The Wellstone

Chapter eleven. The long carry

There was no clearly defined “morning” aboard the good ship Viridity. The cold had faded with Conrad’s insulation trick, but the heat had continued to build until finally he awoke with a yelp, scrabbling at the itchy, crawling sensation of weightless sweat blobs against his skin. He had no idea what time it was, or how long he’d slept, because the ship’s only chronometer was on Bascal’s control panel in the bridge.

But he had to get up and demirrorize the wrapping again, and while he was up he visited the ’soir. This wasn’t strictly necessary, but if he went back to bed it soon would be. Unfortunately, this was a messy process they really hadn’t worked out yet. You had to peel back the gasket sealing the toilet lid, and then carefully do your business without breaking up the pool of water that clung jiggling at the bottom, by the effluent drain. And then you had to reseal the lid and flush, and inevitably there were droplets of stray liquid—not water—that could only be collected by hand. Thank all the little gods he hadn’t needed to crap yet.

So then Conrad had to wash his hands, another elaborate process. Water here was something akin to toothpaste: you squeezed out only as much as you needed, because any more would just get away from you and make a mess. And yeah, there were several globs that he had to chase down and consolidate. They formed a neat little water ball, and it occurred to him that there’d be water-ball fights before long. Was that bad? Should it be prevented somehow? He stuffed the water balls down the drain and plugged it behind them.

By the time he got back to his bed, he was most of the way awake. In zero gee it turned out there was no tossing and turning. Rolling over involved a lot of work with the blankets and straps, and didn’t accomplish much anyway, since the mattress didn’t press hard enough to be uncomfortable or cut off your blood flow. But he wiggled and sighed for a while, trying to put himself back to sleep.

And then he noticed how rapidly the temperature was falling. Not actually cold yet, but the heat that had woken him was gone, and the sweat trapped between his clothes and skin was turning unpleasantly tepid. He’d have to fix that, keep it from getting too cold, or he’d just be getting up again. And again. And he wasn’t sure how long it’d been since he’d last changed clothes, but once he was up he quietly ordered a new set from the fax, changed into them in the cooling darkness, and disposed of his old ones. Then he went to the environment panel and bumped the reflectivity of the cabin’s wrapper from zero percent to fifty percent, hoping that would be close enough to maintain a comfortable temperature. Then he went back to bed, and sighed and wiggled some more.

When he finally gave up on sleeping, some of the other boys had begun to stir. He ruminated on the day ahead: Adventure? Boredom? He should rig up a program to regulate the mirrors automatically, that was one thing. And something needed to be done about that damned bathroom....

When Karl Smoit sat up and rubbed his eyes, Conrad decided that morning had finally arrived, so he got up and retrieved a wellstone sketchplate Bascal had stowed in one of D’rector Jed’s cabinets. The more he thought about it, the more he realized how much work there was to do before Viridity would be anything like a stable environment, much less a comfortable one.

Using his pinkie for a stylus, he scribbled on the sketchplate:

To Do List:

Thermostat for Mirrors

Chronometer/Clock

Measure Stored Energy

Sink Hood

Better Light Controls

Water Dispensing Limit

Bathroom Cleanup Tools

By now Karl and Jamil were grumbling at each other over first use of the bathroom, and Preston and Martin were showing signs of getting up, and there were various thumps and rustles from the storage closet where Ho had sequestered himself. That left only Steve Grush asleep— a condition Conrad was inclined to leave him in.

Soon there was breakfast, which Bascal and Xmary joined blearily. Afterward they washed up, and then Xmary announced her schedule, which specified the times for lights-on, lights-off, three meals, an exercise hour and a story hour, and (thankfully) a “laundry check” of unspecified but probably beneficial nature.

“You should add ‘maintenance,’ ” Conrad told her. “I’ve got a long list of issues, and it’ll probably get longer before it gets shorter.”

She nodded, looking annoyingly chipper and perky. “Okay. Maintenance. Does that include cleaning up?”

“Well, we should probably put that down, too.”

She made a note on her sketchplate. “Maintenance. Cleaning. One hour or two?”

“Um, I dunno. Two hours each?”

“The days are going to be long, boyo,” Bascal agreed, sidling up and putting an arm around Xmary. “It’s better to have too much to do than too little. Can I see your list?”

Conrad dug the sketchplate out of his pocket, mimed tossing it to Bascal, and then did toss it when he was sure the pilinisi was ready to make the catch. Zero gravity was a new twist on this familiar act, but Conrad correctly intuited that he needed to fire the plate directly at Bascal’s chest, not fast or hard but very straight, in a flat spin for stability. The prince caught it on the first try.

