Free To Crush the Moon by Wil McCarthy

some sort of famous historian.
    “You want to know about life in the colonies?” he asked.
    “Very much so,” she said, “but I've been asked to hold that conversation for another time. Right now I'm here to brief you on the past thousand years.”
    Which turned out to be a really short conversation; the population of Sol had quadrupled, and nine of the thirteen colonies had gone offline and were presumed extinct. Nothing else of any real import had happened.
    “We lost contact with Barnard in Q987—three hundred and three years ago. The circumstances were curious; there had been talk of a budget crisis, and then a cemetery crisis. No details were offered, and in your King Bascal's final announcement no mention was made of them. The next message—the colony's last—was from something called the ‘Swivel Committee for Home Justice' announcing that King Bascal had abdicated his throne, and that the Instelnet transceivers were being temporarily shut down to conserve energy. This occurred on schedule, and no further transmissions have been received from Barnard since that time.”
    “So they might still be alive?” Conrad asked, reeling under the news. He'd been born into a world without death, and the grim toll of life on Sorrow had never seemed normal to him. It was, fundamentally, the reason he'd braved the rubble-strewn starlanes once again: to bring thousands of children to a place where “dead” was a medical condition rather than the end of a universe.
    “They might,” she agreed, “although the so-called budget crisis was really more of a food crisis. The population had just passed the one million mark, but the fax economy was declining asymptotically to zero, and agricultural production had not fully taken up the slack. Think of it as an energy shortage, if you prefer; insufficient conversion of sunlight into food.”
    “The soil there was worthless,” Conrad said, with a tinge of bitterness. “Never enough metals. No matter how much organic mulch you throw down, plants
just won't grow
without trace metals. But you can synthesize food in a factory, right?”
    “And they did,” Anne agreed, “from air and ocean water and metals mined from the asteroid belt. But all that takes energy, too. Sunlight and deutrelium, and the technology to exploit them. To function smoothly, Barnard's economy needed more people than it had the resources to support.”
    “So they died.”
    “The ones you knew, yes, very probably. I'm sorry. At the time of last contact, the average lifespan of a Kingdom citizen was just a hundred and ten years.”
    “Jesus,” Conrad said. He had socks older than that.
    “Still,” she offered, “Sorrow's air is breathable. There's water to drink, and
some
vegetation. It just grows slowly. By most estimates, using nothing but human labor the planet should support roughly one person for every twenty fertile acres. And it's a big planet, right? There's no telling what's happened up there, but I'd be astonished if there weren't someone still alive. Possibly hundreds of thousands of someones—the great-grandchildren of the people you knew and loved. They may even be happy.”
    “Hooray,” Conrad said, managing in his distress to make an insult of it.
The world you've left behind is gone. Everyone you know is dead.
    Anne didn't appear offended, but the interview was over; she began the process of gathering her things. “I don't blame you for being upset, Mr. Mursk. I'm sure I would be. But most colonies aren't as lucky. At Ross and Sirius and Luyten, they didn't
have
the cushion of a habitable planet to fall back on. When their economies failed, the air trade failed with them, and most of the communities died out within a year. Maybe someday we'll travel there, to find vacuum-preserved corpses by the hundreds of millions. A field day for people like me, I'm sure, but nothing alive. Nothing contemporary.”
    “Nothing decomposed,” Conrad said. “You could just wake them all