Lost in Transmission

Chapter eighteen. Mursk wandering

Of course, Xmary could have come with him, or arranged to have a copy made. The possibility was certainly discussed, but even after these hundreds of years in the cramped confines of Newhope, she still claimed to have unfinished business there. Conrad suggested that it might be broadening for her to try some other jobs for a while, but she protested that she had eternity to do that, and needn't—in fact shouldn't—be in any hurry right now.

Conrad didn't think a centuries-deep rut was the best way to start off eternity, but he didn't press the point. Neither did he wish to reenter his old life as an architect, nor his even earlier life as an unemployed confidant of Bascal. The king, the oppressor, the Man. This was said and thought in joking tones, yes, but in a period of crisis there was something unsavory about government, and for better or worse Conrad had no desire to associate himself with that anymore.

So he took his own advice, inserting himself beneath the blanket of P2's atmosphere and seeking odd jobs on the outskirts of civilization. A few of these lasted six months; a few lasted a year or two. He supervised robots in a factory for building more robots. He was the editor and publisher of a rural news service until the communities he served closed up and moved elsewhere in search of better agricultural soils.

He even did a turn as a road builder, bulldozing and paving and cobbling streets for old-fashioned maglev vehicles, and even wheeled vehicles, to travel along. It was important work, because large aircraft and spacecraft were increasingly scarce, and for the mining and quarrying communities of the southern lowlands and the mountains between Domesville and Bupsville, there was virtually no other way to get around anymore unless you were a centaur, and even they couldn't carry ore.

That job felt too much like a retreat, though—a shallow attempt to revive his childhood, without even his father there to supervise. So Conrad moved on, and moved on some more. He spent a season as a hermit, taking clay out of the dry riverbed and fashioning it into bowls and oil lamps and fat-figured women in a cold and poorly ventilated shack in the desert. But that was really a retreat, and no service to civilization at all, in its hour of greatest need. So he took a real job again, and this time it stuck.

He was the captain of a fishing boat on the Sea of Destiny. He had a staff of four—bristly unshaven men, all. Their job was to sail P2's larger ocean—shallow and poisonous though it be—tracking the migrations and population dynamics of various species of fish. This was directly helpful to society, since the fax shortage had driven other boats out here to catch the fish for actual human consumption. The movement and fluctuations of the schools were also an important indicator of the health of the infant ecosystem. And yes, out on the ocean there was no one to confront or argue with, nothing to dispute, nothing all that much to worry about.

Except perhaps the weather, and even that was nothing compared to Earth or—God help them—Neptune, which P2 more closely resembled in some ways. Yes, it was a hostile planet for ordinary human life, but Conrad and his men were not ordinary humans. No one on P2 was, or ever would be again. And while the oceans were technically larger than Earth's, they were shallower and occupied a much smaller percentage of the planet's uselessly large surface. And P2's rotation wasn't fast enough to generate meaningful Coriolis forces, so when the sun heated the ocean's surface during the long, long days, the tropical depressions which formed over it were not pulled into raging cyclonic hurricanes. Instead, they formed simple rain showers—or at worst, tornado-spawning thunderstorms—which roamed the oceans aimlessly and were easily avoided.

Indeed, the planet's greatest storms were the dry ones, sweeping off the desert plains and into the ocean. This happened most often at daybreak, as new slices of atmosphere rotated into the heat and proton flux of the solar wind. The resulting aurora could be quite beautiful, but the accompanying ground-to-sky lightning, the random blasts of dry wind off the warming sand, sometimes took the coastline by surprise. When they came, the storms would rise an hour behind the sun and quickly rocket out to sea, carrying clouds of stinging grit which blotted out the sky and clobbered the surface acidity, killing raft vegetation for hundreds of kilometers and driving the fish down, down toward the featureless bottom.

At night, the oceans gave up their heat again, turning over, exchanging with the warm, nutrient-rich muck at the bottom. In this sense, P2's shallow oceans were more fertile—more habitable and forgiving—than Earth's deep ones. No sterile, crystal blue depths here! This turning over was a weather event unto itself, generating thick, cold, chlorinated fogs that reduced the visibility to twenty meters or less and clung to everything in a slick film, turning all but the stickiest of surfaces into skating rinks. But Conrad's ship, Snowflake, rarely sailed at night, except during the mating season of the beholder squids, which glowed eerily beneath the water's churning surface and were one of Conrad's absolute favorite sights in the world.

