Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

This much was traditional, and nearly as old as the Queendom itself. Under their own strange forms of duress, though, the ailing colonies had piled whole suites of additional “healing” onto the process, weaving protective meshes and brickmails throughout the body, filling the cells with wellstone-fiber networks and organelles adapted from alien microbes. Even inserting active programs into the genome, to fight back disease and aging among individuals too poor to have regular fax access.

Via Instelnet radio downloads, the Queendom had imported some of these techniques as either quality-of-life enhancements or cost-cutting measures, so Bruno was no stranger to exotic biomods. But even so these four star voyagers’ bodies were something else altogether; something foreign, alien.

Two of the four were former Queendom citizens whom Bruno had known personally before their Barnard exile: Conrad Mursk and Xiomara Li Weng, the latter being Newhope ’s captain. The two were lovers if Bruno recalled correctly, although Xiomara—“Xmary” to her friends—had nearly been Prince Bascal’s instead. Or so it seemed to the prince’s father, several paces removed from the actual intrigue. At the molecular level, though, neither of them much resembled their original childhood patterns.

The other man also checked out as a Queendomite: one Yinebeb Bragston Fecre, who had played a major role in the Children’s Revolt, prior to the founding of the colonies. The fourth body was female, and matched no Queendom records.

“Eustace Faxborn,” Newhope said of her. “Custom printed in the Barnard colony, one hundred standard days prior to this mission’s departure.”

“Custom printed?” Bruno asked. “Not born, but created for some particular purpose?”

“She is the bride of Yinebeb Fecre.”

“Ah.”

A barbaric custom, that: the crafting of “adults” specialized for… well, various purposes. Honorable marriage was one possibility, but by no means the only one.

At any rate, the legal status of the citizens was clear enough: they were entitled to revival. For the twenty-five thousand actual corpses the opposite was true; they were legally dead noncitizen strangers. Any revival would be an act of charity—of foreign policy, essentially. And this Faxborn woman fell somewhere in the ambiguous middle.

Alas, it seemed a moot point, for all four of the bodies were, according to Boat Gods ’ fax machine, either not human or else irreparably damaged and in need of archival replacement. And since there were no archives available—no buffer copies or formal backups—the four would need that rarest of Queendom services: live medical attention.

So the four bodies were shipped to Antarctica, whose landscape was dotted with small hospitals experienced in the treatment of accidental whole-body frostbite. But the doctors there objected to the extensive radiation damage in these “corpses,” and in the end a team of specialists had to be faxed down from the moons of Jupiter, where radiation accidents were commonplace, and up from Venus, where genomic engineering was both high art and science.

All of this was charged to King Bruno’s accounts. No private charity or government agency seemed prepared to take charge of these people, for fear of an implied obligation to care for their thousands of shipmates. Even if those revivals were free—which they surely would not be—the housing costs alone would be considerable. There weren’t that many vacant apartments in the whole of Earth!

As for Newhope herself, the navy guided her—bodies and all—into a parking orbit in the lower Kuiper Belt. There to remain, like the Instelnet message-ghosts, until some brighter future should happen along.

“Appalling,” Bruno said to his wife as they lounged that night in their bed on Tongatapu. “Have we not wealth enough?”

“It’s more a matter of space,” she reminded him. “If we’re to have any wilderness at all, we must contain urban growth on the habitable worlds, and our own children—natural-born humans with no sins on their shoulders—must have the first pick of what growth we allow. Or do you propose a Queendom without children? I confess, I can’t see the point of that .”

“Mmm,” Bruno grumbled. “No one volunteers to die anymore. To make a bit of space.”

“Would you?” the queen asked with a bitter-tinged laugh.

“No,” he admitted. Not while the wormhole project remained incomplete. Indeed, he had dozens of incomplete projects which held the promise of a better life for all. “But we must do something , you and I.”

“Yes,” she agreed, taking his hand. “We must. This trickle of refugees has begun to add up. We could almost fill a city.”

“A floating city?” he suggested.

She made an unhappy face. “Not another one, dear. Please. The oceans need to breathe.”

“The oceans are vast. One more won’t hurt.”

“But a hundred more,” she said. “A thousand more. Where does it stop? Why don’t you revive your Lunar program instead?”

It was Bruno’s turn to laugh, stroking Tamra’s hand against the wellcloth sheets. “It was you, my dear, who ordered a halt to it. Too many displacements, you said. Too much economic disruption, including the loss of one of history’s greatest landmarks. And you were right: sparsely domed though it may be, the moon is proud home to four million people . Where shall I put them?”

“On a floating city,” she said, and sighed. “It’s like a puzzle. Slide one piece and the others have to move. To make an opening, you’ve got to close one. And yet, the alternative is death.”

“So say the Fatalists,” Bruno chided. “Do they lack imagination? Do we? ‘Everything has an end,’ they insist. ‘Let’s engineer it, peacefully and with love.’ By which they mean the vaporization of innocents, the sabotage of shielded archives. Bah! I say everything has a solution , and we’ve only to find it.”

Tamra kissed him firmly. “And I, my darling, say that everyone must sleep. Come, let’s have a bit of darkness.”

And suddenly, for no discernible reason, Bruno knew just what to do about his wormhole problem. “Egad!” he said, grabbing for the sketchplate he theoretically kept on his nightstand for moments like this. But theory and practice were only lightly acquainted; the sketchplate wasn’t there. Bruno searched the area for a second or two, but the idea was hot on the tip of his brain, and though his fatigue had vanished he was nevertheless terrified he would fall asleep or suffer some distraction, or that the idea would simply trickle away before he could record it.

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 .”