Lost in Transmission (9 page)

This process took a lot of attention and a few more years of their precious youth. This time, more people were needed outside of storage, although the shifts and duty periods were by no means evenly distributed. The old grew older while the young remained as they were. At the start of the journey the crew's oldest member was just seventeen and a half years older than the youngest, but now—even discounting Bascal himself, and the stored passengers whose subjective experience of the journey was zero—that gap had widened by decades. Conrad learned an astrogation term to describe this: dispersion.

“Throw a handful of rocks on the floor,” Second Astrogation Officer Bertram Wang explained one day over beer and blintzes in the observation lounge, “and they'll skid to a halt at various distances: some at your feet, some coming to rest against a far obstacle. Most of them are just scattered in between, in a pattern we call ‘Gaussian distribution.' If we draw a graph of crew subjective ages—a histogram, it's called—I'll bet it follows this pattern. A bell curve, you know, with Bascal at one extreme, the median peak around twenty-seven years or so and, I dunno, Martin Liss at the tail end. Remember Martin?”

Indeed, Conrad remembered him well. Had even gotten him killed once, when Martin suffocated in a makeshift space suit during one of the more hazardous operations of the Children's Revolt. He was technically the ship's medical officer, but the job was so redundant that he'd been pulled out of storage only twice over the entire course of the journey. “Yeah. All right, let's try your graph.”

They did, and it came out much as Bert had predicted it would.

“But these aren't random events,” Conrad objected. “These are people with free will, making conscious choices. Pebbles that get up and walk around.”

“Yeah, well,” Bert replied with a shrug. “Choices are a stochastic phenomenon. Meaning you can apply statistics to them, which I'd call a fortunate thing, or else there would be no science of politics at all. Everyone would just—I dunno—guess what to do and hope it all worked out.”

Conrad laughed at that. “You're saying they don't?”

“Not always, no. If our dear king is clever as well as cracked, he'll keep some people around to check the math on his various plots and schemes.”

And here a prejudice showed through: implicit in any discussion of aging on
Newhope
was the observation that along with the alleged “seasoning,” it fostered a particular kind of craziness, which Xmary dubbed “decade fever.” At the far, peculiar end of the spectrum was King Bascal, yes, now 145 years old, with more than half that time spent in the company of two persons or fewer.

“I wouldn't talk like that too openly,” Conrad warned Bertram. “But you're not the only one worrying about it.”

Bascal, speaking to Conrad on an occasion some nine months later, was upbeat and expansive on the subject. “Ah, my old friend, or rather my
young
friend, my childhood chum who still has baby fat around the cheeks! There is so much more to life than you've yet guessed. It is such a rich and intricate process, of which you've tasted so little!”

“And how would you know that, exactly?” Conrad answered with rising irritation. “What have you tasted lately?”

“A fair question,” the king conceded. “To the untrained eye, I've been doddering around in a cellar for a century and a score now, probably—if not obviously—deranged. But in fact, my dear boyo, there's not just one of me bumbling around the ship. When I'm alone, I print dozens of copies of myself, each with a different work assignment. There has been, at times, a whole society of me, with its own social structure, differentiation of labor, and even a sort of service economy—necessary because I don't always agree with myself about who should do what. Especially when the work is unpleasant. One gets to know oneself very well indeed under these circumstances, and knowing oneself is the first step along the path to understanding others, and therefore what life is all about.

“In addition, laddie-oh, I've absorbed one thousand classics of written literature, in ten different languages. I've also watched at least half a million hours of television—all the classics of the Queendom, and of the societies which preceded it—and I have seen and read the major analyses of them as well, and even added my own voice to the body of criticism. You tease me for abandoning poetry—” In fact, Conrad had done no such thing. “—but there was a hubris to my early works which I now find inexcusable. Chief among the presumptions of youth is the spouting of platitudes, which are understood intellectually but which exist without experiential context, and are therefore not
felt
. Thus, in an information sense, they're meaningless: a repetition rather than a reformulation. As a poet I was an utter fraud, and have been atoning at length for that sin. When I know enough, when I've learned enough, the muse will visit again, and this time her gifts will not be abused.”

