Lost in Transmission (7 page)

“But it's so hard,” Conrad protested.

Bascal grimaced. “My friend, it is much harder than you can possibly imagine. As bad as you think it is, multiply that by ten. Multiply it by a hundred, and you still have no idea. Maybe I'm just going bananas here, but I'll let a doctor make that determination once we've arrived. Well, we don't have any doctors, but I can let a psych program or medical officer interview me and transmit the results back to Earth for confirmation. Then I can pick any archive copy of myself along the way. I can choose my optimal self, from a library of stored snapshots. The Catalog of Bascal Edward. How many people have that privilege, without also excising decades of critical memory? Not many, my friend. Not many at all. But in the meantime, yes, it's difficult.”

He paused for a minute and then added, with pathetic hopefulness, “I'd be honored if you'd join me for lunch.”

Now Conrad did sigh, because he'd eaten two meals in the past two hours, and did not feel like eating a third. Did not feel like even watching someone eat another meal. He said, “I'm not really sleeping in here, you know. No time is passing at all. I almost wish it were.”

Bascal blinked. “You've already eaten?”

“Twice.”

“Oh. I didn't realize. Seriously, though. Would it kill you to spend the day with me? Spend a
couple
of days. Maybe you can help Robert with the navigation.”

“Robert is awake?”

Bascal nodded. “Brenda, too. We had Xmary last month as well, but that was just for a couple of hours. Command decisions; I'm sure you know how that goes.”

And Conrad felt a stab of anxiety at that remark, not liking the implications. “How long has Xmary spent out of storage? Altogether, I mean.”

“Oh, I don't know. Six months more than you? Maybe a year. I'm not sure, Conrad. Why, are you worried?” It was the king's turn to smirk. He singsonged, “Everybody's getting older but you, Conrad!
You're
the impatient one, hustling along to journey's end without stopping to smell the rosewater. You'll be a boy when we get there, and the rest of us will have some seasoning on us. Unless, you understand, you spend some time outside the memory core.”

And this at least was a relief, because Bascal really hadn't changed all that much. Not in his interaction with Conrad, anyway, which had always been light and humorous, yet vaguely conspiratorial, vaguely coercive.

“That's quite a sophisticated twisting of my arm, Your Highness. This ‘seasoning' has done wonders for you, I can see.”

“So you'll stay, then?” The plaintive tone had left Bascal's voice. “I'll make it a request rather than a decree, since you and I are not really friends at the moment. My boy, I've seen you for two hours out of the last sixty years. Don't presume too much, all right? I am your king, and you're some snot-nosed kid I used to know.” Then he paused, touching his chin. “Well, that's not quite fair. You're with me in spirit a lot of the time, even if you're not aware of it yourself. But anyway, yes, I'd enjoy the chance to synch up with you again. I'll bet even Brenda would enjoy your company.”

Sourly: “Doubtful. How long has
she
been out?”

Bascal laughed. “Not as long as myself; don't worry. Altogether she's had about six years of subjective time, spread out over the voyage. One year for every ten of mine? That sounds about right.”

“Thaw her out when you need her, eh? Is it three days a month? Five weeks a year?”

“Whoa, be careful,” the king said seriously. “Don't talk like that around her. She's older and wiser, too, but she's still sensitive, and you always had a habit of tweaking her. Just don't, okay? Or the next time you step out of that fax, you might have fifty-seven arms and no mouth. I'm only half joking. A fuffing Hindu god is what you'll look like.”

After a moment's silence, Conrad suggested, “Why don't we go to the observation deck? I'd like to see Barnard.”

“Well, we'll need to put a realtime window on the ceiling for that. Obviously, Barnard is dead ahead, so you can't just look out through the side of the hull and see it, or up through eleven decks. Even if we turn the sail and bulkheads transparent—which would bleed all our heat into space, by the way—the ertial shield's lensing effects are highly nonlinear. Might as well be looking up through the surface of a lake. There is a nose compartment just above the water tanks, I guess, where you can get a blurry sort of view with your own two eyes. I haven't been there in years, and I wouldn't advise going up without a radiation suit. Every particle in free space hits that nose like a cosmic ray. Kinetic energy rises with the square of velocity, so at .1 C even a helium atom can rip up your genome a bit.”

