Again, surprise. “Fatal concentrations, I thought.”
He shrugged. “To a regular human lung, sure, but it’s a minor biomod. I barely noticed it after the first couple years. The biggest difference between P2 and Earth is the length of the day; P2’s is a lot longer. And that’s not something a sane person would miss.”
And when P.J. was gone there was Lilly the nurse, and then Anne Inclose Ytterba, who was apparently some sort of famous historian.
“You want to know about life in the colonies?” he asked.
“Very much so,” she said, “but I’ve been asked to hold that conversation for another time. Right now I’m here to brief you on the past thousand years.”
Which turned out to be a really short conversation; the population of Sol had quadrupled, and nine of the thirteen colonies had gone offline and were presumed extinct. Nothing else of any real import had happened.
“We lost contact with Barnard in Q987—three hundred and three years ago. The circumstances were curious; there had been talk of a budget crisis, and then a cemetery crisis. No details were offered, and in your King Bascal’s final announcement no mention was made of them. The next message—the colony’s last—was from something called the ‘Swivel Committee for Home Justice’ announcing that King Bascal had abdicated his throne, and that the Instelnet transceivers were being temporarily shut down to conserve energy. This occurred on schedule, and no further transmissions have been received from Barnard since that time.”
“So they might still be alive?” Conrad asked, reeling under the news. He’d been born into a world without death, and the grim toll of life on Sorrow had never seemed normal to him. It was, fundamentally, the reason he’d braved the rubble-strewn starlanes once again: to bring thousands of children to a place where “dead” was a medical condition rather than the end of a universe.
“They might,” she agreed, “although the so-called budget crisis was really more of a food crisis. The population had just passed the one million mark, but the fax economy was declining asymptotically to zero, and agricultural production had not fully taken up the slack. Think of it as an energy shortage, if you prefer; insufficient conversion of sunlight into food.”
“The soil there was worthless,” Conrad said, with a tinge of bitterness. “Never enough metals. No matter how much organic mulch you throw down, plants just won’t grow without trace metals. But you can synthesize food in a factory, right?”
“And they did,” Anne agreed, “from air and ocean water and metals mined from the asteroid belt. But all that takes energy, too. Sunlight and deutrelium, and the technology to exploit them. To function smoothly, Barnard’s economy needed more people than it had the resources to support.”
“So they died.”
“The ones you knew, yes, very probably. I’m sorry. At the time of last contact, the average lifespan of a Kingdom citizen was just a hundred and ten years.”
“Jesus,” Conrad said. He had socks older than that.
“Still,” she offered, “Sorrow’s air is breathable. There’s water to drink, and some vegetation. It just grows slowly. By most estimates, using nothing but human labor the planet should support roughly one person for every twenty fertile acres. And it’s a big planet, right? There’s no telling what’s happened up there, but I’d be astonished if there weren’t someone still alive. Possibly hundreds of thousands of someones—the great-grandchildren of the people you knew and loved. They may even be happy.”
“Hooray,” Conrad said, managing in his distress to make an insult of it. The world you’ve left behind is gone. Everyone you know is dead.
Anne didn’t appear offended, but the interview was over; she began the process of gathering her things. “I don’t blame you for being upset, Mr. Mursk. I’m sure I would be. But most colonies aren’t as lucky. At Ross and Sirius and Luyten, they didn’t have the cushion of a habitable planet to fall back on. When their economies failed, the air trade failed with them, and most of the communities died out within a year. Maybe someday we’ll travel there, to find vacuum-preserved corpses by the hundreds of millions. A field day for people like me, I’m sure, but nothing alive. Nothing contemporary.”
“Nothing decomposed,” Conrad said. “You could just wake them all up.”
“Except for the radiation damage,” she answered. “The way I hear it, you were barely recoverable yourself. If we left right now to rescue them, those people might have a chance.”
“But the Queendom of Sol has its own problems,” he finished for her, “and isn’t going anywhere.”
“Unfortunately, yes. But consider this: you got out, along with thousands of your countrymen. And in light of recent events, there’s little doubt they’ll be revived. If the Fatalists hate you that much, most people will find some reason to love you.”
“What recent events?” Conrad asked, not liking the sound of that. “What Fatalists?”
Anne Inclose Ytterba, already stepping through the doorway, turned to offer him a look of sudden sympathy. Now she felt sorry for him. “Didn’t you hear? You’re all the targets of a secret society’s deathmark. It seems you’re emblematic of everything they’ve ever struggled against, and they want you expunged.”
“Really?” Conrad wasn’t exactly a stranger to conflict; he’d shot his way out of Barnard, and before that he’d been in the Revolt. If people would just be nice, just look out for each other and share the wealth along with the problems, he’d’ve lived long and peacefully without complaint. Hell, if life were short he’d’ve been happy enough to take over his father’s paving business in Cork, living and dying in the county of his birth. But rare indeed was a century without conflict, and this far-wandering Conrad Mursk had already slogged his way through the darkest hours of more than one. Shamefully, he held himself responsible for dozens of deaths—many of them permanent.
But his enemies, numerous though they were, didn’t usually take the trouble to swear out a formal deathmark. That was something one expected of Old Modern robber barons, or cartoon characters. The illegality of it paled in comparison to its sheer absurdity. They want to do what?
“We just got here,” he said to her, a bit defensively. “What could we possibly have done?”
And here Anne the historian cocked her head and laughed a strange little laugh. “You’re breathing the air, Mr. Mursk. Tsk tsk.”
After that charming encounter, Conrad enjoyed a few hours of darkness and sleep, and then another visit from still another civil servant: Sandra Wong the social worker.
“Look,” he told her, before she’d had a chance to say very much, “I just want to get out of here. I want to see my wife.” He was standing at the window, peering out through the frost and into the polar darkness. Except for the faint, shining curtains of aurora australis hanging over the wellstone lights of Victoria Land, it looked just like the view from Newhope’s observation lounge. The same damned stars, a bit less vivid. He hadn’t seen a sky in hundreds of years, but it was winter here; dry and cloudless. The sun wouldn’t be up for months.
“I understand—” Sandra began.
“I’m not sure you do,” he said, turning to glare at her. “We were in a terrible accident. We had to freeze ourselves, without any guarantee we’d ever be revived, and I haven’t seen her since. You people have been kind, and you offer every assurance that she’s fine, just fine. But since when is that a substitute for… for…”