Wil McCarthy The Queendom of Sol 03 Lost in Transmission (Bantam)

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major overhaul, or unless we strip her down even farther. From starship to
tugboat, in one vicious cut. She dropped her voice to a murmur, so that only
Conrad could hear her although technically, the wellstone around them was more
than capable of picking up her voice, amplifying and recording it, and since
the fundamental programming had been laid down by Queendom engineers, one had
to assume it was doing exactly that. But barring the unlikely return of said
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starship into the hands of said Queendom engineers, this mattered little.
It should also be noted that in the Queendom, belief in far-future quantum
archaeologists was widespread and unshakable. People generally agreed, for
whatever reason, that their actions, their imprints, their
electromagneticghosts would be open to future scrutiny, even where the events
themselves took place in the absence of witnesses.Information persists, people
were fond of saying. This was a reasonable supposition, and in many ways
provably true, for such archaeologists already existed in small numbers. But
for the most part the belief sprang from the same irrational roots as the
urban and rural and faery myths of earlier ages. And the queen s subjects
could not know of the terrible changes in store for Sol and her
planets changes that would crush a great deal of this information completely
out of the observable universe.
Be that as it may, the conversation was as private as it could reasonably be
in a programmable environment, in a quantum universe, with live human beings
all around. And so the two of them spoke and thought and emoted without
artifice, without any thought of audience or posterity. Such exchanges are,
when preserved, the rare treasures of quantum archaeology.
Xmary went on, in her quiet voice. I hate this. I never wanted to be the
captain of a tugboat. What kind of job is that, for a spoiled girl from
Denver?
For a moment, Conrad was surprised to hear her say this. Unpacking was good,
right? Getting the hell out of this prison! But then, thinking about it, he
supposed he too might feel some ambivalence about it if his role were about to
shrink and shift so dramatically.
In point of fact, he was personally very excited, because once the initial
colony structures were printed and assembled, there would be need enormous
need! for the design of new buildings and support systems. The Kingdom would
require an architect or two, and while Conrad had only ever designed and built
one major structure, and that a mere school exercise which was torn down
afterward to make room for another project, Conrad knew he had it in him to do
the job. He was a decent matter programmer in the aesthetic sense, as the
bridge s current motif of white gold and pearl could attest, and really a
pretty good one on the materials science side as well.
Why, at age seventeen he d pulled the lining out of a midsized planette and
fashioned it into a rigid one-way superreflector the photosail of the good
shipViridity . He d handled that ship s climate controls and waste disposal
systems as well, and had even taught Xmary enough about programming to support
two abortive mutinies. During his later studies, he d even discovered a new
material, which was named after him in theEncyclopedia of Elements and
Compounds : Mursk Metal. It wasn t the strongest or the brightest or the most
conductive of materials, but it had the interesting property of intermittent
optical superconductance as function of temperature. From 84 to 104 Kelvin,
and again from 200 to 231 Kelvin, the stuff was a pure insulator with an
optical band gap of almost 10 eV. Opaque, yes, but at every other temperature
it transmitted photons with zero energy loss, making it a new and unique
member of the optical superconductor family. Conrad, all fired up to design
his building, had intended the stuff to be used as window glass. To the best
of his knowledge no one had ever used it that way except himself, but somebody
at World University had later found an application for it in hypercomputer
designs.
Conrad supposed he was still technically accruing royalties on that in his
Queendom bank accounts. Twenty dollars a year? A hundred? The price of a good
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massage, anyway, or a couple of fax trips around the solar system. None of
this meant much of anything by itself probably half the adults in the Queendom
earned occasional royalties on something or other but it was a visible sign,
something that Conrad could point to in an argument to defend his supposed
architectural abilities. In fact, no such argument had ever come up, nor was
it likely to. The point was simply that Conrad was going to do some designing,
both in orbit around P2 and on its surface, and no force in the Kingdom could
prevent him, or was likely even to try.
What he said to Xmary was, I think it will be exciting. You never wanted to
be a starship captain either, but you ve been doing it for nearly half your [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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