In desperation, he slid to the floor and began scribbling there with his finger. The wellstone, long accustomed to such behavior, responded with trails of black obsidian in its surface of faux bleached wood. These rough figures arranged themselves into elegant numbers and symbols as the king’s finger raced ahead. “There’s a long axis,” he muttered. “Indeed, indeed. Where the mass distribution falls away as a function of Z, it drives an instability in X and Y. But it needn’t! We shall present the spherical opening with a cylindrical plug!”
Her Majesty Queen Tamra was also accustomed to these intellectual fits and spasms—her husband’s renowned mind was anything but linear—and she knew better than to disturb him in the midst of one. Indeed, she watched with sleepy interest for a few minutes as the obsidian equations spread upward along one wall, and were joined by holographic diagrams: spheres and cylinders surrounded by a forest of right triangles.
“Two spheres,” Bruno said to himself. “They’re one and the same—the real and imaginary component of a single object—but to an observer that’s not evident. How could it be? And the observer’s viewpoint is valid, yes? Or relativity be damned. Two positions in real space, connected by a line. By a cylinder.”
The queen was no mathematician, but she’d seen enough of her husband’s work to know he was trying—vainly trying—to sketch out some four-dimensional object or relationship in a 3-D image.
Fortunately their bedroom was a suite whose outer chamber could be sealed off from both the outside world and the bedchamber itself. And so, sighing, the Queen of Sol stooped to kiss her king upon the shoulder, then dragged her blankets from the bed and stumbled off to sleep on the couch. For the one message she could read clearly in the walls, albeit implicit, was, This will be a long night, dear. Don’t wait up.
When Conrad Ethel Mursk opened his eyes, he was astonished to see something other than the afterlife. There were no angels, no clouds, no twinkling stars, and certainly no God or devil waiting to judge him. Instead, there were green walls and white examination tables, and a young-looking woman with copper hair and eyes the color of jade, dressed in powder-blue medical pyjamas.
“I’m not dead,” he said, and was surprised by the clarity of his voice. He sat up, and was surprised by the pull of gravity. Not grav lasers or spin-gee but planetary gravity. Then he charmingly added, “Where the hell am I?”
The woman was fiddling with controls of some sort behind Conrad’s headrest, and in sitting up he had placed his viewpoint only centimeters from her torso, so that she appeared mainly as a pair of breasts. Still, he caught her smile.
“Welcome back, Mr. Mursk. How do you feel?”
“I don’t know,” he said, pausing for a moment to take stock of himself, to feel his body up and down for numbness or injury. “I suppose I feel all right, all things considered. Is this Sorrow?”
She chuckled. “This is Earth. More specifically, Frostbite Trauma Center in the city of Glacia in Victoria Land, Antarctica.”
“Oh,” he said, digesting that. “What year?”
She told him, and he heard a low, pathetic groan escape from his lips. He’d been gone a long time—so long that the numbers barely made sense. A thousand years? Forty childhoods? Fifty thousand episodes of Barnes and Manetti? The Queendom he knew was ancient history. And so was he.
“Shit,” he said. “Wow. How’s my crew?”
“All fine,” the woman assured him, now stepping back to give him a view of something other than her chest. “We’ve woken you last, since your reconstruction was the most difficult.”
“I was burned,” he remembered suddenly. “The coolant lines blew out. There was this swarm of damage-control robots, just pouring out of the fax machine, draining the mass buffers, hustling us down into storage and trying to stop the air leak. But the ship was coming apart, and somebody had to be last in line. I remember thinking, We tried. We did our best, but this is where it ends.”
“You were fortunate,” the woman said. “It could have been a lot worse.”
“Hmm,” he answered, mulling over the sheer obviousness of that. “It seems I’m in your debt. Or someone’s. What about the passengers? We had twenty-five thousand in cold sleep.”
Her expression shifted, and he had the sense she was choosing her next words carefully. “Well, yes. It should be possible to recover most of them at some point. But sleep is a generous term here, don’t you think? Some of those people were already partially decomposed when you froze them.”
“It was a rescue mission,” Conrad said vaguely. And right away he could see how stupid his plans had been, how pointlessly optimistic. The Queendom of Sol could help his countrymen, yes; it had the wealth, the technology, the notable absence of psychotic leadership and sociopolitical collapse. The Queendom of his dreams would have done exactly that. But the Queendom of the real, physical universe had problems of its own—didn’t every place? A pile of dead colonists would be a curiosity at best, an unwelcome intrusion at worst.
“I’m an idiot,” he said. And it was true; he’d come all this way on the theory that a faint hope was better than none. But if the faint hope didn’t pan out, then it was as good as none. Or worse.
“I doubt that,” the woman answered, offering him a handshake. “Angela Proud Rumson, Doctor of Medicine and Extrapolative Cosmetics.”
He examined her hand for a moment—it looked absurdly soft, like she’d never used it—and then shook it. It was soft.
“Conrad Mursk,” he said, and was about to add a title or two of his own. But what was the point in that? What status did he hold here? What he said instead was, “Refugee.”
“Very pleased to meet you.”
“Can I see my friends now?”
Angela Proud Rumson’s smile was reserved. “Tomorrow, if you please. They’ve gone to their temporary quarters already, and I’m expected to hold you for observation. Test drive the old nervous system, make sure we’ve done all the wiring correctly. Shall we say twelve hours?”
Chapter Four
in which fatalism is confronted by action
Perhaps the event at Newhope’s lonely drydock was inevitable. Certainly, its cargo of dead human flesh invited public commentary: Are we responsible for these lives? For their premature ending, for their mere existence? If so, then aren’t these corpses likewise culpable in the demise of the Barnard colony? Do they then deserve a second chance, at our expense?
Or: Why’d they send us their bodies at all? Why not just their heads, their brains, their memories? If the medium is the message, this message stinks. Where exactly did we sign up? To salvage putrid alien flesh simply because it’s dumped in our laps is to play the chump.
Or: A species of promise was made in the Queendom’s banishment of morbidity—a statement of ultimate equality before God and Nature. Thou shalt not die. This was affirmed in the Fall, and has thereafter formed the defining aspect of our societal character. Such pains as result are ours by choice, and by example we endure them gladly, ever mindful of the alternative. That these folk are the get of our own miscreants is beside the point; by definition, any justice must exist for all comers, or it be no justice at all. Dare we, my brothers and sisters, choose death for those who have come in search of life?