“Are you all right?” she asked.
And what could Conrad say, who’d just gone on about his impatience, his courage in the face of hardship? “I’m… fine, thank you. It’s just been a long time since I traveled this way.”
“It doesn’t feel like much,” she said, shrugging. “Just a little tingle as you go through.”
“I know, dear, but there’s more to it than that. I’ve been to the stars and back, and I’ve lost little bits of myself here and there along the way. One grows…” Cautious? That was hardly the word for a man who’d defied martial law, who’d stolen Barnard’s single most tangible asset, who’d plowed a course through rubble fields and smacked head-on into trouble, bringing his closest friends along for the ride. “One thinks about these things more and more. Right and wrong, life and death, freedom and servitude. Every decision kicks up these consequences that follow along for the rest of your life. Which is forever, right? It sometimes pays to take a moment and think.”
Sandra had apparently seen her share of wackos on the job, and took this comment with equanimity. “I can arrange for other transport, sir. If your beliefs require it, I may even be able to waive the associated fees.”
“No,” Conrad said, for his eagerness outweighed his caution by several orders of magnitude. “I’m done thinking. Let’s go.”
But still, he let Sandra walk through the plate first. It was like watching someone step through paint; the surface parted around her with a faint crackle, and a glow not unlike the southern lights in the cold Antarctic sky. She shrank into it and was gone. Well, here was the heaven he’d bought for Sorrow’s dead; taking a breath, he stepped in after her.
And truly, there was no real feeling to it. It was a bit like falling and a bit like drowning and a bit like a static shock all over his body, but mostly it was nothing much. Stepping through paint would at least have been cold and sticky. And there was this to be said for the process: on the other side there was sky.
He came through, right behind Sandra, in an open-sided, glass-domed atrium the size of a soccer field. There were no trees, but there were people sprawled out on blankets, as in a park. And like a park, the dome’s floor was covered in short grass of a green so bright it hurt Conrad’s optic nerve. There was nothing like this in Barnard; Sorrow’s vegetation favored dark browns and ambers, with the occasional splatter of deep olive, under a sun much redder than Sol. The skies of Sorrow ranged from aquamarine to yellow-gray, and its clouds were hazy or feathery or even striped as the warm, slow jet stream skipped on and off of the cooler, denser layers underneath.
But the sky here was as blue as the grass was green, with the yellow-white sun shining brightly through an arch of puffy cumulus clouds. Did the soul ever forget this stuff? Did the body, independent of the intellect, feel the allure of its natural home?
“Oh my,” said Conrad, his eyes agog, his heart aflutter.
And almost as quickly, with his first few steps, he felt a sort of brightness in his own body as well. His flesh had been optimized by the best morbidity filters the Barnard colony could devise, and Barnard was (or rather, had been) the clear leader in that field. He was very difficult to injure—on Newhope it had taken a propylene glycol explosion, the boiling liquid jetting out so hard it had smashed him right through a wellmetal railing. And he’d survived even that, long enough to get down to the cryo tubes.
And for the same reasons, his body aged slowly. In the colony’s waning days, when Conrad and Xmary had stolen Newhope and spirited away the frozen dead, Barnard’s elite classes had spoken half-seriously about outliving the coming dark age. Hoarding the last of the medical-grade faxes, they planned across the millennia while the proletariat lived and died around them. According to some of the models, a single optimization might carry a careful person through a thousand years of life. Or more. Ah, but Conrad and his fellow traitors had been so long on that ship, that damned, cramped tower of a ship. With limited exercise, limited stimulation, an industrial-grade diet of recycled organics and minerals. Ordinary human beings would surely have cracked under the strain. They were a hundred and forty-six years into the voyage when disaster finally struck, and Conrad, without realizing it, had felt every day of that in his bones!
But the Frostbite Trauma Center had lifted those years away, and now that he was out in the world, in the fresh air and sunshine, he felt light as a pillow and springy as a sapling. Indeed, he’d last felt the tug of Earth at the age of twenty-five—absurdly long ago—and being back here now made him feel almost that young again.
“We’re near the ocean,” he said, for the air smelled of salt. Not the grotty acid smell of Sorrow’s lightly briny oceans, but something cleaner and heavier. Almost edible, a kind of stew. And then, feeling a slight rolling motion in the ground beneath his feet, “We’re on the ocean. A floating platform?”
Sandra nodded. “This is Sealillia, an emergency shelter owned by Red Sun Charities and deployed in times of crisis. I think the last time it was used was during the Amphitrite habitat failure on… one of Neptune’s moons. I forget which one. Twenty thousand people came streaming through these fax portals”—there were three of them here, side-by-side along one edge of the grassy field—” and stayed here five weeks.”
Ah. Interesting. “This place can hold Newhope’s passengers, then.”
She grimaced slightly. “Well, in principle. Right now there’s a bit of a squatter problem.”
Indeed, there were two dozen people sprawled out on the grass, wrapped in blankets and apparently sleeping. This was no real surprise; open real estate with any sort of facilities access—such as the fax machines here—had attracted the indigent even on Sorrow, where indigence tended to be fatal and therefore self-limitingly rare. But as he stepped over one of the sleeping bodies, he saw a woman with painted nails and wellgold earrings, her immaculately coiffed hair only slightly smooshed by its contact with her pillow. A hobo-ish backpack lay at her feet, but she was outwardly young and certainly well dressed, in a peach-colored wellcloth pyjama adorned with moving circles of metallic gold. Her blanket was the reverse: circles of peach roaming a cloth-of-gold surface.
The others around her, men and women alike, looked comparably respectable, though they seemed inordinately fond of wellgold jewelry. And that was interesting, because the indigent people of Conrad’s time had been hairy and smelly, antisocial and unadorned, and that wasn’t the sort of fashion that ever went out of style. The ones in the old days were mostly men, too, whereas these people were about a fifty-fifty mix.
“They’re overgrown children,” he said, recognizing their type at once. Here were fully ripened citizens of, he would guess, anywhere from twenty to a hundred years of age, who could not for the life of them find the employment, the wealth, the respect accorded a true adult. And how could they, when the self-appointed adults of the Queendom refused to grow old and die? The positions of power and influence were all filled long ago, before the colonies were founded. That was why there were colonies. That was why there’d been a Children’s Revolt to inspire their hasty founding.