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."
"People have always migrated in search of something better. It's a fundamental of human nature. It's even why Roderick's project could ultimately succeed, because we do want the best for our kids. People will always choose improvement for themselves if they ever get that choice; they just disagree with the definition of improvement. That's your politics. Colonization is a form of evolution. Minorities can emigrate to live the way they want without persecution. New ideas can flourish once they've escaped the dead hand of inertia, which is what the unchanging, comfortable masses are. New beginnings allow human culture to move forward."
"Forward to what? Higher levels of consumerism?"
"It doesn't matter that some planets are just repeats of Earth. A few of them aren't, and that's what counts. I've been to Santa Chico. It's not a way of life I would ever choose. But they have. And it's incredibly different, and I respect them for that. The portal colonies, who knows what they're building for themselves. You've found something that could help us flourish to an astonishing degree. And it was found out here among the stars, beyond Earth's shriveled horizon. Finding the dragon was an accident. But coming out here to the unknown where we can find the dragons isn't chance. It's where we want to be, it's where we belong."
"We might flourish with dragon nanonics. On the other hand we could just destroy ourselves. It's such a powerful technology."
"That's been said of many new things we've built. The generation alive when it happens is terrified; then two generations on, nobody can even understand what the fuss was about. I don't have religion to fall back on, I don't even believe much in fate, but when it comes down to the bottom line, I do have confidence in us as a species. We'll absorb this as we've absorbed everything else, and we'll move on to something wonderful. History's on our side."