It was a bland but hearty breakfast, served in tiny glass dishes with metal forks and spoons, and the blue nudists gathered these small portions around them in great number. Everyone had a little bit of everything, it seemed, which added up to an awful lot of food.
“Tell me you don’t eat this much for lunch,” Bascal joked.
“Certainly no,” Robert answered seriously. “Breakfast is the energy meal.”
“A spread-out meal, too,” the prince observed.
They were all sitting around the gravity depressions, which turned out to be nice places to eat picnic-style, without any of the hassle of zero-gee dining. Wouldn’t have worked, Conrad suspected, if the dirt were thicker or softer or wetter than it was, or if there’d been bugs, or anything like that. But this place was more like a hydroponics lab than any sort of real garden. Even the dirt was, in some indefinable way, clean.
The Camp Friendlies sat together, with Robert and Money and Agnes, and a sour-faced Brenda, who looked ready to slap the food out of their hands and spit on it. Still, even twisted with anger, her azure features were anything but haggish. Conrad’s impulsive side kept yammering at him to touch, touch, touch these naked women. Karl and Ho, hard-up after weeks aboard Viridity, must be feeling the same; Conrad himself had only once found the privacy to jerk off, and it hadn’t been too terribly satisfying. But touching anyone here without the clearest invitation would likely provoke an incident, and touching Brenda in particular could result in the loss of a limb, or worse.
And what would Xmary think? Not that that should matter to him, but little gods, he wasn’t going to kid himself about it. The symptoms of heartsickness were less pressing here in these open spaces, with life and strangers all around, but the illness itself remained, like a shackle around his chest.
More TSA refugees sat together at the next depression, two hundred meters or so around the donut. It seemed very far away indeed, but not everyone fit there, so still another small crowd was clustered at the next one down. They were only barely visible: tiny figures sitting cross-legged in a cone of light, against a backdrop of dark weeds.
The dogs were here as well, gleefully loping through the air, slipping in and out of the gravity zones with tongues and tails wagging. They, at least, were not blue.
“Yah,” Robert agreed, “it does make a pretty diffuse cafeteria. But we don’t always eat in the same circles. We move around; we mix it up. The variety is nice.”
“What do you do with all these calories?” Xmary asked, picking at the greasy remains of her own breakfast. “You must get a lot of exercise.”
Agnes nodded slightly. “Some, yah. Twice-a-week calisthenics.”
“We had that,” Karl said. “We had it every day for an hour.”
“We used to,” Agnes said, wrinkling her nose. “But I like twice a week better. The ship and the garden keep us busy enough.”
Tucking away a final sausage, Bascal burped, excused himself politely, and asked, “The ship really takes care of itself, though, right?”
“Hardly,” Robert answered with a half-snort. “It isn’t meant for live-in crew, remember. Certainly not this many. Cleaning up after ourselves is a major chore. And you’d be surprised how many things corrode or break or come loose during normal operation, and how little of that shows up in the maintenance logs the shipping company would see. Even with regular inspections and crew rotations, it’s got to add up. When these things pull into port, lugging fifty or a hundred neubles in their groaning bellies, they must be a real shambles. I can only imagine the situation a hundred years from now.”
“Why?” Bascal said. “What happens a hundred years from now?”
“The lower Kuiper gets depleted. We’ve already wrangled a third of it. You see, the Nescog uses lots of collapsium, and the mass has to come from somewhere. Finite supply. Next century, the barges will be trolling in the higher bands, where the distances are greater and comet density is lower. Consequently, missions will be longer and more difficult to support.”
“Oh. I see.” Bascal nodded. “You know, if it helps, we saw a couple of big icebergs on our way down. Near-contact binary, maybe a hundred kilometers each. That’s got to be, what, a few thousand neubles’ worth?”
“At least,” Robert said, nodding. “You’re probably talking about the Cyades, which are a landmark in this part of the belt. If so, it’s more like half a million neubles. So thank you for the tip, but of course we can’t swallow mass in such big chunks. Our orbit crosses the Cyades in about five years, and we’ll do the same thing everyone else does when they pass it: fire the laser a few times to knock off a gigaton of snow. One free neuble, maybe two, for our trouble. Eventually Mass Industries will send an engineering team to blow the thing up, and park a fleet of crushers right there on the site.”
Bascal snorted. “Some way to treat a landmark. Not very sentimental, eh?”
“No,” Robert agreed. “They can’t afford to be. The Queendom’s appetite is perhaps not bottomless, but certainly no one has found the bottom of it yet.”
Here was an issue Conrad had never thought about— he’d always heard the Kuiper’s resources described as “limitless.” But of course, in reality nothing ever was. He’d also thought, naïvely, that all this time they were sailing across a vast, empty wilderness. Were they really just sneaking through a construction site? Could all their trials and tribulations really boil down to something as banal as that?
No, he decided, they could not. As an act of will, he stated it to himself axiomatically: the drama of their journey was inherent in the journey itself, and could not be divided or diminished. The alternative—that they were wasting their time—implied that their individual and collective actions had no meaning, and perhaps never would. And if he believed that, then why do anything at all?
“What happens when the higher bands are depleted?” he asked pointedly.
Money Izolo nodded with approval. “Yah, it’s going to be a real concern. At present growth rates we see maybe a thousand years of Kuiper left to harvest. After that, it’s up to the Oort Cloud for another few thousand, but that’s a lot farther away. We may need ertial shielding on the barges just to make the journey economical. Either that, or a lot more barges.”
“Or less demand for neutronium,” Conrad said.
“Or that, yah. And after the Oort is gone, it’s the comets and wanderers and failed stars of near interstellar space, where the economics get even thinner. I think about this a lot. We’re immortal, right?”
“Immorbid,” Bascal corrected apologetically. “We can die.”
“But we can’t be unhealthy,” Izolo said, grasping the meaning of the term. “All right, but we will live to see these things, yah? The empty Kuiper, the vanished Oort. And then what?”
Nobody had an answer for him.
“This is good food,” Xmary thought to say. “If perhaps a bit heavy.”
“Oh, gods yeah,” Karl agreed. “Much better than that crap we had on the ship. Thank you.”
“That reminds me!” Bascal said. “Our fax machine survived the crash. A bit worse for wear, I’m sure, but if it’s still out there in the wreckage, we should probably go retrieve it at some point. Even a battered, restricted fax is better than none.”