And if the words themselves made a certain amount of sense, albeit one of fatalism, they were delivered with a strange, plodding sort of mania, like the downhill slide of some immense glacier, cracking and grinding its way over any possible objection. One might as well argue with a storm, with the orbit of a planet or the slow rotation of the galaxy itself. That was decade fever. That was Bascal Edward. The two had become indistinguishable.

“I also converse with the ship, of course. By now, its outer personality is shaped primarily through its interactions with me. Not that you would know this, robophobe that you are. And if that social scene begins to feel barren, why, I simply create other personalities as needed. I once spent a decade raising a family of robots. They're in storage now, but I'll bring them out—I will!—when I have a palace to move them into. And of course there is neural sensorium, which is real enough when you've nothing better to compare it to. I have seen London and France, my boy, and more than my fair share of underpants as well.”

Conrad had no idea what that was supposed to mean, but it had an elderly sort of sound to it: wistful and boastful and vaguely, smugly superior. Not for the first time in his life, he wondered whether he and Bascal were still friends, whether they really knew each other at all. But Bascal certainly seemed to feel a bond, and since they couldn't avoid each other anyway, that pretty well decided the matter.

Robert and Agnes were not as bad, as insufferable, as fevered by the passage of time. But they had logged their share of solo hours, too, and of years in various too-small societies with bizarre, insular customs of their own. They still wore their uniforms—everyone did—but their own had mutated in strange, subtle ways: the shoulders too broad, the waist too narrow, the braids and insignia so bright that they actually glowed a little. And there was a hint of transparency to the fabric—perhaps an echo of their old nudist ways, though it looked more funerary than sultry. Sometimes Conrad would find them wandering around the ship like ghosts, together or separately, lost in thought and mumbling to themselves. Agnes had brightened the blue of her skin as well, and Robert had added a subtle pattern of tiger stripes to his that through some trick of the light was plainly visible through the corner of your eye, but could scarcely be seen at all when you looked right at it.

“I've spent my life steering this ship,” Robert would say sometimes, in an angry, almost accusatory sort of way. “Don't you tell me how to count beans, sonny. Your rank at this point is an absurd formality.”

Of course he said nice things, too, like, “You're a fine young man, Conrad. I always thought so. Follow your passions, and this long, long life of yours will ease by like a pleasant dream.”

Farther down on the decade fever scale, Brenda and Peter and Bertram and Money had racked up a couple of decades each, and didn't often let you forget it. Even Xmary was puffing herself up a bit, and Conrad, who lagged her by a good eight years, supposed that he himself was not immune. When the ordinary colonists came out of storage, what would they make of
Newhope
's crew? And of their child-king, yeah, who in their subjective time frame had only just been elected a few weeks before?

Well, maybe the move to larger environments—orbital colonies and finally domes on the planet herself—would do them all some good. After all, no one here was an expert in colonizing a new star. In this most crucial of senses, they would all be on equal footing. Not solid, but definitely equal.

But the problems were already starting as Conrad pulled out a few teams of people who, in their studies, had specialized in astronomy and geology, or matter programming and zero-gee construction. Where possible, he introduced them to the ship no more than five at a time, and for no more than seven days at a stretch. But still it amazed him how quickly they grew bored and frustrated, claustrophobic at the confines of
Newhope,
and cranky—very cranky—at being told what to do. On more than one occasion bitter arguments erupted, and Conrad had to remind himself that these children, many of them, were only a few years removed from their days of revolution, and weeks at best from the Queendom's training and reeducation camps.

So he gave them every possible benefit of the doubt. Until, inevitably, the first of the Barnard freakups occurred.

What happened was that a fight sprang up between two of
the newcomers. One girl was from the uprising in Calcutta, and the other from the sole revolutionary action on the surface of Mars, popularly known as the Chryse Feint. They started arguing about who knows what, and it came not only to blows, but to the Indian girl dragging the taller, thinner Martian to a maintenance airlock leading down to the unpressurized storage levels where the mass buffers and other equipment lived. There were security alerts all up and down the ship as the one girl—or woman, Conrad supposed—dragged the other down fourteen levels, past a dozen onlookers, most of whom tried to intercede in one way or another.