Ah, the adventures they had on that proud little ship! The tides of P2 were high and slow, so that there were islands and peninsulas and even whole archipelagoes that would come and go—a landscape and seascape always in flux. There was so much to see, so much to explore.

On one dry-shoe visit to the Drowned Islands, on a kilometer-wide reef called Umamaha, or Shallow Shoulder, Conrad and his men found themselves knee-deep in rotting fish. They had seen their share of fish kills before, but these were generally monospecific events triggered by a local resource depletion, and so were ultimately a sign of overpopulation. But they knew right away that this one was different, because it involved dozens of unrelated species and had no obvious cause.

Ned Creswell, Conrad's senior ocean chemistry officer, opined thusly: “Nutrient levels in the water are all nominal, sir. And off the island, we didn't read any signatures of unusual decay.”

“Meaning what?” Conrad probed.

“Meaning the dead fish are all right here on the island, sir. Look at them: they haven't been dead more than a couple of pids. They flopped up here while the waters were receding. They were trying to get out of the ocean, millions of fish. From all directions, too, by the look of it.”

“And why would they do that?”

“Hell if I know, sir. If I didn't know better, I would say they were suffocating. Panicking. Trying to breathe the air while keeping their bodies wet? But if that were true, we'd see signs of it in the water. Dissolved gas levels have been normal all week.”

“Hmm. Do fish leave ghosts?”

“Hell if I know, sir. But we haven't got the equipment to read 'em in any case.”

So they held their noses and walked around for a while in the ruddy brown light of morning, but the mystery only deepened.

Said Giotti, the wildlife officer, “Whatever's scavenging these fish corpses, Captain, I've never seen anything like 'em before.”

“They're bugs,” someone said helpfully.

But that did little to shed light on the matter, because even Conrad could see that while these bugs were built on a generally Barnardean chassis—radial symmetry stretched out into a sort of bilateral torpedo—the similarities ended there. For one thing, these bugs had legs all over them. They were absolutely, positively covered in legs. Even the mouthparts were legs—a decidedly nasty feature when examined closely.

“It's the proton flux from the sun,” Conrad speculated. “With a nice, hot yellow star, you can set your planet away from the fusion source. Here, we're practically nestled up against it. And the planet has no strong magnetic field to deflect the proton winds. You and I are full of healing nanobes, medically refreshed every couple of years, but there are no veterinarians under the sea. The radiation damage probably just builds up, generation after generation.”

They began to notice, too, that a lot of the dead fish were covered in tumors. These did not seem, particularly, to have been the cause of death. When you found a fish asphyxiated on dry land, you didn't have to look much farther for what had killed it, even if the reasons for it remained mysterious. But still, there were more cancers than Conrad would expect to see in a healthy population. Was proton radiation a strong mutagen? He couldn't remember, though he would certainly look it up. Anyway, a star would emit neutrons and alpha particles and all kinds of other garbage as well. Clean-burning they were not! This by itself wasn't necessarily a problem, except that no one had designed adequate coping mechanisms into the animals. Or perhaps they had, and the mechanisms had stopped functioning, or something was interfering with them.

“The ecology of this planet was never stable,” commented Giotti. “It never had any need to be, with freshly printed organisms compensating for any unforeseen population crashes. P2 is at best a garden, not a wilderness.”

“Your point being?” Conrad asked, for Giotti was a man who stated the obvious far more readily than he stated his own opinion.

“Well,” said Giotti, “in a stable ecology the mutants die out. Everything is perfectly evolved for its niche, and change comes slowly or not at all. Anything different or anomalous is defective, almost by definition.”

“But . . . ,” Conrad said, with patient tolerance for his crewman's foibles. He was learning patience, oh yes, as anyone must who had lived this long and seen this much.

“But an ecology without stable niches is more tolerant of mutation,” Giotti answered. “You might almost say it encourages mutation, as a means of trying out new body plans and lifestyles. Because you never know what's going to work better unless you try it.”

