“And whose fault is that? They were conveniently distracted and constructively occupied with the virtualities until you crashed them.”
He raised a hand in front of him, palm facing her. “I know, I know,” he said. “Let’s not recriminate. As we agreed, yes?”
“Yes.”
“So the question is what’s to be done about it. I think we have to give them hope, and we have to give them constructive work. Real work and real hope.”
“Planning and designing is real work.”
“Yes, and it’s killing their spirits. The better they are, the more they yearn to put their plans into practice.”
She stopped dead on the path. Constantine took a couple of oblivious steps forward, then noticed and turned around. She glared him in the face. “Don’t open again the question of colonisation. We’re not doing it until at least we get advice from the Red Sun system.”
Constantine spread his hands. “You know you haven’t won the young people over to that. When the emergency goes to referendum they can vote it out, and vote your people off the Council, and colonise anyway.”
“They can vote all they like,” she said. “They can’t force us to invest.”
She thought she detected a flicker of amusement at this, but no note of it reached his voice. “Don’t put them to that test,” he said.
“So do you have anything to propose?” she asked. “Some real work that isn’t virtual?”
“Yes,” he said. “I propose that we let them get to work on real asteroids, but not out in the system.”
“Oh?” she said. “And where would we find these real asteroids? In the slag mountains?”
“No,” said Constantine. “In the hollow spaces of the cones.”
She knew about these asteroids, of course. It was because she had classified them in the wrong mental category that she hadn’t thought of them.
“That sounds very tempting,” she said. “I think we could sell that to the Council. On one condition.”
“Yes?”
“That it counts as colonization, with the settlers emigrating as if they were going into free space. They are, after all, leaving the habitat.”
Constantine smiled. “And therefore can’t vote? Yes, I had thought that aspect would appeal to you.”
“I can see how we benefit,” said Synchronic. “What’s in it for the crew?”
“Same as for the kids,” said Constantine. “Work. Something useful to be getting on with. Trade. Resource extraction.”
“You know,” said Synchronic, “it might be best if the suggestion were to come from the ship generation themselves, and then be acceeded to by the Council. So that it seemed less like a palliative offered by us, and more like a concession won by them.”
“I’ll take steps,” said Constantine.
The town, or miniature city, of Far Crossing had changed since Horrocks had last visited it. This time he arrived in his own hired microlight. He dragged it across the field and parked it at the edge of town, then walked in along the same street he’d walked six months before. Sternward Avenue, that was it. Its familiarity underlined how much about it had changed. It was more crowded and less busy than he remembered. The paintings and writings on the walls were no longer harmonious and decorative. Angry slogans flared in jagged letters. Rock the founders. Rock the aliens. Room to live. Space for us. Elaborate illuminations of names and obscure words. Obsessive, detailed pictures of habitats, fantastically encrusted with weapons; of the aliens, with speech bubbles enclosing improbable dialogue. Trompe 1’oeil murals of climbing plants. The loss of much of the usual electronic buzz and background chatter had shifted illustration and emphasis and communication out to the actual.
Music thudded or moaned from every shopfront and open window, or so it seemed. The air floated pheromones of frustration and molecules of narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinogens. The people in the street affected in their attire a studied casualness — space-rigger fatigues, mesh and nanofibre — or the louche, bedraggled formality of ill-matched, half-fastened outfits like those of people returning drunk from a party. Some of them, Horrocks realised with disdain, were returning drunk from parties. It was the middle of the afternoon.
He felt pinched and short of the ready. The stuff in the shops was out of his reach. Six months of seeing terrestrials stock tank and not much in the way of training fees had left him, not poor, but cost-conscious in a way he hadn’t been before. The thought of Constantine’s scheme put a bounce in his step.
The Yellow Wall held a surprise. It had changed in a different direction. Most of the tables were occupied by two or three people, but it was as quiet as a library. A lot of reading and writing was going on. Some heads were even bent over physical books: pages printed out and bound in codices. Horrocks had come across this before, as a work-around for certain access restrictions. He couldn’t see it as anything but bad for the eyesight.
Atomic sat alone near the window. She stared in front of her, fingers tapping, a neglected coffee cooling. Her hair was tied up by a complex braid of threads, her makeup colours clashed, and she wore a thin vest and long shorts. A bulky crew-surplus jacket hung on the seatback.
Her eyes blinked and refocused as he sat down. He had two fresh coffees; he pushed one across the table.
“It’s good to see you again,” he said before she could say anything, and before he had thought of what to say. Her smile surprised him, but it conveyed detached amusement more than welcome.
“I knew you’d be back,” she said. “What brings you here this time? Another message from Synchronic?”
“No, no, nothing to do with her. And no message. Just an idea.”
Eyes narrow, seen through a wisp of steam. “What kind of idea?”
“One that’s been kicked about in the crew quarters for a while,” he said. “You know I got a lot of stick for supporting the embargo, though what I did on the jury kind of offsets that.”
Atomic snorted. “Not as far as I’m concerned!”
“I know,” he said. “Anyway, we’re all hurting from the embargo. I am, for sure. By this stage we should be raking in asteroid organics, and construction consultancies and training fees. Some of us were grumbling about all this when somebody pointed out that we can get hold of massive chunks of asteroids and chondrites and cometary dirty ice and so forth, in vacuum and free fall, without going outside the ship.”
“Where?”
“In the reaction-mass tanks in the cones. They’re not exactly a reserve, but they’re a bit extra over and above what was in the cylinder. They were full at the start, and now they’re much depleted, but there’s a good bit of rock and ice still in there.”
She gave him a sceptical smile. “Oh, come on, what does that add up to — a few boulders?”
He pulled over the cold cup, dipped his finger in, and drew a triangle on the table, about ten centimetres to a side, and dropped a perpendicular from the apex. “That has the proportions about right,” he said. “The sides represent the space that’s used around the surface and rear of the cone, for living space and machinery and so on. The perpendicular contains the engine, and more living quarters and amenities. The empty spaces stand for the tank. So we’re looking at a conical volume sixty-odd kilometres across the base, less the spaces I mentioned.” He looked up. “You do the math.” He noticed her gaze go blank. “I didn’t mean literally.”
“How much rock is in there?”
He shrugged. “Millions of tons. The tanks aren’t full up. Maybe a tenth of the volume is solid, the rest vacuum — well, very thin gases. The rocks are kind of piled up against the surfaces the deceleration pressed them against — the top of the forward cone at the front, the base at the rear.”
“You’re thinking of us working on them?”