“Telling us what?” Conrad asked.
“Well, it tells us quite a lot, although it may not fit your definition of ‘immediately useful.' It's important because this places the origin of life on Earth and Barnard some four billion years and forty thousand light-years apart—the two stars were nowhere near each other prior to the current epoch. This means that the primordial source must be older still, and its children very numerous indeed. Life is durable, my friend, drifting in great spore clouds across the sweeping arms of the galaxy, sprouting wherever it lands and then freshly seeding the spaces around it. If I were a doctor trying to fight this infection, I'd be worried, because if you and I were to sterilize this planet right now, it would be teeming with unicells again within a million years. From the sky, my boy. From the very stars.”
Conrad nodded unhappily. “This is where the master plan breaks down. We're supposed to terraform—we're provisioned for it, anyway—but we would have to eradicate the biosphere to have any hope of a breathable atmosphere.”
“And we may, Conrad. We may yet. At this point I haven't decided, but when the world is mine to command, with the corruption of absolute power chewing away at my soul and the responsibility for millions of people pressing me to action, I may sign that extermination order. The natives can be archived and their ecosystem documented in detail, so that someday we can reconstruct it in a suitable environment, and they'll have lost nothing but time. Or perhaps we will leave them dead, and spare the galaxy a long, slow war between the microbial armies of halogenia and oxytopia. Chlorine is poison to more than just ourselves, so if we have to choose sides, we should obviously choose our own, and play to win. Barnard's spores could infect Sol, you know, or the stars of future colonies. Perhaps they already have, and that eons-long chemistry experiment has begun anew, barely measurable but slowly, steadily building. Poisoning worlds.”
“You're a romantic,” Conrad accused. “And a melodramatist. This is pent-up poetry, leaking out through the holes in your logic. I know you, Bas. I can see you wriggling inside that monarch skin.”
But Bascal shook his head, unamused. “We'll still be around in a million years, boyo. You and I, personally. These decisions carry palpable consequence, and the morality of it all is murky at best. Either action may brand me a monster or a fool, or both.”
Conrad stifled a sigh. “All right, Tui Barnarda, point conceded. But our concern at the moment is extremely narrow, extremely short-term. The oceans will burn our eyes and sear our membranes. That's bad. The air is poison rather than fire, but twenty minutes' exposure will kill us just as dead. And my real question is, what do we do about that? What protective measures will we need when we walk on the surface?”
“We needn't protect the skin,” Bascal said. “The skin is a protective measure, against all manner of chemical agents. Weak acids and other corrosives are precisely what the skin is there for. That, and foreign microbes. The body's weak points are its openings: the eyes and ears, the nose and mouth, the mucous membranes. At higher concentrations, we might also worry about the nail beds, and the anus and urethra, and in fact for immersion in the oceans that might be necessary.
“But we're really just talking about air pollution, here. Chlorine is the worst of it, but there are plenty of other noxious gases in the brew, and all of them appear, to a greater or lesser degree, in the atmosphere of Earth as well. This was especially true during the Industrial Revolution, but even our squeaky-clean Queendom produced irritants—especially in the mines and refineries of the Elementals, who formed the wellsprings of the supply lines of the Queendom's fax infrastructure. And of course, the Earth's biosphere produces waste products of its own, and the planet itself—with its volcanoes and rifts and mineral springs—produces still more.
“It's a matter of degree: here, a human being in good condition—and we are all in very good condition—will accumulate fatal lung damage over the course of about ten minutes, or possibly twice that long for certain individuals. For that damage to actually result in death may take another ten or twenty minutes, or longer if the source of further damage is removed.
“And we have the fax machine, don't we? The panacea of panaceas? So in some sense, we can get by with no protective measures at all. Just stay indoors as much as possible, limit exposure to the native air, and print a fresh copy if you feel yourself starting to cough. In a more practical sense, we can design filter masks which simply reject all but the oxygen and CO2 and nitrogen our bodies expect. These masks would be passive and would have no consumable portions—no filters to clog, no power source to maintain or replace—so they'd last a good long while, possibly centuries. And they shouldn't need to, because you can fax a fresh one every morning, with your clothing.”
“Well we can't all,” Conrad reminded him. There were only six fax machines within the confines of Bubble Hood, and one of them was in Bascal's quarters, and another in Conrad's. Rank came with privileges, you bet. And there was another in the messtaurant, and a fourth in the inventory, one in the emergency center, and one on the exterior of the hull.
Most of Bubble Hood's citizens had spent at least a little bit of time onboard Newhope, and had gotten used to the idea that they must bathe every day, or else smell bad. This was mostly unnecessary in the technological ubiquity of the Queendom, where travel through fax plates and collapsiter grids cleaned and scented the body several times each day, but stepping into a shower for a few minutes was not so terribly different from stepping into a fax.
Nor did the people here generally print fresh clothing every day. Instead they gathered it in batches and stored it in their rooms. The dress codes had been relaxed, and while many people continued to wear Newhope uniforms (either out of habit or because they liked them, or because they lacked the imagination to dress themselves any differently), many others wore the clothing which for them was still fashionable: children's styles from the Queendom of 150 years before. Some others paid attention to the Queendom news feeds and sensoria, which were only six years out of date, and dressed in those styles instead, but already this had begun to seem like a quaint and vaguely boobish thing to do. Un-Barnardean. So in fact one needed a lot of clothing, and needed to pick it carefully.
Anyway, the point was that most people in Bubble Hood did not have ready access to a fax machine, not without waiting in line, and the same would eventually be true on the surface of P2. In fact, things would be much worse on the surface, because the number of fax machines coming out of storage would double or triple at best, whereas the population, finally unpacked from Newhope's memory cores, would increase tenfold. One of Brenda Bohobe's top priorities was therefore to establish a print plate factory, with all the elaborate machinery and supply chains that entailed. But that would be an enterprise of years, and could not even begin until a lot of other stuff had been unpacked.
Bascal chuckled a kingly chuckle. “Point taken. Also, point irrelevant. Who's digressing now? I can have the masks designed for you in a couple of hours. Probably sooner, actually.”