Lost in Transmission

Chapter one. Unto a nameless world

Radmer vividly remembered his last sight of the old moon, before King Bruno's terraforming operations had begun to squeeze it. . . .

He was called Conrad Mursk in those days, and he was standing on the bridge of the QSS Newhope, falling past the Earth and moon on a sunward trajectory. They had started their fall at Mars, and would keep on falling until they were within a million kilometers of the sun. At that point, scorching even through their superreflectors, they would swing around and rise again.

Their path was like the orbit of a comet: long and narrow and lonely, descending briefly to kiss Mother Sol and then racing back up into the dark again for another long orbit. Except that they'd be firing their fusion motors down there at the bottom, unfurling their sails, catching the light of the sun and the laser boost of a dozen pocket stars to hurl them into deepest space. Past Mars and Neptune, past even the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud where the true comets lived. To the stars themselves.

The windows on the bridge weren't made of glass, weren't made of anything really. They were just video images on the wellstone walls. Holographic—though with nothing close by to look at, this was difficult to discern. The images could of course be tuned and magnified and filtered to the heart's content, but looking out the portside window at that moment, what Conrad saw was probably an unadulterated view: a blue-white Earth no larger than a grape, with a fist-sized moon lurking in the foreground.

There was no man in it. With Luna tidally locked to its parent planet, Conrad was looking at the Farside, the side faced permanently away from Earth, where there were no familiar landmarks at all. Funny: he'd been living in space for most of the past eight years, but he wasn't sure he'd ever seen Farside before. It looked flat and gray, mostly featureless, and the half that was lit by sun revealed no superreflective gleam of dome towns. The dark half of it, washed out by brightness, revealed no city lights, no sign of human presence at all.

This strange, precivilized moon drifted down the window, from fore to aft, with quite visible speed, like a soap bubble blown from a plastic wand and settling to Earth. But a bubble was small and close, whereas Luna was a quarter-million kilometers away, and huge. The QSS Newhope was falling fast, at twenty-seven kps—almost thirty kilometers per second. As fast as a comet. They were still a hundred and fifty million kilometers from the sun, but perihelion—their closest encounter with the furnace of Sol—would occur in just thirty days.

Practically speaking, there were human beings who had traveled faster than this. Several hundred of them, in fact. But Newhope was the largest object ever to break the ten kps barrier. Not the most massive, though, for it was capped fore and aft with shields of collapsium, a foam or crystal of tiny black holes, and the mass between these “ertial” shields kind of . . . dropped out of the universe or something. The ship and crew had mass, had inertia, but not enough. Not as much as the universe wanted them to. Such vessels could be flicked around effortlessly, with even the tiniest of forces generating enormous accelerations, barely felt by the crew inside.

But not many ertially shielded craft had ever traveled this fast, either. Generally speaking, it wasn't considered safe—any more than a hail of bullets could be considered safe. Interplanetary vacuum or no, there was a lot of debris to run into out here.

Conrad Mursk was sitting behind the captain and to her right, in the first mate's chair. Around them were the three other bridge officers: Astrogation and Helm; Sensors, Communications, and Information; and System Awareness. And as it happened, the captain was turning to look at Conrad at that very moment, her face framed beautifully against the window, a part of the planetary tableau. Conrad looked from her face to the moon to her face again, thinking that perhaps she had something to say, some fair words to mark the occasion. The little blue planet down there was her home, after all. But she eyed him instead without speaking, without acknowledging the view at all.

“You okay, Cap'n?”

His use of the title was partly in jest. Her name was Xiomara Li Weng, or Xmary to her friends, and she had no closer friend than Conrad Mursk. Technically speaking, this was a violation of all sorts of Naval protocols and traditions, but then again the two of them weren't really in any sort of navy, weren't even Merchant Spacers in a commercial fleet. Never had been, unless penny-ante space piracy counted as a branch of service these days. In fact, like everyone else on this ship, they were prisoners. Convicts, exiles, fakahe'i. This long adventure, this hundred-year voyage to Barnard's Star, was their punishment for years of antisocial behavior in general, and for the Children's Revolt in particular.

“Would you take a walk with me?” the captain asked, ignoring his ribbing along with the stunning view.

“Um, certainly,” Conrad answered. “Walk” was a euphemism indeed, since every deck on the ship was a circle exactly thirty meters wide. There wasn't a whole lot of walking you could do. But there was an observation lounge, and that was what Xmary meant.

