First mate or no, he was sick of this ship, and the sooner he could get off it and into some fresh (if perilous) environment, the better.
Preparations for the third and final correction burn were extensive—almost in line with the grand perihelion burn itself. And Conrad found himself spending a quarter of his time, and then a third, and then half, outside the fax. Xmary did the same, and with their work to distract them, the time they spent together was pleasanter than it had been in the doldrums. Less strained, less formal. More fun. Still, there was an uneasy edge to it. One time when he greeted her stepping out of the fax, she looked at him and said, “You again.”
She'd meant it as a joke—or so he told himself—but like most jokes it had a sting of truth to it, and that particular shift he had stayed out of her way as much as possible, not caring to test his luck any farther. On the subject of women most men were fools in any era, but Conrad Mursk at least had the wisdom to fold his hand when he saw no hope of winning. As a result, things were better the next time.
And then one day, quite suddenly, they were juking again. Not once or twice a month, but four times in a single day, and three the next, and seven in the day after that as they entered the debris fields of Barnard's upper Oort cloud. This was a genuine milestone—a huge milestone—because Barnard's Oort cloud was only a tenth the size of Sol's. To run into it, to juke around and through it, you had to be pretty damn close to the star.
It was inconvenient, the constant fear of battering from floors and railings and bulkheads suddenly jerking this way or that at full gravity, but even so the crew—Conrad included—cheered every time it happened. They were getting close. It was really happening.
It was in the middle of this, on a bridge running at three-quarters staff—a bridge full of eyes and ears and gossiping mouths—that Brenda and Bascal had their final argument.
Xmary didn't know what to think when Bascal and Brenda started fighting. She had done her share of fighting with both of them: Bascal because she used to go out with him, and Brenda because she was a generally unpleasant person with a habitual disrespect for authority. And certainly, those two had fought before, usually over minor things that an outside observer would have a hard time understanding, much less agreeing with. But the king's fights with Brenda were normally short and hot and superficial, and when Xmary saw it happen—which wasn't often—she figured the two of them pretty well deserved each other.
But right from the start there was something different about this particular fight. It was quieter, tighter, tenser.
“Don't touch me,” Brenda said, snatching her hand away. They were sitting side by side, in the special guest chairs that had become a more or less permanent fixture of the bridge.
“What have you got, a bee up your dress?” Bascal said, though Brenda, like everyone else on the bridge, wore a standard uniform. Xmary was ambivalent about this; the uniforms looked spiffy and gave everyone a sense of importance, and of the solemn nature of their duties. That was good. But the kids had all been wearing them forever, with no civilian population to compare themselves against. As symbols the uniforms had become virtually invisible, and when the colors and insignia faded into the background, losing all cultural significance, what further purpose did they serve? She had thought, more than once, of changing them all to a bright lime green or screaming pink—something the optic nerve simply couldn't ignore. But she guessed that would simply grind people without solving the underlying problem. Bascal wore his own uniform, too: his purple one. The insignia and cut were a little bit different, but this, too, was hard to notice anymore. Unless you really stopped to look at it, as she was doing now.
“I just don't want to be touched,” Brenda said.
The king chuckled mirthlessly at that. “Well there's a surprise. You never want to be touched. Touching grinds you, throws sand in the gears of your otherwise charming nature. I should know better than to try, but hope, as they say, springs eternal.”
“Write a poem about it,” Brenda shot back. And here was a low blow, because everyone knew Bascal had been trying for years to come up with a decent poem—about Brenda, about anything—but had found himself utterly blocked. This was not surprising, considering he'd spent almost a hundred years cooped up in the same fifty-four levels, without a walk in the sun or a cool, shady rest beneath a coconut tree. Oh sure, the wellstone could be made to produce sunlight, even a fair simulacrum of sky, and the texture of a palm tree or a summer breeze could be imitated. But in practice, these things were annoyingly difficult to do, and surprisingly unworth the effort when you bothered. You couldn't spend all your time sulking in the dark, obviously, but you did wind up spending a good deal of it that way.
“Ms. Bohobe,” Bascal said wearily, “you are a treasure. Shall we bury you? Design a clever map which leads to you if the clues are properly understood? Then we burn the map, you see. That'd be a nice diversion.”
Brenda sat very still, and said, “You burned the maps to me a long time ago, Your Highness.”
“Did I? Or was it you?”
“You, Sire. All you.”
“All me? I'm to assume the entire blame for your unhappiness, here on the happiest place in the universe?”
Brenda just looked at him. “Does it matter, Sire? I'll take the blame myself, then, just so long as you keep your damned hands off me. As far as you're concerned, I am buried.”
And there was a sort of patient finality in her tone that Xmary had last heard coming out of her own mouth a century ago, when she herself had broken it off with Bascal. She hadn't even been angry with him at that point—not very angry, anyway—and to a certain extent she'd felt sorry for him. But sometimes the splinter had to come out, and you couldn't worry too much how the splinter felt in the process.
Under the circumstances, she ought to have sympathized with Brenda, who had stayed with Bascal for longer than Xmary could ever have hoped to. And though Bascal had mellowed, become nicer and funnier, more rounded as a human, he was still pretty much the same guy he'd always been—the guy Xmary had broken off with all those years ago.
But whether it was a mark of judgment or simply a flaw in her own character, Xmary found she could not side with Brenda in any argument. She found herself feeling angry on the king's behalf. He was trying to be nice to Brenda, to soothe her with a mix of logic and humor, and she was having none of it. Having none of him. He'd probably done something to deserve this—not one thing but a hundred, a thousand small things. But still he did, in some greater sense, deserve better.
Oh, boy. With a shock, Xmary realized that even after all this time, she still had some intimate feelings for Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. She shuddered at the thought—what a mess that would be! And she felt immediately bad for Conrad, sitting beside her in his first mate's chair, looking uncomfortable. She and Conrad had done their share of fighting, too, and she had been her share of mean to him. He was no angel, either, or he'd never have been on this ship at all. But he was a good man, and did his best to treat her well, and she knew that on some level he feared and resented her past loves, and most especially Bascal, who after all was Conrad's own best friend.