Indeed.
“The reception area will be a separate module, freely traveling,” Conrad said, pointing to the features on his drawing which were meant to convey this. “In principle, we can bring it all the way to Domesville, and then send it back to Pectoralis again so that no one need dwell in its memory-haunted shadow.”
“That's fine,” Bascal repeated without looking up. “I trust you.”
And then, to his enormous credit, he added, “You're up to something, Conrad. I can always tell. But as I say, I trust you. Don't embarrass me, all right? Or yourself.”
“I shan't, Sire,” Conrad replied, wondering if it were the truth.
And they left it at that. Conrad was free to continue, unimpeded and unexamined. Who had the time to harass him? But—clever Bascal!—these words squirmed in his mind, raising blossoms of doubt wherever they touched. As the months and years of the project unfolded, Conrad found himself, more and more, accosting youngsters in the street.
“Would you return to the Queendom if you had the chance?” he would ask them.
And the replies would go something like, “Of Sol? I've never been, sir. But they live forever, yuh? That sounds a bit nice.”
Or, “They have a fine grasp of aesthetics, don't they? I like to watch about them on TV. But to go there and stay? I dunnae, that's a big step.”
Or occasionally an honest, “You're plibbles, old man. Bugs in the attic. Leave us alone, eh?”
But a lot of the kids recognized their first architect and answered very differently. Telling him what he wanted to hear, he assumed. The Queendom, yes! Let's all go! And this more than anything sapped his enthusiasm, caused him to question the very postulates of his plan even as the groundwork itself drew near to completion.
And then one day he stumbled into a funeral procession—fifty youngsters in traditional black and inviz, bawling their eyes out and screaming for someone named Jamie. A surprising number of them were carrying even smaller children in their arms or on their shoulders. Not fax-born pseudoadults but actual babies and toddlers! Courtesy, no doubt, of the liberal reproductive encouragements he'd been hearing about in the news. The Bascal Edward Fuffage Plan, people were calling it.
“Who is Jamie?” he asked one of the childless mourners. He was painfully aware of how he must look: an old man plodding the streets in a lithe young body, crashing a stranger's funeral when it crossed his path. But he needed to know, or believed he did.
The mourner, a young man in a black bowler hat, said to him, “Jamie is the son of Dennis and Tuv.” And at Conrad's blank look he added, “Up there near the front.”
Ah. The couple leading the procession were a priest and priestess, and the knot of people immediately behind them did not especially stand out. But behind them, in a sort of empty bubble within the crowd, were a pair of shattered-looking young men, clutching each other in sad desperation. “Oh, God!” one of them was screaming. “Oh, God! Damn you, God, give him back!”
These children of Barnard were nothing if not expressive. And children they were, too, lacking the subtle gravitas that marked the older generations.
“How old are they?” he could not help asking.
“Seventeen, sir,” the mourner said, and made a show of pulling away.
“Wait,” Conrad told him. “Please. Are you their friend?”
“Yes,” the young man replied, with evident irritation. This was an unwelcome intrusion, and in another few seconds the procession would be past and he'd have to jog to catch up.
“Also seventeen?” he pressed.
“I'm twenty. What's this about, sir?”
Seventeen! Twenty! In Barnard these numbers meant something different than they had in the Queendom, where natural (or more properly, “naturalesque”) births and pregnancies were still the norm. And clearly those older meanings were reasserting themselves here as well, even if they didn't apply to everyone. But it was painfully young just the same. At an age when Conrad and Xmary had still been raising hell, these people were already raising families.
Conrad struggled with his reply. “I'm just . . . very concerned about the plight of young people. I always have been.” He studied the retreating backs of the bereaved couple. “Dennis and Tuv . . . they somehow managed, in a tough market, to get a birthing license and a fax appointment. Was the child a . . . baby?”
“Nearly,” the mourner told him, with tears quivering at the corners of his eyes. “Physiologically he was four. Now he's six, now and forever. He was struck by a falling bicycle.”
Conrad could not picture that scene, or fathom how it might have happened, but the horror of it was plain enough. “And there are no backups, right? If they filled out the right forms and got very lucky in the raffle, Dennis and Tuv could reinstantiate the original Jamie blueprint, but it wouldn't be their little boy, the one they loved and lost. Nothing ever could be. And there is no other way—there is no other way—for two men to have a child of their own on this planet.”
“Correct, sir. May I go, please? This is hard for me.”
“You may go,” Conrad said gently. “I apologize for keeping you. But will you answer one more question first? If you could go to a place where things like this never happened—where sorrow never intruded on the lives of the young, and no one grew old, and tears were as rare as virgins . . . Would you go?”
“It sounds like heaven,” the man answered. “And I don't want to go to heaven. Not now, not soon. But when I die, someday, then yes: I hope to awaken in a place like that. Doesn't everyone?”
And with that he turned to go, breaking into a reluctant jog which was very much at odds with the procession's shrieking, languorous pace.
But Conrad, having received at last an answer he could believe in, proceeded in the other direction with paradoxically lighter steps, with a lighter heart and a brighter future before him. It was time to be a sort of hero again, yes, because no one else was going to.
He sent a message to Xmary that very night, putting events into motion which would, he hoped, in the fullness of time, change everything.
Chapter twenty-three.
By tuberail to the stars
Mechanically speaking, Conrad's plan was simplicity itself. Over a period of several years, the Cryoleum had become five separate structures, each mounted on tuberails and capable of traveling across the face of Planet Two. And for various historical reasons, the tuberails of the ground network were fully compatible with those running up the sides of the Orbital Tower, which by now was itself a historical anachronism that no one paid much attention to.
Traffic there was less than a tenth of what it had been in the glory days, even though it was cheaper than the Gravittoir. The Gravittoir was simply faster, and also more comfortable, with no sense of acceleration and none of the vibration or loud noises associated with tuberail travel. So when P2's morning was over, and with it the funeral season, it was very easy for Conrad to clear the Cryoleum's personnel on the trumped-up excuse that he needed to refinish the interior surfaces.
Then he simply stole the entire facility.
From a control station in the Orbital Tower itself, he whisked the buildings to Tower Base so quickly that it would be a day or two before anyone even realized they were gone. He did this neatly and with precision, allowing no interruption to the structures' power supplies or other services. From there things got even easier, since Murskitectura owned and operated the Orbital Tower. The Cryoleum buildings had been designed to fit side by side in Tower Base's large maintenance hangar, where Mack and his small team of loyalists tore the facades off them, revealing the more-or-less ordinary cargo podships beneath. Then, these pods were simply scooted up the tower like any other cargo.