“Yeah, I know all that,” Conrad said. He knew some of it, anyway. “Can we just print some radiation suits and go? I
would
like to see it with my own two eyes. How's the sail holding up, by the way? We had talked about maybe furling it for the journey.”

“I know, but that didn't work out. It was never a good idea, because what were we supposed to use for forward shielding? Nobody likes eroding the sail on interstellar grit, but it sure beats eroding the forward hull of the ship. We just bleed some power off the reactor to bathe the fabric in infrared, keeping the nanobes warm, and they can repair a typical hit within a few days. Which is about how long we've got between punctures these days, so they mostly stay ahead of the damage. It still adds up, decade by decade, but the thing's not going to fall apart anytime soon. Not in the time frame we're concerned about.” He touched the wall. “Brenda, hi, it's Bascal. I've got Conrad Mursk here with me. Remember him? Our first mate? How'd you like to meet us in the forward blister? He wants to see the stars with his own two eyes.”

“Hmm,” came the sleepy reply, after a few seconds' delay. “Hi there, sweetie. I'll go get a suit.”

“Get three, would you?”

“Sure.”

The view was interesting, if a little disappointing. Ophiuchus
was not one of the clearer constellations. Although the sun passed through it once per year as seen from the surface of Earth, the Babylonians had left it out of their zodiac, relegating it to a sort of eternal cultural limbo. It might've been their tenth month, between November's Scorpio and December's Sagittarius, but it just wasn't that dramatic a picture. The “Snake Holder” didn't correspond to any of the great myths, and the stars which formed the image were not much brighter than the other ones around them. This was especially true when you got outside the Earth's atmosphere.

Still, Conrad had become well familiar with the image during training, and could pick it out now against the background stars. And Barnard, as advertised, was visible: an orange dot just off the hero's right shoulder. It was not the brightest star in the heavens—not yet, not by a long shot—but it was the brightest star in the constellation: a definite interloper, changing the picture to a more humanlike from by appearing in a patch where the Queendom's more distant view showed only empty space.

“There it is,” Bascal said, attempting a shrug in his space suit.

Brenda had gone all-out with these: Fall-era battle armor with a centimeter wellcloth all the way around, extra rigidizable padding at the shoulders and knees, boots like shipping containers, and a high, clear dome above the head, halfway between a Roman arch and a gothic one in shape. It was without a doubt the bulkiest space suit Conrad had ever worn, and while there was room for the three of them up here, it was a tight fit. Conrad usually felt claustrophobic in a space suit anyway, even tumbling free in the empty vacuum, and having three other space suits jammed up against him, head-to-head in a kind of flower or teepee shape, did not improve things.

Worse, even the open space above the ceiling dome felt distant and contained. The view through the ertial shield really did look like he was peering through a lake: the stars were clearly visible, but they rippled, they shimmered, they broke apart into tiny rings of rainbow light. And there was a faint glow as well, a bluish haze, which Bascal said was Cerenkov radiation: the scream of particles exiting the hypercollapsite and slowing to the classical speed of light.

“It doesn't look as red as I expected,” Conrad said.

“‘Red dwarf' is a bit of a misnomer,” Bascal agreed. “I mean, the surface is still white-hot. Hotter than that, really. Main sequence stars are really ultraviolet-hot, and blue giants radiate a lot of X-rays. But the eye can be funny, can't it? Put Barnard right next to Sol and the difference would be more apparent. Anyway, that speck is where we're headed. That is where we will live out the term of our exile, or more probably, our lives, and since that term is infinite, we'd best make an effort to be happy about it. Personally, I think it's quite a pretty star.”

“You write much poetry anymore, Bas?” Conrad asked.