“Robert,” she said to the astrogation officer, “you have bridge.”

“Aye, miss,” Robert said. He had long ago faxed his skin a bright shade of blue, with hair and eyes to match, and it had the effect of making everything he said and did seem sassy, though his tone was innocent enough.

She paused. “You want to keep it all night? Ninety-three days on this tub and you've never had the bridge for more than half a shift. You'd be all right with that, I assume?”

“Absolutely, miss. I've conned bigger tubs than this one, if you'll recall.”

“I'm aware of your record,” she said, wearily displeased. Indeed, she'd been along for part of it, dodging navy ships in the wilderness of the outer solar system. “And will you please call me Xmary?”

But Robert just smiled. They'd had this conversation before, and he seemed determined, for whatever reason, to stand on ceremony. Robert was a sort of pirate himself, having led a group of squatters onboard a Mass Industries neutronium barge for almost five years. Hell, he'd practically run the place—a vigilante handyman and amateur mass wrangler. He was also an avowed anarchist who'd railed for years—uselessly, Conrad thought—against the natural human tendency to form hierarchies and elect leaders. But for all of that, he still seemed to have an anomalous bit of Navy in him.

“Carry on, Number Three,” Conrad said to him crisply, just to carry the theme a little farther.

“Aye, sir. Carrying on, per your instruction.”

Conrad narrowed his gaze with what he imagined to be a Naval sort of ire. “Are you getting smart with me, Astrogation?”

“Doubtful, sir,” Robert replied bluely, “although if I feel any symptoms of smartness coming on I'll be sure to report them.”

“Do that, yes,” Conrad said, then couldn't keep from laughing.

For a variety of logistical, historical, and presumably sentimental reasons, the bridge was actually at the center of the ship's next-to-forwardmost deck, just five meters behind the ertial shielding. It was the only crew-accessible space on this particular deck. All around it, above and below and ringed around the sides, were storage tanks—the eight tons of water the ship's plumbing required as buffer and ballast. It also served as shielding, against radiation and particle impacts and God knew what else.

Conrad hadn't designed the ship, and truthfully, he wasn't all that familiar with the reasoning behind its design. He was only twenty-five years old—still a juvenile by Queendom of Sol standards—and had never held a job of any sort until Newhope's passengers had elected him first mate of the expedition three months ago. He was still learning his way around. Xmary, for her part, had just turned twenty-seven and had even less sailing experience than Conrad did. Systems was a twenty-year-old boy, Zavery Biko, and Information was manned (womaned?) by Agnes Moloi, who was twenty-nine. Blue Robert M'chunu, the old man of Astrogation, was thirty.

It wasn't by coincidence that Conrad knew all their ages. This was his area of specialty: the crew. If he knew nothing else about them—nothing else about anything—he knew their birthdays, their hobbies, their interests and skills. He wasn't sure what to do with the knowledge, but he did his best to keep it fresh in his mind. The launch ops crew were getting on each other's nerves even before the passengers were tucked away, feeling the first twinges of cabin fever even before the Diemos Catapult had drawn back its arms and slung them sunward. Conrad's own personal passion was for architecture, for the subtle interplay of shapes and materials, but he knew a little—a very little!—about holding a crew together through difficult circumstances. It was a responsibility he took as seriously as he'd ever taken anything. Which wasn't saying much, but there you had it.

“Have a nice walk, right?” Robert called after them, in an innocent tone which managed, nevertheless, to convey a sense of lewdness.

Leaving the bridge involved climbing ass-first down an inclined ladder—or sliding sideways down the handrail if you felt like it, which Conrad usually did. The lounge was three decks down, and took up nearly half the level all by itself—one of the few indulgences the ship's designers had permitted her crew and passengers. At the moment, the ship's complement was twenty live people: the launch ops crew. The other forty-eight hundred were in storage, as data patterns in Newhope's wellstone memory cores. And eighteen of those twenty were currently either sleeping, working, or messing around on the galley level. For the moment at least, he and Xmary had the lounge to themselves. Alas, the Earth and moon were no longer visible through the windows, though he supposed he could remedy that by pulling back on their magnification a little.

