Damn.
“You're always showboating,” said Ho Ng, standing now at Conrad's elbow. His voice was quiet, more amused than menacing. “Imagining we're all, like, waiting to see what you'll do. Like we give a shit. So you'll be dead and frozen while the rest of us pull things back together. How dramatic. Is that supposed to make you a hero?”
Ho's wife, looking on from the sidelines, seemed rapt at his words. Or maybe just honestly in love. That couldn't be a bad thing, could it? Even if the man she felt it for was a shitheel? She seemed so young, so innocent. Maybe she'd be good for him.
“I may last longer than you think,” Conrad told Ho, and surprised himself by sounding amused. “Apparently I'm made of brickmail.”
Ho sneered. “Join the club, fuckwipe. I can see in infrared and breathe carbolic acid. You could shoot fifty holes in me without breaking my stride.”
“And you're charming, too,” Conrad told him.
“Oh, Conrad,” Xmary said, touching him on the arm. “Don't be like this, please. I want you safely stored, and not just for your sake or mine. It's the right thing to do. You are important to the colony.”
“He may be stored already,” Brenda said, sidling up around a knot of chatting youngsters. “I wasn't in the room when the cables went live, but Conrad's image was in the fax machine's buffer. If they flushed it rather than scrubbing, then he'd've gone straight to the Data Morgue.” Then she addressed Conrad directly: “I don't know what the fuss is about, anyway; you've never been deleted off the original personnel core. Some copy of you is kicking around down there, younger and snottier than you are today.”
“See?” Ho chimed in gleefully. “Showboating. Thinks he's something special. Better than the rest of us, certainly, when really he's just some old fuck hiding out in the countryside. Counting snowflakes.”
And that was rather an artful jab for someone as coarse and uncomplicated as Ho. Conrad felt he should choose his next words carefully. But just at that moment, the other end of the table rang with the clear, bell-like tones of dinner spoons on wellstone mugs, and a knot of admirers around Princess Wendy were shouting “Ten thousand years! Taha mano ta'u! Ten thousand years!” and hauling her in the direction of the fax machine.
“Wait,” she laughed. “I have to relieve my bladder; I have to fix my hair.”
But her friends were having none of that. “Fix it in the future!” they teased her. “You need some flaws to break the symmetry; store the real you!” And with a slingshot hold on her arms, they hurled her forward against the print plate.
“No! Not so hard!” Brenda shouted at them, but it was too late; the princess had gone ballistic, still on her feet but stumbling forward with one arm stretched out before her and the other trailing behind. To her credit, the last expression on her face was one of simple joy: the birthday girl enduring her mandatory ritual punishments in the spirit with which they were delivered.
The fax, alas, was not so accommodating. Accepting Wendy's careening mass, it flashed and sparked and groaned and then went dark; and with a smell of scorched meat the back half of that young, royal body rebounded from the print plate, flailed upright for a boneless moment, and then collapsed in a squirting heap upon the floor.
The sight of it was, for a moment, too alien for Conrad's mind to process. He did not, in that first second or two, have any idea what had happened, and all he could think—literally all he could think—was that young women really did shriek in horror, like extras in a bad movie, when something hot and red was splashed upon their gowns.
Chapter twenty-one.
Till death do us park
Five days later, after the public funeral procession had wound its way through the streets of Domesville, those same dinner guests—almost the exact same collection of people—found themselves on a tuberail car together, with Wendy's freezer coffin placed conspicuously at its center. Some of these men and women were crying; some were stoic; but most displayed that brittle, funereal cheerfulness which, as the years ground on, all of them would learn all too well. They might be immorbid—emphasis on the “might”—but given enough time, nearly everyone else they knew would end up in one of these boxes.
The accident was freakish and bizarre, but so was every accident. Such was their nature in a world of mature technology. It was shocking enough that the princess had died; did her archive have to be corrupted in the process?
“This is much harder than I expected,” Bascal was saying to Conrad, as they sat together on a bench across the aisle from the coffin. “It occurs to me, belatedly I suppose, that the brunt of this fatal recession will fall on our children. You and I are freshly scrubbed; these bodies will hold together for centuries. With proper care, perhaps a good deal longer than that. But if the colony is going to survive, we must have children. Our population needs to triple, maybe quadruple. And once the faxes are gone, we'll have no way to protect these youngsters from the vagaries of time and fortune. Generation upon generation, they'll be born and live and die without ever once having the benefit of proper medicine. And that will be hard on the parents. Unimaginably hard.”
Conrad hadn't known Wendy all that well, but he fancied he was grieving as much and as hard as the people who had. Not Bascal, perhaps, not Mack or her other close friends. But the other mourners, the acquaintances and well-wishers, did not seem any more or less stricken than Conrad himself. Even Xmary, who had spent nine months with Wendy during an extended Domesville shore leave, had retained her composure, and in fact could not attend the funeral event itself due to a critical departure time conflict.
But the hugeness of Wendy's accident—its suddenness, its permanence and unappealability . . . Those communicated. They penetrated any facade. Wendy had had other plans for the evening, and did not go bravely to her death, or see it coming in any way. Who did?
In some sense everyone in Barnard knew this woman—she was their princess after all—but Conrad realized he could probably sit in the funeral car of a total stranger, someone he'd never once laid his gaze on, and still spend half the time wiping this salty mist from his eyes. Tears: another worldly anachronism.
He was tempted to reassure himself that these were strange times, that these feelings were nothing a human being was ever meant to endure. But the actual facts were quite opposite: in the grand scheme of things, it was the immorbid Queendom that was unusual, not this sad, mortal kingdom. Most of the people who'd ever lived had done it under conditions far more painful and hopeless and humiliating than these. This thought by itself brought fresh tears to his eyes. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, indeed.
“I'm sorry,” he'd told Mack, over and over again. “So very, very sorry for you.”
“Pity the world,” was Mack's only answer. “I love her, I miss her, I want her back, Boss. But I'll be all right. Troll hearts are made of tougher stuff.”
Still, where Bascal was concerned, Conrad's duties were clear: he was bursting with sympathy, and while he rarely knew the right thing to say, he spouted platitudes from old plays and stories, and they sounded all right. But that was only when he felt he must speak; mostly he didn't say anything at all. Instead he listened, and since Bascal wasn't much inclined to talk either, as often as not the two of them just sat together: two old men on a bench, at a loss for words, overwhelmed by their world.