“Not much, no. Sadly, my artistic engine was fueled by injustices of the status quo. Now that I
am
the status quo and the injustices are my own, I find I have less to say, and less artfulness in the saying of it. But I do get your point: this is a sight which should inspire. I'll give it some thought.”

“King Hermit here can barely be bothered to write log entries,” Brenda said. “He is the colony's chief historian, but you'd never know it to look at his books.”

“There's not much happening,” Bascal protested. “What am I supposed to say? ‘Reactor output reduced by seventy-five watts, to account for Captain Li Weng's return to fax storage. There is one less mouth to feed.'”

Brenda laughed again, and didn't answer. In the silence, in a moment of particular strength or particular weakness—Conrad wasn't sure which—he blurted, “Brenda, Bascal tells me I antagonize you. He would know, I guess, but the truth is, I've always felt the reverse: you going out of your way to antagonize
me
. But either way, it's kind of stupid. I'd like it if we could get along.”

“That's interesting,” she answered seriously, and without too much of the rancor Conrad had come to expect from her. “I think you and I definitely got off on the wrong foot, back onboard
Refuge
all those years ago. But I was right to be suspicious of you. You
did
get us caught. If not for you, we'd've lived out the entire twenty-year run in secret.”

Conrad couldn't deny that. In those days, he and Bascal had ripped their way through more lives than just hers. On the other hand, it was a goddamn revolution. And a successful one, sort of. He was through feeling guilty and defensive over what they had accomplished. But had he been too hard on Brenda since that first ugly meeting? Too critical, too ready to see fault?

“We did get off on the wrong foot,” he agreed.

Bascal, perhaps sensing the conversation's potential now to veer off in a less productive direction, changed the subject. “Conrad has some suggested updates to the fax filters. I think it's a good idea, and actually I sort of wonder why we didn't do it a long time ago.”

“Is it the immorbidity extensions?” Brenda asked. “It is a good idea, yah, and everyone seems to come up with it sooner or later. But it's incredibly difficult. In the Queendom there's no need for it, because everybody faxes daily anyway. I'm sure their finest minds could come up with a fine solution, but who's going to pay them? And here on
Newhope
we don't have a billion geniuses to draw on. Instead, my team is five people who never finished traditional school. But I have some ideas on the subject, and the next time I have a few months free, I may press ahead with some models and calculations.”

It was interesting, Conrad thought, to hear her talking this way. She
had
changed since those early days, or at least let some hidden aspect of herself rise to the fore. This made him wonder, with a gut-gnawing anxiety, whether Xmary might have changed as well. For better? For worse? Any difference was unwelcome, if he hadn't been there to witness it, to share it and change along with her. Should he try to catch up? Spend six months, spend a year, spend five years out of storage, adding season to his soup? Or would that just send him off in still a different direction, increasing the distance between them? Damn it, this would be much simpler if people would stick to the plan, and simply stay in storage where they belonged. On a hundred-year coast between the stars, there was very little work that actually needed doing. Was he the only one who saw that?

“Brenda,” he asked tentatively, “can you set up some sort of trigger, to bring me out with Xmary the next time she comes out of storage? And vice versa? I think it would be good if she and I spent some time together.”

Brenda smiled, and there was a knowing, womanly quality to it. “I think something like that can be arranged, yes. That's another point which you're not the first to raise.”

Inside the helmet dome, Conrad nodded his thanks. “This all seemed simpler back in the Queendom, didn't it?”

She wiggled a little beside him, in a way that made Conrad think she was trying to shrug. “Different time, different place. Did you think we would leave all our problems behind? We left some, but you pick up new ones wherever you go.”

Conrad snorted. “Maybe we need a filter so people come out of the fax feeling happy. Adjusted, you know, feeling like they enjoy their lives.”

Brenda's laugh was polite but humorless. “If I could do that, sir, I'd be a declarant in Her Majesty's service. Well, all right. To be fair, the Queendom has toyed with that approach from time to time, but there are dozens of ethical questions wrapped up in it. Where does free will enter in? What are the limits in changing someone else's mind? Without knowing that, we'd be on dangerous ground indeed.”

