Chapter twenty-two.
The architecture of deceit
It made Conrad sad—depressed, even—to see where things were headed. Because he was going to betray Bascal. The compulsion was as palpable as a brick to the head, and he had no intention of resisting it. Indeed, Conrad was not merely an old space pirate and revolutionary but a two-time mutineer. And history had a way of repeating itself. As in those childhood mutinies, he would be recruiting at least a handful of allies, and if he knew his business—which at this advanced age he almost certainly did—then he would select only people who truly saw things his way, who would not turn him in, or out, as a means of currying favor.
The strange thing about it was that Conrad hated rebellion, hated conflict of any kind. All he'd ever wanted to be was an architect or matter programmer or construction boss of some kind. To build things, right? What was so wrong about that? Even in his years of wandering, he had never relinquished ownership of Murskitectura, and had in some sense never stopped pining for it while he was away. He just didn't want it to be the first, last, and only thing he ever did with his life out here among the stars.
Would his childhood self be pleased at the way things had turned out? Helping his father repair roads had been all right, though not terribly exciting, but even that was just nepotism, an extension of the invented “chores” he was called upon to do at home, on the theory that they built character. To get the job for real, to hold it as a grown-up and earn real money at it, he would've had to compete against thousands of other applicants. And be judged not by his father, but by impartial authorities of the bureaucracy, or worse, by computers with no feelings at all, no concept of justice, only a set of goals to be weighed against the available inputs.
And that was just not enough to hang his hopes on. At least he was qualified to be a paver's assistant; he'd had about as much chance of designing buildings as he did of becoming king. On Earth, or anywhere in the Queendom, he would've been eternally fuffed. It was natural enough to feel angry about such a circumstance, and Bascal, when they'd met at summer camp, had latched onto that anger like a supermagnet. Without that influence, Conrad would probably never have been more—or less—than a foul-mouthed delinquent. Unbeguiled by the Poet Prince, he would never have turned pirate, never have joined the Children's Revolt. Knowing the way things went for him, he probably wouldn't even have heard about it until after the fact.
But once you started defying an abusive authority, it was a small step to defying any and all authority, on any point you happened to disagree with. Maybe that was a good thing and maybe it wasn't, but Conrad felt in those dreamy days after Wendy's funeral that it was certainly an irreversible one. Standing up for what you believed in . . . Well, it was a learned art, wasn't it? Like riding a bicycle. And once it was in your head, you couldn't unlearn it. Or maybe you could, with some subtle Queendom technology in the hands of the right sort of expert, but here on Planet Two—on Sorrow, he reminded himself—you were stuck with yourself for life. However long or short that might be.
And so . . . Conrad could pretend to be whatever he liked: an architect, a naval officer, a hermit scientist. A paver, for crying out loud. But he would drop it all when his true calling beckoned: rebellion. The longer he lived, the more betrayal and strife he would see, would invite, would cause through his own dogged efforts.
Damn.
In the first few weeks he did almost nothing but mourn the very different lives he might have led. How did it come to this? he would ask himself. How did I become this person? How did we, collectively, become this place? Sorrow, yes; wasn't that a thing worth rebelling against? Or, alternatively: I caused all this to happen. If not for me, it would have worked out differently. Maybe better; it could hardly be worse. Did he have a responsibility to make good on his errors? Or was this merely the start of a new cascade of mistakes?
Later, when he began drawing up plans for a new Cryoleum and Data Morgue, the vague outlines of a plan began to take shape. It wasn't a great plan—in fact it was disappointingly lacking in any sort of subtlety or finesse, and would not by itself improve humanity's lot. Like the Children's Revolt, it was more a call to action—fraught with the potential to inspire—than an action in its own right. But it did at least have the virtue of being readily achievable.
As with his previous mutinies, he felt no sense of hurry. In fact, at the age of 330—older than his hidebound parents at the time of his birth!—he was inclined to take things very slowly indeed.
“There is psychological value,” he told Bascal as the project unfolded, “in placing the dead so far from the living, as you've already done. Pectoralis makes a good resting place, suitably remote. But this constant traffic in coffins creates bottlenecks and logjams along the tuberail network. Embarrassing, right? There'd be benefits if it were possible to bring the entire facility—or parts of it anyway—a bit closer to the cities for brief periods.”
Deaths did tend to cluster in the Ides of Dark, the hundred-hour window between Barnard's midnight and the long, slow breaking of dawn. Sunrise funerals were therefore the norm, and it was not uncommon for two or three of them to fill a train, leaving other mourners waiting on the platform for a shift or more, as if they didn't have enough problems already. But by their nature these things could not be planned in advance.
“Fine,” Bascal told him, through the haze of grief that seemed these days to separate him from the rest of the world. He was sitting at his writing table, tapping a stylus against its surface, which was dark with scrawled lettering. If the voyage to Barnard had silenced his muse, then Wendy's death, for whatever reason, had reawakened it. Verily, it gushed! The Poet King—now a single, without copies to spread his presence around—spent as much time crafting songs and sonnets as he did running the government or visiting with the kingdom's grieving people. And these creations were astonishing in their honest, unpretentious elegance. In “The Freezing of Our Dreams” he wrote,
Dear,
If peace there be (and peace there must!) it lies beyond these jagged bluffs,
through efforts (ours!) of faithful (us!)
And paradise there be (there will!) then it's a thing that we must build,
Ere frozen dreams themselves are spilled,
I fear.
And when at last we find them thaw, these children's parents children, raw,
upon the skin of Sorrow's Fin and won from sin to life and limb,
rejoice—we shall!—that we have brought them . . .
Here.
But the hope behind these comely words was a distant thing, as false as the promises that had led Conrad astray so long ago. You can be an architect, yes! All it will cost you is . . . well, everything. And damn him, Conrad would still have agreed, even if the promise had been phrased exactly that way.
“Longing be the stronger force,” Rodenbeck had warned in MacSquinky's Reverse. “Gravity and comeuppance must wait their turn upon the stage, until the heart has had its fill of that which breaks it.”