Meanwhile, news continued to trickle in from Earth. It was nothing like the Nescog feeds they'd grown used to as children, but the Queendom had thoughtfully erected an array of hundred-megawatt transmitters, so the bandwidth of their transmissions was not tiny by any means. Newhope was receiving eight hundred separate channels of full sensorium, including news, entertainments, continuous library feeds, and of course personal message traffic, which had taken on a wistful tone as the speed-of-light turnaround time edged past the decade mark.
When Conrad got a message from his parents, it was as though he'd found it in an attic somewhere, dusty and long forgotten.
Hello, lad. Dad here. Hope you've not forgotten us in your travels. I thought you'd like to know we repaved the Kerry bypass this year, with genuine cobblestone on top of a gravel and asphalt base. She's a beautiful road, Conrad, and I wish you could drive her with me. Mother sends her love. You know, it occurs to me that you've been gone from us now for nearly three times as long as you were with us to begin with. Funny, that we should miss you so much, when the time we spent raising you—badly I might add—is such a tiny fraction of our lives. That's immorbidity for you. We were born expecting to die—you know that—and we never did really adjust to the change. It's easier for you, I think. At any rate, you've many exciting adventures ahead of you, lad, and I wish you all the best.
Unfortunately, Newhope's own transmitters were nowhere near as powerful, their return bandwidth nowhere near as broad. Conrad's reply, which took seven hundred watt-hours out of his personal energy budget, was, “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. Not much going on here yet. All my love, Conrad.”
Of course, he was in storage for most of the time anyway, so he got five or six long letters for every terse reply he sent back. It seemed to him that Donald and Maybel Mursk, with lives of their own in a community far older than the Queendom of Sol, must surely be forgetting about him by now. His face growing dim in their memories, his voice and mannerisms increasingly remote, historical, irrelevant. The thought was at once sad and liberating.
Meanwhile, the Queendom astronomers continued to refine their predictions about the nature of Planet Two, and of the other, less habitable planets in Barnard system. For good measure they sent along information about other systems as well, the planets of nearby stars, toward which ten other colony ships had already been launched. Newhope was no longer the sole hope of humanity, the sole cradle of its wayward children. This thought, too, had good and bad sides for him to contemplate.
From what Conrad could see, there had been a lot of experimentation in starship technology, and most of the later ships were of wildly different design than Newhope. Higher thrust, greater terminal velocity, more spacious interiors. Newhope had even received a couple of personal messages from the crew of this or that ship, to one or another of her own sleeping passengers. Their content of course was private, and also many years out of date, having necessarily been relayed through stations in the distant Queendom. But Conrad was curious about them nevertheless. What were they saying, these other colonists?
The transit distances these other ships had to cover were all longer than six light-years, so while they were faster, they had departed decades later and had farther to travel. Some of them quite a bit farther. Except of course for the Alpha Centauri ship, The QSS Tuscany, which had been among the last to be launched, owing to the lack of suitable planets and moons in the chaotic resonances of that triple-star system. But asteroids and Kuiper belts made a decent home too, for the right sort of people, and eventually the Queendom had accumulated ten thousand volunteers willing to make a go of it. If all went as planned, they would be the Queendom's second colony.
Strangely, unlike the Newhope crew and passengers, the other ships carried mostly volunteers. The Children's Revolt was long over and never repeated, and the Queendom did not seem much inclined to exile its rank-and-file criminals. Instead, it reserved that dubious honor for children under forty, whose crimes were clearly social or political in nature, so that the population of prison transportees on the other ships held fairly reliably at fifteen to twenty percent.
The rest of the passengers were just people—children and adults alike—who admired the failed rebels, or envied their exile, or wanted either a fresh start of their own or a long, long adventure among the stars. And being volunteers, they presumably had the luxury of turning back if things didn't work out, leaving their exiled comrades behind or else dragging them back in storage, to be shipped out again to some even chancier and more distant locale.
Anyway, fortunately for Conrad's ego and the morale of Newhope's crew, their own personal colony ship had enough of a lead that it would still arrive first. Whatever else might happen, they—the Barnardeans, the architects of the Children's Revolt—would be the true pioneers, the first to win and settle another star. Tuscany would make starfall two years behind them, followed by a whole string of arrivals stretched out over the next couple of decades.
Conrad wondered about the costs involved. King Bruno had complained, more than once, that Newhope's construction alone was a strain on the Queendom's resources. How had they managed to build ten more ships, all larger and more sophisticated, in the seventy years following her departure? Maybe they couldn't afford it, but had felt nonetheless that it was one of those things that simply needed doing. Since their parents would never die and the planets weren't getting any bigger, the children of Sol did, in the end, need a place to live and a means to get there.
In this manner did Conrad while away the decades of Newhope's transit. And then, in year 89 of the Barnardean calendar, the level of shipboard activity took a sharp upward spike as Robert's position errors dropped off their high plateau and began, finally, to shrink. The star was close enough now to provide very exacting Doppler and proper motion readings, to be triangulated against the starry backdrop shifting behind it.
Postponing the third correction burn turned out to have been a wise decision on Xmary's part, because the erroneous position and velocity estimates would have pointed the ship in the wrong direction. The resulting waste would have come to several megawatt hours, or dozens of kilograms of their precious deutrelium fuel supply. Xmary had been hoarding against uncertainty, and the strategy had paid off; with more fuel now for accurate correction, and of course for the deceleration burn itself, their arrival date had moved up by six and a half weeks—welcome news to all.
Of course, Conrad had largely stopped keeping track of subjective time by then. It hardly seemed to matter. But even unaccounted for, the months and years added up. Like an office tower in a downtown district somewhere, Newhope was spacious for a quick visit and comfortable for a day's work, but much too fuffing small to be your whole world. To occupy for years on end, without ever going outside.
In his pirate days he'd spent eight weeks on a tiny fetu'ula—a sailship patched together from pieces of a ruined planette—and it had driven him to the edge of breakdown. He was older now, better able to handle it, but the situation was a lot worse. There were quiet corners to retreat to, holie displays and programmable surfaces to change the decor and the sense of scale, and even neural sensoria to provide the illusion of space and company. But illusion could only go so far when there was no relief, no hope of rescue or capture or early release. No one was waiting for them at journey's end, except their own sleeping passengers, and they could not go outside.