“To use a thing properly, lad,” he had said one time, “you've got to know how it's put together.” And then, with a wry Irish grin he'd added, “That applies to women as well as machines. Keep that in mind for the future, eh? The study of anatomy is the best friend love ever had.”
Here in Pule'anga Barnarda, the Kingdom of Barnard, it was simpler to send robots out to do the actual assembly work. They were faster and stronger than human beings, more versatile than smart components, and of course they didn't complain. This particular kit—the Martin Kurster Memorial Shipyard, named for some old astronomer—consisted of several hundred distinct pieces that had to be rotated and translated in three dimensions in a particularly large and cunning geometry puzzle.
It was slow work, but fun to watch as it unfolded. For this reason, pretty much everyone on the ship was either on duty or in the observation lounge, and the number of people who were ostensibly on duty, but found themselves in the lounge anyway, was more than Conrad could count on the fingers of one hand. Still, except for Engineering and Information, Systems, and Stores, there were no critical assignments today, so Conrad was inclined not to notice.
As it came together, the shipyard proved every bit as large as the plans had promised, first equaling and then exceeding and finally dwarfing the outlines of Newhope beside it. The structure was mostly empty space, of course, but in Conrad's experience, most things were. Anyway, because of its great size, the project was visible from half the ship, and as it turned out, the view from Conrad's quarters was nearly as good as the ones from the bridge and lounge. So when their overlapping shifts had ended and the bridge was turned over to Robert, that was where Conrad and Xmary found themselves, looking out through the hull, which they had made transparent for this purpose.
“It'll be done soon,” Xmary said, with that wistfulness in her tone again. “Tomorrow we install the shipyard's own fax machines and pipe over some deutrelium and some mass from the buffers. My buffers. And after that, I'm off to Gatewood to pull a deutrelium refinery out of my ass. Well, out of Newhope's ass.”
She was crying now. Conrad rocked her in his arms, not knowing what to say or do. Were humans ever meant for stresses like these? Did situations like this occur naturally, over the course of human evolution? Prolonged and painful separations? He supposed they must have, and he supposed they had always been hard.
Over the later years of their journey Brenda had been building voluntary neurochemical balancers into the fax filter, and it occurred to Conrad that Newhope's crew might have gone into massive freakup a long time ago—gone murderous and suicidal, despondent and bitchy—if the “medicine” of the fax were not constantly propping them up. Conrad had gotten in the habit of printing a fresh copy of himself every couple of days, and sometimes more often than that, but still, even in a state of chemical balance, you could feel overwhelmed.
Maybe this was what it was like, back in the Old Modern days, when friends and family members and neighbors would suddenly drop dead without warning, never to be seen again. That would be harder, right? Or did an immorbid future of infinite possibility simply short-circuit the grieving process, without truly eliminating the need? For all he knew, he and Xmary might never see each other again.
What he said was, “And then, with a belly full of deutrelium, you'll return here and tow this yard to P2, where I'll be waiting. You'll leave the passfax with me, and with it I'll produce an orbital colony with a nice little corner to call our own. A place for you to come home to.”
“This is my home, Conrad. Right here, on Newhope. I never would have believed that, but it's true. I have no other skills or ambitions, no other place to go, unless I change the . . . the definition of myself. If I don't do that, I lose you, and if I do do it, then I lose myself, and everything else that matters. Either way, nothing can ever be the same again.”
And what could Conrad say to that? What was the purpose of revolution and exile, of starting fresh, if not that exact thing? She was supposed to feel uprooted. He tried to put words to this feeling, this dichotomy, but he was no Poet Prince. He didn't know a damn thing, not really. What came out of his mouth was a simple, stupid complaint: “This wasn't supposed to be painful. By gods, it wasn't. I've seen the master plan, and that wasn't in it.”
Chapter nine.
Worldfall
The probes were simple, thumbnail-sized dodecahedrons of wellstone, programmed with a titranium-impervium alloy for atmospheric entry and impact, and then filled in with whatever sensors and photovoltaics and telecom antennas their hypercomputers deemed necessary and appropriate for the conditions at their landing sites. Per the master plan, a thousand of them were dropped on the surface of Planet Two, while devices on the orbiting colony and a dozen other satellites scanned the planet's surface and subsurface from above with sensors of excruciating precision and subtlety.
This raw data—enormous quantities of it—was then fed into hypercomputer algorithms designed in the Queendom, which sifted it for differences and similarities and then statistically and chaotetically analyzed it for greater meaning. The orbiting colony where this work took place was officially known as Lilililitata, literally “boiling cap,” a Tongan neologism that meant “valve” or “relief”—a place where pressure was blown off. But that was too much of a mouthful even for Bascal, who laughingly approved a mistranslation in its place: Bubble Hood. Anyway, the place had a population of several hundred by now, most of whom were employed in the hands-on analysis of the results, and the filing of reports, and the forming and testing of hypotheses so that a picture of P2's inner and outer workings could emerge in something more than astronomical detail.
“My boy,” Bascal told Conrad expansively, “the synthesis of data is information, and the synthesis of information is knowledge. Knowledge is constructed, piece by piece, from loose, unkitted parts.”
Bubble Hood was a sphere two hundred meters across, and had originally been intended to revolve around a polar axis to produce half a gee of artificial gravity. Conrad had two problems with that, though: First of all, he wanted the bubble to be transparent, but the planet spinning by every forty seconds would—he knew from experience!—make people sick if they could see it. Second of all it was a waste of space, since the gravity vector would be “straight down” (that is, straight through the inward-facing floor) only at the equator. Everywhere else would be a hillside, broken into terraces by unnecessary “buildings” inside what was already a large, climate-controlled structure. So on a whim, Conrad had crossed the scheduled spin-up off his list and ordered his people to print up hundreds of gravity lasers and scatter them every which way throughout the structure.