstone of the dormitory shelter.

“Excuse me,” Mursk said, a look of worry blooming on his face. He rose from his chair and moved to the wall, murmuring “Window” to it just as though he’d been in civilization all his life. And when the window appeared, he said, “Oh, brother.”


Conrad had been expecting trouble since before he’d even arrived here, and he’d spent much of his time huddled at a library in the apartment’s wall, learning what he could about Fatalist tactics. But what he saw outside was a surprise nonetheless. There was an attack of sorts under way, but the invaders coming down the staircase were not gray-skinned Fatalist ghouls or skeletal Death avatars, but ordinary men in blood-colored jumpsuits trimmed with white.

Conrad had spent time in four different Barnardean services, and had a fine eye for uniforms. These were neither military nor medical; they looked more like a mechanic’s coverall than anything else. They had names stenciled in black across the left breast, but no indications of rank or functional specialty. Indeed, the only insignia was a white rectangle on each man’s left sleeve, bearing a blood-red circle surrounded by five outward-facing triangles. A sunburst, highly stylized.

Conrad counted twenty men, two of them with bullhorns and all of them carrying objects he recognized immediately: contact tazzers, capable of dropping any human being in his or her tracks with the merest brush of their business end. The tazzer was a humane weapon as such things went, but the people who’d actually been struck by one—Conrad included—tended to give them a wide berth. In the words of the poet Rodenbeck, “Being tazzed is like being stepped on by an electric elephant.”

The other surprise was that the half-dressed kids at the bottom of the stairs—nearly a hundred of them—were holding their ground rather than falling back or scattering.

“What’s happening?” Bechs asked, buzzing up beside Conrad for a look.

“It’s the Red Sun eviction team,” Conrad answered. Then, in a much louder voice: “Feck! Xmary!”

He stepped out onto the balcony, prepared to vault over its railing as Xmary had done, or at least call down advice to the children and warnings to the Red Sun security. But the surprises just kept on coming.

“We are not taking names,” said one of the bullhorn carriers in an amplified but outwardly reasonable tone. “No one here will be punished. We simply request that you vacate these premises so they can be put to humanitarian use.”

But the kids—boys and girls alike—were forming up into battle lines as though they’d been training for it all their lives. Their wellgold necklaces and earrings flashed and flickered in the sunlight, not merely reflecting but in some way modulating the glare. Passing notes in class, oh my, in their own secret language. Did they feel it as taps upon their skin? As nerve inductions? As sights or sounds?

They couldn’t change their bodies, but clearly they could use their brains. And whatever they were passing, whatever they were saying to each other, the Red Sun workers seemed oblivious to it until it was too late, and their fate was sealed. When the mob had self-assembled into five clean ranks, they rushed their attackers. Silently at first, as rows one and two launched into motion, but then rows three and four let out an ululating yell, while row five raised its fists in defiance.

Nor were these kids afraid to absorb some hurt; the first two rows were sacrificial, simply throwing themselves against the Red Sun line—in some cases right up against the tazzers. This put the Red Sun workers off balance—literally—so that the third and fourth lines could sweep them off their feet, wrenching the tazzers from their hands. This was also sacrificial, as most of the kids involved went down twitching and grunting. But the fifth line swept over them without opposition, taking up the tazzers and hurling them away, without even bothering to use them against their owners.

Instead, the Red Sun people were hauled up by their armpits and threaded into cunning arm- and neck- and headlocks that made optimum use of the strengths and weaknesses of human anatomy. The guards, like everyone else, must be terribly hard to injure, but against overpowering leverage they had little recourse.

“Here now!” one of them said.

“This activity’s unlawful,” tried another.

But more kids were streaming into the area, and the ones already here were finding their voices. “We’re not hurting anything! Why are you on us like this? Leave us the hell alone!” And then, in a rising chorus: “Into the drink with you! Swim for it! Swim for it! Swim for it!!

“Excuse me,” said the camera of Bernhart Bechs, buzzing down for a closer view.

Conrad didn’t know what to feel. Barely fifteen seconds after the first commotion, the kids were dragging their captives toward the platform’s edge, at the juncture between two of its flower petals, and they really were going to throw them in the water.

“Stop!” he shouted after them. “There are . . . there . . . shit. There are smarter ways!”

But nobody was paying attention to an old man’s babbling, and if he jumped down there to intervene, in all likelihood he’d just be going for a swim himself. Damn! Whatever faults these kids might have, helplessness was clearly not among them. And Conrad had seen this all before, had lived it all more than once—the anger, the spontaneous order and chaos, the pent-up need for action. Alas, Utopia, Rodenbeck had written in the wake of the Children’s Revolt, thou retreatest from immorbid grasp as a cricket from fractious children.

And yea, verily, Conrad could feel it in his bones: the dream of a better life never ended, even when all sense said it should. And so the Queendom of Sol—forged with the loftiest of intentions by the best minds in history—was poised, once again, at the brink of revolution.

“Eternal life,” Conrad observed though no one was there to hear him, “is a tuberail car that won’t stop crashing.”


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