“No!”
“Then you're pretty much stuck here, right? Ho, just take him.”
“With pleasure, sir.” Ho grabbed Louis' arm and roughly hauled him toward the ladder.
“Gently, Security,” Conrad warned. He knew Ho from their pirate days, and trusted him about as well as he trusted a starving dog. Security was a real interesting job choice for him, the result not of a vote but of a writ issued by King Bascal shortly after his coronation. “Ho likes responsibility,” Bascal had said at the time. “It's good for him, and that's good for us. You want him idle instead? You want him tuning the engines?”
But as Ho and Louis ascended the ladder together—not stopping at the nearest fax machine but continuing all the way to the top—Conrad heard the echoes of Louis' yelping and squawking for a long time, and knew that Ho would gladly break an arm or two if the opportunity arose.
“Jesus Christ and all the little gods,” he said to Robert. “I need to get my ass into storage pretty quick here. Maybe I should punch you myself.”
Chapter five.
Through every waking moment
Time? Any physicist will tell you it's just another dimension, not so different from space, and its relentless forward movement is an illusion imposed by conscious minds rather than an inherent property of the universe itself. Remove consciousness and time does not pass, does not have any dynamic properties at all. It simply is.
The first thing Conrad saw when he stepped out of the fax machine was Bascal's face. Or something like it, anyway. The king looked different: at once chubbier and more gaunt, his skin looser. There were even strands of gray in his hair, and in his beard. But his eyes were the thing that really stood out. They had a milky, unfocused look to them.
“Bascal?”
The careworn face lit up with a smile. “Ah, Conrad. So glad to hear your voice again. It has been . . . too long.”
Conrad felt a cold shiver. “What year is it?”
“Well, let's see.” Bascal's smile collapsed into a frown of concentration. “We did the first correction burn at one year, and the second burn at ten years, and that was thirty years ago. So we're forty years into the journey. Yeah, forty.”
“And nobody thought to wake me before now?” Conrad didn't know whether to feel relieved or insulted.
“Yes, well, we would have,” Bascal said. “You're due next in the rotation, I believe. Xmary will sit out the next burn, but that's not for a while yet. That's not why I brought you out.”
Well, that sounded encouraging. Conrad cast a look around him, scanning for signs of trouble. They were at the forward inventory, on deck fourteen, twelve levels aft of the bridge. It was all done up in projective holograms: a tropical theme of sand and palm trees, elephant grass and vanilla. And right away, Conrad noticed flaws in the imagery, indicating streaks of dead material in the wellstone of the walls and ceiling. But not too much—the damage was no worse than he'd expect after forty years of cosmic wear and tear—and other than that, there was nothing obviously amiss.
“What's going on?” he asked.
Bascal stepped away from the fax's print plate, gesturing for Conrad to follow. “Our colonization plans need . . . revising. Some surprises have trickled along in the news from Earth, and . . . Well, the truth of it is that I was lonely. You're my best friend, and I don't feel like doing this without you. All right?”
Conrad felt his brow furrowing. “How long have you been out here, Bas? You're supposed to be in storage.”
Bascal smiled sheepishly, his face showing off deep creases. “There is a lot to do, you know. A lot to study. I'm to be the king of an entire planet, an entire solar system. The first truly new civilization since the conquest of the Americas. I thought I'd, you know, pack in some wisdom along the way. I've got six master's degrees now, do you know that? I was going to try for a Ph.D., but, well, it seemed wrong to specialize in any one field. That's not really my place, I think.”
Conrad was both awestruck and horrified. “You mean you've been bumping around the ship all by yourself, for forty years? Some kind of hermit? So when we get to Barnard, we'll all still be kids, but you'll be a pleasantly seasoned man. A grown-up, here to lead us in the ways of the world. Is that it?”
“Yeah, basically.” The king did not seem particularly embarrassed by this admission. “But I realized I can't do it alone. I need help; I need friends. It's a powerful insight! So you see, in spite of the doubts written all over your face, there is a bit of wisdom accumulating.”
Conrad studied his friend's face and body. “How long has it been since you faxed a fresh body? You look terrible. Your eyes, especially. Can you even see me?”
Bascal frowned, looking him up and down. “You know, I thought you looked a little . . . dim. I put it down to all the reading I've been doing. But I think you're right—there's something rather wrong with me.”
“It's the cosmic rays,” Conrad said. “They're eroding your retinas and your corneas, and God knows what else. Stop here. Don't leave this room. I'm not going anywhere with you until you step through that print plate.”
The king paused, then nodded. “Very well. It's your advice I seek, and this sounds like strong counsel. One gets . . . neglectful. My father lived alone for decades, on a planette out in the Oort Cloud, but it occurs to me, talking to you now, that I've been a hermit for longer than he. The people finally dragged him back and made him their king. That was more than Mother could ever do. But there is no one to drag me anywhere, and nowhere to be dragged to, so a hermit I remain.”
Though he hated to bring it up, Conrad asked, “No one? Not even Brenda?”
“Oh, I've seen her,” Bascal said distractedly. “We have our little flings every now and then. Although I suppose it has been a while. Funny, that I brought you out instead of her. But we get different things from different people, don't we?”
“Aye, Your Highness,” Conrad said with some amusement, although there was something creepy about this situation.
Bascal stepped up to the print plate and murmured, “Repair and reprint, please.” Then stepped through. It was like watching someone brush through a slightly sparkly gray-black curtain, or sink into a pool of liquid paint. The print plate didn't move, didn't part, didn't resist. It simply accepted Bascal's body, whisking it apart into component atoms. And then, a moment after Bascal's back had vanished into it, his front reemerged, stepping clear and bringing the rest of his body along behind it. He blinked, suddenly young and fit again, sharp of mind and fleet of foot.
“Oh. Wow. That feels better.”
“I'll bet,” Conrad said. “You should consider, you know, making it part of your regular schedule.”
Bascal's youthful face broke into a smirk. “Ah, you kids, you think you know everything.”
Conrad sneered at the joke and then said, more seriously, “So what is this bad news from Earth?”
“Ah. Yes. Trouble with the atmosphere, I'm afraid. More than a hint of chlorine in it. Not nearly as much as the oxygen, thank God, but more than enough to be toxic. There is also sulfur dioxide, which gives us some clue about the biological processes that must be involved. I have a master's degree in the subject, by the way.”
Conrad shrugged. He'd never expected the atmosphere to be breathable, anyway. He'd never expected the planet to be habitable at all. “I wouldn't worry, Bascal. Most of the settlement designs are already provisioned for doming over. Chlorine is pretty corrosive, I seem to recall, but if we use chlorinated plastics in the dome material, or even probably just standard semiconductors—basically wellstone in the off state—I doubt that will matter. It's more an inconvenience than anything else—some extra filtration when we pump in fresh air. It's really not that big a deal.”