Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

The queen was no mathematician, but she’d seen enough of her husband’s work to know he was trying—vainly trying—to sketch out some four-dimensional object or relationship in a 3-D image.

Fortunately their bedroom was a suite whose outer chamber could be sealed off from both the outside world and the bedchamber itself. And so, sighing, the Queen of Sol stooped to kiss her king upon the shoulder, then dragged her blankets from the bed and stumbled off to sleep on the couch. For the one message she could read clearly in the walls, albeit implicit, was, This will be a long night, dear. Don’t wait up.

When Conrad Ethel Mursk opened his eyes, he was astonished to see something other than the afterlife. There were no angels, no clouds, no twinkling stars, and certainly no God or devil waiting to judge him. Instead, there were green walls and white examination tables, and a young-looking woman with copper hair and eyes the color of jade, dressed in powder-blue medical pyjamas.

“I’m not dead,” he said, and was surprised by the clarity of his voice. He sat up, and was surprised by the pull of gravity. Not grav lasers or spin-gee but planetary gravity . Then he charmingly added, “Where the hell am I?”

The woman was fiddling with controls of some sort behind Conrad’s headrest, and in sitting up he had placed his viewpoint only centimeters from her torso, so that she appeared mainly as a pair of breasts. Still, he caught her smile.

“Welcome back, Mr. Mursk. How do you feel?”

“I don’t know,” he said, pausing for a moment to take stock of himself, to feel his body up and down for numbness or injury. “I suppose I feel all right, all things considered. Is this Sorrow?”

She chuckled. “This is Earth. More specifically, Frostbite Trauma Center in the city of Glacia in Victoria Land, Antarctica.”

“Oh,” he said, digesting that. “What year?”

She told him, and he heard a low, pathetic groan escape from his lips. He’d been gone a long time—so long that the numbers barely made sense. A thousand years? Forty childhoods? Fifty thousand episodes of Barnes and Manetti ? The Queendom he knew was ancient history. And so was he.

“Shit,” he said. “Wow. How’s my crew?”

“All fine,” the woman assured him, now stepping back to give him a view of something other than her chest. “We’ve woken you last, since your reconstruction was the most difficult.”

“I was burned,” he remembered suddenly. “The coolant lines blew out. There was this swarm of damage-control robots, just pouring out of the fax machine, draining the mass buffers, hustling us down into storage and trying to stop the air leak. But the ship was coming apart, and somebody had to be last in line. I remember thinking, We tried. We did our best, but this is where it ends. ”

“You were fortunate,” the woman said. “It could have been a lot worse.”

“Hmm,” he answered, mulling over the sheer obviousness of that. “It seems I’m in your debt. Or someone’s. What about the passengers? We had twenty-five thousand in cold sleep.”

Her expression shifted, and he had the sense she was choosing her next words carefully. “Well, yes. It should be possible to recover most of them at some point. But sleep is a generous term here, don’t you think? Some of those people were already partially decomposed when you froze them.”

“It was a rescue mission,” Conrad said vaguely. And right away he could see how stupid his plans had been, how pointlessly optimistic. The Queendom of Sol could help his countrymen, yes; it had the wealth, the technology, the notable absence of psychotic leadership and sociopolitical collapse. The Queendom of his dreams would have done exactly that. But the Queendom of the real, physical universe had problems of its own—didn’t every place? A pile of dead colonists would be a curiosity at best, an unwelcome intrusion at worst.

“I’m an idiot,” he said. And it was true; he’d come all this way on the theory that a faint hope was better than none. But if the faint hope didn’t pan out, then it was as good as none. Or worse.

“I doubt that,” the woman answered, offering him a handshake. “Angela Proud Rumson, Doctor of Medicine and Extrapolative Cosmetics.”

He examined her hand for a moment—it looked absurdly soft, like she’d never used it—and then shook it. It was soft.

“Conrad Mursk,” he said, and was about to add a title or two of his own. But what was the point in that? What status did he hold here? What he said instead was, “Refugee.”

“Very pleased to meet you.”

“Can I see my friends now?”

Angela Proud Rumson’s smile was reserved. “Tomorrow, if you please. They’ve gone to their temporary quarters already, and I’m expected to hold you for observation. Test drive the old nervous system, make sure we’ve done all the wiring correctly. Shall we say twelve hours?”

Perhaps the event at Newhope’s lonely drydock was inevitable. Certainly, its cargo of dead human flesh invited public commentary: Are we responsible for these lives? For their premature ending, for their mere existence? If so, then aren’t these corpses likewise culpable in the demise of the Barnard colony? Do they then deserve a second chance, at our expense?

Or: Why’d they send us their bodies at all? Why not just their heads, their brains, their memories? If the medium is the message, this message stinks. Where exactly did we sign up? To salvage putrid alien flesh simply because it’s dumped in our laps is to play the chump.

Or: A species of promise was made in the Queendom’s banishment of morbidity—a statement of ultimate equality before God and Nature. Thou shalt not die. This was affirmed in the Fall, and has thereafter formed the defining aspect of our societal character. Such pains as result are ours by choice, and by example we endure them gladly, ever mindful of the alternative. That these folk are the get of our own miscreants is beside the point; by definition, any justice must exist for all comers, or it be no justice at all. Dare we, my brothers and sisters, choose death for those who have come in search of life?

And it was this, more than anything, which inflamed Fatalist sentiment, for if the so-called “right to life” could not be waived for the long-dead corpses of nonhuman noncitizens, then it could not be waived at all, and the Fatalist cause was utterly lost. But by its very nature, Fatalism could not take an armchair view of these matters.

Shall we imagine a deathist philosopher and Fatalist general? Call her “Starquake” or “Dark Cloud” or “Shiva.” Shall we imagine her followers, in their dozens or hundreds, or perhaps even thousands? Shall we describe the terrifying Death persona they crafted and physically instantiated, to loom cadaverously in their midst and remind them of their supposed duty?

This much is certain: a group of individuals held a meeting. Enormous care was taken to conceal their identities, as well as the meeting’s location. In theory this was both possible and legal, for the Queendom was not a tyranny. But it was astronimically difficult , for by its own nature the Nescog must store buffer images of the people passing through it; must log their movements and enforce their copy-hour limits. Too, nearly everything under Sol’s light was made from wellstone, or from other forms of programmable matter, and its nature was to record the commands—even subtly implied commands—that washed over it every moment of every day. Indeed, the universe itself was a witness to all of the events within it, and like any witness it could, with the proper inducements, be compelled to testify. And then, of course, there were the participants themselves, human and therefore corruptible.