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 Hmm.
 Even after that Peter and I, and one or two of the others, will have to stop
by occasionally, to check on efficiencies and such. Maybe tweak a parameter
here and there, or spec out a new monitoring routine.
 The comm antenna is another issue. We re already using the whole sail for
this, so there s no room left to expand communications. As our distance from
Earth increases, we ll have to increase transmitter power to maintain our data
rate. Or just live with a lower data rate, I guess. Weare supposed to be on
our own. But to answer your question, I think we need another ten days here at
half-crew, and probably five or ten more with a single person on part-time
watch. Then we can talk about storage. But truthfully, we need to go last. Or
nearly.
 Why so?
Money shrugged.  Fax machines take a lot of energy. Of course they recover a
lot of energy, too, forming chemical bonds and such. But the demand is
asymmetric. With no crew, you don t have to worry about it, and with a
thousand people sharing one machine, you can project your energy needs with
statistics. But right now we ve got almost as many fax machines as people, and
it s getting to be a grind.
 And here I ve been taking them for granted, Conrad said thoughtfully.  Do
we need some kind of rationing or scheduling system? Would that make your life
easier?
 Yah, Money said vaguely,  I don t know about that. Talk to your Chief of
Stores. She s my main energy customer after propulsion.
Just then, Peter Kolb came back, stepping through the hatch like a new man,
no longer holding his eye.
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 Better? Money asked him.
 Much, Peter answered testily.  And don t ask me again for those cooling
numbers. I m on it.
Conrad found his Chief of Stores in the aft inventory, cursingand glaring.
She was sitting on the floor beside the fax machine the largest one in the
ship s habitable compartments with a bunch of tools and sensors and
sketchplates spread out around her.
 Is this a bad time? Conrad asked, wincing inwardly because there was no
good time to talk to Brenda Bohobe. Not for him, at any rate.
Brenda looked up sharply, as if surprised to find anyone penetrating her
little bubble of a world.  Oh. It s you. Hi.
 Some trouble here? he asked.
 The start of some trouble, I think. She chewed her lip for a moment.  This
is the fax most of our passengers stored themselves through, and in the last
hundred or so, the system logged an increase in energy consumption. I ve run
the plots, and it looks shallow but exponential.
 So the machine is slightly broken, and it ll only get worse over time?
 Right.
 Wonderful. Have you identified a cause?
The look she gave him was hard.  I have, yes, thank you. These kind of surges
are always related to error correction. Now before you get too excited, let me
say that a print plate doesn t last forever, and the large ones tend to die
more quickly than the small ones. And this one here has probably got a million
tons of throughput left before it gives up the ghost. With proper maintenance,
it ll last for hundreds of years.
 And that s what you re doing now? Routine maintenance?
 I didn t say it was routine. There are burned-out faxels which my nanobes
can t replace. To avoid molecular defects in the items being printed and
stored, error correction has to judder back and forth around these. Like a
snake s head swaying to improve the view.
 So then, Conrad said with some relief,  there s no danger of pulling the
passengers out of storage as cancer-riddled morons?
To his surprise, Brenda actually laughed at that. She had kind of a sadistic
laugh, but good-humored just the same.  Unless they went in that way, no. What
I m doing right now is scrubbing behind the print plate s surface, bringing
all marginal faxels up to full capacity. I don t know where this damage is
coming from.
 Probably cosmic rays, Conrad told her.  We re seeing traces of it all over
the ship. It s going to be a fact of life until we slow down and get back
inside a large magnetic field of some sort. But you get cosmic rays on Earth,
too. Is this sort of damage unusual? Have you seen it before?
 Not unusual, no. Just more than I m used to seeing.
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 Well, Conrad said with a smirk,  you could always print another fax
machine.
He was joking with her. The print plate of a fax machine had, like,
extradimensional quantum attributes that couldn t be stored or described
atomically. People and oranges and even whole spaceships could be produced by
fax machine, and most of the parts for another fax machine could be as well,
but the print plate itself had to come from a special factory, and every
square centimeter of it represented according to rumor a year s labor from a
thousand patient elves. The amazing thing, when you thought about it, was how
dirt-common these things had become even before the rise of the Queendom. By [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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