battles, even rescued the sun from destruction, this former Declarant-Philander of Spanish Girona. But there was nothing complicated about him.
“Never change,” she instructed. “Bruno, Bruno, you are my anchor. By which I mean, you drag me to the bottom and hold me there until my struggles cease, while the waves break overhead.”
“Ah. And are you drowned yet? Have I filled your lungs with the bright saline of hope?”
She didn't answer for a while. On the railing, her own fingers left trails of glittering diamond, hard and clear, which refracted the light of
Newhope
's sail, and of its rippled twin in the ocean's broad mirror. And when she finally spoke, all that came out was, “You must fill me with more than that.” For she had the body of a twenty-year-old and the grieving heart of a mother, and neither could be soothed by words alone.
chapter four
of creation and power, and the
finding of oneself
Conrad was minding his own business, sliding down the ladder railing and whistling some half-remembered tune, when everything around him lurched violently to starboard. The railing was yanked out from under him, and he flailed backward, and would have hit the floor if the wall hadn't come along and hit him first.
“Ow!” he cried, just as the floor really did come up and smack him in the butt. “Little gods!”
“Collision avoidance. Sorry, people,” said the voice of Robert M'chunu over the intercom.
“Get processed,” Conrad muttered under his breath, picking himself up and probing gingerly for bruises.
This kind of crap was just a fact of life onboard a starship. Given their speed of travel and the range of their sensors, if there was any debris in their path which was too large to be disintegrated by the nav lasers and too small to be spotted telescopically and plotted around, they had about ten seconds to get out of its way. With lateral thrusters belching fusion exhaust at one full gee, you could juke laterally by about half a kilometer in this length of time. And that was usually enough; it was the safety margins that really killed you, made you juke five or eight or ten kilometers instead.
If the thing you were avoiding was the size of a thumbnail or a particularly large grain of sand, and it was bearing right down the ship's centerline, then you really only had to dodge fifteen meters to let it skate past the edge of the hull with nary a scratch. But that did nothing to protect the sail, which was needed to slow down again at Barnard, and which was actually still giving them some fairly substantial push, even out here in the Oort Cloud, ten times as far from the sun as the orbit of Neptune.
And fuck if it was empty space. The last-minute dodges—“jukes” they were called—were happening ten or fifteen times a day. This was down substantially from the third-day peak of a hundred and four, but damned annoying nonetheless. Human bodies simply weren't meant to withstand this sort of sustained battering. Even null-gee hockey players would fax themselves a fresh body after every game, but here onboard ship, in the middle of operations, there generally wasn't time. For this reason, all nonessential personnel were being cycled—very willingly—into fax storage. The ship had been quiet before, but now it was
deathly
quiet. As the thrum of the nav engines faded away, the air resumed its stillness.
The skeleton crew—now a partial skeleton crew—actually had no particular use for Conrad Mursk. He didn't keep the engines or the fax machines running; he didn't navigate; didn't maintain or forecast or repair. Thus he was tempted—more tempted every day—to jump in the fax and let this part of the mission be over. Stored as data, he'd experience no time or sensation of any kind. He would simply step out of the fax in a hundred years, and everything would be great. But somebody did have to look after the crew as a whole, and anyway Conrad felt it was bad form for a first officer to go to sleep
“Never change,” she instructed. “Bruno, Bruno, you are my anchor. By which I mean, you drag me to the bottom and hold me there until my struggles cease, while the waves break overhead.”
“Ah. And are you drowned yet? Have I filled your lungs with the bright saline of hope?”
She didn't answer for a while. On the railing, her own fingers left trails of glittering diamond, hard and clear, which refracted the light of
Newhope
's sail, and of its rippled twin in the ocean's broad mirror. And when she finally spoke, all that came out was, “You must fill me with more than that.” For she had the body of a twenty-year-old and the grieving heart of a mother, and neither could be soothed by words alone.
chapter four
of creation and power, and the
finding of oneself
Conrad was minding his own business, sliding down the ladder railing and whistling some half-remembered tune, when everything around him lurched violently to starboard. The railing was yanked out from under him, and he flailed backward, and would have hit the floor if the wall hadn't come along and hit him first.
“Ow!” he cried, just as the floor really did come up and smack him in the butt. “Little gods!”
“Collision avoidance. Sorry, people,” said the voice of Robert M'chunu over the intercom.
“Get processed,” Conrad muttered under his breath, picking himself up and probing gingerly for bruises.
This kind of crap was just a fact of life onboard a starship. Given their speed of travel and the range of their sensors, if there was any debris in their path which was too large to be disintegrated by the nav lasers and too small to be spotted telescopically and plotted around, they had about ten seconds to get out of its way. With lateral thrusters belching fusion exhaust at one full gee, you could juke laterally by about half a kilometer in this length of time. And that was usually enough; it was the safety margins that really killed you, made you juke five or eight or ten kilometers instead.
If the thing you were avoiding was the size of a thumbnail or a particularly large grain of sand, and it was bearing right down the ship's centerline, then you really only had to dodge fifteen meters to let it skate past the edge of the hull with nary a scratch. But that did nothing to protect the sail, which was needed to slow down again at Barnard, and which was actually still giving them some fairly substantial push, even out here in the Oort Cloud, ten times as far from the sun as the orbit of Neptune.
And fuck if it was empty space. The last-minute dodges—“jukes” they were called—were happening ten or fifteen times a day. This was down substantially from the third-day peak of a hundred and four, but damned annoying nonetheless. Human bodies simply weren't meant to withstand this sort of sustained battering. Even null-gee hockey players would fax themselves a fresh body after every game, but here onboard ship, in the middle of operations, there generally wasn't time. For this reason, all nonessential personnel were being cycled—very willingly—into fax storage. The ship had been quiet before, but now it was
deathly
quiet. As the thrum of the nav engines faded away, the air resumed its stillness.
The skeleton crew—now a partial skeleton crew—actually had no particular use for Conrad Mursk. He didn't keep the engines or the fax machines running; he didn't navigate; didn't maintain or forecast or repair. Thus he was tempted—more tempted every day—to jump in the fax and let this part of the mission be over. Stored as data, he'd experience no time or sensation of any kind. He would simply step out of the fax in a hundred years, and everything would be great. But somebody did have to look after the crew as a whole, and anyway Conrad felt it was bad form for a first officer to go to sleep
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