Lawrence checked her pack. She'd chosen Chateaubriand steak with bearnaise sauce. The hydration valve was preset, so she couldn't have used the wrong amount of water to saturate it before she put it in the microwave slot. "It'll just be freefall pooling," he told her. "Fluid buildup in your head plays hell with your taste receptors. Try squirting some more salt solution into it."
"It's not just the taste, it's the texture, too." She pulled an array of mealpacks out of a box, sending them whirling across the little cabin to bounce off the walls. "Look at these. Each one a different food, and all with exactly the same consistency. It's like lukewarm mashed potato in twenty colors."
"Right. Sorry about that." Only another 103 days of this to go. When the wheel section was finally repressurized, Lawrence stood in the bridge compartment and cautiously unsealed his Skin. He sniffed at the cool air. "Sweet Fate, no problem with freefall pooling here."
Denise took her face mask off and grimaced. "What did that?"
"Let's go find out."
They never did track the stench down to a single source. Coolant fluid that had frozen was now sloshing about, slowly evaporating. The waste recycler was a big culprit, which they solved by closing the valves and having the robots spray the whole mechanism in foam sealant. Food scraps that the crew were eating had partially boiled in the vacuum before freezing; now they were truly rotten. Lawrence also suspected rodents and insects, decomposing away behind the wall and ceiling paneling.
All of it had to be cleared away: the fluids mopped up, biodegradable items taken through an airlock and dumped in nearby compartments that were still in a vacuum. It kept them busy for a while.
Lawrence claimed the captain's small suite of rooms. He took out every article of Marquis Krojen's clothes, all the personal items, erasing his identity. Then he went through the other cabins in search of clothes that fit. A lot had been sucked out into space, but there were enough to last a couple of months before he had to start thinking about washing them. Denise moved into a cabin on the other side of the bridge.
After the first week Lawrence began reviewing the multimedia library. He didn't have much else to do. Prime and the robots were perfectly capable of maintaining the few pieces of environmental equipment necessary to keep their section of the wheel functional. He had reactivated a sustainer cabinet for his Skin. Not that he expected to wear it again. That kept chugging along quietly without his intervention. The compression drive was operating efficiently, as were its tokamaks. There was no navigation required. No daily inspection of the ship. And no view.
At first he started choosing music to play, racking the volume up loud. It was kind of eerie, two people alone in a ship built for over twenty thousand. The music went partway to filling the emptiness for him while he exercised away in the gym to keep his body in trim. Then he and Denise started arguing about the tracks he played. He refused to let it get out of hand. He'd acquired plenty of experience with grudges building amid small groups in confined quarters; she with her rustic upbringing had no idea about the compromises that had to be made. So after that she chose half of them, and he kept quiet about her taste.
Even spending three or four hours a day working out left him with a lot of time to kill. He went back to the library and began accessing the i's. It was something he hadn't really done since leaving Amethi. At first he went for the comedies, new and classic, but there's only so long you can keep laughing at situations that have no real bearing on your own life. After that he immersed himself in action adventures, finally giving up on them when they became idiotic and repetitive. Dramas were generally too harrowing. He guessed that his current circumstances must have heightened his emotional state, leaving him too susceptible to the melodramatic traumas that characters involved him in. Science fiction he refused point-blank. Despite the huge temptation, that really would be premature. He would see Flight: Horizon again. But not here, and not alone. So he butterflied between classic plays and travelogue documentaries and historical event reenactments. Though more often than not he'd delve into the dragon's scattered memories of the Ring Empire and other strands of galactic history, already old when Earth's dinosaurs were young.
Even though they kept to themselves during the day, he and Denise made a point of spending mealtimes together. They varied the food as much as possible, although Denise never let up bitching about its blandness.
"You really do love her, don't you?" she asked during one dinner, about five weeks into the voyage.
Lawrence gave her a slightly guilty glance. As usual he'd tuned out her moaning about the state of the duck a la orange. When he followed her gaze, he saw he was rubbing the pendant between his thumb and forefinger. The little hologram smiled at him below her foggy age-worn surface.
"Yeah," he said. It didn't hurt to say it to her, not now that there was no turning back. "I do."
"Lucky girl. How long ago was it, twenty years?"
"Just about." He gave the pendant another look, then dropped it back inside his sweatshirt "You know, I only kept it at first to remind me why I left home, so my anger wouldn't fade. That's sort of shifted over the years. I keep it now because of what she represented. The happiest days of my life. It took a long time to realize that nobody can have that effect on your life without meaning something to you. And nobody else has ever meant that much to me, not even close."
Denise gave him a fond smile, slightly surprised by the admission. "I hope you manage to patch things up."
"I was so angry when I found out. Angry with everybody else for being part of a universe where such things were allowed to happen. Which was the only way I had of expressing myself. It was such a shock to discover that someone you love has been used like that. But then we were both young and stupid, me and her. She was desperate to emigrate, and that was the only way she could make it happen. And you know what? There's no difference between what she did and what I did. Zantiu-Braun had my body for twenty years because that's the only way I could ever hope to realize my dream."
"You really are hung up on starflight, aren't you?"
"Absolutely. I was born on a colony. I owe my existence to wanderlust."
"That's so old-human. Just pressing onward for your own satisfaction and never seeing the consequences. I think Simon Roderick may have had a point."
"You are kidding." Jacintha had transmitted her entire conversation with Roderick up to the Koribu before they went FTL. Hearing Z-B's policy hadn't shocked him quite as much as it should have, or at least as much as it would have a month previously. After all, he had been extensively v-written himself, and if he had kids, he would want the best for them, just as Roderick said. Being born a part of a movement like this made you more sympathetic to its aims. It would probably look a lot different from the outside. Terrifying, probably. Smarter, richer, more powerful people wanted to alter your children so that they could take part in their level of society, not yours. Lawrence wasn't sure if that was evolution or eugenics.
"No," Denise said. "He was right to say that all we've been doing with colonization is re-creating new Earths for no reason other than personal aggrandizement. They are established as fresh territories for the wealthy so that they're not hemmed in by old problems and restrictions. But those problems and restrictions don't cease to exist back on Earth just because they've left. If anything, they've been exacerbated. Because the type of people who leave are the ones whose energy and determination are exactly what's necessary to solve those problems. It's a political statement; you've given up on the rest of the human race."