“Yes,” she said unhappily. “We've improved the equipment as much as we possibly can out here. It's nearly as good as the Queendom's best, but we don't have anything like the Queendom's industrial base. They can afford to recycle all but the best of the best Here, the most we can do is decertify the plates which don't pass medical, and squeeze the maximum functionality out of the few that do.
“We've got the most advanced filtering algorithms that have ever existed, anywhere, in fourteen star systems. Unless some other colony has leaped ahead of us and the broadcast hasn't arrived yet, which I suppose is possible. But here on P2 we had the advantage of a nearly breathable atmosphere. That challenge—being tantalizingly close to the good life but not quite in it—has given us a big head start.”
As they walked, she looked him over again in that same critical, vaguely disappointed way, and Conrad realized suddenly that she was seeing not so much a person as a dynamic and very complex object which had passed, many times, through her fax plates and filters. When she looked at him, she was admiring her handiwork. Seeing its flaws, wondering how she could do better.
“You've been without a fax for what, fifteen years now?” she asked.
“Fourteen,” he answered, counting it out on his fingers.
She nodded. “All right, fourteen. Biologically, you should be in middle age by now. Turning fat and gray, with wrinkles around the eyes.”
“You always were a charmer,” he told her grumpily.
“But you aren't!” she said, protesting his anger. “Have you looked in a mirror? You're fine. You're a handsome young man, and I'd guess a virile one as well. Even fourteen years ago, our morbidity filters were attacking the aging process at its base—reversing not only the symptoms, but the causes. No one has ever needed to do that before, and believe me, it's not easy. But I'll estimate you're aging at about a third the natural rate. Maybe even a quarter.”
“Oh,” he said. “Really?” She thought he was handsome? Now that was news. Nearly everyone was physically handsome, of course, and the people who weren't either didn't want to be or simply had bad taste. So in using the word, people generally meant something more than the obvious skin-deep. And she thought he was “virile,” too! Another loaded word. This was so much at odds with what he thought she thought of him that for the time being he wasn't sure he could believe it. Surely she was flattering him, currying his favor for some reason.
“You probably are due for a faxing, though,” she said, still studying him. “If you'd care to risk it, I've got a medical-grade machine in the latter stages of testing. It's intended for the Bupsville hospital, and it has my latest, greatest filter that should keep you fit for several centuries.”
“Hmm,” he said, considering that. “Wow. You have been making progress here. Can I make a backup first?”
Her laugh was sour. “I'll insist on it, Conrad. What kind of place do you think we're running here?”
“All right, all right, no offense meant. Sure, I'll give your machine a try.”
It turned out she was leading him toward it already—the last stop on his tour. In another minute they were there, in a much smaller testing chamber than any he'd seen previously. The machine stood in the room's exact center, with lights shining down on it from above. The number 449 was emblazoned on it in glowing red numerals. Conrad sniffed the air, finding it rich with . . . something.
“That's the new fax smell,” she said, catching his look. “Ionization on the plate and polymer outgassing from the surrounding chassis. Plus a hint of neodymium, and of course the cleaning solution. There's nothing else quite like it.”
And then she said something dark and strange that Conrad didn't fully process until much later: “I'm glad you got to smell it this once.”
Back at her office again, she called for a door, ushered him inside, and moved back around to sit behind her desk. Conrad settled into one of the armchairs, which was made of plush wellcloth—currently a brightly glowing yellow—and was probably the most comfortable thing he'd parked his ass on in half a century.
“Ooh,” he said. “Wow. Nice.” His ass was new as well, so the fit was close to perfect.
“So. Have I answered your questions? Do you understand the issues we're faced with?”
With effort, Conrad summoned up a bit of the outrage that had brought him here. “Well, no, not completely. I mean, for example, better fax filters aren't going to help with accidental death. Which is all death, right? I haven't heard of anyone dying of old age.”
Fortunately, although he'd been studying the shifting decorations on her wellstone walls, he happened to be looking right at her when he said this. As a result, he saw the flicker of unease which passed over her face.
“You have?” he said, leaning forward. If there was one thing he'd learned in his life, it was not to let people conceal bad news. “There have been old-age deaths? Spill it, Brenda.”
“No,” she said, a bit too quickly and defensively. “Not that, definitely.”
He waved his hands in little circles in front of him, urging her on. “But . . .”
She sighed, and raised her own hands partway in a gesture of helplessness. “Look, a fax machine doesn't last forever. Ours especially; they seem to have about half the lifetime of a Queendom model, and I'll be damned if I know why.”
“So make more,” he suggested—but realized immediately what a stupid thing that was to say. Brenda's operation here was already bursting the seams of the Barnard economy.
“We'd need more people, Conrad,” she told him angrily. “More robots, more machines and raw materials. Can you give them to me? No? Then shut up.”
Watching her, hearing her, Conrad felt a sudden, sinking feeling in his gut. “Oh, God, Brenda. The machines are breaking faster than you can build them.”
She didn't deny it, so he went on, “And to build them faster you'd need a bigger colony, which isn't going to happen without more fax machines. It's an old-fashioned chicken-and-egg problem, isn't it?”
“I'm not familiar with that expression,” she said.
“I think it's from Rodenbeck. Now that you mention it, I'm not sure I'm using it right. But . . . People used to eat eggs, right? And if you eat too many eggs, you won't have enough chickens hatching, and . . . and then . . .”
“Conrad,” Brenda said with surprising gentleness, “you're blithering. I don't think I've ever seen you blither before.”
“Sorry,” he said, and with that word his thoughts snapped back into focus. “We're all going to die, aren't we? Of injury, of old age. Of disease. The fax machines are leading the way already, preceding us to the grave. This colony is a failure.”
She answered him with a level gaze, her eyes twinkling with faint wellstone lights. “That's been evident for some time. We're going to die, yes, almost certainly. My goodness, didn't you know?”
Conrad was so shaken up—and Brenda so surprised by this—that she took him by the arm and led him to the facility's main cafeteria, a huge room lined with tables, mostly empty at the moment because it wasn't lunchtime.
“We gave it a good try,” she was telling him. “And we have a long way still to fall. And as you can see, we're fighting with all our strength. For all we know, we may pull out of it.”
“No,” he said, seeing the lie in that.
“Well, if we don't, we don't. We knew the risks coming out here, didn't we? Didn't Their Majesties make it plain enough? We're free out here, to live as we please. And to die; immorbid doesn't mean forever. I never thought so, anyway. By the time it all winds down, we'll have had hundreds of years of freedom. It's worth our lives just for that.”