“Shit. Shit. Are you going to say anything else?”
“Is there anything else to say? I'm sorry, but I'm really not equipped to have a discussion with you about this.”
“Well, piss off, then. Tell Xmary . . . Tell her . . . shit. Just tell her good-bye.”
After the recording had mailed itself back, Conrad said some other things which are best not repeated.
“You're late,” said one of the Bascals, in the ferry hangar. “And you've been crying. Both of you. What's wrong?”
This question was at once leaderly, medical, and deeply personal, for tears occurred very rarely in the Queendom of Sol, and were regarded with utmost seriousness.
“Xmary,” said the two Conrads together. They were freshly printed, and hadn't had much of a chance to diverge yet. Their potential responses were limitless, but bounded by identical experience. They wouldn't always say or do exactly the same thing, but until their thoughts got off on different tracks, the responses would be pretty close.
Bascal's features—not at all boyish despite their youthful construction—melted in sympathy. He held up two sets of arms, and embraced both Conrads warmly. “Ah, my friend, the vagaries of love and loss are the curse of the immorbid. Even in the Queendom, two hundred years ago and more, they were saying these first marriages, first relationships of any kind don't last. Ask a woman what animal she feels like and she will say ‘cat,' a creature as playful and graceful and cruel as God himself! Ask a man and he'll say ‘pig,' with no apology, and how long can a cat dance with a pig before somebody's paw gets hoofed?
“My parents are perhaps a reminder that true love can be found and kept, but they had—both of them!—been around the world a few times before falling in together. And they did break off for thirty years, you'll recall. Perhaps there are additional fallings-out in their future, or it may be that they're locked together by their positions as king and queen. Each was duly elected in isolation from the other, and their divorce would not—could not—change their joint monarchial status. They are as trapped by circumstances as we ourselves.
“Ah, but these are words of gloom, when you need cheer! Of empty misogyny when you need companionship! Take a cue from Plato, my boy. He said, ‘Being is real. Becoming is an illusion.' This moment is nothing but a snapshot, a sort of hologram laid out beside the happier moments before and after. Let's end it and move on. Come to the planet with me, hmm? It's the start of a new relationship, a new love affair. And if she treats us as well and as badly as our women have, then we shall have an interesting time of it indeed, and revel in our successes while they last.”
It was a nice thing to say, or mostly so, and Conrad should have been nice in return, but instead he scowled and said, “I'm not in the mood for pomposity, you fuffer. My parents are still together as well, but what difference does that make? What bearing does it have on me, on this day, right here? Just leave me alone, all right?”
At that moment, two copies of Bertram Wang sidled up. “I think we're ready to fly,” one of them said.
At Conrad's look, Bascal explained, “Bertram here is the only person in the entire colony, in or out of the memory core, with any experience piloting actual reentry vehicles. It's such a rustic way to fly—not a skill that most of us maintain, although in retrospect the jailers probably should have taken it out of the simulator and made it a part of our physical training. The ferries should fly themselves, more or less, but it never hurts to have an experienced hand aboard.”
“Of course,” Conrad said. “Nice to see you, Bert.”
“Hi,” Bert acknowledged.
There were six ferries in the bay—half a year's output from the Martin Kurster Memorial Shipyard, consuming a costly stream of crushed asteroidal rock. Each ferry could comfortably carry twenty humans, or up to a hundred if you stacked them in bunks, which was exactly what they would do when it came time to really populate the planet. And yes, it was inconvenient. Even when there were fax machines installed on the surface, there was no easy way to land the memory core itself. For that you'd need some sort of railroad, reaching vertically through the planet's atmosphere.
Or teleportation, yeah, but it wouldn't be possible to fax live humans to the surface from Bubble Hood until there was at least one telecom collapsiter in orbit around the planet. And that would require a collapsium manufactory—rather beyond their means right now—and something like fifty or a hundred gigatons of raw material. Dozens of neubles; little spheres of di-clad neutronium, pressed from a fleet of neutronium barges. Or from one really busy barge, perhaps, over a long period of time. And the Kurster Memorial Shipyard just wasn't big enough to produce a craft that large. Like so many other things in their nascent economy, neutronium barges would have to wait.
The Conrads and Bertrams and Bascals split up, each team going to one of the prepped ferries. Ho and Steve were already aboard, laughing about something and punching the seats. In this context they were not Security per se, but simply muscle. A pair of strong backs and reasonably obedient minds, in case there was real work to be done. There were probably better choices for that particular assignment, but Conrad understood the king's impulse; Ho and Steve had been with them from the very beginning, from that first exploratory riot at Camp Friendly. And although they were jerks, they were his jerks, as close to him in their own way as Conrad was. And yes, close to Conrad as well, in that way that old adventures had of binding people together.
Like Conrad and Xmary, for example.
“Settle down, men,” he told them crossly. “Steve, you're out of uniform.”
In fact, Steve was wearing a fishnet shirt and a pair of improbably shiny black trousers, with matching boots and cap. Hardly the best ensemble for exploring the surface of a hostile planet.
“Yes, sir,” Steve said with a smirk. He reached for a jacket draped over one of the seats, and it slithered up his arm and onto his body. It was a Newhope uniform—a Navy of Barnard uniform—done up in that same shiny material. Conrad looked it over with a stab of irritation, but decided he'd had enough friction for one day.
“All right, then. Let's buckle in, shall we?”
Bertram of course took the pilot's seat, and Conrad was ready to cede the copilot's to Bascal, but the king demurred, saying, “You're in charge of this flight, Mr. Mursk. I merely own the planet.”
And for some reason, that ground on Conrad's nerves as well. He nearly said something nasty, just because he could, and bit it back only with considerable effort. He tried to force himself to be cheerful. This was a day he'd remember all his life, even if he lived to be a million, and why remember being a shit when he could simply remember being unhappy?
He thumbed a warning toggle on the wellstone control panel, and moments later red lights were flashing all over the hangar bay, and nameless workers—mostly people Conrad had never met—were scurrying for the airlocks and the safety of the two control booths.
“Bay Boss,” Bertram said into the panel, “we are go for departure. Diagnostics nominal. You may open the doors when ready.”
“Bay Boss here,” said an unfamiliar female voice. “Go for departure, acknowledged. Depressurizing in five, four, three, two, one . . . now.” Outside the winged ferry, there was a sound like a sigh, trailing to whispers, and then total silence. The pumps were some serious quantum-scale hardware which paid the entropy cost and yanked out every molecule which touched them. In about a second and a half, the bay's interior pressure dropped to hard zero: five balls after the decimal.
When the pressure was off them, the ferry bay doors did not so much open as curl aside, like theater curtains, and Bertram had to negotiate with his other self to determine who would go first, so they didn't both crowd each other on the way out. The ferries themselves were smart enough to avoid any true accident, but it would be bad form to rely on them for it, and the Bertram in this particular shuttle won the bit toss anyway, and so they went, lighting their engines and shooting out into starry blackness.