This was Conrad's eighth original building—small gods be praised, he really was an architect, no longer tweaking the designs of Queendom engineers!—and like the others this one had been designed with one foot firmly in the future. The colony would grow and change, yes, and he'd be damned if that obvious truth would come back to bite him on the ass later.
In his first months on the planet's surface, Conrad had waited around for some sense of normalcy to assert itself. Then, when the first year had passed, he thought perhaps things would settle down in the second. But so far the level of chaos remained on a steady increase: more buildings, more change, and above all, more people. The resources of Bubble Hood limited the number of kids they could pull out of fax storage in any given month, but the more that were out, the louder the hue and cry became to release those few who remained. The sleepers had missed quite enough of humanity's greatest adventure, thank you very much.
Still, even the most pessimistic projections showed the memory cores emptying out within another five months, or eight Barnardean days if you wanted to count it that way. A less experienced Conrad might've been tempted to pick that moment—finally—as the true start of Barnard's history, but increasingly he had the sense that history never really started, or was always starting. There was enough work to keep everyone busy for decades, or maybe forever, and truly decisive moments, with whole futures hanging in the balance, had always been rare. And that was a good thing, right?
The years of the colony were Earth years, by the way. P2's seasons, its cycles of day and night, were just too strange and inconvenient to warrant a calendar of their own. If not for the “Barnardean hour,” ever so slightly shorter than a standard one, even the day itself would be an adversary: 461 hours long—a prime number, indivisible by anything useful. As it was, the day stood at 460 hours, and the official clock had 20 hours on it, breaking the day into 23 “pids,” each consisting of two 10-hour “shifts.”
So a “shift” was kind of like an Earth day or night, except that the sun barely moved during its span, while the 20-hour “pid” was second cousin to an Earthly solar day. Except, again, that the sun barely moved. It was kind of like living at Earth's poles, where summer was eternal day and winter was eternal night, except that the winters here weren't appreciably cooler than the summers, and anyway the Barnardean day was closer to an Earthly month in duration.
What a mess. In Conrad's opinion, these shifts were about four damned hours too long, and the pids four hours too short. But the planet's peculiar orbit could not be argued with, and despite widespread grousing no one had come forward with a better clock. He wondered if he'd ever get used to sleeping in the daylight, and he hated working in the dark even more. His job sites were lit up like crime scenes! But all that seemed to do was blot out the stars, making the sky seem that much blacker.
Once the clock was in place, mandated and prototyped and programmed into the walls of every office and residence, Bascal had studied the calendar possibilities for 20 pids before throwing them out in disgust and mandating the Queendom's own Greenwich Mean Proper Date—uncorrected for light lag—as the standard Barnardean calendar. “We needn't rebel against that,” he'd said at the time. “P2's ‘year' is of no use to us.” And indeed, Conrad figured the people of Barnard were confused enough. Better to hang onto a few precious shreds of the culture and planet that had spawned them. At least you would know when your birthday was.
“Skybox? What nonsense,” Bascal replied for at least the third time that month. “Do I deserve a better view than my countrymen? Your efforts are appreciated, my boy, but I'm quite pleased to watch the action from here.”
“Climate controlled,” Conrad said, by way of temptation. But it was a silly offer, a joke; Domesville was right on the coast, and so far as their two years' stay had yet revealed, the climate didn't seem to fluctuate all that much. It rained, but mostly at night, and while Barnard made a warm, bright, shockingly ordinary sun to fill their daytime sky, you had to work pretty hard to get a sunburn from it. There just wasn't enough UV. In fact, if not for the impoverished soil, the poisons in the air and water, and the absurdities of clock and calendar, this place would be damned close to paradise.
So they laughed together at that, until Conrad broke into a most embarrassing fit of coughing. Embarrassing, because like a lot of people he still wasn't really used to breathing human-lethal concentrations of chlorine and carbon dioxide. His cells, filled by the fax with halochondria and carbon reducers and half a dozen other new organelles, could process the air without difficulty, but it just didn't feel right. It smelled funny (truthfully it smelled like semen), and it tickled slightly in the lungs. The talematangi or halogen cough occurred in a minority of the population—less than twenty percent, these days maybe even less than ten—but its sufferers were the butt of more than their share of jokes.
“We're still thinking about the air composition,” Bascal said, as if apologizing for the planet. “More oxygen would be nice, for one thing. This period is just one more stage in a long, slow unpacking. If a world has been birthed, alas, for the moment it remains an infant, suckling from the plans laid down for it by Mother Sol. But someday, my boy, we'll control the very air. We'll have print plates larger than this stadium, ringing all around the city and continually adjusting the gas balance.”
“Not on my account, I hope,” Conrad said, clearing his dry throat. “I'll adjust. We all will.”
“No doubt,” Bascal agreed. But he flagged a passing vendor—some freshly thawed Earth kid Conrad had never seen before—and ordered a chilled red tea “for my flimsy friend, here.”
“Immediately, Sire,” the vendor replied with bright humor, jamming his fingers through the print plate of his vendory and hauling out a glass cup. “We mustn't have our VIPs fainting on opening day.”
“Indeed not.”
And here was another bit of ribbing: the men and women who put Domesville together naturally felt a bit superior to those who merely inhabited it. The newly awakened, moving into their assigned apartments and neighborhoods and jobs on the planet's surface, naturally resented this—such condescension had after all been a major driver of the Revolt. But they found it uncouth to say so. And in turn, the builders of Domesville denied any sense of envy toward the arrogant bastards who'd puffed the first air into Bubble Hood. As for Newhope's transit crew, well, who didn't resent them? Too old, for one thing, and too closely associated with the power structures they were supposed to be fleeing.
The term “VIP”—Verily, Important Personage—smacked enough of Queendom pomp and foofery that it could not properly be given as a compliment. Nor received as one.
Making faces at this punk who had seen so little and knew so much, Conrad raised a warning backhand that was only half in jest. “You want to work in the Lutui Belt, kid? If chlorine doesn't make you cough, try vacuum.”
But he accepted the tea just the same. It was good—a blend of sugars and electrolytes, vitamins and flavinoids, with a hint of glycerine to improve fluid absorption, plus assorted stimulants and euphoriants and anti-inflammatories to improve the outlook of the person drinking it. “Good fer what ails ye,” as the slogan said, and indeed it was just the thing to soothe away the talematangi. Here was Barnard's first true culinary innovation—nothing at all like the astringent red teas of the Queendom—and Conrad saw no shame in enjoying it on its own terms.