The density of the chromosphere was not all that much—about equivalent to the “vacuum” in low orbit above the Earth. But plowing through a quarter-million kilometers of it raised a substantial cumulative drag, shaving hundreds of kps off their speed. And then, of course, there were the photobraking effects from the pressure of Barnard's light on the sail. This was also significant, shaving off another fifty kps, which was enough—just barely—to lower their apogee down into the upper reaches of the Lutui Belt.
This process took a lot of attention and a few more years of their precious youth. This time, more people were needed outside of storage, although the shifts and duty periods were by no means evenly distributed. The old grew older while the young remained as they were. At the start of the journey the crew's oldest member was just seventeen and a half years older than the youngest, but now—even discounting Bascal himself, and the stored passengers whose subjective experience of the journey was zero—that gap had widened by decades. Conrad learned an astrogation term to describe this: dispersion.
“Throw a handful of rocks on the floor,” Second Astrogation Officer Bertram Wang explained one day over beer and blintzes in the observation lounge, “and they'll skid to a halt at various distances: some at your feet, some coming to rest against a far obstacle. Most of them are just scattered in between, in a pattern we call ‘Gaussian distribution.' If we draw a graph of crew subjective ages—a histogram, it's called—I'll bet it follows this pattern. A bell curve, you know, with Bascal at one extreme, the median peak around twenty-seven years or so and, I dunno, Martin Liss at the tail end. Remember Martin?”
Indeed, Conrad remembered him well. Had even gotten him killed once, when Martin suffocated in a makeshift space suit during one of the more hazardous operations of the Children's Revolt. He was technically the ship's medical officer, but the job was so redundant that he'd been pulled out of storage only twice over the entire course of the journey. “Yeah. All right, let's try your graph.”
They did, and it came out much as Bert had predicted it would.
“But these aren't random events,” Conrad objected. “These are people with free will, making conscious choices. Pebbles that get up and walk around.”
“Yeah, well,” Bert replied with a shrug. “Choices are a stochastic phenomenon. Meaning you can apply statistics to them, which I'd call a fortunate thing, or else there would be no science of politics at all. Everyone would just—I dunno—guess what to do and hope it all worked out.”
Conrad laughed at that. “You're saying they don't?”
“Not always, no. If our dear king is clever as well as cracked, he'll keep some people around to check the math on his various plots and schemes.”
And here a prejudice showed through: implicit in any discussion of aging on Newhope was the observation that along with the alleged “seasoning,” it fostered a particular kind of craziness, which Xmary dubbed “decade fever.” At the far, peculiar end of the spectrum was King Bascal, yes, now 145 years old, with more than half that time spent in the company of two persons or fewer.
“I wouldn't talk like that too openly,” Conrad warned Bertram. “But you're not the only one worrying about it.”
Bascal, speaking to Conrad on an occasion some nine months later, was upbeat and expansive on the subject. “Ah, my old friend, or rather my young friend, my childhood chum who still has baby fat around the cheeks! There is so much more to life than you've yet guessed. It is such a rich and intricate process, of which you've tasted so little!”
“And how would you know that, exactly?” Conrad answered with rising irritation. “What have you tasted lately?”
“A fair question,” the king conceded. “To the untrained eye, I've been doddering around in a cellar for a century and a score now, probably—if not obviously—deranged. But in fact, my dear boyo, there's not just one of me bumbling around the ship. When I'm alone, I print dozens of copies of myself, each with a different work assignment. There has been, at times, a whole society of me, with its own social structure, differentiation of labor, and even a sort of service economy—necessary because I don't always agree with myself about who should do what. Especially when the work is unpleasant. One gets to know oneself very well indeed under these circumstances, and knowing oneself is the first step along the path to understanding others, and therefore what life is all about.
“In addition, laddie-oh, I've absorbed one thousand classics of written literature, in ten different languages. I've also watched at least half a million hours of television—all the classics of the Queendom, and of the societies which preceded it—and I have seen and read the major analyses of them as well, and even added my own voice to the body of criticism. You tease me for abandoning poetry—” In fact, Conrad had done no such thing. “—but there was a hubris to my early works which I now find inexcusable. Chief among the presumptions of youth is the spouting of platitudes, which are understood intellectually but which exist without experiential context, and are therefore not felt. Thus, in an information sense, they're meaningless: a repetition rather than a reformulation. As a poet I was an utter fraud, and have been atoning at length for that sin. When I know enough, when I've learned enough, the muse will visit again, and this time her gifts will not be abused.”
And if the words themselves made a certain amount of sense, albeit one of fatalism, they were delivered with a strange, plodding sort of mania, like the downhill slide of some immense glacier, cracking and grinding its way over any possible objection. One might as well argue with a storm, with the orbit of a planet or the slow rotation of the galaxy itself. That was decade fever. That was Bascal Edward. The two had become indistinguishable.
“I also converse with the ship, of course. By now, its outer personality is shaped primarily through its interactions with me. Not that you would know this, robophobe that you are. And if that social scene begins to feel barren, why, I simply create other personalities as needed. I once spent a decade raising a family of robots. They're in storage now, but I'll bring them out—I will!—when I have a palace to move them into. And of course there is neural sensorium, which is real enough when you've nothing better to compare it to. I have seen London and France, my boy, and more than my fair share of underpants as well.”
Conrad had no idea what that was supposed to mean, but it had an elderly sort of sound to it: wistful and boastful and vaguely, smugly superior. Not for the first time in his life, he wondered whether he and Bascal were still friends, whether they really knew each other at all. But Bascal certainly seemed to feel a bond, and since they couldn't avoid each other anyway, that pretty well decided the matter.
Robert and Agnes were not as bad, as insufferable, as fevered by the passage of time. But they had logged their share of solo hours, too, and of years in various too-small societies with bizarre, insular customs of their own. They still wore their uniforms—everyone did—but their own had mutated in strange, subtle ways: the shoulders too broad, the waist too narrow, the braids and insignia so bright that they actually glowed a little. And there was a hint of transparency to the fabric—perhaps an echo of their old nudist ways, though it looked more funerary than sultry. Sometimes Conrad would find them wandering around the ship like ghosts, together or separately, lost in thought and mumbling to themselves. Agnes had brightened the blue of her skin as well, and Robert had added a subtle pattern of tiger stripes to his that through some trick of the light was plainly visible through the corner of your eye, but could scarcely be seen at all when you looked right at it.