The king smiled and shook his head. “No, sorry. That's a nice theory, but the only thing civilizations act to preserve is their own continuity. That's a very different thing. Rome lasted a thousand years, with an average citizen's life span of just twenty-five. Think about that. Lives were fleeting; it was ideas and institutions that mattered. Perhaps we have something to learn from their example.”
“How to die?” Conrad asked. “No, thank you. They didn't have a choice about it.”
“We may not, either,” Bascal said unhappily. “What are we to do, evacuate the planet? Newhope was meant to carry a hundred live people, plus cargo modules, including memory cores. Do we put everyone in storage? We can't, because the cores are full, and making more would tie up our best remaining faxes, further exacerbating the shortage.”
“We could freeze the living,” Conrad suggested half seriously. “Ship them in coffins.”
But Bascal rebutted that at once, and firmly. “Frozen bodies take up ten times more volume than the core space for a scanned human image. Captain Li Weng, how many coffins can your ship hold?”
Xmary shrugged, clearly reluctant to take Bascal's side over Conrad's. “I don't know. Properly containerized, I suppose it would be thousands.”
“Hundreds of thousands?” the king pressed. “Our entire population?”
“No,” she admitted, plucking a final morsel off her plate and popping it into her mouth. “Not nearly.”
Conrad had no reply to that, and the king's next words were gentler. “The answer is to live well, Conrad, to take joy in every day that remains. That has always been the answer. Do you know much about economics?”
Glumly, Conrad shook his head. “Not beyond what it takes to run a construction company, no. Why would I? I never thought I'd need it.”
“Well,” the king said, “it never hurts to know what fate has in store. I'll summarize for you, if you don't mind. Do you know what a free market is?”
“Sure,” Conrad said. In the same way he knew what a guillotine was, or a printing press. Contrivances of the Old Modern era, or perhaps even earlier, before even electricity had been tamed, when the world stank of horse manure and burning wax.
“Don't look so disdainful, my friend; free markets were elegant, self-correcting systems. With supply and demand driving the cost of goods directly, pathological outcomes—the razing of forests, the overvaluation of trivial commodities—were uncommon and brief. Most of the horror stories come from partially free markets, distorted by ill-considered policy. In fact, it's been shown mathematically that unregulated markets were two-thirds as efficient as perfect-knowledge monarchies. Without hypercomputers to guide them, the Old Moderns learned—painfully, to be sure!—that nature was better left to take its course.”
“Why are you telling us this?” asked one of the young men Conrad didn't recognize.
“In your case, Titus,” the king answered coolly, “because you happen to be here. As a bonus, you're also ignorant and in sore need of enlightenment. Others are merely curious.”
“‘Monarchy is the mathematical optimum of governance,'” Conrad quoted.
“Yes,” Bascal agreed, “but only with sufficient computing power to back it up, and only if the monarch himself is sensible. This is in large part why we retain the anachronism of a Senate, to whom formal power is nominally assigned. It's a check against my own potential for error. They have their own analysts, their own computers, and they're free to overrule my judgments if they deem it necessary.”
And if they don't value their careers, Conrad added silently. Bascal was well known for arranging the dismissal of senators who failed to share his vision.
“What I'm getting at,” the king said, “is that we can, in some actual tangible sense, prepare ourselves for what lies ahead. Quantum mechanics demands that the future be uncertain, but not infinitely so. Finite uncertainty, you see? Which is the same thing as a tiny bit of certainty. And as it happens, our productivity curves do not appear to crash to zero. Indeed, with finite certainty they seem to skirt it and rise again into prosperity. We have a long, dark night ahead of us, but if we can maintain that continuity of civilization, with labor-driven industries and children born the old-fashioned way, as actual babies from actual wombs, then our morning will eventually come, and with it perchance the revival of our dead.”
“Maintain it how?” asked the young man named Titus.
Bascal smiled at him. “Has it occurred to you, boy, that I'm addressing someone other than yourself?”
“Oh,” Titus said, dropping his gaze. “Well. My apologies, Sire.”
“Accepted,” Bascal answered dismissively. “Now do shut up.”
Toying with his mug, Conrad cleared his throat and said, “Why, uh, did you take this fax machine, Bas? As a birthday present? It belongs to a hospital.”
“I know very well to whom it belongs, boyo. They'll receive it in due time—probably within a few days—but in the meanwhile it has an official state function to perform. Namely, the archiving of the critical personnel here assembled. Backups have been sporadic since the palace machine went down, but continuity requires not only the right people, but also some synchrony among them. I can't have a five-year-old copy of my finance minister collaborating with a fifty-year-old copy of my security chief! Therefore a hard cable, surrounded by layered insulation of almost geological dimension, has been laid from here—from this very room wherein we dine—to the Southland Data Morgue where the memory cores are stored.
“And yes, never fear, I'll be updating the records of more than just you few; over the next few days we'll be cycling over a thousand people through these opalescent gates. Notices are going out as we speak.”
A thousand people. Barely half a percent of the colony's population. Conrad wasn't so dense as to require an explanation: Bascal could not save everyone, so he would save—literally save, archive, store—the people he deemed most valuable to the colony. Death would come, yes, but not for all. The imperfect promise of freezing and eventual revival would be reserved for the proletariat, the rabble, the serfs and peasants, while this immorbid elite feasted its way through the crisis.
Conrad sighed, feeling a bit more of the fight drain out of him. He could see the logic—even the inevitability—of this approach. But he and Bascal had been faced with such decisions before, in the very darkest of their pirate days, and Conrad had insisted at the time that they seek volunteers, that they draw straws, that death be accepted only as a voluntary sacrifice, not imposed as a sentence upon weeping innocents. And he'd been overruled.
Still, honor demanded his next words, which he stood to deliver. “Sire, I thank you sincerely for this honor, but I must decline. I wouldn't feel right about it.”
Bascal gave him a hard look, then finally an unhappy shrug. “Suit yourself. I think it's a mistake, and I'll invite you to reconsider. The colony needs its founders, its senior members, its most talented and insightful. But Jesus, Conrad, that tazzing was a joke. For old times' sake, you understand? And for my daughter's birthday. I'm not a monster, boyo. I'll not force anyone.”
This answer was unexpected, and Conrad was somewhat unbalanced by it, like a man who throws his weight against a wall only to discover it's really a curtain. To add lack of insult to this lack of injury, Bascal then rose from his seat—a signal to the other diners that the formal part of the dinner was over, that casual chitchat and milling around were duly authorized. This of course broke the spell of Conrad's gesture, leaving him no room to reply unless he raised his voice. And that would make him look like an ass, if he didn't already.