“Yeah,” he said a few seconds later, looking it over and nodding. “Yeah. I’m going to add a few items before you get started. You need more sailing lessons, for example. Every day. And a turn at the helm while I’m doing other things. We really shouldn’t leave it unattended for long periods.”

Resignedly: “Right. I can see that.”

“Well, I’ll go update the master list,” Xmary said, decoupling herself from Bascal’s arm. Then she looked at the two of them and added, “Be nice to each other, all right? Set an example.”

When she was out of earshot, Bascal said, “How did we get so lucky, Conrad? What are the odds?”

“I dunno. Not bad I guess.”

Bascal rolled his eyes. “ ‘Not bad,’ the man says. Not bad. Run the experiment a hundred times, and how many Xmarys do we get?”

“There’s a lot of unhappy people in Denver,” Conrad answered. “You’re popular, and the Constabulary got confused. They just grabbed whoever was next to you. What you’re really asking is, how many people in that position would play along? I’m guessing quite a few.”

“Ah,” the prince said. “Now there’s a romantic notion. You’re a fun guy, Conrad.” He fiddled briefly with the sketchplate and added, “Our first order of business—our absolute highest priority—is to do something about our coloration. The sail is transparent, which is good, but you’ve got the cabin all shiny, which is bad. We want to be”—he fluttered a hand—“invisible. A light conduit: photons in one side, out the other.”

Conrad was nodding. With wellstone sensors and emitters readily programmed for it, “invisible” objects were commonplace for certain uses. Many people had invisible toilets, for example, to hide the fact that they had any bodily functions at all. Photons hitting one side were analyzed and absorbed, then re-created on the far side just as though they had traveled through unimpeded. A really transparent toilet would simply show off the water and other contents as if they were floating in midair, but an invisible one hid everything, looking like a weak lens, a slight distortion in the air and nothing more.

“The problem is heat,” Conrad said. “We’ve got to hold ours in or we’ll freeze to death.”

“I realize that,” Bascal said, in a testy way that sounded patient but wasn’t. “But the trick is to make the inner surface reflective, and the outer one invisible. We can even keep the windows clear. One-way mirrors.”

“Oh. All right. That sounds sensible.” Conrad knew about one-way mirrors, another popular programming trick that involved asymmetrical atoms. “Do you know ... how?”

“We’ll work on it,” Bascal said. “I’m not completely sure how it’s done, but we’ve figured out harder things together. Right?”

“Uh, sure. I guess.”

“And Conrad?” Bascal glanced up over the top of the sketchplate.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t work too fast on the rest of this. Stretch it out; make it last. We’re going to be out here a long time, and we need to stay busy.”

That night at story time, Xmary told the tale of the first American flag, and following along in the same theme Karl, who was also American, recited what he could remember of “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Jamil followed up with “Sinbad the Sailor,” which turned out to be the first of many Sinbad stories he knew and promised to tell. It didn’t have much to do with sailing, but entertainment was entertainment.

And then somehow it was Bascal’s turn again—the seating pattern was totally different from yesterday’s— and he was saying, “I’m taking you back, back, back before the Tongans and Europeans had discovered one another, to a time when land powers ruled the coasts of the Pacific, and sea powers ruled its islands.”

He paused for effect—he was a big one on pauses and cadence—and then continued. “On the island of Tongatapu, a special day had arrived: Elders’ Day, and all the people were afraid. The young prince, Polua-le-uli-gana, or Polu to his friends, did not understand.”

“Understand what?” someone asked, as if on cue.

Bascal answered, “The people wouldn’t come out to throw the fishing nets. They refused to race up the coconut palms and be the first one to throw down the most coconuts. They wouldn’t swim in the ponds, or come to the king’s feast. Instead, they stayed hidden until the feast was finished.

“Prince Polu was sad. He didn’t understand why on Elders’ Day his playmates stayed in hiding, or why one of them would never be seen again. When the prince questioned a servant, he got no answer. The servant simply walked away. Prince Polu lived with his royal family at Lapaha, a large village on the main island. The village included many great stone buildings, and even a stone pier jutting out into the lagoon for the king’s ships to use. Many paths led toward this royal village. Many people walked these paths to bring gifts, food, news, and greetings to the prince’s father, King Malietoa. Some people came because they were commanded—some to be honored, others to be punished.

