Hell, with the mass restrictions lifted—with a whole planet of buffer mass at his disposal—he could spin off as many copies as he wanted. Even the Queendom's plurality restrictions—twenty-five hundred copy-hours per person per month under normal circumstances—needn't apply here, not unless Bascal wrote a proclamation about it or unless the Senate, when it was elected and holding regular meetings, decided to pass a law.
“Conrad!” he called to his other self, thirty meters up on the sandy bank. “The lidicara are beautiful! We've got to preserve them, share the world with them. . . .” His voice trailed away when he realized the other Conrad wasn't listening. To himself he said, “Got to share the world.”
He studied the dancing forms, admiring the way they not only tolerated the poison in the air, but actually souped themselves up with it. Would a bit more oxygen in the atmosphere hurt them? Would it supercharge them even more? If life here really was related to life on Earth—and Bascal insisted that it was—then maybe the lidicara's chlorine-breathing structures—halochondria, they were called—could be imported into Earthly cells? He pulled out his ever-present sketchplate and said to it, “To do: investigate fax modifications to adapt humans to chlorine atmosphere. Discuss with Brenda: Can we change ourselves instead of the planet? Or in addition?”
The ocean waves here were tiny—at least for the moment—and he felt them lapping pleasantly at his heels, slowly working their way up the stream as the tide came in. “Be aware of it,” the site surveyor had warned them over the radio link. “The tide will be in the middle of its range, rising steadily at ten centimeters per hour.” Was that a lot? It didn't seem so here and now. As his shoes grew damper and saltier Conrad simply moved uphill a step, and then another, following the channels of the stream's mouth, crawling up along the foreshore's steep bank.
P2 had no moon; its tides were exclusively solar, and since it was so damned close to Barnard they were formidable indeed. Thanks to the planet's 3:2 tidal lock—three revolutions for every two orbits—they were also slow, following the 461-hour cycle of the “day” and to some extent the 691-hour cycle of the “year.” But though they were sluggish, the tides were far more powerful than those of Earth. A hundred times more powerful, in fact, though their effect on the actual water level was not quite so dramatic as that. For one thing, the land was higher near the equator, so the seas were up in the temperate zones—one in the northern hemisphere and one in the south—where Barnard's pull wasn't quite as strong.
And the fact that the seas themselves did not reach all the way around the planet limited how far and how well a tidal bulge could travel. Or so Conrad had heard, second- and third-hand. The survey had pegged the tidal range for this location at plus or minus thirty-one meters, with little variation over time.
Had a planet like Earth been at this position, with its thin skin of rock floating atop a sea of metal-rich magma, the land tides would have been plus or minus several meters, and daily catastrophic earthquakes would be the norm. Along with volcanoes, yes, bursting out through sudden rifts in the crust. Fortunately P2 was a stiffer world, with a much smaller and cooler liquid interior. But even so it had a few large, semiactive volcanoes.
“Which is good,” Bascal had insisted when the subject came up, “because this metal-poor world cannot prick itself and bleed. The radioactive heating of its interior is insufficient to drive tectonics or volcanism. Without the tides stretching and pulling at the core, raising blisters on the crust, there would be no renewal of the surface. It would smooth itself into a giant billiard ball, and the metals would all find their way to the bottom of the ocean and eventually be buried by sediment, and the biosphere would die.”
Hmm.
These were Conrad's last coherent thoughts, for as he scrabbled up the hillside, the ditches of the stream's delta grew deeper, their banks sandier and rockier and steeper. In studying the lidicara, he had thrust his hands into the stream's warm water, and failed at first to notice that its acidity was turning his fingernails yellow and burning at the edges of the flesh beneath. Only when he tore a fingernail right off on the river rocks did he finally pull his hands out. Seeing the damage then, he stood up in alarm.
Next, as near as Ho's investigation could figure it, he lost his balance and dug an arm into the stream's bank. There were no roots or grasses there to hold the bank in place, so it crumbled, and one or more large stones came down on his face, knocking the mask free and breaking his nose. Even this might not have been fatal if he hadn't taken a breath of native air, then coughed because of it, then coughed even harder from his own blood running down into his throat. Still not fatal, if he hadn't spasmed, falling face-first into the stream, and then gasped at the agony of its burning in the membranes around his eyes. But he did each of these things in turn, and so inhaled a small quantity of the water, which was not at all kind to the tissue of his lungs.
On the first sight of him lurching up the foreshore, Ho and Steve—ostensibly there to keep him safe—burst into laughter. They may be forgiven for this, since the state of Conrad's injuries was not apparent at the time, and the drunken stagger of his walk, combined with the mud on his face, really did present a comical image. Conrad himself said, “Boyo, it's a lucky thing she's not here to see you.”
Regrettably, the injured Conrad collapsed and died with these words in his ears. The surviving Conrad never did find out what he was doing in that stream, since there was no fax here to resuscitate him while his brain still lived, and since Bubble Hood and even Newhope lacked the facilities to read his dead memories. This sort of thing had happened to Conrad once before, back in Ireland a long, long time ago, and it did not occur to him now to interpret the event as any sort of omen. If it had, things might have gone very differently.
Instead, he was left only with an enigmatic to-do entry, which itself proved pivotal in the colony's history—indeed of colonial history in general. And while the idea—pantropy, the re-forming of themselves to suit this new world—would certainly have come up sooner or later, Conrad would wonder until the end of his days why he had been the one to raise it. There was a Tongan word for this feeling: kuiloto mamahi. Literally, “blind sorrow,” the mourning which occurred when one did not know precisely what had been lost. And this, too, would prove important, though the extent of it would not be apparent for hundreds of years.
Life is like that sometimes, all the more so when it lasts forever.
Chapter ten.
The red badge of security
Two years later, the occasion of the Security training finals found Conrad and Bascal in the bleachers at Victory Stadium, in the burgeoning town of Domesville, surrounded by fellow colonists in an atmosphere of gaiety, complete with hurled confetti and the joyous tinkling of glass shattered on slabs of landscape-friendly wellrock.
“I still say you should have a private skybox,” Conrad opined, for the stadium was brand new—this was its inaugural show—and he'd designed it with such improvements in mind. “It would only take a few days to install.”
Right now the stadium held two thousand people—nearly half the population of P2—but it could easily hold three times that many, and could be expanded upward—someday would be expanded upward—to accommodate up to thirty thousand.