The results were interesting to say the least, especially after their long imprisonment in the narrow tower of Newhope. This particular conversation found Conrad and Bascal in a maze of transparent surfaces, facing each other at right angles, with a sketchplate hovering uncertainly in the air between them while the khaki light of P2 glowered down motionlessly from “above.”
“Theoretically,” the king continued, “the next step is wisdom, the sum and synthesis of knowledge. But the more I think about it, the more I think that's a quality I've never seen. I'm sure it exists somewhere—there are sixty billion humans in the universe so far, and at least a few more arriving every day—but wisdom has a quality of mirage about it, retreating when inspected. Historical figures have the benefit of distance, and are incapable of making new mistakes, so we're free to see them as wiser figures than anyone contemporary. But there will be no new historical figures, will there? We are all of us contemporary, always and forever.
“And the wise woman is always a puffed-up biddy when you get to know her, isn't she? The wise man is a fretting gambler. If you guess right a hundred times, my boy, people will call you wise. But with all those billions of people kicking around, statistical narrowing demands that there be winners, even if all the decisions are random. There will be people who have always guessed right, every time in their lives. But it's meaningless, isn't it? Because if their next action is also a guess, it will have no more validity, no greater chance of success, than the cockamamie theories of a punk in some kiddie café. We most of us fail, Conrad, but we find our strength in numbers. If someone succeeds, if someone is wise, then civilization staggers forward, if not happier then at least a little bit richer, a little bit grander.”
“Kind of a harsh view, Highness,” Conrad said crossly. “Be useful for a minute. Focus. What can you tell me about the chlorine situation?”
Conrad had been a little unnerved, at first, when he realized he was the ranking officer for an entire planet, with hundreds of people answering to him. Technically speaking, space crews fell under the command and jurisdiction of the government of Barnard, hence of Bascal personally, and would eventually be reconstituted as some sort of Royal Barnardean Navy, but none of that long-term stuff had been unpacked yet.
The current government, such as it was, consisted of little more than conversations over lunch and dinner, mainly between himself and Bascal, and these were concerned as much with their old days at camp and in the Revolt as with anything contemporary. And since Bascal, with a Juris Doctor, three PhDs, and a ridiculous assortment of master's degrees, was taking a direct and leading role in the sensor analysis, this placed him, in a funny way, under Conrad's command.
Bascal was currently specializing in the biology of the native life-forms and their effects on the larger environment of the planet. But he required a certain amount of direction and had to be pumped periodically for information. For all his newfound age and gravity, he was a rather impulsive worker, selecting random tasks and attacking them for a while with battering-ram intensity, and then flitting on to something else, leaving a debris trail of half-completed projects behind him. The jellycells! The lidicara! The chlorine-producing algoids! The weather!
It was hard to argue with this approach—King Bruno had invented collapsium in exactly this way, and in the following centuries had parlayed the discovery all the way to the Nescog, the collapsium-veined telecom network which permitted Queendom citizens to fax themselves anywhere at all, including everywhere at once. But Conrad did not have centuries to wait, and the analysis of P2 needed patience and focus far more than this lurching and somewhat playacted brilliance. So Conrad found himself growing increasingly—if inappropriately—bossy.
And while the King of Barnard was thirteen decades Conrad's senior by this point, the new relationship seemed to bother him not at all. He was enthusiastic and accommodating, as willing to take direction as to give it, and Conrad found himself, for the first time in years, feeling the old bonds of friendship come truly alive. Sure, the king had a bad case of the Fever, and spoke like a bad echo of his father. But as a rebel, the Prince of Sol hadn't needed any role models. By definition, almost, he'd been his own man. All he'd had to do was struggle against the status quo, without having to actually run anything himself! But as a king, what other lead did he have to follow? Who but Bruno had ever been the immorbid king of an immorbid people?
And to fit himself into that mold, Bascal had to be a scientist—in fact a demented genius of staggering proportion—who only reluctantly turned his attention to matters political and economic. This of course changed his whole definition—what it meant to be Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui—and even with the help of a fax machine there was only so much brilliance you could cram into your skull. Some things were still God's to grant. So Bascal was making up the difference by rote, simply memorizing an encyclopedia of facts and methods and then styling his hair and beard and mannerisms in an ensemble hypercomputed to enhance his credibility. Which Conrad supposed was how most scientists probably did it, or anyway the ones people trusted.
The resulting facade was, on the one hand, very impressive and imposing and yet also quite approachable: the kind of public face you might actually want for your king. But on the other hand, it was really just another half-baked scheme, a kind of moral power-grab that Bascal had rushed through during the period when everyone else was sleeping. It had taken him a century and more of grinding effort, yes, but it remained fundamentally an impulsive, impatient act. In a way this was sort of endearing, for it was a sacrifice on the entire colony's behalf, but even so Conrad enjoyed pricking the facade and watching the real Bascal twitch underneath.
“Chlorine?” The king harrumphed. “The situation is that we have some. Its release appears to be a defense mechanism of the sessile algoids, because there's sure as hell no energy advantage in the transaction. Well, usually none. As far as we can determine, they've been churning the stuff out for eight billion years. Chloride ions become chlorine molecules, and for four billion of those years, the lithosphere absorbed them. Very interesting geology, with chlorination weathering as well as oxidation playing a role.
“But once the lithosphere was saturated, once every rock had soaked up as much chlorine as it could hold, the gas had nowhere to accumulate except in the atmosphere. It finally reached equilibrium, coincidentally just below the level which would be toxic to the algoids themselves. Since then, the levels have been propped up by numerous feedback loops, including a weak geochemical cycle that churns it all back underground, and they've been stable for a long time. I say that with a scientist's precision: a long time.
“The concentration is more than enough to kill us, of course—one hundred twenty parts per million at sea level. Even the native multicelled eukaryotes have a hard time with it, and have evolved a number of interesting mechanisms for coping. The lidicara especially, which actually burn the chlorine as fuel. It's an interesting mutation, this chlorine business, since as far as I can tell, Barnard's ecosystem was seeded from the same primordial sources as Sol's. There's the same encoding—protein on top of DNA on top of RNA. And the same distinction between prokaryotic cells—the primitive ones, the bacteria and archaea—and the eukaryotes, with a clearly defined nucleus and an assortment of specialized organelles, which are themselves mostly subsumed prokaryotes. A party indeed.”