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around it.
It would be nice, Bascal mused, if we could simply extrude the whole,
finished structure in one go. As it stands, we ll have that robot swarm
crawling over the wreckage for hours, fitting the puzzle pieces together. And
when they re finished, we ll see that primal eldest symbol of civilization
here, within the borders of our Kingdom. A shipyard!
Your Highness, Xmary said impatiently, we re all excited. But could you
tone down the commentary, please? Or do it somewhere else?
Ma am, I believe His Highness is recording for posterity, Robert protested.
I don t care if he s recording for God himself. This is a work environment,
in the middle of a delicate operation.
Ouch, Bascal said. Twoex-girlfriends telling the king to stifle himself.
Let him eat cake! Or at least, let him stuff his cakehole with something
soundproof and chewy. Very well, my dears, your sovereign will slink to the
privacy of his quarters, there to contemplate the future of his future. And
yours.
His tone was jovial enough, but as the king left his seat and leaped for the
downward spiral of the ladder, Conrad was pretty sure he caught a gleam of
teardrops at the corner of those royal brown eyes. This was perhaps an
emotional moment in more ways than one, and for more people than just Xmary
and Conrad.
Wow, said the newly awakened Zavery Biko from his seat at the Systems
Awareness console, when the king was safely out of earshot. He seems
different. Has he gone a little bit crazy?
Conrad would have answered in spite of decorum, but Xmary saved him the
effort, speaking almost the very same thoughts that were poised on his own
tongue. Bascal Edward was always crazy, Zav. Brilliant and impulsive, vaguely
unhinged. He s an interesting man to stand beside, and I mean that in the
Chinese-curse sense. Life in his shadow will never be dull.
Conrad had long since stopped thinking in terms of planetaryseasons and times
of day, but it seemed like a long, lazy afternoon as the swarm of gleaming
robots, over a period of six or eight hours, assembled the pieces extruded
from the passfax. With his father, Conrad had many times helped to assemble
vehicles in precisely this way, from kitted parts. When you were working on a
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road, or more properly, watching with bored eyes while your father worked on
one, sometimes you found yourself in a remote location where the nearest
public fax just wasn t big enough, or didn t have enough capacity in its
midbuffers to extrude a complete machine. The machine s designers understood
this, though, and so the machines rolled out in five or six easily mobile,
easily connected pieces. And when you were done, you simply popped the pieces
apart again, and fed them back into the fax. There were, of course,
self-assembling kits whose parts were intelligent enough to get around on
their own, but Donald Mursk had always disdained these, insisting that the
ritual of assembly and disassembly was educational, fostering an intimate
familiarity with the machinery, with the subtleties and intricacies of its
operation.
To use a thing properly, lad, he had said one time, you ve got to know how
it s put together. And then, with a wry Irish grin he d added, That applies
to women as well as machines. Keep that in mind for the future, eh? The study
of anatomy is the best friend love ever had.
Here inPule anga Barnarda, the Kingdom of Barnard, it was simpler to send
robots out to do the actual assembly work. They were faster and stronger than
human beings, more versatile than smart components, and of course they didn t
complain. This particular kit the Martin Kurster Memorial Shipyard, named for
some old astronomer consisted of several hundred distinct pieces that had to
be rotated and translated in three dimensions in a particularly large and
cunning geometry puzzle.
It was slow work, but fun to watch as it unfolded. For this reason, pretty
much everyone on the ship was either on duty or in the observation lounge, and
the number of people who were ostensibly on duty, but found themselves in the
lounge anyway, was more than Conrad could count on the fingers of one hand.
Still, except for Engineering and Information, Systems, and Stores, there were
no critical assignments today, so Conrad was inclined not to notice.
As it came together, the shipyard proved every bit as large as the plans had
promised, first equaling and then exceeding and finally dwarfing the outlines
ofNewhope beside it. The structure was mostly empty space, of course, but in
Conrad s experience, most things were. Anyway, because of its great size, the
project was visible from half the ship, and as it turned out, the view from
Conrad s quarters was nearly as good as the ones from the bridge and lounge.
So when their overlapping shifts had ended and the bridge was turned over to
Robert, that was where Conrad and Xmary found themselves, looking out through
the hull, which they had made transparent for this purpose. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