“The prince was tired of all the noise and confusion. He was lonely. Tomorrow had been declared Elders’ Day, and as usual, all of his friends were in hiding. People hurried from task to task with worried looks and sad faces. The prince felt as if they were preparing for a funeral rather than a feast day.

“He slipped away from his bodyguards and walked far from his home until, just as the sun was setting behind the sea, the prince reached Kolovai on the other side of the island. This was his favorite place, a place to see everything but not be seen. He climbed up the steep cliff until he reached his observation post, a large, flat rock that stuck out from the cliff. Here he could see the sky above, the ocean beyond, and the meandering pathway below. The prince rested.

“It was night when voices woke him. The moon was full. The silver of its shining face flowed across the rippled surface of the sea like a ghostly, glowing road. The prince shivered, although the rock beneath him was still sun-warmed. The voices that were once far away were now directly below him. The prince listened.

“ ‘If you could have one wish before you die,’ said the voice of a young boy, ‘what would it be?’

“Another voice answered: ‘I would paddle out beyond the reef and watch the frigate birds fish the open sea. Oh, how I’d love to glide on the winds, higher and higher, and then plunge straight down to spear a fat, juicy fish. I’d swallow it whole, and with a full belly I’d glide again, around and around, closing my eyes and dozing in midair, in the warm sunshine.’

“ ‘How can you talk of food when tomorrow is Elders’ Day?’

“ ‘Stop! Tonight I will not think of tomorrow. Until the sun rises, we are alive. So let us live!’

“But the first boy said, ‘I cannot stop thinking about the horror of tomorrow. I don’t want to die! I don’t want to be eaten!’ There were no more words, just the crying of the one child and the gentle shushing of the other.

“Suddenly, Prince Polu understood. His legs began to tremble, his stomach heaved, and his heart pounded madly and painfully in his chest. On every Elders’ Day one of his friends disappeared. On every Elders’ Day a special feast was prepared for his father. Lesser chiefs from all around the islands—and many from neighboring kingdoms Polu’s father had conquered—came to share the feast. A special animal was roasted. King Malietoa was always given the tender nape of the neck and the rich, flavorful heart. Now the prince realized. ‘The animal I thought was a roasted pig was something else entirely!’

“No wonder his friends hid. No wonder the servants were too ashamed to answer his questions! And Polu knew, deep down in the marrow of his bones, that there were some things around here that needed to change. He shouted out, ‘Brave travelers, listen! Please wait. I must speak with you!’

“Suddenly, the sounds of the night stopped. Silence filled the darkness and echoed in Polu’s ears. ‘I am the king’s own son, Polua-le-uli-gana. I will not harm you. Who are you? Tell me the story of your journey.’

“At first the two young travelers said nothing. The prince shouted again, ‘Speak to me. Perhaps I can save your lives. If you’re marked for death already, I can hardly make things any worse.’

“One of the boys whispered to the other. ‘We have nothing to lose. We might die now if this is some wicked trick. So what? Tomorrow we die in the king’s stone kitchen.’

“The other boy called out, ‘We are from Eua. We were selected from the matai’s family. Tomorrow we finish our journey. Tomorrow we meet our death with courage that will honor our family.’

“As the prince listened to these words, his heart nearly broke with sorrow. And then a dangerous plan began to form in his mind. He might lose his life, but he might gain life and pride and freedom for many others. So the prince stepped forward and gave a strange order. ‘Climb this coconut tree that stands between shore and sea. Break off its finest branch. Hurry. Already the sky loses its darkness as the sun draws near. Soon, it will slip above the waves and your time will be over.’

“The two boys ran to the tree. Within minutes they returned with a large palm frond.

“ ‘Plait the frond into a mat,’ the prince said. ‘Wait. Let me lie in the middle of it.’

“Again, they obeyed the prince’s order, wrapping him in the middle of the palm frond as if he were a large, freshly caught fish.

“ ‘Good. I’m ready.’ The prince’s voice was stern and clear. ‘Carry me to the king. Hurry. I hear the roosters warning that night has ended.’

“The two boys carried their bundle to the king. With heads bowed to the ground, they placed the wrapped bundle at the king’s feet. King Malietoa called to his chiefs. ‘Here is a fine catch brought for our feast. Ha! In isolated areas where the diet is restricted, it is hard to eat well. There are only so many pigs in the world, ah? But a chief must be strong, and straight. His mind must be sharp. What do you feed a human, to build strong human flesh? What meat is the most plentiful?’ The king laughed. ‘Cooks! Prepare this as usual. Once it is roasted, invite all the chiefs to join me as I cut out the heart and neck. The rest will be shared.’