There wasn't much to the Indian woman, who weighed no more than Conrad had at age fifteen, nor was there any real power behind her jabs and thrusts. But she knew exactly where to hit—the inner curve of an elbow or knee, the base of the nose, the soft tissue of the ear.

When Conrad got there she was actually working the controls of the airlock, speaking voice commands and thumbing authentication circles, even rotating the locking wheel on the inner hatch itself. If she did not intend to murder the taller girl, she certainly made every effort to appear as if she did. Fortunately, it was no trivial matter to open the lock, especially with the white heat of rage slowing her down.

Conrad arrived at the same time as Ho and two of his heavies: Steve Grush and Andres Murillo.

“What's going on here?” Conrad and Ho asked at the same time.

“Help!” cried the Martian girl, whose name Conrad could not for the life of him remember. She was not technically a member of the crew, so her uniform bore no insignia, and looked like what it was: a prison coverall. The Indian girl—Geetha something—wore a shorter, broader version of the same garment, and looked no better in it.

“This shitnick Earther is trying to kill me!”

“It certainly looks that way,” Conrad agreed, though Geetha had stopped with the controls and was simply restraining the other girl.

“I was just scaring her,” she said flatly.

“Sure you were,” Ho chortled.

“Let go of her,” Conrad said, “and tell me what happened. Why are you doing this?”

“She was careless. She nearly burned my hand. She nearly burned it right off, and somebody has to show this Martian bitch some damn manners. You understand? Some damn, some goddamn manners.”

“I was nowhere near you! We weren't working together, and there is no way that telescope mirror would have burned you. The sunlight is too weak, you stupid twat! I could focus it right in your fucking retina for twenty fucking minutes, and you'd still be fine.”

Geetha let the other girl go, but promptly brandished a fist at Conrad. “You think you control me? You think you tell me what to do?”

“The chain of command thinks so, yes,” Conrad said. “And our lives depend on it. We can't have this kind of behavior going on. If you have a grievance, bring it to me. That's my job. If you feel you're in immediate danger, talk to Ho here, or just shout ‘Security!' at the nearest bulkhead. They'll break up your disputes, one way or another.”

“I fought people like you,” Geetha said through clenched teeth. “I fought to get people like you off my back. Out of my face, out of my fucking life. But here you are, like a big fat bag of pus. Chain of command my bleeding twat, fucker.”

There was a time, Conrad realized, when he and his brothers and sisters in arms had used such language, and worse. But perhaps he had matured, or the youthful fires within him had cooled, because he found it shocking now, and offensive, and flatly unnecessary. He resisted the urge to tell Geetha to watch her mouth. At this point, that would be counterproductive. What he did say was, “Compared to some of the ships we trained on, this one is fairly spacious. Maybe not as big as the habitats you grew up in, but not tiny, either. Still, there is nowhere to escape to.

“You can't even throw on a suit and go outside, because even though the radiation has finally died down, we're under maneuvering thrust half the time as we nudge, frugally, toward our target asteroid. You'd get lost, or slung to the end of your tether, or knocked in the head and burned. And there's no reason to go out anyway, if we use the fax machines wisely and judiciously, and treat each other with some minimum level of respect. I don't see a minimum level of respect here. Do you?”

“She started it,” both girls said.

And the Martian girl, finally free to do so, launched a punch at Geetha's stomach. Geetha launched a blow at the Martian girl's face and for good measure, a wild kick in Conrad's direction as well.

“Oh, I don't think so,” Ho said. And with that, he drew a gas pistol from a holster hidden in his uniform somewhere, aimed it at the two girls, and pulled the trigger twice. It went
Pop! Pop!
—a vaguely comical sound, except that a round, red hole appeared in the side of each girl's head, and the two of them collapsed to the deck in a tangle of limbs. There was an immediate pooling and spreading of blood.