“Ah, too bad,” Sandy said. “But if you already know the theory, you could pick up something else, pretty quick.”
“Nah. The fact is, I don’t have music in my head,” Becca said. “If you don’t have music in your head, you can’t really play—all you can do is reproduce what’s on the page. No fun in that.”
“Mmmm. So what do you have in your head?”
“Structures, mostly,” Becca said. “Shapes. Next life, maybe I’ll be an architect. I’ve got a whole town in there, that I put together building by building, and block by block. I can lie in bed and close my eyes, and walk through it. Move stores around, change apartment layouts, streets, you know… shuffle the whole deck.”
“How big is the town?”
“About five thousand right now, but it’s growing. I think I might get it to thirty thousand, someday, but that’d about be my intellectual limit…. Why are you pushing that edge out?” She was looking over his shoulder at the schematic on the screen.
“Because Crow’s thin,” Sandy said. “A heavy guy, I’d cut some off the basic pattern—you need the guitar to snuggle up to you, when you’re standing up.” She nodded, and Sandy pushed the edge out a bit more.
“Where are the frets?”
“No frets. He started by playing the upright bass,” Sandy said.
“Huh. Who woulda thunk.”
“What are you doing down here, anyway?” Sandy asked.
She shrugged. “Looking for something to do, I guess. I’m about burned out on pushing bytes… and I thought I might borrow one of the smaller printers and poop out a Go board and some stones.”
“Yeah? I tried playing that, back in school,” Sandy said. “The chess guys were such jerks about it that I gave up on chess and tried Go. It’s like playing chess in a heavy fog… sort of.”
“If you help me poop out my board, I’ll teach you how to play,” Becca said. “In a couple of months, you could fake being an intellectual.”
“Yeah…” He laughed. “I can do that now. Set up the Go board and stare at it. Chuckle every once in a while. What more do you need?”
“Well, you need the board…”
“All right. You give me secret Go lessons, we’ll print up a board and the stones. Then when I look like I might know what I’m doing, we’ll go play in the Commons where we can impress people.”
“Deal.”
They chatted for a couple of minutes, then Becca wandered away and Sandy went back to his schematic. After a moment, he smiled, just for himself.
27.
Six days after parasol deployment and thirty-two days into their mission, the Nixon passed perihelion. This was the most uncertain part of the mission plan, next to visiting the alien whatsit.
There were a number of ways the ship could get into trouble. Parasol failure was only the most obvious and predictable one. That wouldn’t kill the crew.
“Well, probably not,” Fang-Castro told Clover. They were drinking tea in Fang-Castro’s apartment. “The ship could take the heat, at least for a couple of weeks. We don’t know if the heat pumps could shunt the thermal load from the living modules to the radiator system, but we think they could. Probably.”
“I wasn’t really thinking about the heat,” Clover said. “We got the heat handled. But I was talking to Alfie, and he said we’re near the solar maximum…”
“True…”
“…and so we get these flares and coronal ejections and whatnot, and there’s no really good way to model them. They can’t really see forward for more than a few days or a week. After that, it’s guesswork.”
“Guesswork and statistics. Statistics say we’d have to be really unlucky to get hit.”
“But if we did, it’d be all bad,” Clover said.
“Yes, it would be.” She smiled at him. “Since there’s not much we can do about it, except have fire drills, it’s best not to think about it.”
A major flare would unleash a burst of X-rays, and at the Nixon’s distance, the hard radiation would hit them in a few minutes—most of the crew wouldn’t get enough warning to reach the safety of aft Engineering, where they would be shielded by the huge water tanks that provided reaction mass for the VASIMR engines.
There were hidey-holes in each module of the ship, which, in a pinch, could accommodate the crew in a radiation-safe environment for the hour or so they might need protection—but it would be crowded and uncomfortable. Crowded and uncomfortable was better than dead.
Fang-Castro had insisted on drill after drill until every crew member showed they could make it to safety in less than ninety seconds, three times in a row. In the month leading up to perihelion, every crew member had come to hate the sound of the flare alarm.
After the X-rays, there’d be a proton storm. The flood of charged particles was immensely damaging, biologically, but it would also wreak havoc with electronics, inducing massive eddy currents in anything metallic.
The hidey-holes and the water tanks were enough to protect the crew but there was no way to electrically shield the entire ship. Shunts and circuit breakers would provide some protection, and the ship builders believed the craft would make it through without fatal damage. Nobody was quite sure, and there was no way to test for it.
The worst possibility was that they’d be hit by a coronal mass ejection. If that happened, they were toast. The massive plasma stream would overwhelm any imaginable safeguards on the ship’s critical systems.
There really wasn’t much to be done except prepare for what they reasonably could. Space weather could give them some advance warning, but the Nixon was not a maneuverable ship. The math was simple and irrefutable: the ship was barreling along at one hundred and fifteen kilometers per second deep in the sun’s gravitational well. At best, its engines could alter its velocity by two kilometers per second in a day’s time. Major course changes were out of the question. If the Nixon found itself on a collision course with a coronal mass ejection, then a collision was what was going to happen.
The anxiety was compounded by the boredom. There just wasn’t much to do on the ship: eat, work, sleep, exercise, watch vids beaming in from Earth. Ten days on, it looked like they were going to luck out, as far as solar storms were concerned. No news was the best news. Still, it was no news.
Boring.
Well, not all the time.
28.
Francois Peneski, a biochemist known for research into the possibilities of non-carbon-based life-forms, finished dinner in the cafeteria/commons. He took his tray and empty dishes to the dirty-dishes corral, dumped the dishes, then carried the tray back to where Don Larson, a mathematician, was chatting with friends, and used the hard-plastic tray to smash Larson in the face, breaking several blood vessels in Larson’s nose and knocking him off his chair.
Larson knew precisely why this had occurred, and though the nose pain was nearly blinding, and blood was running down his chin, he got up off the floor and swung wildly at Peneski, connecting, more by luck than anything else, with the other man’s left eye.
Then it was on: flailing fists and feet, several bites, screaming crew members. A woman named Rosalind Aster, a mechanical engineer, ripped at Peneski’s face with her fingernails. Peneski elbowed her in the mouth, and she fell backwards, hard, taking a table full of dishes down with her.
(After the fight, several of the numbers people and one of the physicists tried to work out the optimum tactics for a low-gravity fistfight. The problem proved to be surprisingly difficult, given the number of variables involved; the actual fight, however, was carried out with some efficiency.)