Bascal grimaced. “My friend, it is much harder than you can possibly imagine. As bad as you think it is, multiply that by ten. Multiply it by a hundred, and you still have no idea. Maybe I'm just going bananas here, but I'll let a doctor make that determination once we've arrived. Well, we don't have any doctors, but I can let a psych program or medical officer interview me and transmit the results back to Earth for confirmation. Then I can pick any archive copy of myself along the way. I can choose my optimal self, from a library of stored snapshots. The Catalog of Bascal Edward. How many people have that privilege, without also excising decades of critical memory? Not many, my friend. Not many at all. But in the meantime, yes, it's difficult.”
He paused for a minute and then added, with pathetic hopefulness, “I'd be honored if you'd join me for lunch.”
Now Conrad did sigh, because he'd eaten two meals in the past two hours, and did not feel like eating a third. Did not feel like even watching someone eat another meal. He said, “I'm not really sleeping in here, you know. No time is passing at all. I almost wish it were.”
Bascal blinked. “You've already eaten?”
“Twice.”
“Oh. I didn't realize. Seriously, though. Would it kill you to spend the day with me? Spend a couple of days. Maybe you can help Robert with the navigation.”
“Robert is awake?”
Bascal nodded. “Brenda, too. We had Xmary last month as well, but that was just for a couple of hours. Command decisions; I'm sure you know how that goes.”
And Conrad felt a stab of anxiety at that remark, not liking the implications. “How long has Xmary spent out of storage? Altogether, I mean.”
“Oh, I don't know. Six months more than you? Maybe a year. I'm not sure, Conrad. Why, are you worried?” It was the king's turn to smirk. He singsonged, “Everybody's getting older but you, Conrad! You're the impatient one, hustling along to journey's end without stopping to smell the rosewater. You'll be a boy when we get there, and the rest of us will have some seasoning on us. Unless, you understand, you spend some time outside the memory core.”
And this at least was a relief, because Bascal really hadn't changed all that much. Not in his interaction with Conrad, anyway, which had always been light and humorous, yet vaguely conspiratorial, vaguely coercive.
“That's quite a sophisticated twisting of my arm, Your Highness. This ‘seasoning' has done wonders for you, I can see.”
“So you'll stay, then?” The plaintive tone had left Bascal's voice. “I'll make it a request rather than a decree, since you and I are not really friends at the moment. My boy, I've seen you for two hours out of the last sixty years. Don't presume too much, all right? I am your king, and you're some snot-nosed kid I used to know.” Then he paused, touching his chin. “Well, that's not quite fair. You're with me in spirit a lot of the time, even if you're not aware of it yourself. But anyway, yes, I'd enjoy the chance to synch up with you again. I'll bet even Brenda would enjoy your company.”
Sourly: “Doubtful. How long has she been out?”
Bascal laughed. “Not as long as myself; don't worry. Altogether she's had about six years of subjective time, spread out over the voyage. One year for every ten of mine? That sounds about right.”
“Thaw her out when you need her, eh? Is it three days a month? Five weeks a year?”
“Whoa, be careful,” the king said seriously. “Don't talk like that around her. She's older and wiser, too, but she's still sensitive, and you always had a habit of tweaking her. Just don't, okay? Or the next time you step out of that fax, you might have fifty-seven arms and no mouth. I'm only half joking. A fuffing Hindu god is what you'll look like.”
After a moment's silence, Conrad suggested, “Why don't we go to the observation deck? I'd like to see Barnard.”
“Well, we'll need to put a realtime window on the ceiling for that. Obviously, Barnard is dead ahead, so you can't just look out through the side of the hull and see it, or up through eleven decks. Even if we turn the sail and bulkheads transparent—which would bleed all our heat into space, by the way—the ertial shield's lensing effects are highly nonlinear. Might as well be looking up through the surface of a lake. There is a nose compartment just above the water tanks, I guess, where you can get a blurry sort of view with your own two eyes. I haven't been there in years, and I wouldn't advise going up without a radiation suit. Every particle in free space hits that nose like a cosmic ray. Kinetic energy rises with the square of velocity, so at .1 C even a helium atom can rip up your genome a bit.”
“Yeah, I know all that,” Conrad said. He knew some of it, anyway. “Can we just print some radiation suits and go? I would like to see it with my own two eyes. How's the sail holding up, by the way? We had talked about maybe furling it for the journey.”
“I know, but that didn't work out. It was never a good idea, because what were we supposed to use for forward shielding? Nobody likes eroding the sail on interstellar grit, but it sure beats eroding the forward hull of the ship. We just bleed some power off the reactor to bathe the fabric in infrared, keeping the nanobes warm, and they can repair a typical hit within a few days. Which is about how long we've got between punctures these days, so they mostly stay ahead of the damage. It still adds up, decade by decade, but the thing's not going to fall apart anytime soon. Not in the time frame we're concerned about.” He touched the wall. “Brenda, hi, it's Bascal. I've got Conrad Mursk here with me. Remember him? Our first mate? How'd you like to meet us in the forward blister? He wants to see the stars with his own two eyes.”
“Hmm,” came the sleepy reply, after a few seconds' delay. “Hi there, sweetie. I'll go get a suit.”
“Get three, would you?”
“Sure.”
The view was interesting, if a little disappointing. Ophiuchus was not one of the clearer constellations. Although the sun passed through it once per year as seen from the surface of Earth, the Babylonians had left it out of their zodiac, relegating it to a sort of eternal cultural limbo. It might've been their tenth month, between November's Scorpio and December's Sagittarius, but it just wasn't that dramatic a picture. The “Snake Holder” didn't correspond to any of the great myths, and the stars which formed the image were not much brighter than the other ones around them. This was especially true when you got outside the Earth's atmosphere.
Still, Conrad had become well familiar with the image during training, and could pick it out now against the background stars. And Barnard, as advertised, was visible: an orange dot just off the hero's right shoulder. It was not the brightest star in the heavens—not yet, not by a long shot—but it was the brightest star in the constellation: a definite interloper, changing the picture to a more humanlike from by appearing in a patch where the Queendom's more distant view showed only empty space.
“There it is,” Bascal said, attempting a shrug in his space suit.
Brenda had gone all-out with these: Fall-era battle armor with a centimeter wellcloth all the way around, extra rigidizable padding at the shoulders and knees, boots like shipping containers, and a high, clear dome above the head, halfway between a Roman arch and a gothic one in shape. It was without a doubt the bulkiest space suit Conrad had ever worn, and while there was room for the three of them up here, it was a tight fit. Conrad usually felt claustrophobic in a space suit anyway, even tumbling free in the empty vacuum, and having three other space suits jammed up against him, head-to-head in a kind of flower or teepee shape, did not improve things.
Worse, even the open space above the ceiling dome felt distant and contained. The view through the ertial shield really did look like he was peering through a lake: the stars were clearly visible, but they rippled, they shimmered, they broke apart into tiny rings of rainbow light. And there was a faint glow as well, a bluish haze, which Bascal said was Cerenkov radiation: the scream of particles exiting the hypercollapsite and slowing to the classical speed of light.