“We're on dangerous ground already,” Conrad pointed out. “Though I see your point.”

She snorted. “Hell, I'd settle for just having people come out feeling rested.”

chapter six

as a stone is skipped
across the water

Suitably chastened, Conrad did indeed spend more time
out of storage over the next couple of decades. A lot of that time he spent with Xmary, and it was nice, but he learned—as Bascal and Brenda had—that they didn't want to spend
too
much time together in the small confines of the ship. A few weeks together, a few weeks apart, a few months in storage, and then start all over.

Their alternating supervision was kind of needed anyway, because there
was
a certain background level of activity required to maintain the ship—more so as the hardware aged—and a lot of that had been going on without benefit of senior officers. Which might or might not be a good thing, depending on your point of view, but it had side effects like excessive unauthorized energy allocations, raiding of the mass buffers for spur-of-the-moment projects, and peculiar forms of vandalism, such as the word
EXHALE!
inscribed twenty thousand times in the floor and walls and ceiling of the observation lounge.

The lettering was elegant: inlaid impervium on a brushed-platinum background. Very tasteful, even beautiful. And reprogramming the wellstone to wipe away the display was no great exercise for Conrad, who'd been programming since the age of sixteen. But it struck him as a bad sign for morale, somehow—both a symptom of poor discipline and an encouragement for worse. Only the tiny size of the crew and the brief, staccato nature of their assignments prevented it from being widely seen.

Meanwhile, news continued to trickle in from Earth. It was nothing like the Nescog feeds they'd grown used to as children, but the Queendom had thoughtfully erected an array of hundred-megawatt transmitters, so the bandwidth of their transmissions was not tiny by any means.
Newhope
was receiving eight hundred separate channels of full sensorium, including news, entertainments, continuous library feeds, and of course personal message traffic, which had taken on a wistful tone as the speed-of-light turnaround time edged past the decade mark.

When Conrad got a message from his parents, it was as though he'd found it in an attic somewhere, dusty and long forgotten.

Hello, lad. Dad here. Hope you've not forgotten us in your travels. I thought you'd like to know we repaved the Kerry bypass this year, with genuine cobblestone on top of a gravel and asphalt base. She's a beautiful road, Conrad, and I wish you could drive her with me. Mother sends her love. You know, it occurs to me that you've been gone from us now for nearly three times as long as you were with us to begin with. Funny, that we should miss you so much, when the time we spent raising you—badly I might add—is such a tiny fraction of our lives. That's immorbidity for you. We were born expecting to die—you know that—and we never did really adjust to the change. It's easier for you, I think. At any rate, you've many exciting adventures ahead of you, lad, and I wish you all the best.

Unfortunately,
Newhope
's own transmitters were nowhere near as powerful, their return bandwidth nowhere near as broad. Conrad's reply, which took seven hundred watt-hours out of his personal energy budget, was, “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. Not much going on here yet. All my love, Conrad.”

Of course, he was in storage for most of the time anyway, so he got five or six long letters for every terse reply he sent back. It seemed to him that Donald and Maybel Mursk, with lives of their own in a community far older than the Queendom of Sol, must surely be forgetting about him by now. His face growing dim in their memories, his voice and mannerisms increasingly remote, historical, irrelevant. The thought was at once sad and liberating.

Meanwhile, the Queendom astronomers continued to refine their predictions about the nature of Planet Two, and of the other, less habitable planets in Barnard system. For good measure they sent along information about other systems as well, the planets of nearby stars, toward which ten other colony ships had already been launched.
Newhope
was no longer the sole hope of humanity, the sole cradle of its wayward children. This thought, too, had good and bad sides for him to contemplate.

From what Conrad could see, there had been a lot of experimentation in starship technology, and most of the later ships were of wildly different design than
Newhope
. Higher thrust, greater terminal velocity, more spacious interiors.
Newhope
had even received a couple of personal messages from the crew of this or that ship, to one or another of her own sleeping passengers. Their content of course was private, and also many years out of date, having necessarily been relayed through stations in the distant Queendom. But Conrad was curious about them nevertheless. What were they saying, these other colonists?

