When he was done with his inspection, he called Command: “Captain, we’re ready to deploy. On your command.”
Purely a courtesy. Fang-Castro: “You may proceed, Mr. Martinez.”
Martinez made one last check to make sure all the personnel were clear, and then said, “Deploying the shade. Three-two-one-fire.”
He pressed a button, the package unzipped, and the parasol unfolded exactly like a metallic flower, and for the first time ever, the Nixon was in the shade.
A minute inspection of the shade showed no tears; a tear could be fixed, but it would be a pain in the ass. No such pain would be experienced.
The second section was larger than the first, a huge rectangle of metallized Kapton to be stretched broadside to the ship on the side that would be facing the sun at closest approach. At four hundred meters in length, it was longer than the entire ship.
Temporary memory-metal support booms were attached to key mount points on the axle, booms, and mast of the Nixon and triggered to unroll. The unpacked parasol would be attached to a rectangular x-frame, whose double handful of sockets would mate with mounting points on the ends of those booms. The process wasn’t fundamentally different from the deployment of the front-end disk. The shell containing the shade was towed into place and attached to one of the support booms.
At Martinez’s command, the package began to blossom, just as the first one had, until nearly half a square kilometer of shiny plastic film and its x-frame floated in space next to the Nixon. The servicing jockeys maneuvered the ungainly oblong into position close enough to the other booms that the mounting teams could drag the couplings on the parasol frame and mounting booms together.
By mid-afternoon, the crew had finished with the attachments, and the Nixon was ready for its close encounter with Sol.
The vid of the work, condensed to five minutes on that night’s broadcast, was quite beautiful, Sandy thought. For one shot, using a digital sun filter on his longest lens, shooting from the far side of the ship, he had shown the shade eclipsing several minor sunspots as it was maneuvered into place. He’d locked on Fiorella’s egg, holding it in a constant predetermined set of pixels, which did not have the digital filter, so her egg hung like a bright white star across the pumpkin-colored face of the sun.
Fiorella had narrated.
The ratings were down.
The earth was moving on, as the two ships were moving out.
26.
Time passed—for most of the people on the ship, it was business as usual. Although there was a growing time lag for radio-wave contact between the ship and the earth, it wasn’t noticeable except in direct conversations. Professors who lectured continued to lecture; they might then have to wait for some minutes for blocks of questions from the audiences, and the audiences would have to wait a similar number of minutes for a block of answers, but they adapted to the delay.
As Clover said, “I can finish a lecture, walk down the hall, take a leak, and get back in time to answer the questions. Can’t do that when you’re there in person.”
Sandy spent a lot of time in the shop, designing and printing a five-string bass guitar for Crow. There’d been carbon-composite guitars for most of a century, and though wood-bigots still ruled, most objective measures suggested that properly designed and printed carbon instruments now exceeded their wooden counterparts in the various parameters of tonality.
“Properly designed” being the stumbling point: nobody knew what that meant, just as nobody knew what “art” meant.
And Martinez and Sandy did not see precisely eye to eye on the matter: although the same pitches were involved, Martinez favored more of a country whack sound, while Sandy favored more of a RhythmTech boom.
Either sound could be simulated with software, of course, but sound-bigots still insisted that amplified native-wood resonance was clearly distinguishable from electronic sound. Both Martinez and Sandy subscribed to that view, although numerous blind tests had proven that even professional musicians couldn’t tell the difference. But, carbon composites would have to do.
“Hey.”
Sandy turned and found Becca standing behind him, dressed in her usual jeans and T-shirt. “Haven’t started printing it yet?” she asked.
“Not yet. Still tweaking the sound, making some adjustments in shape.”
“You know, with a perfect sound system, you guys probably couldn’t tell the difference between the native resonance…”
“Yes, we could.”
“…and constructed sound, and after you finish running it through the leads and stompboxes and then through the preamp and power amp and out through a couple of speakers and then bounce it around the Commons… you’re lucky you can even tell it’s a guitar.”
“Shut up.”
After a moment of silence, she said, “So, not to abruptly change the subject, will you be sleeping with Fiorella tonight?”
That stopped him: “Jesus, where did that come from?”
She leaned against the printer bench and grinned at him. “From rumor central. And it’s all over the ship.”
Rumor central was a guy named Larry Wirt, who, in addition to being an excellent cook, knew more about who was doing what to whom than anyone else on the ship. And he talked about it. Incessantly.
“Ah, he saw Cassie and me talking down by Cassie’s cabin… he’s just making up bullshit.”
“Don’t wanna see my boy get hurt. That woman is a snake.”
“Becca, I’m just thinking about guitars. That’s it. Fiorella is a good-looking woman who doesn’t do a lot for me.” Sandy paused to think. Actually, Fiorella did do a lot for him, but then… This had to be handled carefully. “We started out hating each other and have improved that to active dislike.”
“Ah, well. Say, don’t basses have four strings?” She waved at the screen on Sandy’s slate. “Yours seems to have five.”
“Becca… Look, basses have as many as seven strings….”
The following lecture on bass guitars was a cover, designed to conceal a temptation to giggle. Sandy hadn’t actually giggled since Harvard, but now…
Earlier that day, John Clover had collected Wirt, supposedly to talk about a menu change for their joint cooking class, and had skillfully guided him past Sandy and Fiorella, who’d been waiting for them.
When Clover and Wirt appeared, Fiorella had her back to the corridor wall, while Sandy’s hand was planted on the wall next to her head, their faces barely half a meter apart. Or, as Wirt put it later, in the cafeteria line, “He was practically drooling on her perky little breasts. Wait, did I say little? Anyway, she liked it.”
That posture, that image, went viral. According to Clover, who talked to them later, eighteen thousand dollars had gone into what had become known as the Hump Pooclass="underline" “We’re at a hundred and forty-eight thousand and counting,” Clover said, gloating.
“Gloating is unbecoming in a man of your stature,” Fiorella said.
“If you’ll excuse the language, my asshole is unbecoming of a man of my stature, but I got one anyway,” Clover said. “Honest to God, one more day like this and we’ll be at two hundred thousand. A month, if we manage it just right, we’ll be at half a mil, and from there on out… snowball heaven.”
After finishing the short lecture on bass guitars, Sandy asked, “You play an instrument?”
“I started playing a violin when I was five,” Becca said. “My parents made me do it, for the discipline. I quit when I was ten. I hated it. I still hate it. I can’t even stand to listen to violin music—and I mean classical, bluegrass, whatever.”