As a result, his materialization in the Copernicus town square was greeted by no small number of shouts and dirty looks from the hundreds of people assembled there. Ah, yes: the people of Luna.
The moon’s gravity was too low for the planet-born and too high for the space-born. Too high also for practical low-gee manufacturing, and the place couldn’t compete with Mercury for solar energy, or with the asteroids for mineral accessibility, or with anyplace for remoteness from the traffic lanes and comm chatter of Earth. So industry here was even scarcer than on Mars, and with no carbon or hydrogen of its own, Luna wasn’t exactly a garden spot.
And yet, in Conrad’s day it had ironically been one of the most expensive places to live in all the Queendom. As a result, it attracted a small population of fierce eccentrics who loved its vast lifeless spaces, its laissez-faire attitudes, its quaint little crater-domed towns. People who could afford to pay! Lunatics, yes, who looked down on the crowded Earth with thumbed noses. Oh, how happy they would be at the news of their eviction!
“Developer,” one woman called out to Conrad as he exited the fax. On her lips, the word was definitely a curse. “Trillionaire! Dirty robber baron,” said someone else.
Looking around, Conrad decided that the Lunar domes, too, held a lot more people than they used to. The only uncrowded place he’d yet seen was Maplesphere itself—hardly representative of society as a whole.
“What’s wrong with the moon we have now?” demanded a red-haired man in reedy tones. And with a shock, Conrad realized he was looking at humanity’s greatest playwright, Wenders Rodenbeck, who had penned such classics as Uncle Lisa’s Neutron and Past Pie Season. Under other circumstances, Conrad would have been pleased to shake the man’s hand, to sit down with him over a mug of hot tea and chitchat about the ways of the world. But Rodenbeck—a noted opponent of terraforming—had brought an angry mob with him, and Conrad figured this might not be the best time. In a glance around the square, half a kilometer beneath the town’s domed roof, he could even swear he saw the hooded, translucent figure of Death out there at the back of the crowd. When he looked again, though, the apparition was gone.
“I didn’t start this project,” Conrad called out to the mob, for all the good it would do. “Your king has simply hired me to take a look at it, to alleviate the crowding problems and provide a home for billions.”
That went over well. The crowd groaned and shouted and cursed.
“Listen,” Conrad said. “You’ll be compensated for the fair value of your property here, and as far as I’m concerned you can continue to occupy it for as long as it’s safe—probably several years, while we’re getting the project logistics in order.”
“Go back to Barnard!” someone shouted, and Conrad answered angrily, “I wish I could, sir. How very rude. How many of your friends have died forever?”
Presently, a group of men in heavy but helmetless space suits pushed their way to the front of the crowd, and Conrad, fearing violence, briefly wished the Palace Guards were here. Or at least the local police, who on Luna were renowned for their courage and skill. But the leader of the men said to him, “Mr. Mursk, I’m Bell Daniel, the president of Lunacorp Construction.”
“You’re hired,” Conrad said at once. “Your first assignment is to find me an office, away from this mob.” Then, thinking about it, he added, “It might also be a good idea to start digging a hole.”
“Um, okay. What sort of hole, sir? How deep?”
“All the way through,” Conrad told him.
Only much later would it occur to him that he had missed his chance to see the moon—the old, the original moon—in the skies of Earth, before King Bruno’s proclamations had begun the long, slow process of crushing it.
“Call Xmary,” he told the wall of his new office, just as soon as he stepped inside. The network took a few fractions of a second to figure out whom he meant, and the light of his signal itself took a second and a half to reach the surface of Earth. But presently her face appeared, framed against clouds and sky, green grass and oceans.
“Conrad,” she said, “where have you been? Three days you’ve been gone, and no message?”
“Sorry,” he told her. “A lot has happened. It turns out I’m a trillionaire. Also I met the king, and I have a job. Oh, and my parents say hi.”
Xmary nodded impatiently. “That’s nice, dear. We’re under attack.”
Chapter Eleven
in which death comes wrapped in cellophane
So was Conrad, as it turned out. He heard a really loud noise, like a glass battleship crashing down outside his building, and a moment later his ears popped, and his building’s exterior doors and windows were closing and vanishing, locking the place down.
“I’ll call you back,” he said to his wife, then rushed to find Bell Daniel.
Fortunately, Daniel was caught just this side of the front door, and was sealed in rather than out. “The dome came down!” he shouted in the overloud voice of a deafened man. “Blew up and came down. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s the Fatalists, sir—I saw Death outside, with his arms up in the rising air and the falling wellglass. There were space suits, too, stealthed in inviz. That was before the dome broke.”
Conrad uttered a curse that even Barnardean spacers considered obscene. Fortunately, Daniel didn’t hear it, and everyone else in the building was shouting and running around, or trying to call out on the Nescog. Or fleeing toward the fax machine, yes, but already the early arrivals were turning back, fleeing elsewhere.
“The Nescog is down!” someone said.
And that was impossible. It would take a huge calamity to bring down the entire network—even the shock fronts of a supernova would take hours to reach the solar system’s remotest corners—and the fact that these people were all still standing here put sharp upper limits on the violence of what might’ve happened. But you could cut off a planet’s access to the network. Conrad had done this himself, during the Children’s Revolt, and he imagined a sparsely populated world like Luna could be serviced by as little as a few hundred hardware gates. How difficult would it be to smash them all?
“Window,” he said to the wall in front of him.
“Not authorized,” the wall replied.
“Excuse me?”
The wall cleared its imaginary throat. “Regrettably, sir, I’m observing disaster protocol, and am required to maintain a superreflective exterior. There could be hazardous radiation outside, or bioinformatic viruses, or visual imagery which could damage you psychologically. I’m incapable of allowing any harm to come to you, sir.”
“Override,” Conrad told it impatiently.
“Not authorized, sir. I can be overriden only by badged emergency personnel, government officials, and members of the royal family.”
“Yes?” Conrad snapped. “Really? Because I’m the chief architect of this fuffing planet, and I need to look outside.”
“I have no way to confirm that, sir.” The wall now sounded uneasy, and willing perhaps to hedge its bets. “Would you settle for a low-resolution cartoon, assembled from sensors on my exterior surface?”
Conrad waved a hand. “Whatever. Yes. Show me what’s out there.”