“Hence these leggybugs?”

“I don't think those are going to succeed, sir. At least, I hope not.”

And here some old words of Bascal's floated up in Conrad's mind: “The true measure of any life-form is how quickly it can skeletonize a cow.” By that half-serious reasoning, Giotti could hardly be wrong, for the leggybugs were not efficient scavengers, nor tidy ones.

The men of Snowflake might've explored more—hell, they might've found the clue that would solve the whole mystery—but the long, slow morning was already beginning to heat up, and by the end of their next shift on the island the smell of rotting fish drove them back onto the boat and out to sea, none the wiser for their investigations. Would the incident have made more sense as an isolated, anomalous occurrence? It was hard to know, because they encountered several more such kills over the course of that year. And then the kills stopped, just as mysteriously, but the fish populations in that area never did seem to recover.

“Ah, well,” Conrad told his men on a rare night of drunken revelry, when the light of Sol shone down upon them like a mother watching over her children. “If the sea weren't full of mystery, then what good would it be?”

The night sky of P2 was a lopsided affair, with all the bright stars squeezed into a band along the river of the Milky Way, cutting at an angle against the horizon. Sol herself dangled from the belt of Orion, a fourth star in that perfect line, but brighter and spaced out a bit farther. A longer and much brighter line, cutting the sky from horizon to pole, was formed by Canopus and Sirius and Alpha Centauri, with Rigel and Betelgeuse and Procyon hovering nearby. Together they formed a single constellation, much bigger and clearer than anything in the skies of Sol: Orion, the Randy Vaulter.

“Men go to sea,” Conrad said beneath the Vaulter's light, “because the land is tedious, and the sea, which is never twice the same, obliges them. Drink up, laddies! Turn those mugs over and drain them dry, for tomorrow the sea will have new surprises, and beforehand we must needs refresh ourselves.”

The parlance of sailors was saltier and more expansive than the clipped, dead-in-five-seconds urgency of spacers, and Conrad found that he loved talking that way as much as he loved the sea itself. In all his long life, this was the closest he would ever come to poetry. Alas.

In the years that followed, they never did see any more leggybugs, although they did find a few amphibious creatures so strange that it was hard to believe they'd evolved from human-drawn designs. Perhaps their made-up genomes were unstable? Given to sudden fits of mutation in the isolation of an island ecosystem?

Fancying himself a bit of a scholar, Conrad went so far as to trace the evolution of a particular beast, the island river nereid, from a primordial form—the sea nereid—that had been designed and introduced in the colony's earliest days. Then it had turned out that the river nereid really was man-made, though obscure, and the whole argument sort of collapsed.

But then, as happens sometimes with scientific obscura, it revived again with lively debate in the ecology journals when a number of other established species—some more awful even than the leggybugs—turned out to have mutated in exactly the ways that Conrad had theorized. This touched off a wave of cryptozoological exploration which flew in the face of the colony's poverty, igniting imaginations. Who knew—who knew—what strange monsters might be found on and around these islands, or in the deeper trenches of the middle ocean?

“It may be hubris,” Conrad wrote in a letter to several of the journals, “to believe that a system as complex as a planetary ecology can simply be installed to order, or controlled in place.”

There were strange creatures as well in the growing Thorn Jungles, as blackberry bramble decided not only to take over the world's narrow soil belts, but to creep in around the edges of civilization itself. Naked-eye ghost sightings there were easily dismissed, for the lighting was always poor. And for similar reasons, the existence of a rumored Thorn Jungle Hydra was never verified, although other shocking discoveries were made during the hunt. Anyway such a beast was plausible in the extreme, for the jungle's own mutants kept company with unauthorized creatures invented and released without official permission. And who was doing the releasing? Civilization had its own monsters, driven half mad—or perhaps wholly mad—by ill-conceived body plans their human brains could not control without gross rewiring. More than one of these self-made unfortunates had disappeared into the jungles, and who could say what became of them? But that is another tale, and nothing to do with Conrad Mursk.

Of course, not every adventure on the sea was fish or monster related. Snowflake really did encounter some weather every now and then, especially in the polar latitudes where it occasionally met its namesake, where the ice on the deck and the instruments and steering controls would occasionally get so thick that Snowflake couldn't maneuver at all and had to radio for emergency warming by batteries of orbital lasers.

