“It doesn't look as red as I expected,” Conrad said.
“‘Red dwarf' is a bit of a misnomer,” Bascal agreed. “I mean, the surface is still white-hot. Hotter than that, really. Main sequence stars are really ultraviolet-hot, and blue giants radiate a lot of X-rays. But the eye can be funny, can't it? Put Barnard right next to Sol and the difference would be more apparent. Anyway, that speck is where we're headed. That is where we will live out the term of our exile, or more probably, our lives, and since that term is infinite, we'd best make an effort to be happy about it. Personally, I think it's quite a pretty star.”
“You write much poetry anymore, Bas?” Conrad asked.
“Not much, no. Sadly, my artistic engine was fueled by injustices of the status quo. Now that I am the status quo and the injustices are my own, I find I have less to say, and less artfulness in the saying of it. But I do get your point: this is a sight which should inspire. I'll give it some thought.”
“King Hermit here can barely be bothered to write log entries,” Brenda said. “He is the colony's chief historian, but you'd never know it to look at his books.”
“There's not much happening,” Bascal protested. “What am I supposed to say? ‘Reactor output reduced by seventy-five watts, to account for Captain Li Weng's return to fax storage. There is one less mouth to feed.'”
Brenda laughed again, and didn't answer. In the silence, in a moment of particular strength or particular weakness—Conrad wasn't sure which—he blurted, “Brenda, Bascal tells me I antagonize you. He would know, I guess, but the truth is, I've always felt the reverse: you going out of your way to antagonize me. But either way, it's kind of stupid. I'd like it if we could get along.”
“That's interesting,” she answered seriously, and without too much of the rancor Conrad had come to expect from her. “I think you and I definitely got off on the wrong foot, back onboard Refuge all those years ago. But I was right to be suspicious of you. You did get us caught. If not for you, we'd've lived out the entire twenty-year run in secret.”
Conrad couldn't deny that. In those days, he and Bascal had ripped their way through more lives than just hers. On the other hand, it was a goddamn revolution. And a successful one, sort of. He was through feeling guilty and defensive over what they had accomplished. But had he been too hard on Brenda since that first ugly meeting? Too critical, too ready to see fault?
“We did get off on the wrong foot,” he agreed.
Bascal, perhaps sensing the conversation's potential now to veer off in a less productive direction, changed the subject. “Conrad has some suggested updates to the fax filters. I think it's a good idea, and actually I sort of wonder why we didn't do it a long time ago.”
“Is it the immorbidity extensions?” Brenda asked. “It is a good idea, yah, and everyone seems to come up with it sooner or later. But it's incredibly difficult. In the Queendom there's no need for it, because everybody faxes daily anyway. I'm sure their finest minds could come up with a fine solution, but who's going to pay them? And here on Newhope we don't have a billion geniuses to draw on. Instead, my team is five people who never finished traditional school. But I have some ideas on the subject, and the next time I have a few months free, I may press ahead with some models and calculations.”
It was interesting, Conrad thought, to hear her talking this way. She had changed since those early days, or at least let some hidden aspect of herself rise to the fore. This made him wonder, with a gut-gnawing anxiety, whether Xmary might have changed as well. For better? For worse? Any difference was unwelcome, if he hadn't been there to witness it, to share it and change along with her. Should he try to catch up? Spend six months, spend a year, spend five years out of storage, adding season to his soup? Or would that just send him off in still a different direction, increasing the distance between them? Damn it, this would be much simpler if people would stick to the plan, and simply stay in storage where they belonged. On a hundred-year coast between the stars, there was very little work that actually needed doing. Was he the only one who saw that?
“Brenda,” he asked tentatively, “can you set up some sort of trigger, to bring me out with Xmary the next time she comes out of storage? And vice versa? I think it would be good if she and I spent some time together.”
Brenda smiled, and there was a knowing, womanly quality to it. “I think something like that can be arranged, yes. That's another point which you're not the first to raise.”
Inside the helmet dome, Conrad nodded his thanks. “This all seemed simpler back in the Queendom, didn't it?”
She wiggled a little beside him, in a way that made Conrad think she was trying to shrug. “Different time, different place. Did you think we would leave all our problems behind? We left some, but you pick up new ones wherever you go.”
Conrad snorted. “Maybe we need a filter so people come out of the fax feeling happy. Adjusted, you know, feeling like they enjoy their lives.”
Brenda's laugh was polite but humorless. “If I could do that, sir, I'd be a declarant in Her Majesty's service. Well, all right. To be fair, the Queendom has toyed with that approach from time to time, but there are dozens of ethical questions wrapped up in it. Where does free will enter in? What are the limits in changing someone else's mind? Without knowing that, we'd be on dangerous ground indeed.”
“We're on dangerous ground already,” Conrad pointed out. “Though I see your point.”
She snorted. “Hell, I'd settle for just having people come out feeling rested.”
Chapter six.
As a stone is skipped across the water
Suitably chastened, Conrad did indeed spend more time out of storage over the next couple of decades. A lot of that time he spent with Xmary, and it was nice, but he learned—as Bascal and Brenda had—that they didn't want to spend too much time together in the small confines of the ship. A few weeks together, a few weeks apart, a few months in storage, and then start all over.
Their alternating supervision was kind of needed anyway, because there was a certain background level of activity required to maintain the ship—more so as the hardware aged—and a lot of that had been going on without benefit of senior officers. Which might or might not be a good thing, depending on your point of view, but it had side effects like excessive unauthorized energy allocations, raiding of the mass buffers for spur-of-the-moment projects, and peculiar forms of vandalism, such as the word EXHALE! inscribed twenty thousand times in the floor and walls and ceiling of the observation lounge.
The lettering was elegant: inlaid impervium on a brushed-platinum background. Very tasteful, even beautiful. And reprogramming the wellstone to wipe away the display was no great exercise for Conrad, who'd been programming since the age of sixteen. But it struck him as a bad sign for morale, somehow—both a symptom of poor discipline and an encouragement for worse. Only the tiny size of the crew and the brief, staccato nature of their assignments prevented it from being widely seen.