Just then, Peter Kolb came back, stepping through the hatch like a new man, no longer holding his eye.
“Better?” Money asked him.
“Much,” Peter answered testily. “And don't ask me again for those cooling numbers. I'm on it.”
Conrad found his Chief of Stores in the aft inventory, cursing and glaring. She was sitting on the floor beside the fax machine—the largest one in the ship's habitable compartments—with a bunch of tools and sensors and sketchplates spread out around her.
“Is this a bad time?” Conrad asked, wincing inwardly because there was no good time to talk to Brenda Bohobe. Not for him, at any rate.
Brenda looked up sharply, as if surprised to find anyone penetrating her little bubble of a world. “Oh. It's you. Hi.”
“Some trouble here?” he asked.
“The start of some trouble, I think.” She chewed her lip for a moment. “This is the fax most of our passengers stored themselves through, and in the last hundred or so, the system logged an increase in energy consumption. I've run the plots, and it looks shallow but exponential.”
“So the machine is slightly broken, and it'll only get worse over time?”
“Right.”
“Wonderful. Have you identified a cause?”
The look she gave him was hard. “I have, yes, thank you. These kind of surges are always related to error correction. Now before you get too excited, let me say that a print plate doesn't last forever, and the large ones tend to die more quickly than the small ones. And this one here has probably got a million tons of throughput left before it gives up the ghost. With proper maintenance, it'll last for hundreds of years.”
“And that's what you're doing now? Routine maintenance?”
“I didn't say it was routine. There are burned-out faxels which my nanobes can't replace. To avoid molecular defects in the items being printed and stored, error correction has to judder back and forth around these. Like a snake's head swaying to improve the view.”
“So then,” Conrad said with some relief, “there's no danger of pulling the passengers out of storage as cancer-riddled morons?”
To his surprise, Brenda actually laughed at that. She had kind of a sadistic laugh, but good-humored just the same. “Unless they went in that way, no. What I'm doing right now is scrubbing behind the print plate's surface, bringing all marginal faxels up to full capacity. I don't know where this damage is coming from.”
“Probably cosmic rays,” Conrad told her. “We're seeing traces of it all over the ship. It's going to be a fact of life until we slow down and get back inside a large magnetic field of some sort. But you get cosmic rays on Earth, too. Is this sort of damage unusual? Have you seen it before?”
“Not unusual, no. Just more than I'm used to seeing.”
“Well,” Conrad said with a smirk, “you could always print another fax machine.”
He was joking with her. The print plate of a fax machine had, like, extradimensional quantum attributes that couldn't be stored or described atomically. People and oranges and even whole spaceships could be produced by fax machine, and most of the parts for another fax machine could be as well, but the print plate itself had to come from a special factory, and every square centimeter of it represented—according to rumor—a year's labor from a thousand patient elves. The amazing thing, when you thought about it, was how dirt-common these things had become even before the rise of the Queendom. By some accounts, as much as ten percent of the economy—both human and monetary—was involved in the production of fax machine print plates. Alas, that was pretty much everything Conrad knew on the subject.
What he said to Brenda was, “Are there programs to monitor this damage while we're all in storage?”
“Of course,” she said impatiently. “My crew and I will be pulled out if any of these machines degrade beyond a threshold value. But like I said, they've got a long life ahead of them. We take good care here.”
“So, do you anticipate going into storage yourself soon? Or releasing some of your people?”
In response, Brenda scowled and threw up her hands. “I don't know. Ask me when I'm finished with this! I'm going to look at all the other machines, too. Louis McGee is worthless, how about you store him?”
“He is on my roster,” Conrad confirmed.
“Good. Now leave me alone. Please. Sir.”
Conrad looked for Robert on the bridge, but found two of him in a service-core crawl space just forward of Engineering. Though the space was crowded and close, Conrad stuck his head in.
“Some trouble here, Astrogation?”
There was a thump.
“Oh, hell,” said one of the Roberts, rubbing his head. “Don't startle me like that. Yeah, it's the sweep radar. I've reconfigured the antenna, but now it needs more power. I'm trying to boost the range.”
“Can't you do that from the bridge?”
“There's a safety interlock,” said the other Robert. “Bertram's on the bridge right now, issuing commands, but there's got to be a human thumb on the control point here as well. All critical systems need at least two nonidentical operators to modify. Some of them require five.”
“Even the ship can't override it?”
“Especially, the ship can't override it. Isn't that right, Ship?”
A speaker appeared in the wall of the crawl space. “Absolutely, sir.” The voice was vaguely feminine, almost childlike. “I am completely at your command, and nothing could please me more. Of course I'm programmed that way, but feeling it is, I should think, a higher level of obedience.”
“So,” Robert prodded, “you enjoy your work, even when it consists of letting me tinker with your guts?”
“Immensely, sir, although I do hope you'll be careful.”
“Right, right. Warn me if I'm doing something stupid.”
“My programming demands it,” the ship confirmed. And then, as quickly as it had appeared, the speaker was gone again, vanishing with the faint crackle of programmable matter operating at needlessly high speed.
Conrad personally didn't talk to the ship very much. The idea didn't bother him, exactly, but his first ship had been the pirate fetu'ula Viridity, whose only intelligent hardware had been a snotty fax machine. Not much of a conversationalist, and not much point in even trying. Over the years he'd trained on half a dozen other ships, some of them quite charming, but Conrad really didn't see the point in getting chummy. He didn't talk to houses, either. To its credit, Newhope seemed to sense this about him, and kept mostly silent in his presence. But it was just like Robert to have a personal relationship with the equipment.
“So, when you were on that neutronium barge, did you talk to it as well?”
Both Roberts smiled, and one said, “Not so much, no. Barges are funny that way; they're not really intended for crew, and I don't think Refuge ever really got used to having us there. It didn't matter how we talked to it or what we did, we were always kind of anomalous, a constant source of surprise and confusion. Of course, we weren't exactly authorized, which may have had something to do with it. But Newhope, why, she and I are friends.”
“You make friends with robots as well?” Generally speaking, robots had a kind of collective intelligence thing going; whatever thoughts they had in their wellmetal brains, they were shared and spread across the brains of nearby robots, or household hypercomputers, or anything else that might be handy. They could be shockingly intelligent, but with a sort of mindless, mechanistic quality just the same. Idiots savant. And when they appeared together in the same sentence, the terms “friendly” and “robot” had certain other connotations—sordid ones which a lesser man might take amiss.