Of course, Conrad still had his money, and during his infrequent trips to Backupsville he still sometimes sent copies of himself off to the stars and gathered up the replies. There were always fewer incoming messages than outgoing ones, though—he'd lost two more copies of himself out there, and something about that began to bother him in a way it never had before. Lost in transmission, yes: two more pieces of himself he could never recover, experiences and conversations he'd genuinely had, but would never know about. Would they have changed him? Solved his problems?

Finally, he ceased the practice altogether—no more would he cast his soul upon the spaceways—and when a call came in for him from the King and Queen of Sol, he refused to accept it. Let them come in person, or else leave him in peace.

In spite of these sobering distractions, Conrad could have been happy at his fishery job for a long, long time. Alas, it was not to be. The main outcome of Snowflake's research was the realization that fish stocks were falling dramatically, everywhere, regardless of any human predation. Per Giotti's years-ago warning, the planet's ecology had always been propped up by human action. But now every available hand was digging ore or growing food or stitching together fax machines of increasingly, alarmingly poor quality. There was nothing left to prop up the ecology with, and so it slumped, and fell, and after sixteen years in the salt air Conrad finally couldn't bear to watch the planet die anymore, and so resigned his commission.

From there, he found himself moving southward, building more roads again for lack of anything better to do, until he found his way to the Polar Well itself, where there were no roads and couldn't be any. Like many warm terrestrial planets, P2 had no polar caps per se, but given the grazing angle of the sunlight at extreme latitudes, it did have regions which were permanently in shadow. Most notably the Well: a hundred-kilometer-wide depression ringed by sharp-toothed mountains, where the fall of snow and the melting and refreezing of ice made the terrain anew every 460-hour cycle of day and night.

Increasingly, agriculture was a necessity for the colony rather than a diversion. It was a source of fuel—a low-tech means for harvesting the ruddy light of Barnard and converting it into human activity, through the mediating elements of starch and sugar and comestible proteins. But agriculture, unlike fishing, really was at the mercy of an uncooperative climate, and the weather patterns of P2 were surprisingly complex, and surprisingly dependent on the speed and direction of winds in the Polar Well.

So there were sensor stations there, and the sensors were always getting covered with snow and ice or sinking into pools of slush, and no one had ever found a good way to make robots understand how best to clean and care for them. So each of the seven stations—arranged in a rough hexagon with the seventh and largest at the center—had to be manned by one actual human being, who lived alone in a nearby hut. Which sounded nice, didn't it? To be a hermit who also served a vital need for the greater good? When a vacancy opened up, Conrad saw his opportunity and moved in.

Here, in the land of permanent twilight and permanent cold, of snow and ice, of clear, bright starlight that cut through the hazy atmosphere, Conrad found a kind of clarity he had never known before. Maybe it was just the solitude—he'd never had that, either—but he had a lot of opportunity to ponder it, and over time he decided that the environment itself was a crucial element in this new sense of peace.

Here in the Well, human beings could live, but only barely. This wasn't a matter of body forms, but simply the hugeness of nature; lapses of attention quickly became serious, even fatal. Especially in bad weather. In his first season on the job, his immediate neighbor to the east had frozen to death, and had had to be evacuated in a special coffin housed within a robot tractor built especially for this purpose. Ironically, they took him north to Pectoralis and had to thaw him out again there, just to freeze him properly for long-term storage. Such was the fate of the colony's dead: neither heaven nor hell nor simple oblivion, just an icy limbo in the Cryoleum, on a spit of land popularly known as the Fin.

Conrad hadn't known that neighbor—hadn't been moved particularly by his death—but a few years later it happened again. The same isolated hut, the same exact stupid circumstances, and this time the victim was Raylene Pine, a woman Conrad had gotten to know rather well over the radio and through occasional conjugal visits by tractor or, when one of them was feeling particularly ambitious, by snowshoe.

Her death hit Conrad hard, because it was the first time in his long life that he'd ever known anyone who had actually died for real—who had simply dropped out of the world, dropped out of the universe, and in all likelihood would not be coming back. What a strange concept! He wept off and on for weeks, and part of him—the last shreds of his childhood, perhaps—withered away and never did grow back.

