To Crush the Moon (7 page)

“That's in the record, yes. Do you have any regrets about the encounter?”

“Many. Most notably, the skeletal figure was not apprehended during the scuffle, and no trace of it could be found afterward. This, too, is typical of our encounters with presumed Fatalists. We have yet to develop an effective tactic for arresting them.”

When asked what he did with the Medal of Conduct he'd won for his heroism, Captain Shiao replied, “It's against regulations, sir, to wear such adornments on duty, or to wear them at any time on a garment other than a Constabulary uniform. There is one that I sometimes bring with me to state functions; this particular medal I placed in a locker with the others for safekeeping. It's a great honor to serve the Queendom in this way, for the Fatalists are
breaking the law
. The awards themselves are of secondary importance.”

And when asked if he expected to die himself someday, Shiao frowned in thought before answering, “Permanently? Irretrievably? That would be a gross dereliction of my duties, sir. Unless a qualified replacement were found ahead of time, I should do my best to remain alive. However, if it happened that my services were no longer required, I suppose I'd consider terminating my life voluntarily, as an act of community.”

In response to this remark, Shiao's wife Vivian, the beloved Director of the Constabulary, is reported to have offered a colorful rebuttal which history, alas, does not record.

chapter five

in which innocents are imperiled

The doctor, Angela Proud Rumson, turned out to
be only the first of a tag team of nonthreatening female civil servants paraded through Conrad's room. There was P.J. the environmental technician—who thoughtfully interrogated him about the conditions of his “native” Planet Two. Was the light too bright for him here? Would he prefer a chlorine atmosphere?

“It was called ‘Sorrow,'” Conrad told her, “and I wasn't born there. I'm from Ireland, originally.”

“Oh, how nice,” she said, sounding surprised.

“It wasn't that much dimmer than Earth, just . . . yellower. And the chlorine was never more than a trace gas.”

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 . . .”

“Warm flesh and a smile?” Sandra asked, looking down at her sketchplate and nodding. “I'm your last visitor, Mr. Mursk, and my job is to process you back into Queendom society. Technically speaking, you're still a prisoner.”

“Eh?”

“For your role in the Children's Revolt. You
were
banished, yes?”

“Oh, that. Yes.” It seemed such a long time ago. But these people were immorbid, and forgot nothing. Time passed for them like a kind of dream, a river without end.

“As your caseworker, I've filed a temporary motion to reinstate your citizenship with full privileges. This means, among other things, that you're entitled to draw Basic Assistance. It's not much, but it should get you on your feet until you're able to find employment. What's your area of specialty?”

“Uh,” Conrad answered brilliantly. Specialty? He'd kicked around from one profession to the next, mastering few tangible skills. Life in the colonies was like that; there was always more work to do than there were people to do it, and no one was really qualified. You just grabbed urgent-looking tasks and did them, and then you grabbed some more, and just kept on like that. Until you died. But how could he explain that to someone like Sandra, who'd probably had fifty years of schooling before her first lowly apprenticeship?

“Architect,” he finally said, for lack of anything better to attach his name to. He'd been First Architect of the Kingdom of Barnard, for whatever that was worth. A laugh, here, probably.

Indeed, Sandra's expression was primly amused. “Architecture is a
field
, sir. I need a specialty.”

“You
need
one?”

“Every citizen needs one. If nothing else, it may win you Appreciator status, which would boost your assistance level.”

Conrad frowned. “You mean I'd be paid to walk around admiring buildings?”

“In a sense, yes.”

“Would I have to write anything?”

Again, that flicker of amusement. Sandra was trying not to smirk, not to condescend; she seemed like a nice person, and certainly her profession was one of understanding and tolerance. But Conrad was just too damned ridiculous: not just a refugee but a
bumpkin
, from a place so backward it had collapsed and died in its own filth, without building so much as a teleportation grid. Architect, indeed.

“Sir, that would make you a Reviewer. I'm not sure you've got the background for that.”

Ouch. “Hmm. No, I don't suppose I do. I became a revolutionary
because
there was nothing else for me here. All the good jobs were filled with people too competent to ever leave them. And that was a long time ago. Today, I'm a thousand years more foolish!”

A faint smile acknowledged the joke, but then she said, “There's nothing wrong with being an Appreciator, sir. It's honest work. Most people don't have the eye for it.”

“Hmm. Well. I suppose I'm flattered, then.”

“I do need to put something down for your specialty. Shall we say, residential architecture?”

“Oh, I've
done
residential,” Conrad said. “Single- and multifamily. Also industrial, civic, monumental, and certain infrastructure projects, including roads and tuberails. But lots of people were doing that. The only
specialty
I can claim is in transatmospherics. I once built an orbital tower a thousand kilometers tall.”

Sandra the social worker blinked at that. “Personally? With your own two hands?”

It was Conrad's turn to laugh. “Yeah, I'm magic. I had a crew, miss. Twenty-five men and eleven hundred robots.”

She blinked again, then glanced down at her sketchplate and said, “Specialty: transatmospheric architecture with supervisory experience.” When she looked up, the condescension was gone. “You may qualify for more than Basic Assistance. It could take a few weeks to sort out, though.”

“I'm a patient man,” he said, “except where my wife is concerned. For that matter, I wouldn't mind seeing my parents, whom I haven't laid eyes on in a thousand years. And the sky, the
wind
. I tried to go outside, here, but the door wouldn't open. It said I'd freeze to death in ten minutes. I said I'd be back in two. I've lived on polar caps before. But as you say, I'm still a prisoner.”

“We'll be on our way in a few minutes,” Sandra assured him. “But first, shall we talk about your wardrobe options? The right appearance could make a big difference in your prospects.”

Conrad laughed again, pinching the hospital gown he'd been wearing since before they revived him. “Are you saying this is the
wrong
appearance? I'm shocked. Miss, we wore clothes in the Barnard colony, too. Give me a fax machine and I'm sure I can work something out.”

“You'll have access to one,” Sandra said cautiously. “You won't own it.”

“Good enough,” Conrad said. And then, with a burst of wonder: “I'll be able to travel anywhere in the Queendom, won't I? I can eat whatever I want, and I'll never get sick or geriatric again. I'll be immorbid. I'll be
rich
.”

Sandra shook her head at that, and dutifully burst his bubble. “Don't get your hopes up, sir. You'll be living on Basic Assistance, in a Red Sun emergency shelter in one of the hottest, wettest climates on Earth. You'll be in the bottom percentile for personal income, with sharp travel and plurality restrictions.”

“Plurality!” Conrad chortled. “I can make copies of myself. I can be twins, triplets!”

“You can be twins,” Sandra said, “but it just means your energy budgets will go half as far. There's no way of knowing how long you'll be on assistance, sir, and you need to prepare yourself for the reality of it.”

Conrad
was
a patient man, and a kind one, but this went too far. He'd had enough of these self-important children telling him what to do, what to think. “Miss,” he said coolly, “have you ever walked out of a blizzard with a broken collarbone? Have you spent a
hundred years
aboard a starship, or fought off a team of angry asteroid miners? I once watched my best friend's daughter cut in half, while her image archive was permanently erased. I've stood knee-deep in the rot of a failed ecology, and handled a city's worth of corpses. I've betrayed the trust of a king, and lived. So don't tell me about hardship, all right?”