Robert, for once, was not queried. He'd done his job already, guiding the ship alongside this nameless rock, and as far as the unpacking operations were concerned he was nothing more than a spectator. He fidgeted under the strain of this, but did not offer any opinions. Nor did Bascal, who sat a good deal more regally in his “temporary” chair behind the captain's.
Xmary paused for a few moments, sucking her teeth and frowning, before saying, “Open the doors, please, and activate the passfax.”
Newhope's mass buffers were already full, stocked with the assortment of elements a fledgling colony was expected to need, although the more reactive atoms had been compounded with carbon or hydrogen and stored as small, inert molecules. But the colony structures were all stored as data, in the same shielded memory cores which held the colonists themselves, and to instantiate them all would take nearly ten megatons of raw material. Hauling that mass all the way from Sol—even within the confines of an ertial shield—would be wasteful madness. Might as well haul the artifacts themselves! Instead, Newhope was designed to live off the land, making use of the materials native to Barnard system.
In a sense, Newhope was a fax transaction unto herself: both the transmitter and receiver, and also the carrier of the signal. In fact she was the signal, packaged as small and as light as the Queendom engineers could cram her. All she carried were emergency supplies: the organics and alkalai metals and electrolytes of human bodies and foodstuffs, and the heavier metals and semiconductors of wellstone and other programmable materials. There was also a supply of basic industrial metals, heavy on titanium and gold, plus a contingency periodic table with at least a ton of every stable element, just in case. And some of this would no doubt prove handy—perhaps even priceless—in the metal-poor environs of Barnard.
“He's an elder star, our Barnard,” the king said to no one in particular. “Not one of the original Titans—the hydrogen supergiants that blew themselves to plasma in the first gigayear of creation—nor even one of their helium-swollen children the Olympians. He's safely removed from that bitter past, that stellar ice age when even lithium was still a dream. He tastes of metal, and it's a good thing or we'd've never come to see him in the first place! But he is not of Sol's young, fat lineage. He's a grandchild, this runt star of ours, not some great-great spoiled in a carbon-rich nursery. His parents sent him off starving with a half-empty purse. And here we are, raiding it! Thank you, old man! There are younger, hotter stars than Sol, and they'll burn out sooner, choking on the iron in their bellies, and then Sol herself will swell and die.
“But Old Man Barnard will still be here, whiling away the eons. He learned frugality at an early age, learned to plan and save for the long haul. By the time he breathes his last, the galaxy will be dark with collapsars and neutronium, with iron nebulae and calcium dwarfs. These ancient, red-orange stars will be the last to go, the fading lights of creation.”
“Shut up, Bas,” said Brenda's voice over the comm system. “Passfax contact in forty-five seconds.”
With no discernible noise, the middle third of Newhope's hull had split open and folded itself out, looking—as Conrad had said—like a pair of dainty insect wings. This exposed the passfax, which then extended bootward along telescoping mechanical rails until it was thirty meters clear of the hull. Conrad realized he'd never seen the passfax before, not even a recorded image, but it looked exactly like he imagined it should: a gigantic fax machine with shimmery gray print plates on either side, thirty meters wide and a hundred tall. Like a big, flat sandwich. Like a pair of pearly gray doors slapped together around a tangle of plumbing and machinery.
“Those are the largest print plates ever constructed,” Bascal said to Brenda, as if somehow she wouldn't know this. “They are the largest single objects on the ship—the largest that could fit inside her. Any wider and they'd have to be assembled here on station, but I've never heard of a print plate with seams. That would be a tough assembly problem.”
“Contact in fifteen,” Brenda said in a louder and more irritable voice. On the well-window viewscreens, the gray-black asteroid—looking for all the worlds like a gigantic turd wrapped up in spiderwebs—approached the port face of the passfax.
“Not a problem without solution, one presumes, but surely expensive to implement? I wonder. I do miss our technical discussions, Brenda.”
“Shut up! Contact in five, four, three, two . . .”
There was the tiniest flicker of light where carbonaceous stone met the quantum machineries of the print plate, and then the asteroid was slipping—centimeter by centimeter—into the fax machine, for disassembly into individual atoms. But Newhope's mass buffers were full. Or nearly full, at any rate; a few tons might fit in here or there, to replace the mass of printed humans and robots and other equipment, but there was certainly no room for three megatons of disassembled rock. Instead, finished pieces spilled out the passfax's other side: metal beams, rolls and blocks of wellstone, clear panes of monocrystalline diamond.
Such a thing had never been attempted before: the real-time assembly of so many pieces, from so large a mass, with so little buffering. Nothing like the passfax had ever been needed before; this one was the prototype, the first of its kind. It had performed as intended, meeting requirements and passing diagnostics, so the infant Newhope—itself a prototype—had been constructed around it.
“It would be nice,” Bascal mused, “if we could simply extrude the whole, finished structure in one go. As it stands, we'll have that robot swarm crawling over the wreckage for hours, fitting the puzzle pieces together. And when they're finished, we'll see that primal eldest symbol of civilization here, within the borders of our Kingdom. A shipyard!”
“Your Highness,” Xmary said impatiently, “we're all excited. But could you tone down the commentary, please? Or do it somewhere else?”
“Ma'am, I believe His Highness is recording for posterity,” Robert protested.
“I don't care if he's recording for God himself. This is a work environment, in the middle of a delicate operation.”
“Ouch,” Bascal said. “Two ex-girlfriends telling the king to stifle himself. Let him eat cake! Or at least, let him stuff his cakehole with something soundproof and chewy. Very well, my dears, your sovereign will slink to the privacy of his quarters, there to contemplate the future of his future. And yours.”
His tone was jovial enough, but as the king left his seat and leaped for the downward spiral of the ladder, Conrad was pretty sure he caught a gleam of teardrops at the corner of those royal brown eyes. This was perhaps an emotional moment in more ways than one, and for more people than just Xmary and Conrad.
“Wow,” said the newly awakened Zavery Biko from his seat at the Systems Awareness console, when the king was safely out of earshot. “He seems different. Has he gone a little bit crazy?”
Conrad would have answered in spite of decorum, but Xmary saved him the effort, speaking almost the very same thoughts that were poised on his own tongue. “Bascal Edward was always crazy, Zav. Brilliant and impulsive, vaguely unhinged. He's an interesting man to stand beside, and I mean that in the Chinese-curse sense. Life in his shadow will never be dull.”
Conrad had long since stopped thinking in terms of planetary seasons and times of day, but it seemed like a long, lazy afternoon as the swarm of gleaming robots, over a period of six or eight hours, assembled the pieces extruded from the passfax. With his father, Conrad had many times helped to assemble vehicles in precisely this way, from kitted parts. When you were working on a road, or more properly, watching with bored eyes while your father worked on one, sometimes you found yourself in a remote location where the nearest public fax just wasn't big enough, or didn't have enough capacity in its midbuffers to extrude a complete machine. The machine's designers understood this, though, and so the machines rolled out in five or six easily mobile, easily connected pieces. And when you were done, you simply popped the pieces apart again, and fed them back into the fax. There were, of course, self-assembling kits whose parts were intelligent enough to get around on their own, but Donald Mursk had always disdained these, insisting that the ritual of assembly and disassembly was educational, fostering an intimate familiarity with the machinery, with the subtleties and intricacies of its operation.