And that was a sorry thought all by itself, because most of the time the two of them seemed to tolerate rather than actually like each other. In practice, Conrad and Bascal were always stewing about something, getting over something, looking forward with trepidation to something that was about to happen between them. But aside from Conrad, she had no close friends herself these days, unless you counted Blue Robert, so she was hardly in a position to criticize.
When Bascal next spoke, his voice was resignedly unhappy, and cold. Xmary could hear him giving up, letting go. “Not deep enough, my dear. Not nearly deep enough.”
This was Brenda's one chance to make it better, to apologize and smooth things over. Bascal paused long enough to make the chance unambiguous, but she didn't take him up on it. Sighing, he stood, straightened his collar, and headed for the stairs.
Xmary and Conrad shared a look, and then Conrad and Robert, and then Robert and Xmary. Everyone was looking at everyone, except Brenda, who looked down at the ray-streaked wellstone of the deck until a seemly interval had gone by and she could, with dignity, slip away herself.
That night, and for days afterward, Xmary hardly spoke to Conrad at all—hardly dared to—but touched and hugged him every chance she got. She met his gaze; she smiled warmly. She clung. If he was not her flotation device, her air supply, her anchor against the winds of fortune, he was something not far removed from that. Something vital.
And so she asked herself: Will I stay with him when we've unpacked and debarked? For a thousand years? Ten thousand, a million? I could live without him. I have lived without him, and the odds are virtually certain, in an infinite universe, that I will again. But God help me, I can't imagine it.
To the best of her knowledge, Bascal and Brenda were never intimate again, and when Xmary asked him about it, years later, all he said was, “Dear girl, human beings weren't meant to love forever. Indeed, I fear sometimes that we weren't meant to love at all.”
Chapter seven.
Starfall
Technically speaking, the pressure of Barnard's light on the photosail had begun to slow Newhope in the year 92, when its light finally became brighter than Sol's. In practice, though, this effect was negligible until year 98, when Newhope was well inside the Oort cloud; and it was quite minor until the very end of year 100, when they were finally inside the orbit of Gatewood, the outermost gas giant, some thirty-six light-minutes from the star itself.
Of course, there were no launching lasers—or rather, braking lasers—here at Barnard, and while a number of complex schemes had been floated before their departure, involving lasers shining away from Sol, bouncing off the sail in funny ways to brake it here at Barnard, the mission planners had finally decided on the simplest of solutions: carrying lots and lots of deutrelium for a really hard deceleration burn.
So Newhope screamed into the system at .06C—eighteen thousand kps—running tail-first with the fusion motors burning at medium power, supplementing the nav lasers in their effort to vaporize any debris in their path. Flitting—in a single crew shift!—past the orbits of giants Gatewood and Van de Kamp, the nearly hospitable Planet Two and the barren rock of Planet One. Disappointingly, only the latter was in a position to be seen clearly, and that for only a fraction of a second. By this time the braking effect of the light sail was not negligible, not even minor, but then, neither was the gravitational attraction of Barnard. The two balanced each other that first shift, and then on the second shift the braking effects began to dominate, began to slow Newhope's travel measurably, though still not nearly enough. The fusion motors still provided twenty times more braking than the sail, and then as the ship approached perihelion—or peribarnardion, as Robert insisted on calling it—the deutrelium valves were opened all the way, the throttle set at maximum, and in the safe cocoon of the ertial shields, Newhope decelerated at almost two hundred gravities.
The view through filtered portholes and simulated windows was staggering. Barnard was smaller than Sol, with a weaker surface gravity, and though its temperature was lower, and its energy output a lot lower, its surface was markedly more active: a riot of flares and sunspots and coronal anomalies. The space around it was lively with proton storms, prompting Robert to remark, “Eighty percent of our hull mass is given over to radiation shielding right now, and we're still getting an unhealthy dose. Even our clippers and frigates, when we build them, will need battleship plating in this system, or the crews will be down with cancer in no time.”
“Even our orbital colonies will need to be shielded,” Bascal added. “P2's trifling magnetic field isn't much of a defense. You have to remember how close it is to the star, snuggled right up against its meager warmth, only forty-five light-seconds away. We're lucky the atmosphere is so thick, or we'd die of radiation sickness right out on the surface.”
After that, some more dramatic words were spoken and recorded for posterity, but Conrad never did remember what they were, and never heard them played back or spoken of again.
And then, with alarming swiftness, Barnard was shrinking behind them. Or ahead of them, if you wanted to think in Newhope-centric terms, for the bow of the ship would remain pointed at Barnard for the foreseeable future, until orbital capture was complete.
“Information, can we have a graph of deutrelium consumption over time?” Conrad asked.
“Deutrelium consumption is constant,” Agnes protested.
Indeed, as Money Izolo had told Conrad many times, the flow rates were very tightly controlled for a given throttle setting, to minimize damaging thermal anomalies in the reactor. “Snaps,” he called them.
Conrad sighed. “Deutrelium stores, I mean. Give me a graph of the deutrelium level in the tanks. And talk to engineering: find out how much of our supply has decayed over the course of the journey. The stuff has a half-life, right?”
“It has two half-lives,” Robert said. “One for the deuterium and one for the helium-three.”
Conrad rolled his eyes. “My, isn't everyone a stickler today. Your precision is commendable, Robert, and my own lack of it an embarrassment to us all.”
“Just give him what he wants,” Xmary cut in with an authoritative voice. By now, everyone knew you didn't quibble with Xmary. You could disagree with her, bring her serious issues, even take the initiative to accomplish necessary things without asking her first. But any sort of nitpicking, any splitting of hairs or academic nose tweaking, and you would bring out the old party girl in her: judgmental, hypercritical, and impatient of needless posturing. “Don't be such a leak,” she had said to Agnes more than once, right here on the bridge. And to Robert: “Don't speak to me again until you've ingested a drug, mister. I don't care which one.” And to Conrad: “Plan on just shutting up for a while, all right? There's a plan for you.”
Bad enough if she said these things in command tones, but she generally managed to make them funny, which was worse. For the most serious cases she reserved the Ugly Hat, a punishment so lame and undignified that no one had risked it in decades. The Ugly Hat was a full meter tall, and composed of equal parts feather and sequin and madly flickering wellstone, like a blitterstaff that had spent the weekend in Gamboll City.