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as high energy as that.” He nodded at the streak. “But there are charged particles flying through us all the time. Poking holes in our cells, flipping bits in our DNA . . . It's one reason people used to grow old, isn't it? Before there were fax machines to reprint us from scratch?”
    “Yuck, Conrad. I don't need a biology lesson, especially from someone who failed it in school. Anyway, let's see a graphic of Planet Two, please.”
    The floor thought about that, pausing for a moment before deciding she was talking to it. Then the translucent, holographic cube was replaced by a translucent, holographic sphere. But not a featureless one; it was paler around the middle, darker and bluer at the top and bottom, and clinging to it all around was a thin haze of refractance, a suggestion of atmosphere.
    The captain cleared her throat. “Planet Two, my dear.”
    “Best guess, anyway,” Conrad answered. “A five-year-old could draw this.”
    “Well, they
have
detected oceans, and some suggestion of a small polar cap.”
    “Who has? I don't know how they get that,” Conrad protested. He'd done a little amateur astronomy himself—in space, where it was a matter of life and death—and he knew how difficult it was to resolve a dim, distant object as anything other than a pinpoint. “All they've got is an analysis of the light reflecting off the planet's atmosphere, right?”
    “Well, the air is breathable.”
    “Maybe,” Conrad said. “Barely. I heard you'd die from the carbon dioxide.”
    “Breathable to something, I mean. There is life there.”
    “Hmm. Yeah.” That much at least was undeniable. There wouldn't be free oxygen in the atmosphere—probably not even free nitrogen—without biochemistry to replenish it.
    “Fix this image in your mind,” Xmary said. “Don't ever forget. We won't always have these silly jobs. Before you know it, we'll be building a world of our own.”
    Conrad's smirk was somewhat bitter. “If you believe these clowns, which I'm not convinced you should, then Planet Two is four times the mass of Earth. Its day is, what, nineteen times too long? Fix
this
in your mind, dear: unprotected on the surface, you'd die in a couple of hours. The planet merely soothes the Queendom's conscience; Barnard is no friendlier than Venus, or the wastes of the Kuiper Belt.”
    “People live on Venus. And in the Kuiper.”
    “Sure they do.
We
did. But we could fax ourselves to Earth anytime we needed to. Fresh air, sunshine . . . We won't have those things at Barnard. Not for a long time.”
    There was a sound at the door, a scratching and thumping as if someone were nudging it with an elbow. And then, ever so faintly, the sound of voices. There was an unsealing noise, like someone hawking to spit, and then the hatch was swinging inward.
    “Hello?”
    “Hello?” Xmary called back.
    “Are we decent in there?” The voice belonged to Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui, the former
Pilinisi Sola
and
Pilinisi Tonga,
the Prince of Tonga and of the Queendom of Sol. Now, newly elected as King of Barnard.
    That hatch had been verbally sealed, but of course locks meant very little in a programmable world, where Royal Overrides could compel the obedience not only of machines but of the very substances from which they were made. At least the king had had the courtesy to knock.
    “Hi, Bascal,” Xmary said. “Come on in.”
    The hatch swung inward, and Bascal stepped into the room. He was wearing the same sort of uniform that Conrad and Xmary were, but his was purple and bore no insignia. He wore no crown or other signs of office, unlike his mother the Queen of Sol, who wore a ring for every civilized planet in her domain and carried, at least on formal occasions, the Scepter of Earth. But Barnard's civilization—all twenty people of it—hadn't had the time to develop such trimmings. Perhaps they never would.
    Bascal's skin was the tan color of mixed ancestry, or “hybrid strength” as he liked to say: a dark