The transit distances these other ships had to cover were all longer than six light-years, so while they were faster, they had departed decades later and had farther to travel. Some of them quite a bit farther. Except of course for the Alpha Centauri ship, The QSS
Tuscany,
which had been among the last to be launched, owing to the lack of suitable planets and moons in the chaotic resonances of that triple-star system. But asteroids and Kuiper belts made a decent home too, for the right sort of people, and eventually the Queendom had accumulated ten thousand volunteers willing to make a go of it. If all went as planned, they would be the Queendom's second colony.

Strangely, unlike the
Newhope
crew and passengers, the other ships carried mostly volunteers. The Children's Revolt was long over and never repeated, and the Queendom did not seem much inclined to exile its rank-and-file criminals. Instead, it reserved that dubious honor for children under forty, whose crimes were clearly social or political in nature, so that the population of prison transportees on the other ships held fairly reliably at fifteen to twenty percent.

The rest of the passengers were just people—children and adults alike—who admired the failed rebels, or envied their exile, or wanted either a fresh start of their own or a long, long adventure among the stars. And being volunteers, they presumably had the luxury of turning back if things didn't work out, leaving their exiled comrades behind or else dragging them back in storage, to be shipped out again to some even chancier and more distant locale.

Anyway, fortunately for Conrad's ego and the morale of
Newhope
's crew, their own personal colony ship had enough of a lead that it would still arrive first. Whatever else might happen, they—the Barnardeans, the architects of the Children's Revolt—would be the true pioneers, the first to win and settle another star.
Tuscany
would make starfall two years behind them, followed by a whole string of arrivals stretched out over the next couple of decades.

Conrad wondered about the costs involved. King Bruno had complained, more than once, that
Newhope
's construction alone was a strain on the Queendom's resources. How had they managed to build ten more ships, all larger and more sophisticated, in the seventy years following her departure? Maybe they couldn't afford it, but had felt nonetheless that it was one of those things that simply needed doing. Since their parents would never die and the planets weren't getting any bigger, the children of Sol did, in the end, need a place to live and a means to get there.

In this manner did Conrad while away the decades of
Newhope
's transit. And then, in year 89 of the Barnardean calendar, the level of shipboard activity took a sharp upward spike as Robert's position errors dropped off their high plateau and began, finally, to shrink. The star was close enough now to provide very exacting Doppler and proper motion readings, to be triangulated against the starry backdrop shifting behind it.

Postponing the third correction burn turned out to have been a wise decision on Xmary's part, because the erroneous position and velocity estimates would have pointed the ship in the wrong direction. The resulting waste would have come to several megawatt hours, or dozens of kilograms of their precious deutrelium fuel supply. Xmary had been hoarding against uncertainty, and the strategy had paid off; with more fuel now for accurate correction, and of course for the deceleration burn itself, their arrival date had moved up by six and a half weeks—welcome news to all.

Of course, Conrad had largely stopped keeping track of subjective time by then. It hardly seemed to matter. But even unaccounted for, the months and years added up. Like an office tower in a downtown district somewhere,
Newhope
was spacious for a quick visit and comfortable for a day's work, but much too fuffing small to be your whole world. To occupy for years on end, without ever going outside.

In his pirate days he'd spent eight weeks on a tiny
fetu'ula
—a sailship patched together from pieces of a ruined planette—and it had driven him to the edge of breakdown. He was older now, better able to handle it, but the situation was a
lot
worse. There were quiet corners to retreat to, holie displays and programmable surfaces to change the decor and the sense of scale, and even neural sensoria to provide the illusion of space and company. But illusion could only go so far when there was no relief, no hope of rescue or capture or early release. No one was waiting for them at journey's end, except their own sleeping passengers, and they
could not go outside
.

