He patted his old friend on the knee. “Bascal, maybe it's time we cut our losses. We could stop having children, and start ferrying the ones we do have back to Sol. With prudence, and perhaps some risky allocation of faxes and memory cores, I'll bet we could complete the job in five trips.”
But Bascal was shaking his head. “No. No, the mating urge is much stronger than that. Especially among the young, the doomed, the mortal, and most especially of all in poor economies. Read up on your history; it's all there. You could make a trip, yes, but by the time you got back, the problem would have doubled in size and complexity, and you'd be faced with whole generations for whom your departure—however heroic—would be a historical event. These kids don't pine for a Queendom they've never seen, never smelled, never felt between their toes.”
“And on the return voyage,” Conrad said, as though the king had not spoken, “we'll fill the holds with print plates of the Queendom's highest quality. And while the colony is using those up, we'll be off fetching more.”
Bascal's hands were waving in frustration. “That doesn't solve the basic problem, which is a dearth of industrial base. You can't cheat on this, Conrad. We've been trying for two hundred years, and where has it led us? I've run the numbers every way I can think of, and have yet to find any relief. Because relief doesn't exist. Not in this lifetime.
“And anyway, economically speaking, the promise of rescue reduces the incentive to plan for the long term. There is a branch of psychology called lifeboat psychology that has many salient words on this point. I fear there is only one solution, and it's a hard, sad road indeed. The appalling thing is that none of us saw this coming until it was too late. Indeed, we may have been doomed from the moment Newhope's engines lit up. Which, by the way, is yet another problem with your theory: we have no launching lasers here. Newhope's departure velocity would be a lot lower than it was leaving Sol. The journey would take centuries, not decades, and by the time you got back we'd all be dead, or through the needle's eye to prosperity again.”
This reply was about what Conrad had expected. It was rare indeed for him to have a thought which had not occurred to Bascal first, and Bascal always had planning and wise mathematics on his side. Or believed he did, anyway, and there was no changing his mind about that. Nevertheless, with a strange sense of déjà vu—a sense that they were not so far removed from their pirate days after all, he persevered. “We could ask for help. Surely the Queendom has realized our peril by now. Ask your parents for a rescue ship, ten times the size of Newhope. I'll bet they could have something here within fifty years.”
But at these words Bascal's face, already blotchy with grief, simply closed down in anger. “We are prisoners here, or have you forgotten? We've been kicked out of Paradise, and now you propose to go begging at its gates. To die like a dog when with far less effort you could die like a man. I'm disappointed, Conrad. I wish I could say I was also surprised.”
“Your parents haven't turned their backs on us, Bas. They wouldn't do that.”
“No? They've got problems of their own, boyo. In case you hadn't noticed, they haven't produced a starship in decades. The era of colonial expansion has ended. It's just not cost-effective, and why would it be? Wiser now, they focus their not-so-limitless resources on terraforming, on digging new holes for their own burgeoning population to slither into. Places which are directly under their control, you understand, so that these colonial blunders, these fakaevaha and de'sastres, cannot be repeated. You have a good heart, Conrad—I've always known that. But equally, you've got a soft head and a weak stomach. You've never been good at facing reality when reality is bleak. Which, if you think about it, is always.”
“Facing a reality that we're all going to die? Am I supposed to just accept that?”
“Probably not all of us,” Bascal said. “But most. And yes, I expect you to understand that fact and behave accordingly. If you don't accept the possibility of death, you have no way of putting your affairs in order, of planning your life as a useful enterprise. You'll simply collapse one day—maybe far in the future, but with no greater dignity for that. No higher purpose.
“Or perhaps you'll throw your life away in a grand gesture. You do like to play the hero. But there is greater heroism, my friend, in being realistic. It's a greater service, to yourself and to the rest of us. Little gods, Conrad, you're a grown man. Act your age, hmm? Historically speaking, you're ten grown men laid end to end on the timeline of civilization.”
“Aye,” Conrad agreed, slipping unconsciously into the surety of naval parlance. “That I am.” His thoughts, though, were not in agreement with Bascal's. He realized suddenly that they rarely had been, ever. This seemed a late and rather pointless epiphany, but he filed it with the others that had occurred to him over the years—his private stash of agely wisdom.
He clapped the king on the knee again. “Let's speak of something else. Tonight, my friend, we'll drug ourselves insensible and talk about the past. Isn't that what old men do? And none of these subtle Queendom drugs will do: I'm talking about memory enhancers and straight ethanol. Maybe a hint of the grape, for flavoring.”
Bascal smiled a brittle, funereal smile and leaned back wearily in his bench. “Oh, that sounds awful, truly. And yet, it's better than any of the alternatives. There are those who won't recover, and those who'll recover without assistance. And then there are those who require attention. Yes, I see it now: triage demands that we do as you say.”
At the end of their three-hour train ride lay the Southland Cryoleum, five thousand kilometers away, near the center of the Peninsulum Pectoralis. The province was known less formally as the Fin, which Conrad suddenly realized was a kind of pun or double-entendre: the arm of a fish, yes, and also a word for endings. The fin, the terminus, the Land of the Dead. Their tuberail car was greeted by a man who claimed to have been Wendy's undertaker.
“She was no trouble,” he assured them all in what he probably thought was a kindly voice.
And why should she have been? With her body bisected like that, every blood vessel was laid open for his nanobes and preservatories, and he'd need only half the usual amounts! There wasn't a lot of her to freeze, and while the Palace Guards had surely loomed over him like metal angels of retribution, making sure everything was done just so, it hardly mattered that her cell structure—even the remains of her brain—survive the long freezing.
Over in the Data Morgue, ten kilometers west of here, her core image had been corrupted—overlaid with half a copy, followed by a mess of random electrical noise and then silence. A set of plausible terminators had been computed and applied to the file—the news reports were emphatic about that—but nobody really believed that half a damaged body and half a damaged core image could be reassembled into a whole person again. Not the original person, anyway; no amount of technology, of royal wealth or staffing, could accomplish that.
“Thank you,” Bascal said to the man, with apparent sincerity. Then he choked up a bit before managing to add, “We appreciate your efforts.”
There was a bishop at the actual ceremony, in the Cryoleum's rather industrial-looking reception hall, but his words were perfunctory, his rehearsed praises and platitudes mercifully brief. This was a private ceremony, and there was little he could tell the crowd about Wendy—or about death and resurrection, or the mathematical possibilities of an afterlife—that they didn't already know.