Appendix D.
Mursk in lalande, act two
Lalande was another metal-deprived dwarf, with three gas giants and one tidally locked terrestrial—the half-frozen world of Gammon. Allegedly it was named after a historical person of some sort, but Conrad had always figured it was really because, as in a well-won game of backgammon, all the black was on one side and all the white on the other. It might also have been named “eyeball,” for the frosty whites extending just beyond the terminator, the coal-colored iris beyond it in the daylight, and the clear blue “pupil” of tidally raised ocean.
Conrad's image found itself appearing on the front porch of a brick-veneer ranch house, beneath an awning of translucent gray wellstone. A woman stood before him, out on the grass beyond the porch's concrete. She was barefoot and whipped by a strong steady wind, so that her hair and the hem of her long dress flailed out beside her. She didn't appear cold, but from the look of things Conrad would be if he were actually standing here in front of her.
Behind her, in the distance, was an ocean shrouded in fog.
“Hi, Benny,” he said. “Nice to see you again. It was windy like this the last time I was here.”
“It's always windy here, Conrad Mursk of the Kingdom of Barnard.”
“And always three in the afternoon,” he said, looking up through the awning at the sun, resting motionless in the sky. It was difficult to say for sure, with no landmarks around it for reference, but it seemed to Conrad that it was both wider and dimmer than the sun of P2's own sky. Certainly it was much redder.
She laughed. “Always, yes, but not forever. The planet is locked, but the snow and ice builds up on the Darkside, bleeding off the Brightside Ocean. The water gets shallower and shallower, and the Darkside gets heavier and heavier, and every eight hundred years the planet flips.”
“I'll bet that's a fun ride.”
“We'll evacuate the planet,” she said, flashing a don't-be-daft look in his direction. “We're actually due for a flip in just two centuries. Which is good, because the melting glaciers will expose all kinds of fresh ore, which we can really use.”
“So the shore is farther away than it used to be.”
“Yup. It retreats about twenty meters every standard year.”
Conscious of the time, Conrad looked around the immediate area. The house was large, and it was up on a hill overlooking the city of Moll. And the hill was grassy where most of the landscape beyond it was bare slate or shale. He hadn't noticed this on his previous visit, but it didn't surprise him now. Finding a pen pal here on Gammon had taken decades of back-and-forth prowling on the Instelnet's low-bandwidth message boards, and anyone who could afford to take him up on the offer was, almost by definition, a member of the planet's upper-crust palasa. Wealthy, at least by colonial standards.
“Benny N.,” Conrad mused, now looking over the woman herself. “You must think I'm an idiot.”
“For what?”
“This doesn't look like a palace,” he offered, by way of excuse.
“Ah,” she said. “No, it doesn't. So you've found me out, have you?”
“Bethany Nichols, the Queen of Lalande.”
She smiled sheepishly. “Guilty. We can still flirt, though, can't we?”
“I don't know,” Conrad answered seriously. “Your philander might have something to say about it.”
“I don't have philanders,” she said. “I have old-fashioned boyfriends. And right now, I'm in between.”
“Oh, I see,” Conrad told her, then made a show of eyeing her even more appraisingly. “If only I had a body. And some time.”
Her giggle was pleasant, unhurried. “Maybe someday, Architect. But if I'm going telefuff, I'd rather pick someone closer to home. Lalande is less than five light-years from Wolf system and only six and a half from Ross. We have our own little club: we can actually trade fashions quicker than they go out of style. Whereas Sol is a round trip of seventeen years, and all the other colonies—including yours—are twenty or more. Wolf has an ocean, too, and a biosphere, and a mean case of tidal lock. So really we have a lot in common.”
“You can't see Wolf from here, though. Can't see Ross, either. Right? Not with the naked eye, not even on Darkside.”
“We can see Wolf when it flares. God, they have lovely flares. You think you've got radiation troubles, try living on Pup!”
“I've visited there in message form,” he said. “Stay out of the water, is my advice.”
She snorted regally. “And the air. There's a reason the capital is under a mile of rock, along with most of the population. King Eddie is many things, but stupid is not one of them.”
“Ah,” Conrad said, “so it's Edward Bascal you have your eye on, is it? It wouldn't be the first time he and I crossed swords over a woman.”
“Well,” she admitted, “he is kind of cute. Younger and more charming than his so-called cousin. A girl could do worse.”
Running through what little he knew of her bio, Conrad asked, “Aren't you a playwright or something?”
Her smile grew pained. “Used to be. I fear my muse has fled, and anyway the bitch only ever gave me one solid hit. If you're looking for the next Rodenbeck, I'm afraid it's not me.”
“Well,” he said, “life is long. You never know.” And then a chime sounded through his virtual bones, and he added, “I'm done here.”
“Already? I haven't even shown you my tattoo. Ah well, see you in twenty.”
“God willing,” Conrad agreed, and vanished.
And while it may be true that the digital summary of these experiences was lost in transmission, they were thoughtfully archived in the Brick Palace Library, and moved off the planet's surface in the Turnabout Evac, there to find their way into a letters archive which survived intact for nearly twenty thousand years.
In a quantum universe, as they say, almost nothing is ever truly lost.
about the author
Engineer/novelist/journalist Wil McCarthy is a contributing editor for Wired magazine and the science columnist for the SciFi Channel, where his popular “Lab Notes” column has been running since 1999. A lifetime member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, he has been nominated for the Nebula, Locus, AnLab and Theodore Sturgeon awards. His short fiction has graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Wired, SF Age, and other major magazines and anthologies, and his novels include the New York Times Notable Book Bloom, Amazon.com's “Best of Y2K” The Collapsium (a national bestseller) and, most recently, The Wellstone.
Previously one of those “guidance is go” people for Lockheed Martin Space Launch Systems, and later an engineering manager for Omnitech Robotics, McCarthy is currently the Chief Technology Officer for Galileo Shipyards, an aerospace research corporation with projects ranging from rockets to high-altitude balloons to quantum nanoelectronics. He can be found online at www.wilmccarthy.com.