Instead, he engaged a voice lock on the hatch, then turned and yanked down his captain's pants. This was his other main joy and passion, and the only other responsibility he took at all seriously. Within the minute they were fuffing on the cool wellsteel plating of the deck, kissing and hugging and working out the kinks. That they should do this as soon as the opportunity arose was not terribly shocking; they'd been intimate partners for years. And since everyone in this thirtieth decade of the Queendom of Sol had the eternally, immorbidly youthful body of a twenty-year-old, it was considered right and proper to squeeze in a vigorous fuff or two in the course of every day. Well, the men considered it so at any rate, and the women did not protest it overmuch.

When Conrad and Xmary were done, they lay tangled in each other's arms, resting. Still on the floor, not even bothering with the couches or trampolines because they were young in their minds as well as their bodies and liked the sense of immediacy that a nice, cold floor could provide.

“Now that's what I call a walk,” Conrad said.

“Hmm,” Xmary grunted noncommittally. She liked a good fuff as well as anyone, but that wasn't why she'd asked him down here.

“You want to talk?” he asked, taking the hint.

“Oh, now you want to.”

“My head is clear,” he agreed. “My full attention can be brought to bear. You have some problem? Some little worry itching at the corners of your mind?”

“The usual.” She sighed. “I hate my job. I hate it for me, anyway. Captain of a fuffing starship? What do I know about that? Robert is spacewise; it should be him. I should be in storage with the passengers.”

Conrad shrugged. “People like a woman in charge; they've had a queen ruling over them for three hundred years now. Well, I guess the oldest person in storage has only had a queen for forty-five years, but even so, we're all products of society, aren't we? You think we want Blue Robert M'Chunu for our captain, who doesn't believe in leaders or followers? Who went five years without wearing clothes, just on general principle? I don't think so, dear. I really don't.”

“There are other women available,” she sulked. “I was always a party girl. I'm tempted to say just a party girl. The rest of my life has been . . . a fluke of circumstance.”

“Aye,” he said, kissing her hair. “There are other women. And some of them were in the August Riots, and some were space pirates, and some were confidantes of the Prince of Sol. You alone were all three of these things. You fooled the queen to her own face, and talked a Palace Guard into doing your illegal bidding. You turned your back on the chance to be a princess, and sowed confusion in the streets of Denver. Shall I go on?”

“Don't bother,” she grumped. “You've at least been a first mate before. Well, sort of.”

“Sort of,” he agreed, laughing. In fact, he'd never held the actual title, and had clung to the de facto position only through threats and blackmail, onboard a rickety homemade fetu'ula commanded by a suicidally depressed prince. And—this part wasn't funny—eight people had died along the way. Horribly, for the most part. They'd later been restored from backups, but the whole experience had left a bad taste in Conrad's mouth that was still with him these eight years later.

“Sorry,” she said, catching his shift of mood. “You probably don't like your job, either.”

“Not particularly. It's a hundred-year voyage, and even if we're in storage for a lot of that time, we'll still be living a lot of years in . . . this.” He spread his arms to indicate the narrow confines of the lounge. “And I'm supposed to hold things together? Me? The Paver's Boy of County Cork?”

“This is our punishment,” she reminded herself.

“Aye.” Now he was the one sounding bitter. “We're punished for wanting a future. Well, we've surely got our fill of one now.”

“A pretty good one,” she said, rising to the bait. “A whole star to ourselves. A new king, a new society. That's not so bad.”

“No, it isn't. Am I squishing you, by the way?”

“A little. I wish we could turn the gravity off in here.”

He snorted. “Now that would be rude.”

Once you'd lived in space for a while, you got used to the idea that all the stars were out there for you to look at, all the time. After that, you always felt sort of cheated when you were standing on a planet, which blocked half the sky all by itself, and had an atmosphere that washed out the remaining starlight except at nighttime. Fuffing in zero gee was like that: always a good time, and you got used to the total freedom of it. In gravity, you always had some surface pressing against you, and you found yourself wanting to reach right through it to get in the proper position. Actually there were special beds designed to accommodate spacers and former spacers in this way, and Conrad had toyed more than once with the idea of installing one in his quarters.