The royal cooks opened the bundle, and quickly gasped in horror. They fell to their knees, trembling in fear.

“The king roared. ‘Why this disobedience? Shall I have you thrown into the fire with the fish?’

“ ‘Look for yourself,’ said the cooks. ‘It is not a fish. It is your own son, our royal prince Polua-le-uli-gana! With a mango in his mouth!’

“The king’s face went as pale as an Englishman’s. He stared at his beloved son. The prince continued to sit, head bowed, not saying a word, waiting for a killing blow. But the blow did not happen. The prince looked up at his father. Only then did the father understand the sorrow and anguish he had so many times caused.

“The king looked at the bowed heads of his cooks and chiefs, waiting in perfect silence for his next command. ‘Rejoice!’ he cried out. ‘Let this day begin a new feast, a new celebration. My son has risked his life so I might see. From this day forward, the Elders’ Day feast shall be fish and chicken, fruits and plump tasty pigs!’

“The great king Malietoa kept his word. Of course, so did his sons and grandsons after him. Thus it is told and retold, that because of the brave and loving act of Prince Polu, the people of the Kingdom of Tonga finally stopped feeding on their own children.”

The pecking order worked out like this: Bascal at the top, of course, with Ho and Xmary sharing the next level down. Whatever they wanted done, got done. At the bottom were Preston and Martin and Karl—Karl taking this status the hardest and complaining about it the most. But not too much, not too loudly, for fear of faxwise cannibalism; he could easily be the stuff of the ship’s future meals, recycled endlessly into food and shit and more food and more shit, and maybe eventually restored to his former self, or maybe not. It was an effective deterrent.

Slightly above them was Jamil Gazzaniga, who had a bit of mechanical aptitude thanks to his bicycle fetish. He also had a sense of humor—very important under conditions like these—and despite some wisecracking he did seem to enjoy taking orders. He’d always seemed to have a bit of a submissive streak, or a masochistic one, and like most Queendom citizens he was a staunch monarchist at heart.

And above him, hovering uncertainly in the middle somewhere, was Conrad. Surely an expert: a helmsman and mission planner, a sometime associate of the prince. One of only two matter programmers aboard the ship, and indispensable as such, and yet also a constant focus of royal irritation. How many times had Bascal shouted a hole in him already?

On the face of it, Conrad was needed but not wanted, respected but not loved, and so he served as a kind of executive officer, taking the dictates from on high and translating them into individual actions and duty assignments, however unpopular.

Viridity’s crew seemed not only to accept this role for him, but actually to push him into it with active nagging. “How do we do that, Conrad?” “What’s first, Conrad?” “What’s next, Conrad?” It made their day easier, and gave them someone safe to blame for the things they were unhappy about. But if Conrad was the organizer of work, then Steve Grush was its enforcer. He’d decided all of a sudden to quit being Ho’s buddy and had simply kissed up to him subordinately instead, with immediate payoff. Ah, the triumph of the flattering mediocrities: as the bad cop’s bad cop, Steve could now enjoy all the freedom and social status of a prison trustee.

And this was a prison; Conrad wondered why he’d ever expected otherwise. If he’d chafed at the fresh air and open spaces of Camp Friendly, how could he possibly have seen this as an alternative? The “freedom” of an infinite universe was the worst sort of illusion: they were locked on a single trajectory fixed by energy and gravity, with less freedom even than a railroad car or a river raft, or a motorcar driving along some endless, arrow-straight bridge.

There was a reason his father’s roads meandered across the countryside, wasting time and energy and paving stone, doubling and tripling the length of a journey—because it masked this dearth of freedom. People traveled on a road for the sport of it, the adventure, the sense of exploration. But it could only lead them to the road’s other end, or maybe another road with ends of its own. Whereas a fax gate could take you anywhere.

Turned away from the sun and with the pinpoint fusion sila’a now millions of kilometers distant, Viridity could alter its course by starlight alone. The feather-touch of a few weary microwatts was barely enough to turn the sail. And yet, its cumulative effect was the only thing keeping them precisely on course. Even the tiniest drift up or down or left or right would “derail” them, causing them to miss their final stop—the neutronium barge—and continue helplessly on toward the sun.