Around this same time, in her increasingly disheartened messages to him, Xmary complained that Newhope's fax machine had finally been confiscated: relocated to Bubble Hood and then finally to Domesville. As a not-too-surprising result, the miners and refiners of Barnard space were in a state of open rebellion, and the only thing keeping them even marginally in line was the threat that their frozen dead would not be respected, would not be relocated to the Fin for proper storage. These were fun times indeed, but the discussion's main effect on Conrad was to remind him just how precarious his own situation had become.

It was a hazardous occupation, this monitoring of weather stations in permanent shadow, and as the years slid by Conrad found himself marking time by the deaths of his colleagues. He came to realize that he was pushing the odds himself, that after three or four decades in this place he would surely die, and as had happened in several other cases, they might not even recover his body. The ice was a flat sheet hundreds of meters thick—an ice lake, the geologists insisted on calling it—and sometimes in the expansions and contractions of the day/night transition it would just crack, straight down to the bottom, and sometimes a person would fall in, and then inevitably the cracked ice would warm just enough to collapse and refreeze, and it would have taken the resources of a starship just to identify the body, buried half a kilometer deep in the ice.

And so, reluctantly, Conrad began planning his exit strategy. He would return to civilization; he would get a real job and resume a normal social life. He would even, he supposed, resume regular contact with King Bascal, though the prospect held little joy for him. The fact that they were friends—had always been friends—did not make up for the increasingly heavy-handed tactics of a government under pressure.

But new thoughts can be dangerous in an environment where routine equals safety. One day, while morosely planning this sad excuse for a future, Conrad was hiking along his northern perimeter when the ice groaned and banged and cracked in front of him. Not a deep crack—a crevasse to the lake bottom itself—but a much rarer surface crack that was eighty meters long or so, and just wide and deep enough to admit Conrad's snowshoe and then swallow his foot up to the ankle. He stepped in it, yes, and fell badly, and surprisingly enough it was not his leg that broke but his left arm and collarbone. It was just about the most painful thing that had ever happened to him—death included!—and walking back was a hassle and an agony, and finally a deadly ordeal.

There was a meter of powder on top of a meter of packed snow, with the ice underneath, and while Conrad had sprung for the best snowshoes available—featherlight platters of wellstone which stuck to snow and ice as though they were glue—snowshoeing was still hard work under even the best of circumstances. And these were hardly the best of circumstances; he couldn't use his left arm at all, which meant he couldn't use his left shoeing pole, which meant he was effectively a three-legged creature, rather than a four-legged one as the environment demanded.

Being dazed with pain didn't help matters either, and he had neglected to bring any food or water on this hike. He always carried a wrist phone when he was away from the hut, but when the wind was blowing and whipped up the snow, reception could be spotty. Also, he wasn't sure he'd given the thing a proper charge recently; there was no sunlight here to run it, and it was easy to forget to touch it against a powered wellstone surface. So he dutifully called for help every ten minutes, but no help materialized, and no one called him back.

And then, like an idiot, he managed to lose his way in the blowing snow several times, and while hypothermia was not a risk—not in his high-end wellcloth bodysuit—by the time he found his way back he had become rather seriously dehydrated. He spent his first ten minutes sitting in a chair drinking warm water, and then spent his next ten minutes peeing it back out again. Only then did he feel fit enough to approach the hut's communication gear and raise his neighbors.

Two of them arrived by tractor before the shift had ended and saw to his injuries as best they could, but what he really needed was evacuation to the Domesville hospital or, in a pinch, the one in Bupsville. What he got instead was a ten-day tractor ride to the southern outpost of Aurora, where they had to rebreak his bones and then set them the old-fashioned way, by sealing his shoulder in piezoelectric foam while a pair of robots pulled his arms out straight. He spent four surly weeks in a convalescent ward, and when he was finally fit to travel again, he did not return to the Polar Well, but instead caught a tractor north to the print plate factory on the southern outskirts of Bupsville.

He had had it—had it—with this fax shortage, and he was bloody well going to do something about it, though he couldn't imagine exactly what. Not then, anyway.