But turning the gravity off was a no-no. It was generated in the aftmost compartment of the ship's crew segment, about halfway down the long needle that was QSS Newhope. Conrad even knew the buzzwords to explain it: a zettahertz laser—that's a trillion gigahertz, you know—operating at four watts and refracted through a pair of Fresnel condensates to form an isotropic beam exactly thirty meters wide, terminating at the collapsium barrier of the forward ertial shield. The photon becomes a spin-positive graviton at high enough energies, and will penetrate a light-year of lead. You couldn't deflect it, or control it on a room-to-room basis. It was gravity, pure and simple, and you either had it inside the ship or you didn't. So while Xmary had the authority to turn it off for an afternoon fuff, the inconvenience to the rest of the crew would be substantial. Along with their sniggers and smirks.

Anyway, it wasn't really zero gee without the grav laser; thanks to the ertial shields there were all kinds of screwy momentum and inertia effects in here. People got the spins, got the upchucks, got the willies and the shakes when the gravity was off. You'd have to fuff quickly to avoid serious trouble.

“Floor hologram, please,” Xmary said. Beside them, a few meters away, a murky cube appeared. Well, kind of a cube—holographic displays emanating from the floor tended to look really good when you were standing up, and really bad when you were actually lying on the floor itself. Her calling for one was, in its own way, an announcement that they should get up. And indeed, she was disentangling herself, reaching for her clothes, letting them shimmy onto her like living things.

Conrad reached for his own uniform's pants, inserted his feet, and let them slide up. There were all kinds of clothes in the Queendom, including spray-on, wrap-on, and clothes that looked like a ball of putty until you stepped on them or smacked them with your fist, at which point they came alive and sort of straitjacketed themselves around you, taking on some stylish cut and color. In this regard, Conrad and Xmary were a little old-fashioned for their generation. They liked to see the shape of their clothes before they put them on. They liked to pull them from the fax, look them over, request modifications, and then dress.

And indeed, this “classique” style remained by far the Queendom's most popular, though in actual composition it only vaguely resembled the leathers and textiles of ancient times, or even the synthetic fabrics of the Old Modern era. Queendom fabrics were spun largely of silicon for one thing, and their fibers were a thousand times finer than a human hair. But like the wellstone of the hull, these wellcloth fibers moved electrons around in creative ways, forming structures that mimicked the properties of atoms and modules, radically altering the cloth's apparent composition.

And they adjusted themselves independently, aye. Shouldn't they? Conrad had worn natural cloth from time to time—even been forced to in his days at Camp Friendly—but the stuff didn't keep you warm and dry, or cool and airy, or whatever. It didn't stop projectiles, or harden to sponge-backed diamond in a fall. It didn't even look good, not really.

So he and Xmary weren't Luddites or Flatspacers or anything, and anyway these Newhope uniforms were pretty raw—green and black, flecked with hints of subliminal starlight. Xmary's had two impervium bars on the collar, where Conrad's had only one. And hers shaped itself differently around her rather different form, but otherwise they looked about the same. Which is to say: gorgeous. Anyone could be young and beautiful, but to be stylish was a thing the Queendom admired greatly. It was perhaps the one area where the opinion of youngsters was still considered important.

Once the two of them were on their feet, the hologram looked a lot better, except for a stripe running down the length of it, just left of center. This defect remained stationary as the holographic cube rotated through it. Weird. Beneath it on the floor, Conrad could see a narrow, matching streak of discolored material. Frowning, he got down on his knees and scratched at it with his fingernail, feeling the difference between that and the faux metal plating around it.

“Huh. Something wrong with the wellstone,” he muttered.

“Broken threads?” Xmary asked.

“It looks more like contamination.” Here was another thing he knew a bit about: matter programming, and the perils and pitfalls of wellstone. He was going to be an architect someday. “The composition of these threads has been altered. They're still working, still shuffling electrons and forming pseudoatoms, but not the right ones.”

“It's in a perfectly straight line,” the captain said, “but it's not aligned with the ship. It just slices through. I'll bet it's a cosmic ray track.”

“Hmm. Yeah, probably. There's a spot here on the bulkhead as well. Some kind of heavy particle firing through here at the speed of light.” He traced a path in the air with his finger, matching it with a sort of projectile noise. “I'll note it in the maintenance log, and if the nanobes haven't fixed it in a few days, we'll wake up damage control.”

“Sounds good,” she said, then shuddered. “We're taking the same kind of damage ourselves. Our bodies.”

“We did on Earth, too. Maybe not as much, and maybe not as high energy as that.” He nodded at the streak. “But there are charged particles flying through us all the time. Poking holes in our cells, flipping bits in our DNA . . . It's one reason people used to grow old, isn't it? Before there were fax machines to reprint us from scratch?”

