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sooner or later the power always fails. If civilization is to ride out its
gloomier moments, we ll need a larger class of planette one that can hold its
atmosphere indefinitely.
Is this place serviced by tankers, then? Mursk asked.
Rarely. I ve designed a tertiary system which is capable of bleeding mass
from the neubles at the planette s core.
Hmm. Clever. They passed from the cottage s grassy meadow into the green
gloom of the forest itself.
Lad, I want you to level with me. No sweeteners, no half-truths. You fled
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the Barnard colony with guns blazing, in the midst of what proved to be a
total collapse. What happened?
A disagreement.
With Bascal?
Aye, with Bascal. Who else? He was in charge, Sire. Of everything. Now
Mursk was angry.
Gently, Bruno said, fearing he might not get an answer at all if he pressed
too hard, or in the wrong way. It s all in the past, and I ll not prosecute
misdeeds which took place outside my dear wife s jurisdiction. You understand?
The chips have fallen; the cards are on the table, and I call. I just want to
know.
Behind them, the sun set through the branches and canopy of the forest. On
the world s other side currently its night side it was the crickets, not the
birds, that chirped. Such was life on a planette: you could walk to any time
of day you liked.
People were dying, Mursk said. His tone begged no forgiveness, offered no
apology. Your son s plans were rational, but they weren t humane.
And yours were, Bruno said.
Aye. But not rational. And not loyal. Your son put his faith in me, and I
betrayed him.
Bruno could hear the pain in Mursk s voice, and he supposed it was all true;
this man did love Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. As a friend, as a brother. As
a traitor squirming under the bootheel of oppression loves his country and his
people. Bascal had always been, in his father s sad opinion, more a user than
a developer.
Sometimes oppositionis loyalty, he offered, though it must be cold comfort
indeed.
Maybe. You should know, Sire, that there s a partial copy of Bascal
inNewhope s comm archives. Not a whole person by any means, but a valid
memory nonetheless. I promised him that when we got here, I d transmit it back
to Barnard.
Promised him? Even after he tried to erase you from the colonial sky? My
goodness. Lad, the worst evil is the kind we feel fondly toward. I understand
your reluctance to condemn him, truly. But you must be honest with yourself,
and with me. Do you know whomy best friend was?
Marlon Sykes, Mursk answered, for every schoolchild knew this.
Correct, Bruno said. And as you say, we fought as only brothers of the
spirit can fight. With absolute conviction, with love and honor and hatred. To
the death. And even after all these centuries, the wound still felt fresh,
still brought an angry mist to Bruno s eyes. Rational and inhumane, indeed!
Marlon had been a brilliant creator as well as a villain, and if the two
traits could have been separated somehow, then perhaps Bruno might not have
pulled that switch, and sent his friend packing in acage de fin , on a one-way
journey to the end of time. But thedamage that hidden monster had caused the
sheer scale of it boggled even Bruno s imagination. Some offenses simply
overflowed the dams and levees of any possible compassion.
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That must be quite a load for you to carry, Sire, Mursk said to him, as
starlight broke through the trees.
Quite, Bruno agreed. And they finished the walk in silence.
I don t know anything about wormholes, Murskadmitted. You re making them?
Here?
Seated once more in his comfortable study, Bruno spread his hands. Trying
to, yes.
Sensing an appropriate moment, Hugo appeared with a pipe and lighter, which
Bruno accepted gratefully.
Thanks, old thing.
You re entirely welcome, Hugo answered, sounding truly pleased with
himself, albeit that stale, arithmetic sort of pleasure to which emancipated
robots were given. May I walk around the yard a bit?
You re supposed to do as you please, my friend.
It pleases me to serve, Hugo said, and wandered off.
With the ease of much practice, Bruno ignited the home-grown, home-cured
weeds in the pipe s ceramic bowl, and drew a puff of their smoke into his
mouth. The natural drugs involved, passing through the tissues of his cheeks
and into his bloodstream, were mild and crude and beside the point. It was the
anachronism of the act itself that Bruno savored; the loops and whorls of
rising smoke connected him to Einstein, to Edison, to all the great thinkers
of the Mortal Age, of whom he was the last. Connecting him, indeed, to the
fireside musings of primal humanity itself.
What are they for? Mursk asked. You intend these wormholes as a substitute
for fax gates?
Ideally, yes. There may yet be time to prop up these failing colonies, if I
can just
Make it work?
Bruno laughed around the stem of his pipe. Yes, make it work. Clever lad.
Alas, I fear I m not up to the task. These old chalkboards are getting white.
Eh?
Chalkboards. Blackboards. Ah, what do you children know? The cloud around
him thickened with his huffing, and he waved it away. In the tradition-heavy
wilds of Catalonia, where I cut my first set of teeth, the last vestiges of
the stone age lingered very nearly until the rise of the Queendom. A
chalkboard was a slab of hard, dark slate onto which you would scribble with
little cylinders of soft, white chalk. Really! We had one in every classroom,
every kitchen. You d erase the board with a rag, you see, and write in a new
batch of lessons or chores or ingredients. But sometimes you d misplace the
rag, and you d have to scribble around the margins of what you d already
written. If you let this go on long enough, eventually the board would get so
white with scribbles that you couldn t read it anymore. And so we learned: too
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much knowledge is as bad as none at all. We forget how to forget. But this
lesson itself seems to have fallen from our collective memory. Our
civilization grows too brilliant to brush its own teeth.
At any rate, yes, I m battering my head against this problem, and what
progress I ve made has been more tantalizing than helpful. Bruno didn t
generally present his works-in-progress too embarrassing but in a sudden fit
of hospitality he added, I can show you, if you like.
Sure, Mursk said, shrugging. It sounds kind of fundamental to our future.
This irritated Bruno. The lad meant well enough, surely, but a king could
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