It wasn't by coincidence that Conrad knew all their ages. This was his area of specialty: the crew. If he knew nothing else about them—nothing else about anything—he knew their birthdays, their hobbies, their interests and skills. He wasn't sure what to do with the knowledge, but he did his best to keep it fresh in his mind. The launch ops crew were getting on each other's nerves even before the passengers were tucked away, feeling the first twinges of cabin fever even before the Diemos Catapult had drawn back its arms and slung them sunward. Conrad's own personal passion was for architecture, for the subtle interplay of shapes and materials, but he knew a little—a very little!—about holding a crew together through difficult circumstances. It was a responsibility he took as seriously as he'd ever taken anything. Which wasn't saying much, but there you had it.
“Have a nice walk, right?” Robert called after them, in an innocent tone which managed, nevertheless, to convey a sense of lewdness.
Leaving the bridge involved climbing ass-first down an inclined ladder—or sliding sideways down the handrail if you felt like it, which Conrad usually did. The lounge was three decks down, and took up nearly half the level all by itself—one of the few indulgences the ship's designers had permitted her crew and passengers. At the moment, the ship's complement was twenty live people: the launch ops crew. The other forty-eight hundred were in storage, as data patterns in Newhope's wellstone memory cores. And eighteen of those twenty were currently either sleeping, working, or messing around on the galley level. For the moment at least, he and Xmary had the lounge to themselves. Alas, the Earth and moon were no longer visible through the windows, though he supposed he could remedy that by pulling back on their magnification a little.
Instead, he engaged a voice lock on the hatch, then turned and yanked down his captain's pants. This was his other main joy and passion, and the only other responsibility he took at all seriously. Within the minute they were fuffing on the cool wellsteel plating of the deck, kissing and hugging and working out the kinks. That they should do this as soon as the opportunity arose was not terribly shocking; they'd been intimate partners for years. And since everyone in this thirtieth decade of the Queendom of Sol had the eternally, immorbidly youthful body of a twenty-year-old, it was considered right and proper to squeeze in a vigorous fuff or two in the course of every day. Well, the men considered it so at any rate, and the women did not protest it overmuch.
When Conrad and Xmary were done, they lay tangled in each other's arms, resting. Still on the floor, not even bothering with the couches or trampolines because they were young in their minds as well as their bodies and liked the sense of immediacy that a nice, cold floor could provide.
“Now that's what I call a walk,” Conrad said.
“Hmm,” Xmary grunted noncommittally. She liked a good fuff as well as anyone, but that wasn't why she'd asked him down here.
“You want to talk?” he asked, taking the hint.
“Oh, now you want to.”
“My head is clear,” he agreed. “My full attention can be brought to bear. You have some problem? Some little worry itching at the corners of your mind?”
“The usual.” She sighed. “I hate my job. I hate it for me, anyway. Captain of a fuffing starship? What do I know about that? Robert is spacewise; it should be him. I should be in storage with the passengers.”
Conrad shrugged. “People like a woman in charge; they've had a queen ruling over them for three hundred years now. Well, I guess the oldest person in storage has only had a queen for forty-five years, but even so, we're all products of society, aren't we? You think we want Blue Robert M'Chunu for our captain, who doesn't believe in leaders or followers? Who went five years without wearing clothes, just on general principle? I don't think so, dear. I really don't.”
“There are other women available,” she sulked. “I was always a party girl. I'm tempted to say just a party girl. The rest of my life has been . . . a fluke of circumstance.”
“Aye,” he said, kissing her hair. “There are other women. And some of them were in the August Riots, and some were space pirates, and some were confidantes of the Prince of Sol. You alone were all three of these things. You fooled the queen to her own face, and talked a Palace Guard into doing your illegal bidding. You turned your back on the chance to be a princess, and sowed confusion in the streets of Denver. Shall I go on?”
“Don't bother,” she grumped. “You've at least been a first mate before. Well, sort of.”
“Sort of,” he agreed, laughing. In fact, he'd never held the actual title, and had clung to the de facto position only through threats and blackmail, onboard a rickety homemade fetu'ula commanded by a suicidally depressed prince. And—this part wasn't funny—eight people had died along the way. Horribly, for the most part. They'd later been restored from backups, but the whole experience had left a bad taste in Conrad's mouth that was still with him these eight years later.
“Sorry,” she said, catching his shift of mood. “You probably don't like your job, either.”
“Not particularly. It's a hundred-year voyage, and even if we're in storage for a lot of that time, we'll still be living a lot of years in . . . this.” He spread his arms to indicate the narrow confines of the lounge. “And I'm supposed to hold things together? Me? The Paver's Boy of County Cork?”
“This is our punishment,” she reminded herself.
“Aye.” Now he was the one sounding bitter. “We're punished for wanting a future. Well, we've surely got our fill of one now.”
“A pretty good one,” she said, rising to the bait. “A whole star to ourselves. A new king, a new society. That's not so bad.”
“No, it isn't. Am I squishing you, by the way?”
“A little. I wish we could turn the gravity off in here.”
He snorted. “Now that would be rude.”
Once you'd lived in space for a while, you got used to the idea that all the stars were out there for you to look at, all the time. After that, you always felt sort of cheated when you were standing on a planet, which blocked half the sky all by itself, and had an atmosphere that washed out the remaining starlight except at nighttime. Fuffing in zero gee was like that: always a good time, and you got used to the total freedom of it. In gravity, you always had some surface pressing against you, and you found yourself wanting to reach right through it to get in the proper position. Actually there were special beds designed to accommodate spacers and former spacers in this way, and Conrad had toyed more than once with the idea of installing one in his quarters.
But turning the gravity off was a no-no. It was generated in the aftmost compartment of the ship's crew segment, about halfway down the long needle that was QSS Newhope. Conrad even knew the buzzwords to explain it: a zettahertz laser—that's a trillion gigahertz, you know—operating at four watts and refracted through a pair of Fresnel condensates to form an isotropic beam exactly thirty meters wide, terminating at the collapsium barrier of the forward ertial shield. The photon becomes a spin-positive graviton at high enough energies, and will penetrate a light-year of lead. You couldn't deflect it, or control it on a room-to-room basis. It was gravity, pure and simple, and you either had it inside the ship or you didn't. So while Xmary had the authority to turn it off for an afternoon fuff, the inconvenience to the rest of the crew would be substantial. Along with their sniggers and smirks.