“Yuck, Conrad. I don't need a biology lesson, especially from someone who failed it in school. Anyway, let's see a graphic of Planet Two, please.”

The floor thought about that, pausing for a moment before deciding she was talking to it. Then the translucent, holographic cube was replaced by a translucent, holographic sphere. But not a featureless one; it was paler around the middle, darker and bluer at the top and bottom, and clinging to it all around was a thin haze of refractance, a suggestion of atmosphere.

The captain cleared her throat. “Planet Two, my dear.”

“Best guess, anyway,” Conrad answered. “A five-year-old could draw this.”

“Well, they have detected oceans, and some suggestion of a small polar cap.”

“Who has? I don't know how they get that,” Conrad protested. He'd done a little amateur astronomy himself—in space, where it was a matter of life and death—and he knew how difficult it was to resolve a dim, distant object as anything other than a pinpoint. “All they've got is an analysis of the light reflecting off the planet's atmosphere, right?”

“Well, the air is breathable.”

“Maybe,” Conrad said. “Barely. I heard you'd die from the carbon dioxide.”

“Breathable to something, I mean. There is life there.”

“Hmm. Yeah.” That much at least was undeniable. There wouldn't be free oxygen in the atmosphere—probably not even free nitrogen—without biochemistry to replenish it.

“Fix this image in your mind,” Xmary said. “Don't ever forget. We won't always have these silly jobs. Before you know it, we'll be building a world of our own.”

Conrad's smirk was somewhat bitter. “If you believe these clowns, which I'm not convinced you should, then Planet Two is four times the mass of Earth. Its day is, what, nineteen times too long? Fix this in your mind, dear: unprotected on the surface, you'd die in a couple of hours. The planet merely soothes the Queendom's conscience; Barnard is no friendlier than Venus, or the wastes of the Kuiper Belt.”

“People live on Venus. And in the Kuiper.”

“Sure they do. We did. But we could fax ourselves to Earth anytime we needed to. Fresh air, sunshine . . . We won't have those things at Barnard. Not for a long time.”

There was a sound at the door, a scratching and thumping as if someone were nudging it with an elbow. And then, ever so faintly, the sound of voices. There was an unsealing noise, like someone hawking to spit, and then the hatch was swinging inward.

“Hello?”

“Hello?” Xmary called back.

“Are we decent in there?” The voice belonged to Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui, the former Pilinisi Sola and Pilinisi Tonga, the Prince of Tonga and of the Queendom of Sol. Now, newly elected as King of Barnard.

That hatch had been verbally sealed, but of course locks meant very little in a programmable world, where Royal Overrides could compel the obedience not only of machines but of the very substances from which they were made. At least the king had had the courtesy to knock.

“Hi, Bascal,” Xmary said. “Come on in.”

The hatch swung inward, and Bascal stepped into the room. He was wearing the same sort of uniform that Conrad and Xmary were, but his was purple and bore no insignia. He wore no crown or other signs of office, unlike his mother the Queen of Sol, who wore a ring for every civilized planet in her domain and carried, at least on formal occasions, the Scepter of Earth. But Barnard's civilization—all twenty people of it—hadn't had the time to develop such trimmings. Perhaps they never would.

Bascal's skin was the tan color of mixed ancestry, or “hybrid strength” as he liked to say: a dark Tongan mother and an olive—if brown-haired—Catalan father. Bascal was a son of the Islands, now exiled to hard vacuum, hard time, hard life among the stars.

“Hi,” he said, a bit sheepishly. “Are we interrupting?”

“Not now,” Xmary replied. “A few minutes ago, you would have been.”

“Well, that's all right then.” Bascal stepped inside, away from the hatch, and a woman trailed in behind him. Her uniform—green and black like everyone else's, though it didn't go with her bright blue skin—bore the markings of an engineer.

“You know Brenda Bohobe,” Bascal said.

Xmary looked annoyed. “She is my Chief of Stores, third engineer, and fax machine specialist, Your Majesty.”

And more. Brenda had been one of the Blue Squatters, along with Robert and Agnes and the others. Conrad and Xmary had met her at the same time Bascal did, in the midst of the Children's Revolt. The king was just being pedantic, a failing he seemed to have fallen into in the wake of his election.

“Hi, Brenda,” Conrad said.

