Saturn Run

26.

Time passed—for most of the people on the ship, it was business as usual. Although there was a growing time lag for radio-wave contact between the ship and the earth, it wasn’t noticeable except in direct conversations. Professors who lectured continued to lecture; they might then have to wait for some minutes for blocks of questions from the audiences, and the audiences would have to wait a similar number of minutes for a block of answers, but they adapted to the delay.

As Clover said, “I can finish a lecture, walk down the hall, take a leak, and get back in time to answer the questions. Can’t do that when you’re there in person.”

Sandy spent a lot of time in the shop, designing and printing a five-string bass guitar for Crow. There’d been carbon-composite guitars for most of a century, and though wood-bigots still ruled, most objective measures suggested that properly designed and printed carbon instruments now exceeded their wooden counterparts in the various parameters of tonality.

“Properly designed” being the stumbling point: nobody knew what that meant, just as nobody knew what “art” meant.

And Martinez and Sandy did not see precisely eye to eye on the matter: although the same pitches were involved, Martinez favored more of a country whack sound, while Sandy favored more of a RhythmTech boom.

Either sound could be simulated with software, of course, but sound-bigots still insisted that amplified native-wood resonance was clearly distinguishable from electronic sound. Both Martinez and Sandy subscribed to that view, although numerous blind tests had proven that even professional musicians couldn’t tell the difference. But, carbon composites would have to do.

“Hey.”

Sandy turned and found Becca standing behind him, dressed in her usual jeans and T-shirt. “Haven’t started printing it yet?” she asked.

“Not yet. Still tweaking the sound, making some adjustments in shape.”

“You know, with a perfect sound system, you guys probably couldn’t tell the difference between the native resonance…”

“Yes, we could.”

“…and constructed sound, and after you finish running it through the leads and stompboxes and then through the preamp and power amp and out through a couple of speakers and then bounce it around the Commons… you’re lucky you can even tell it’s a guitar.”

“Shut up.”

After a moment of silence, she said, “So, not to abruptly change the subject, will you be sleeping with Fiorella tonight?”

That stopped him: “Jesus, where did that come from?”

She leaned against the printer bench and grinned at him. “From rumor central. And it’s all over the ship.”

Rumor central was a guy named Larry Wirt, who, in addition to being an excellent cook, knew more about who was doing what to whom than anyone else on the ship. And he talked about it. Incessantly.

“Ah, he saw Cassie and me talking down by Cassie’s cabin… he’s just making up bullshit.”

“Don’t wanna see my boy get hurt. That woman is a snake.”

“Becca, I’m just thinking about guitars. That’s it. Fiorella is a good-looking woman who doesn’t do a lot for me.” Sandy paused to think. Actually, Fiorella did do a lot for him, but then… This had to be handled carefully. “We started out hating each other and have improved that to active dislike.”

“Ah, well. Say, don’t basses have four strings?” She waved at the screen on Sandy’s slate. “Yours seems to have five.”

“Becca… Look, basses have as many as seven strings….”

The following lecture on bass guitars was a cover, designed to conceal a temptation to giggle. Sandy hadn’t actually giggled since Harvard, but now…

Earlier that day, John Clover had collected Wirt, supposedly to talk about a menu change for their joint cooking class, and had skillfully guided him past Sandy and Fiorella, who’d been waiting for them.

When Clover and Wirt appeared, Fiorella had her back to the corridor wall, while Sandy’s hand was planted on the wall next to her head, their faces barely half a meter apart. Or, as Wirt put it later, in the cafeteria line, “He was practically drooling on her perky little breasts. Wait, did I say little? Anyway, she liked it.”

That posture, that image, went viral. According to Clover, who talked to them later, eighteen thousand dollars had gone into what had become known as the Hump Pool: “We’re at a hundred and forty-eight thousand and counting,” Clover said, gloating.

“Gloating is unbecoming in a man of your stature,” Fiorella said.

“If you’ll excuse the language, my asshole is unbecoming of a man of my stature, but I got one anyway,” Clover said. “Honest to God, one more day like this and we’ll be at two hundred thousand. A month, if we manage it just right, we’ll be at half a mil, and from there on out… snowball heaven.”

After finishing the short lecture on bass guitars, Sandy asked, “You play an instrument?”

“I started playing a violin when I was five,” Becca said. “My parents made me do it, for the discipline. I quit when I was ten. I hated it. I still hate it. I can’t even stand to listen to violin music—and I mean classical, bluegrass, whatever.”

“Ah, too bad,” Sandy said. “But if you already know the theory, you could pick up something else, pretty quick.”

“Nah. The fact is, I don’t have music in my head,” Becca said. “If you don’t have music in your head, you can’t really play—all you can do is reproduce what’s on the page. No fun in that.”

“Mmmm. So what do you have in your head?”

“Structures, mostly,” Becca said. “Shapes. Next life, maybe I’ll be an architect. I’ve got a whole town in there, that I put together building by building, and block by block. I can lie in bed and close my eyes, and walk through it. Move stores around, change apartment layouts, streets, you know… shuffle the whole deck.”

“How big is the town?”

“About five thousand right now, but it’s growing. I think I might get it to thirty thousand, someday, but that’d about be my intellectual limit…. Why are you pushing that edge out?” She was looking over his shoulder at the schematic on the screen.

“Because Crow’s thin,” Sandy said. “A heavy guy, I’d cut some off the basic pattern—you need the guitar to snuggle up to you, when you’re standing up.” She nodded, and Sandy pushed the edge out a bit more.

“Where are the frets?”

“No frets. He started by playing the upright bass,” Sandy said.

“Huh. Who woulda thunk.”

“What are you doing down here, anyway?” Sandy asked.

She shrugged. “Looking for something to do, I guess. I’m about burned out on pushing bytes… and I thought I might borrow one of the smaller printers and poop out a Go board and some stones.”

“Yeah? I tried playing that, back in school,” Sandy said. “The chess guys were such jerks about it that I gave up on chess and tried Go. It’s like playing chess in a heavy fog… sort of.”

“If you help me poop out my board, I’ll teach you how to play,” Becca said. “In a couple of months, you could fake being an intellectual.”

“Yeah…” He laughed. “I can do that now. Set up the Go board and stare at it. Chuckle every once in a while. What more do you need?”

“Well, you need the board…”

“All right. You give me secret Go lessons, we’ll print up a board and the stones. Then when I look like I might know what I’m doing, we’ll go play in the Commons where we can impress people.”

“Deal.”

They chatted for a couple of minutes, then Becca wandered away and Sandy went back to his schematic. After a moment, he smiled, just for himself.