Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

“Is it the wormhole physics again?” asked another of the cameras.

“I don’t discuss my husband’s work,” she reminded. But her tone was indulgent, for when Bruno retreated to Maplesphere, which happened three or four times each decade, he generally returned with treasures: the backtime processor, the quantum screw, the popular word-cypher game known as “Nickels.” Nothing could match the twin bombshells of his early career—collapsium and ertial shielding—but he remained the most inventive soul in a population of one hundred and sixty billion. Tamra would never blame her subjects for being curious about his current interests.

“What’s happening with the Barnard refugees?” asked someone else.

“The four living crewmates remain in Red Sun custody,” she said. “No decisions have been made about the others.”

“Has the attack on Newhope accelerated the timetable for their revival?”

“I repeat,” she said, less patiently than before, “no decisions have been made. Whatever we finally do here will set a precedent for all time hereafter. There is no reason to enter into it hastily.”

“What about radiation damage?” another reportant demanded, somewhat angrily. “You can’t leave them out there forever.”

“Steps are being taken,” the queen assured. “Whatever status these people are finally accorded, we will treat their remains with utmost dignity.”

Meanwhile, another Bernhart Bechs camera had found its way to Sealillia, to interview one Conrad Ethel Mursk. It would be the climax of a series; Bechs had already profiled the other three, whom he thought of as the Captain, the Comedian, and the Cactus. He’d even interviewed the ship itself.

In a lurid, voyeuristic sense, the Cactus was by far the most interesting of these; Xiomara Li Weng and her jokester second mate, Yinebeb Fecre, had been born in the Queendom and exiled in the Revolt. They’d had real lives, if sad ones, whereas Eustace Faxborn was created specifically for the interstellar return mission, stepping live and whole and nearly adult from a Barnardean fax machine. This custom had been commonplace out in the colonies, where—strange notion!—there was a chronic shortage of human beings. But in the Queendom this was considered one of the the basest possible perversions.

Especially since people named “Faxborn” were, for the most part, sexually active from the word go. Indeed, if the refugees’ accounts were accurate—and Bechs had no reason to believe otherwise—Eustace Faxborn had married the Comedian shortly before the bloody surprise attack that was the mission’s unauthorized departure. She’d begun less as a member of Newhope ’s crew than as part of its life-support system: a living sex robot for the otherwise lonely second mate. In this sense, she’d done quite well for herself, and Bechs was careful to say so in his profile.

“You could run that ship by yourself,” he’d said to her in the interview, echoing the words of the Comedian. “You could fix any subsystem. You’ve a quick mind, and quick hands to go with it, for you’ve been using them all your life.”

He’d meant it in the best possible way—most of his viewers had no such practical skills, and admired them greatly—but her reply was characteristically prickly: “ Newhope ran for five hundred seventy-eight years without any crew. After the accident it repaired itself with no help from me. It’s smarter than a human being when it needs to be.”

Which was partly true and partly her own sort of modesty, but mostly it was an uncomfortable and vaguely hostile evasion. The Cactus seemed at ease only when reciting facts, or describing the emotions of others. Her own self, her own feelings, were a troubling subject she didn’t care to examine. And why should she? She’d lived her life in a microcosm, with only two other people besides her husband. Plus the ship itself, yes, which could spin out robots and specialized personality constructs to suit any whim or need. But it wasn’t human.

“I regret the accident,” the ship had said to Bechs in its own interview, conducted at distance over the Nescog voice channels, with hours of signal lag between question and answer. “I was aware of the divergence in the navigation solution, but I was unable to formulate a response. I failed to realize the debris shoal was within our position envelope, and failed to imagine the resulting collision. I was caught off guard.”

“What did you imagine?” he’d asked in response.

And the ship had replied: “Very little, sir. Imagination is an inductive trait, and difficult to mechanize.”

Of course.

At any rate, Bechs had buzzed and flitted his way back here on the news that the ship’s first mate—the captain’s husband—had finally been released from hospital. Bechs would round out his story and then rerelease the whole thing, with commentary, to a curious public.

Unfortunately, several dozen other reportants had beat him to it; he found Mursk seated at his apartment’s tiny dinner table, swatting angrily at a cloud of them.

“Shove off, parasites. I’m done. I’m eating !”

And so he was: fax-fresh plibbles and bran flakes, steaming blood sausage and curried potatoes, with miso soup and the nutrient paste known as “mulm,” which Bechs had never seen eaten by anyone but navy crews and merchant spacers. It was far more food than a human stomach could hold, and there were three nearly full beverage mugs in front of him as well. Here was a man who hadn’t tasted for decades. Not enough, anyway, or not the right things.

But still the cameras pestered him, spitting out questions, stepping all over each other in a haze of white noise. Most people had no idea how to run a press conference, even if they’d called it themselves.

“Welcome back to civilization,” Bechs said to him, raising his voice above the din. He could do that; he had a special volume license, along with other privileges. “You do realize, I hope, that you can order these cameras outside? They can’t invade your home, nor peer through your windows, without permission.”

“Ah!” Mursk said. “Then my permission is revoked. Off with you pests. Off!” To Bechs he said, “Thank you.”

“Quite welcome,” Bechs assured him, while the others buzzed sullenly away. “I wonder if I could speak with you when you’re finished, though. I’ve already interviewed your friends, and I’m hoping to round out my set.”

“You’re Bernhart Bechs,” Mursk said.

“Yes.”

“I remember you from when I was a kid.”

“Do you?” Bechs was surprised, and pleased. “That was a long time ago.”

Mursk laughed. “You’re telling me? But you did that thing on the history of Europe, and the one about the plight of juvenile commuters.”

“God, I barely remember it myself. When can I return, Mr. Mursk? I don’t mean to trouble you.”

Conrad looked down at his food, then up again at the maroon bug that was Bechs. He seemed disappointed. “You know, truthfully, I’m already full. What would you like to know?”

Conrad Mursk turned out to be very nearly an ideal interviewee, whose life story could, Bechs sensed, fill volumes of its own. Nearly everything Bechs asked was met with a long, detailed answer which neither rambled nor lacked a point. A longtime spacer, Mursk had as much vacuum lore as any of his crewmates—and quite a bit more than Eustace Faxborn. But unlike the other three, Mursk had done a lot of additional things with his life, spending more than a century of it on the ground, and decades more on the sea and on the ice of Planet Two’s small polar cap.

He was never a politician—he made that abundantly clear—but he had nevertheless been a member, if unofficially, of King Bascal’s inner circle. He’d been remotely consulted on several occasions by the King and Queen of Sol, and seemed to have been present at almost every major turn in Barnard’s history.