Brenda looked back at him with an expression that was both irritated and smug. “You didn't mess the place up, did you?”

“Not that I know of, Engineer Three.” Conrad tried to say this in a way that dressed her down but didn't make him sound overly concerned about it. He was technically her superior, after all. But it was grinding, her always sniping at him like that.

“Ah,” Bascal said, his eyes lighting on the hologram. “Planet Two. Now there's a site for naive eyes, who've never yet caught glimpse of a thing undoable. Plotting its takeover, are we? Scheming its subjugation to the fist of Man? Or are we making friends, filling out a shopping list to surprise it with the gift of ourselves? That's the fist of Woman, I reckon: to love a thing into submission. Either way, my friends, I'm encouraged to see you fuffing by its light. I was going to name the place—such is my privilege, I'm told—but I figure we should wait for the formal introductions. Find out what she's like, how she treats us.”

“You need a shave,” Conrad observed. It was just an expression; what Bascal really needed was to reprogram the cells in his face to stop producing unsightly hair. Either that, or simply step through a fax machine, commanding it to give him a real beard.

“Do I? Who says?”

“What, are you growing a beard? Growing one?”

“The old-fashioned way,” Bascal agreed. “It seems more proper than just printing one, or printing myself attached to one. I'm not dressing up here, Conrad—I'm growing into a role.”

“It's a lucky thing everybody's in storage,” Conrad prodded. “You look like you're growing into a pirate again. Or a hobo.”

“Ha, ha. You slay me, sir. A king does need a beard, though, don't you think? It provides a certain sense of gravitas.”

Conrad smirked. “Even a king in exile?”

“Especially a king in exile, boyo. I have no real duties here. I command the expedition, but your darling Xmary here commands the ship. My citizens are in a state of quantum slumber, and even when they awaken, they'll be much too busy to look to me for anything more than emotional support. Unlike my parents, I really am a figurehead. I rule myself and nothing more.”

Xmary smiled, without much warmth. “It takes more than a beard, Your Majesty.”

Bascal's answering smile was equally polite. “I never said otherwise, Captain. It's a grave responsibility, to look good doing nothing. Eternally, no less, for we shall never die! But give me time and I'll do nothing better than anyone has ever done it. I'll be the King of Nothing, and Nothing will bow down before me in admiration.”

Xmary laughed at that, though she clearly tried not to. She and Bascal had had a fling once which had ended bitterly, and as far as Conrad could tell, that sort of thing never really healed over.

“Don't you have a ship to steer?” the king asked gently. “I saw the Earth outside my window. These are treacherous shores, awash in paint chips and spalled flecks of wellstone. The detritus of civilization: bullets, every one.”

“Robert has the con, Sire, and my complete confidence.”

“Ah, good for him. Though this ramrod of a ship may be thin for his tastes, as well as freakishly light.”

“Still,” Brenda said, “it's a safe feeling, knowing he's up there.”

Instead of Xmary, yeah. Conrad opened his mouth to dress Brenda down more firmly—

But if there was one thing the King of Barnard knew, it was how to head off an unpleasant conversation before it got too far along. He turned to the window and spread his arms. “Where is it? The Earth? The moon? We came up here to see them, to revel in their glow.”

“You're a few minutes late,” Conrad said. “If you like, I can rewind it for you. Or change the magnification or something.”

But Bascal just waved the suggestion away with a frown that was partly genuine. “No, no. It wouldn't be the same. I can see the Earth in playback anytime I want, right?”

“But not the real thing, maybe never again,” Brenda said sourly. Or maybe that was just her normal voice; it was hard to tell the difference.

“Well,” Conrad said, in his best official, first-mate tone, “perhaps we'd best surrender the room.” He turned to Xmary. “Shall we finish our walk?”

“Sure.”

When they were outside, sealing the hatch behind them, Conrad muttered to her, “Those two are spending a lot of time together. I never see him anymore without her attached at the hip. Are they an item? Have they been?”

“For a while now,” Xmary said. “You know, for a first officer in charge of crew issues, you're not very observant. You might want to work on that.”

“Well, I'm slow, but I get there eventually.” He thought for a moment before adding, “Do we need a title for her? Something like Philander or Sackmate, but for women? You know, to denote her formal status as consort to the king?”

“How about Shrew?” Xmary suggested sweetly, plopping herself on the handrail and sliding down out of sight.