Lost in Transmission

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.

“Ms. Bohobe,” Bascal said wearily, “you are a treasure. Shall we bury you? Design a clever map which leads to you if the clues are properly understood? Then we burn the map, you see. That'd be a nice diversion.”

Brenda sat very still, and said, “You burned the maps to me a long time ago, Your Highness.”

“Did I? Or was it you?”

“You, Sire. All you.”

“All me? I'm to assume the entire blame for your unhappiness, here on the happiest place in the universe?”

Brenda just looked at him. “Does it matter, Sire? I'll take the blame myself, then, just so long as you keep your damned hands off me. As far as you're concerned, I am buried.”

And there was a sort of patient finality in her tone that Xmary had last heard coming out of her own mouth a century ago, when she herself had broken it off with Bascal. She hadn't even been angry with him at that point—not very angry, anyway—and to a certain extent she'd felt sorry for him. But sometimes the splinter had to come out, and you couldn't worry too much how the splinter felt in the process.

Under the circumstances, she ought to have sympathized with Brenda, who had stayed with Bascal for longer than Xmary could ever have hoped to. And though Bascal had mellowed, become nicer and funnier, more rounded as a human, he was still pretty much the same guy he'd always been—the guy Xmary had broken off with all those years ago.

But whether it was a mark of judgment or simply a flaw in her own character, Xmary found she could not side with Brenda in any argument. She found herself feeling angry on the king's behalf. He was trying to be nice to Brenda, to soothe her with a mix of logic and humor, and she was having none of it. Having none of him. He'd probably done something to deserve this—not one thing but a hundred, a thousand small things. But still he did, in some greater sense, deserve better.

Oh, boy. With a shock, Xmary realized that even after all this time, she still had some intimate feelings for Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. She shuddered at the thought—what a mess that would be! And she felt immediately bad for Conrad, sitting beside her in his first mate's chair, looking uncomfortable. She and Conrad had done their share of fighting, too, and she had been her share of mean to him. He was no angel, either, or he'd never have been on this ship at all. But he was a good man, and did his best to treat her well, and she knew that on some level he feared and resented her past loves, and most especially Bascal, who after all was Conrad's own best friend.

And that was a sorry thought all by itself, because most of the time the two of them seemed to tolerate rather than actually like each other. In practice, Conrad and Bascal were always stewing about something, getting over something, looking forward with trepidation to something that was about to happen between them. But aside from Conrad, she had no close friends herself these days, unless you counted Blue Robert, so she was hardly in a position to criticize.

When Bascal next spoke, his voice was resignedly unhappy, and cold. Xmary could hear him giving up, letting go. “Not deep enough, my dear. Not nearly deep enough.”

This was Brenda's one chance to make it better, to apologize and smooth things over. Bascal paused long enough to make the chance unambiguous, but she didn't take him up on it. Sighing, he stood, straightened his collar, and headed for the stairs.

Xmary and Conrad shared a look, and then Conrad and Robert, and then Robert and Xmary. Everyone was looking at everyone, except Brenda, who looked down at the ray-streaked wellstone of the deck until a seemly interval had gone by and she could, with dignity, slip away herself.

That night, and for days afterward, Xmary hardly spoke to Conrad at all—hardly dared to—but touched and hugged him every chance she got. She met his gaze; she smiled warmly. She clung. If he was not her flotation device, her air supply, her anchor against the winds of fortune, he was something not far removed from that. Something vital.

And so she asked herself: Will I stay with him when we've unpacked and debarked? For a thousand years? Ten thousand, a million? I could live without him. I have lived without him, and the odds are virtually certain, in an infinite universe, that I will again. But God help me, I can't imagine it.

To the best of her knowledge, Bascal and Brenda were never intimate again, and when Xmary asked him about it, years later, all he said was, “Dear girl, human beings weren't meant to love forever. Indeed, I fear sometimes that we weren't meant to love at all.”