First mate or no, he was sick of this ship, and the sooner he could get off it and into some fresh (if perilous) environment, the better.

Preparations for the third and final correction burn were extensive—almost in line with the grand perihelion burn itself. And Conrad found himself spending a quarter of his time, and then a third, and then half, outside the fax. Xmary did the same, and with their work to distract them, the time they spent together was pleasanter than it had been in the doldrums. Less strained, less formal. More fun. Still, there was an uneasy edge to it. One time when he greeted her stepping out of the fax, she looked at him and said, “You again.”

She'd meant it as a joke—or so he told himself—but like most jokes it had a sting of truth to it, and that particular shift he had stayed out of her way as much as possible, not caring to test his luck any farther. On the subject of women most men were fools in any era, but Conrad Mursk at least had the wisdom to fold his hand when he saw no hope of winning. As a result, things were better the next time.

And then one day, quite suddenly, they were juking again. Not once or twice a month, but four times in a single day, and three the next, and seven in the day after that as they entered the debris fields of Barnard's upper Oort cloud. This was a genuine milestone—a huge milestone—because Barnard's Oort cloud was only a tenth the size of Sol's. To run into it, to juke around and through it, you had to be pretty damn close to the star.

It was inconvenient, the constant fear of battering from floors and railings and bulkheads suddenly jerking this way or that at full gravity, but even so the crew—Conrad included—cheered every time it happened. They were getting close. It was really happening.

It was in the middle of this, on a bridge running at three-quarters staff—a bridge full of eyes and ears and gossiping mouths—that Brenda and Bascal had their final argument.

Xmary didn't know what to think when Bascal and Brenda
started fighting. She had done her share of fighting with both of them: Bascal because she used to go out with him, and Brenda because she was a generally unpleasant person with a habitual disrespect for authority. And certainly, those two had fought before, usually over minor things that an outside observer would have a hard time understanding, much less agreeing with. But the king's fights with Brenda were normally short and hot and superficial, and when Xmary saw it happen—which wasn't often—she figured the two of them pretty well deserved each other.

But right from the start there was something different about this particular fight. It was quieter, tighter, tenser.

“Don't touch me,” Brenda said, snatching her hand away. They were sitting side by side, in the special guest chairs that had become a more or less permanent fixture of the bridge.

“What have you got, a bee up your dress?” Bascal said, though Brenda, like everyone else on the bridge, wore a standard uniform. Xmary was ambivalent about this; the uniforms looked spiffy and gave everyone a sense of importance, and of the solemn nature of their duties. That was good. But the kids had all been wearing them forever, with no civilian population to compare themselves against. As symbols the uniforms had become virtually invisible, and when the colors and insignia faded into the background, losing all cultural significance, what further purpose did they serve? She had thought, more than once, of changing them all to a bright lime green or screaming pink—something the optic nerve simply couldn't ignore. But she guessed that would simply grind people without solving the underlying problem. Bascal wore his own uniform, too: his purple one. The insignia and cut were a little bit different, but this, too, was hard to notice anymore. Unless you really stopped to look at it, as she was doing now.

“I just don't want to be touched,” Brenda said.

The king chuckled mirthlessly at that. “Well there's a surprise. You never want to be touched. Touching grinds you, throws sand in the gears of your otherwise charming nature. I
should
know better than to try, but hope, as they say, springs eternal.”

“Write a poem about it,” Brenda shot back. And here was a low blow, because everyone knew Bascal had been trying for years to come up with a decent poem—about Brenda, about anything—but had found himself utterly blocked. This was not surprising, considering he'd spent almost a hundred years cooped up in the same fifty-four levels, without a walk in the sun or a cool, shady rest beneath a coconut tree. Oh sure, the wellstone could be made to produce sunlight, even a fair simulacrum of sky, and the texture of a palm tree or a summer breeze could be imitated. But in practice, these things were annoyingly difficult to do, and surprisingly unworth the effort when you bothered. You couldn't spend
all
your time sulking in the dark, obviously, but you did wind up spending a good deal of it that way.