“Maybe Venus could be crushed,” Conrad suggested. “That would speed up its rotation. You’d have to remove a lot of mass to keep the gravity tolerable, but you could make a moon with it. Hell, you could get two viable planets out of it, and if you set up the eclipses properly they’d shelter each other from the noonday sun.”
“Ho!” Bruno chortled dryly. “What have I pulled from this hat of mine? An architect of worlds, indeed! Your ambition does you credit, lad, but there isn’t money enough in all the universe for a scheme as mad as that. If you can imagine such a thing, I’m actually running short of funds. I, yes! I’ve built thirteen starships out of my own pocket, and each of them cost as much as the entire Nescog and provided not one penny in returns. Some corners of society may be richer for the investment, but I myself am not.
“My coffers have slowly recovered from the shock, but your squozen moon will set me back a thousand years. Think of the energies we must deploy, the masses we’ll shift! And here you speak to me of lifting half the weight of a planet, against the planet’s own gravity, and then crushing it all! That’s twenty times the project you have before you, lad, and the project before you is the largest since Marlon’s Ring Collapsiter.”
He paused a moment, though, tugging his beard and pinching his chin, and finally said, “Still, the suggestion has merit. Someday, perhaps. Meanwhile I have more to show you, for Venus has not been our only disappointment.”
The fax took them next to a low hilltop overlooking a village in the middle of a rusty plain, with steep red cliffs rising up on either side, just beyond the horizon.
“Savage Mars,” Bruno said, “turns out to have none of Venus’ rages and sorrows, and in truth human beings have discovered no gentler world anywhere, except the Earth. He needed a bit of air, a bit of warmth to get him going again, but Mars never forgot how to live. Thriving, though, has always eluded him, for he’s a scarred old soldier whose energies are long spent. The warmth of Sol touches this place with a quarter of its Earthly intensity, and the core of the planet is dead and cold and solid. Nor is there enough heavy hydrogen in the poles for economical fusion. So deutrelium is imported, and solar power stations throughout the Queendom beam their energies here. Without this input, this net inward flux of foreign energy, the cities of Mars would grind to a chilly halt. It’s a fine world for poets and dilettantes, gardeners and gamers, but industry must look elsewhere for its shelter and comfort.”
The king eyed Conrad curiously. “Unless you’ve, er, got some suggestions for this place as well?”
Conrad shrugged. He wasn’t exactly a font of spontaneous genius. He said to the king, “There’s always tidal heating, right? On Sorrow it was the only thing keeping the core molten. If Mars had a large, close moon… Well, wait a minute. Imagine a water moon, larger than the planet itself, with no solid surface or center. It doesn’t weigh as much as rock, but it could still exert a strong tidal force. And it would act as an enormous lens, gathering light from the sun and heating up. It would radiate in the infrared, and Mars’ gravity would pull it into a teardrop shape that should direct more than half the emissions toward the planet. Right?”
“Hmm,” Bruno said, thinking about that. “Possibly. But would it be stable over geologic time? I suppose it might!”
“Or we could move the planet,” Conrad added lamely. “Closer to the sun.”
The king laughed at that. “I see thinking small is not among your faults. Long ago, I’d thought to give the squozen moon project to Bascal, but in truth he was never suited. He was a political creature, and started a revolution instead.”
So did I, Conrad answered silently. For he was just as guilty as Bascal, or nearly as guilty, in getting the Children’s Revolt moving.
“And he clawed his way to the stars,” Bruno mused, staring down at the village and the red desert plains beyond it, “through my pocketbook. And there he met his end.”
At that poignant sentiment, Conrad asked, “Sire, what will you do with the image of Bascal? The one in Newhope’s memory?”
“I don’t know,” the king answered. “If my son is dead then this thing, this recorded entity, must be more a caricature than a copy. We could overlay it on his childhood fax archives and see what happened, but…”
“But tinkering produces monsters?”
“Indeed. And so does hardship, of which you had plenty out there in the dying colonies. I’m sick with guilt about that, lad, and I’m not eager to compound my past errors. Some people are more inclined to monsterdom than others. But I do mourn for the little boy, the Poet Prince who used to putter around Tongatapu on that noisy little scooter of his. What a happy lad, what a joy to behold! Already containing within him the sprouts of wickedness, or poor judgment. Even before the time of Newhope’s departure, he’d become a stranger to us. A dangerous one.”
“You’re going to let him die? Your own son?” Conrad couldn’t help feeling a little bit horrified, after he’d gone to the trouble of preserving that damned message. If it was the only record of Bascal’s adult life… God, it must be a wrenching decision. If it were up to Conrad, what would he do?
“We don’t know his fate,” the king said sadly. “We only suspect it. And this so-called cousin of his, this Edward Bascal Faxborn, is an alternate expression of the boy I raised. ‘King Eddie of Wolf’ they call him, in tones of true friendship. I’ve never met the man outside a self-aware transmission, but is he not also my son? A better version? A different set of choices?”
The king moped for a few seconds, the Martian breeze twisting in his long hair. “Someday, perhaps, when we’ve universe enough to contain him, we can dare to unleash that spirit again. But for now I suspect we’re better off leaving him where he is. If it’s a kind of murder to postpone his resurrection, I’ll invite you to join in the conspiracy. Will you do me the favor, Architect, of forgetting this conversation? I don’t want his mother finding out.”
Conrad’s next stop was Luna itself—specifically the small domed city of Copernicus, nearly dead-center on Nearside, which was to be the site of his temporary headquarters, until by his command the ground started shaking and cracking and falling in on itself and the surface became uninhabitable.
“How exactly do we accomplish this?” he’d asked the king, for there were already detailed cross-sectional blueprints of the squozen moon, showing exactly where the surface must lie, and how the dense subsurface must be layered in order to maximize the world’s utility to its future inhabitants. Toxic metals were to be buried deep—the moon had an excess of nickel and arsenic—and useful ones were to wrap the planette like foil, in layers easily accessible from surface mines. Deeper, a third of the way down to the core, there’d be a layer of di-clad neutronium supported by pillars of monocrystalline diamond.
“How?” the king asked, as though the question had never occurred to him. “I should think you would tell me.”
Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be any huge hurry; Conrad was given two hundred years to complete the task, and a budget of trillions to get it started. Still, Bruno’s tour around the solar system, ending back in the remoteness of Maplesphere far out in the Kuiper Belt, had been a long one. Subjectively they were gone for just a few minutes, but the speed of light was the speed of light, and most of the Nescog was incapable of exceeding it. Invisibly, the journey had chewed up nearly a day in transit times, during which the evacuation orders had been broadcast to Lunar citizens, along with Conrad’s name and face.