“Oh.” Bascal looked as though the light had gone out of his sails. “Well. That's all right then.”
The two of them looked at each other for a long moment. “You want to have lunch?” Bascal asked finally.
As it happened, Conrad had eaten dinner only thirty subjective minutes ago—his last waking act. He wasn't hungry, and he wasn't bored or lonely. In point of fact, he was very eager to get to the next mission milestone, and from there to Barnard itself. He'd spent enough time on this ship already! But forty years? That was a long, long time to be alone, without ever once having lunch with your best friend. Bascal had inflicted the fate on himself, of course, and it was crazy—it was crazy—to go and do a thing like that. But the king had his reasons, weird as they were, and the desperation in his eyes was unmistakable now.
“Sure,” Conrad said, and watched Bascal's face relax.
The next time Conrad stepped out of the fax, he saw exactly the same thing. Well, not exactly the same; Bascal looked fresh, for one thing. And the holograms were different: an underwater theme of translucent reefs and fish, with the illusion of depth and a hint of surface light somewhere up around the bridge.
“You've got a fresh body this time,” Conrad said encouragingly.
“Newly printed,” Bascal agreed.
“And how long did you let yourself go before that?” Conrad accused. “Were you blind? Arthritic? Was your mind playing tricks on you?”
“Maybe a little,” Bascal said with a dismissive wave of his hand. He looked impatient.
“You know, we really should modify those fax filters. There's no reason you should become decrepit like that, just because you haven't faxed in a while. Why should our bodies age? Why should the radiation damage accumulate instead of being repaired? Or bouncing off?”
“I don't know,” Bascal said, pausing to think about it. “That's a good question. I'll add it to my list of things to do.” And he reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a little wellstone sketchplate, and said to it, “Item: modify fax filters for aggressive immorbidity and repair.” Then he looked at Conrad and nodded smugly.
On a hunch, Conrad asked, “Bas, how many items are on your list?”
Bascal glanced down at the sketchplate. “38,450. Or rather, 38,451, thanks to you.”
Wow. Conrad's own lists rarely exceeded ten items, and the longest of his life had been under thirty. “That's a lot of items.”
“I suppose so. I suppose it is. How are you, Conrad?”
Quietly annoyed, Conrad answered, “I'm exactly the same as the last time you saw me. It was, like, five seconds ago. But you're older and wiser and weirder, right? You've got another master's degree.”
“Four, actually. Atmospheric dynamics, planetology, stellar plasma dynamics, and biochemistry. Truthfully I'm running out of things to major in. Soon I may have to start accumulating doctorates.”
Little gods. Knowing he didn't really want to know, he asked, “What year is it?”
Bascal counted on his fingers, in that weirdly fast way his father had taught him. “Let's see. Four, eight, twelve, sixteen . . . We're sixty years into the voyage, so it's Q353, 3.5 centuries since my dear mother's coronation. Perhaps we Barnardeans should mark our dates from my own ascension, though, or from our departure, which conveniently occurred on the same date. By that calendar, it's year 61. Sadly, our voyage has been quite uneventful, except that our positional uncertainty has grown outrageously. Four hundred AU and climbing. Astrogation is having fits about it.
“The good news is that Barnard, tiny speck that it is, is finally visible to the naked eye. You have to squint, but you really can make it out. A little red dot, just off the shoulder of Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer. As we draw closer to it, those errors should start to come down again. That metal-poor piece-of-shit star, also known as Gliese 699 from the Dim Star Catalog, has only four ten-thousandths the luminosity of Sol, and seventeen percent of its mass. It's practically a sila'a, like the pocket stars we used to have in the Kuiper Belt. Remember those, Conrad? Remember hacking that one by voice to get a launch beam out of it? That was fun. Anyway, Barnard is an old man—already twenty percent older than Sol—but he'll outlive her by forty billion years, maybe more.”
“Okay, thanks for the lesson. So why did you wake me up this time?”
“It's good news, actually,” Bascal said quickly. “It's the surface gravity. We were worried about the planet's high mass, right? Four times the mass of Earth. But the Queendom astronomers have been studying its infrared profile, and they figure it's got about two and one-quarter times the diameter of Earth, as well. That means the gravity is around .8-gee, not bad at all. And being so close to the star, it's got some greenhouse heating which makes the atmosphere a lot thicker than you would suspect. About three bars of pressure—that's three times what you'd experience at sea level on Earth. That's not so bad, eh? Low gravity, thick air—you could practically fly. Hammer spikes into the air and climb it. What do you think about that? How does that affect your habitat designs?”
Conrad struggled not to sigh. That was good news—much better than he would have expected—and on some level he should be happy about it. But Planet Two was still very unreal to him, very hypothetical, and he resented being nagged in this way. If you could call it nagging, when it happened at twenty-year intervals and longer.
“That is good news,” he admitted. “We won't have to crawl around like slugs. It hardly seems like a punishment at all.”
The king grinned. “So? Shall we do some redesigning?”
“Well, I hate to tell you Bascal, but although I did some of the initial sketches, those habitat designs have been vetted by real architects. The structures are gravity-insensitive, or nearly so. All we do is build them and move in. Sorry.”
This news seemed to grind Bascal. “I thought we were on our own here, liberated from the long and overprotective arm of parental love. We should be so lucky, eh? They'll be looking over our shoulders till the day we die. Which is never.”
Conrad felt a smirk coming on. “Well, you never know. We might get lucky and meet death somewhere along the way.”
Bascal glared at him. “Yeah? Be careful what you wish for.”
And for no reason he could think of, Conrad felt a shiver run down his spine. Did Bascal know something, suspect something? Or was it just a general gloom that had settled over him in his time alone? He said, “There will be plenty of other work, Your Highness, without redesigning things that have already been carefully designed. There's a whole world to be built. Why don't you just pop yourself into storage, and we'll see when we get there?”
The king's smile returned, if wearily. “You make it sound so reasonable.”
“Isn't it?”
Bas waved a hand, looking conflicted. “I just don't know, Conrad. This plan seemed so sensible when I started. Now, well . . . If it was the wrong thing to do, I should just commit suicide, and refresh an older copy of myself who maybe hasn't gotten so crotchety and demented. But I can always do that later, right? Meanwhile, it makes sense for me to stay my course. Because if this is the right thing to do, and I blow my only chance to finish it properly, then that opportunity will never come again. A hundred years of wisdom is nothing to sneeze at. That's a big thing, well worth a bit of sacrifice.”
“But it's so hard,” Conrad protested.