Xmary went on, in her quiet voice. “I hate this. I never wanted to be the captain of a tugboat. What kind of job is that, for a spoiled girl from Denver?”
For a moment, Conrad was surprised to hear her say this. Unpacking was good, right? Getting the hell out of this prison! But then, thinking about it, he supposed he too might feel some ambivalence about it if his role were about to shrink and shift so dramatically.
In point of fact, he was personally very excited, because once the initial colony structures were printed and assembled, there would be need—enormous need!—for the design of new buildings and support systems. The Kingdom would require an architect or two, and while Conrad had only ever designed and built one major structure, and that a mere school exercise which was torn down afterward to make room for another project, Conrad knew he had it in him to do the job. He was a decent matter programmer in the aesthetic sense, as the bridge's current motif of white gold and pearl could attest, and really a pretty good one on the materials science side as well.
Why, at age seventeen he'd pulled the lining out of a midsized planette and fashioned it into a rigid one-way superreflector—the photosail of the good ship Viridity. He'd handled that ship's climate controls and waste disposal systems as well, and had even taught Xmary enough about programming to support two abortive mutinies. During his later studies, he'd even discovered a new material, which was named after him in the Encyclopedia of Elements and Compounds: Mursk Metal. It wasn't the strongest or the brightest or the most conductive of materials, but it had the interesting property of “intermittent optical superconductance as function of temperature.” From 84 to 104 Kelvin, and again from 200 to 231 Kelvin, the stuff was a pure insulator with an optical band gap of almost 10 eV. Opaque, yes, but at every other temperature it transmitted photons with zero energy loss, making it a new and unique member of the optical superconductor family. Conrad, all fired up to design his building, had intended the stuff to be used as window glass. To the best of his knowledge no one had ever used it that way except himself, but somebody at World University had later found an application for it in hypercomputer designs.
Conrad supposed he was still technically accruing royalties on that in his Queendom bank accounts. Twenty dollars a year? A hundred? The price of a good massage, anyway, or a couple of fax trips around the solar system. None of this meant much of anything by itself—probably half the adults in the Queendom earned occasional royalties on something or other—but it was a visible sign, something that Conrad could point to in an argument to defend his supposed architectural abilities. In fact, no such argument had ever come up, nor was it likely to. The point was simply that Conrad was going to do some designing, both in orbit around P2 and on its surface, and no force in the Kingdom could prevent him, or was likely even to try.
What he said to Xmary was, “I think it will be exciting. You never wanted to be a starship captain either, but you've been doing it for nearly half your subjective life now, and have grown nicely into the role. Right? And it seems to me there's a lot more to do on an interplanetary vessel than an interstellar one. For a hundred years you traveled in a straight line, and for twenty-three in a big spiral. Now you'll have a new destination every couple of months. A new cargo, a new mission. Maybe not as many lives will depend on you at any particular moment, but no civilization could possibly rise here without your efforts.”
That didn't seem to mollify her. She said, “Conrad, I want to live on a world. I want to stay with you. But then someone else would be Newhope's captain, and what would I be? A party girl? I will drive the tugboat. I'll stay here with Newhope, bumping around Barnard system, but you won't. I know you won't. You're going to Planet Two.”
And here was a thought which had honestly never occurred to Conrad, though surely it should have. In his mind, somehow, Barnard system was conceived as a single place. But in fact, of course, it was hundreds of light-minutes across, and consisted of many thousands of individual places, not even counting the surface of the planet, which was an infinity of places unto itself. None of which would contain Xmary.
Suddenly, he felt his own eyes grow misty, though he kept his voice brave. “Oh. Well. Not to worry, dear; you'll be stopping frequently at P2. I mean, I have to assume you will. As the main population center, it stands to reason it will also be the center of industry, and therefore the main destination for cargo. Right? So you'll pop down to the planet, or I'll come up, and we'll see each other nearly as often as we have on Newhope.”
“Not as often. Not nearly as often.”
Conrad sighed, because she was right. There was no sense kidding themselves about it. They had loved and fought, grown bored with each other in the perpetual sameness of Newhope and then rekindled their passions as Barnard approached. And every step—even the negative ones—seemed to make them stronger in the end. But here was a new challenge of an altogether different sort: time and space, unfettered.
“Well,” he said carefully, “maybe so, but it's only for a while. When we get the collapsiter grid installed, we'll be able to fax back and forth at leisure, and this whole ship will be just one more room in my big, beautiful house. We'll have the speed of light between us, and nothing more.”
“And when is that?” she asked sadly. “Twenty years from now? Forty? A collapsiter grid doesn't just grow, like a houseplant. It's built up from pieces of pieces of pieces.”
“Maybe,” he acknowledged. “Maybe that long. We'll see, I guess.”
But the time had come for personal conversations to cease; the target rock was in position, snared with electromagnetic grapples and pressors, and a team of gleaming humanoid robots was out there wrapping physical lanyards around it, to keep it from sliding around during passfax operations. The bridge was plastered with views from various points on the ship and a few—lurching sickeningly—from the robots themselves.
Xmary raised her voice to normal command levels. “Brenda, what is your status?”
A well-window appeared in the bulkhead, showing Brenda Bohobe in the aft inventory. She looked up and said with all seriousness, “Ma'am, the passfax clears every diagnostic I can push it through. It has been edge-on to the particle flux for most of our journey, and has suffered some cosmic ray streaking, which I've repaired, but no other serious damage or degradation. As far as I'm concerned, you can throw open the doors and begin operation.”
Xmary nodded, her demeanor once again professional and leaderly. “Information?”
“Nothing to report,” Agnes said.
“Systems?”
“Everything is nominal,” said Zavery.
“Engineering?”
When Money Izolo appeared, he said, “The door has three latches, ma'am, and I've opened them all singly, while leaving the others closed. They all function, no problem. I can't test the force on the hinge motors, but I can verify that the coils are working, so there is virtually nothing that can go wrong.”
“I've heard that before, mister. Are you prepared for unknown emergencies?”
There was a twinkling in Money's eye, and he said, “Tell me what the unknowns are, ma'am, and I'll tell you if I'm prepared for them. We're as ready as we can be, yah? Let's quit dawdling already, and unpack our bags.”