“Hello, sir,” Robert said to Conrad.
“Hi,” he returned. “You two are looking well.”
“Healthy as horses,” Robert said, then laughed at his own joke. “The country air does a body good, but I think by now you've learned that for yourself.”
Conrad was disappointed, though truthfully not terribly surprised, to find Ho Ng seated at his own left. With effort, he managed to smile politely at his old nemesis. Though still a commander in the Royal Barnardean Navy, Ho was married now, too, and his wife (apparently printed only a few weeks before) sat at his elbow looking adoring and excited and terribly, terribly young.
“If possible,” Ho was saying, while his hands sketched cylindrical shapes in the air, “you want to fire along the target ship's longest axis, to rupture the maximum number of compartments. The Queendom's naval theoreticians have never fought a real battle, but their analysis is bang on.”
“Have you fought a real battle?” Conrad asked him, surprised.
“Two,” Ho said, looking him over. “Space pirates, out in the Lutui Belt. Where the fuck have you been?”
Conrad snorted. “Nice to see you, too, Commander.”
To Conrad's right were a pair of empty chairs, and presently their occupants appeared in the doorway: Feck the Facilitator and his noble captain, Xiomara Li Weng. Conrad lit up when he saw them.
“Xmary! Feck! So they tazzed you too, eh?”
“What?” Feck said, looking back at him blankly.
“Where's Money?” Conrad tried.
And Feck answered, “Living on Element Pit, if you can believe it. Still working the bugs out of that neutronium drip-line pump of yours. He's going to blow that place up, I swear.”
“Of mine? I had nothing to do with that.”
“Really? Your name is on the patent. And truthfully, Money's onto something. Even the Queendom is taking an interest, though of course they're years out of synch.”
Xmary just smiled and sat down beside him. “Hello, darling. I heard you broke your arm.”
“Oh, that? It was nothing,” Conrad assured her. The sound of her voice had arrested him; suddenly he was seeing nothing but her eyes, her cheekbones, the happy upward curve of her lips.
“That's not what I heard. Someone told me you almost froze to death.”
Conrad sighed, then smiled. “The world is full of spies, I suppose. Yes, I caught my shoe in a crack and broke my arm falling; then I had to walk two kilometers through blinding snow with no direction finder. Are you happy now?”
From the other end of the table, Brenda called down at them, “He won't be breaking it anymore, Captain. These latest filters weave wellstone and nanotubes into the bones, along with a cylindrical sleeve of brickmail.”
“They do?” Conrad asked, surprised. Brenda hadn't mentioned that at the time. There had been no consent forms, no permissions or fine print, just a casual step through the plate. He found the idea vaguely unsettling, though; brickmail was a three-dimensional array of interlocked benzene rings—carbon chain mail, some called it—and it was the strongest nonprogrammable material known to humanity, by a considerable margin.
It was porous, too, allowing gas molecules to diffuse through, and even small fluid molecules like water. Well, under the right conditions, anyway. It wasn't difficult to picture a honeycomb of that stuff inside his bones, propping them up, making them stronger and lighter than bones had any right to be. The idea of being indestructible was actually kind of appealing—he might even survive a bit of Security training—but of course he still had blood and marrow, internal organs and all that. If something really bad happened to him, they would find—intact!—these bits of artificial skeleton, with no Conrad attached to them.
Unless—and this was a crawly sort of thought—the changes ran deeper than that. His arm began, nonsensically, to itch.
“Am I still human?” he asked Brenda.
This provoked a hearty laugh from everyone at the table, most especially Mack.
“As much as ever,” Brenda replied, and then did something Conrad had never imagined her capable of: she winked. This brought more scattered laughter from the assembled diners, and Conrad had the distinct feeling there was some joke here that he wasn't in on. Spending the past few decades in such isolation had seemed like a good idea—most immorbid people seemed to do it sooner or later—but it did have its disadvantages. Even onboard Newhope, he'd been connected more or less directly with the machineries of government, and with the palasa, the bronze, the upper stories of Barnard's social pyramid. Not so on Snowflake, or in the Polar Well.
C'est la vie.
When dinner arrived, it pushed upward from the table's surface as if growing: bowls and mugs, plates and utensils rising into the light of existence. Conrad realized with a shock that the entire tabletop was an industrial-grade print plate, cleverly disguised. Good God! Here was a table he'd be sure to keep his elbows off of, lest it suck him in for raw material!
“Kataki hau o kai,” Bascal said in his best Tongan, marking the official beginning of the meal, though in fact more than one set of fingers had already pinched a morsel.
The dinner itself was an odd blend of old and new traditions. The main course was a Barnardean favorite: TVs. This consisted of dozens of little television holies composed of edible polymers and served in a bowl, chilled. The pictures on all the little screens cycled through some of the best-known scenes from the early Queendom and the late Tongan monarchy at the tail end of Old Modernity. There was sound, but it was turned down so far that Conrad couldn't make it out over the conversation around him.
Along with TVs there was a salad composed mainly of Earth plants that grew well on Planet Two: dandelion and collard, sweet potato and dwarf peanut. But it was seasoned with a bitter mash: tévé from the islands of Tonga, also known as “famine weed” for its habit of sustaining the Polynesian peoples when other crops refused to grow. Ironically, though, no one had ever come up with a strain of tévé that could survive for long in the open on P2. You could grow it in filtered hothouses or print it whole (and dead) from a high-end food machine, and that was about it. Its presence here could only be symbolic: a carefully orchestrated nod toward the deprivations outside.
There were other delicacies: red tea and iceberg soup, sugar blossoms and meatcakes, but these were fitted in like garnishes around the two main courses. Truthfully, it was a better meal than Conrad had seen in centuries, or maybe ever.
Conrad turned to Princess Wendy and said, around a mouthful of TVs, “It's very nice to see you again, young lady. I've just realized that I never did meet your mother.”
Wendy's smile was radiant, almost painfully beautiful. Conrad did not doubt that she was a constructed creature, the child of her parents but equally, obviously, tailored to some optimum, some royal ideal of humanity.
She said, “I rarely see Mumsy myself, First Architect. She is not after all a member of the royal family, and while you might hope such things would not come between a mother and daughter, or any two people really, the simple fact is that they do.”