And that was a bad thing not only in terms of being caught, but more seriously, of not being caught. The Queendom’s outermost permanent settlements—around the orbits of Pluto and Neptune and such—were eighteen months away at present speed, and sparsely scattered across the vastness of space. The fetula would likely sail right through without ever getting close to anything. The sun would be nearer and brighter, of course, pressing harder on the sail, but at this speed they could well reach the orbit of Mars before gaining enough control authority to set a new course.

So while manning the helm was boring duty, it was genuinely vital to their survival, and what little remained of their freedom. They’d at least managed to restore transparency to the windows, so there was a view—the illusion of vastness and freedom, the stars beckoning, the huge sail responding to his slightest touch at the controls. It was exhilarating at first, and then bearable for maybe as much as twenty minutes at a time.

To break up the day, Conrad would periodically kick up to the ceiling, stick his head in the center of the outward-bulging skylight, and spend a few minutes just looking at the stars. Not with a navigator’s eye, although he was beginning to learn the constellations, and Viridity’s own path among them like an imaginary line. Mostly what he wanted and needed was the sense of space. He couldn’t step outside, couldn’t take a walk or climb a tree, but at least he could do this.

The brightest stars, when he looked them up, were Sirius, Canopus, and Rigil Kentaurus, which was actually a three-star system better known as Alpha Centauri—the nearest neighbor to the Queendom of Sol. There was something magical about that one. Most of the other bright ones were big rather than close: Sirius and Procyon were two and three times farther out—with many dimmer stars in between—while Vega and Arcturus were dozens of light-years (or tens of millions of AU) farther still. As a budding sailor, Conrad found it barely plausible that some sort of ship—ertially shielded or whatever— might someday reach those distant shores. The rest— Canopus and Capella, Rigel and Achernar—were simply decorations in the sky, so distant that the numbers made little sense.

Still, he learned their patterns, until he was able to judge the ship’s orientation from these nine stars alone. The constellations were a fiction, especially out here in the deep dark, where so many more stars were visible, cluttering up the supposed pictures. But to shut Bascal up about it, he’d spent their fifth day in space memorizing the brightest and clearest of the images. Similarly, the distinction of a northern and southern hemisphere struck him as arbitrary and foolish, whether in Earth or solar coordinates. What really mattered—what really showed— was the blue-white slash of the Milky Way, bisecting the sky all around, and dividing the bright stars into three groups: above it, below it, and swathed within it. He wished they could simply navigate in galactic coordinates, although Bascal assured him it was a lot more work in the long run.

Not that he really cared what Bascal thought, except insofar as it threatened his safety. One thing was clear: Conrad had misjudged the prince, and had put his own fate—along with a dozen others’—in less-than-trustworthy hands. He didn’t know what to do about that.

But the sky did not judge him, or lay fresh worries at his feet. The sheer number of stars out there was boggling, especially when he considered the Milky Way itself: a spiral of stars so dense and numerous and distant that they blurred together into a haze. And how many other galaxies were there? Did anyone even know?

Were there Queendoms, or the equivalent of Queendoms, around any of these billions of billions of pinpoints? It seemed there must be, although no one had ever detected one. Were there runaway children out there, making the best of a bad situation? Did they look like squidgy slugs, or ravenous flesh-eating spiders? Hell, he’d greet them anyway.

Inevitably, though, he grew bored with stargazing as well. That sense of awe was the only anchor he had right now, so when he felt it fading even slightly, he would kick back down to the helmsman’s seat again. He would check the labe and gnomon, the register and chronometer. He did this three times, slowly and carefully making sure he wasn’t ignoring a problem. Then he’d look straight up and check the sail, and the whole cycle would start anew.

Even with the sail newly configured as a one-way mirror, transparent in one direction and reflective in the other, the push of starlight across the entire sail wasn’t much more than the Earth-weight of an eyelash. Not much to work with. But there was only one perfect path to the neutronium barge—that invisible line slicing through otherwise empty space—and the push of this weak source against frictionless space did add up over time. Over the weeks of their journey it could drive them hundreds of kilometers toward or away from the path. And because the barge was only twelve hundred meters long—a tiny target in the vastness of Kuiper wilderness— this fine-tuning could literally mean the difference between life and death.

So Conrad took the duty seriously, and so did Bascal, and they were each careful to check up on the other at shift change, to make sure Viridity hadn’t drifted a few meters this way or that. The closer they got to the target, the less time they’d have to make up those errors. And gods help them all if anything happened to the hypercomputers, which were the only thing making these absurdly precise calculations even vaguely possible!

And gods help them, also, if the neutronium barge decided to change course, to deviate from its gravitationally expected path. This would not be done lightly—the energies involved were enormous—but of course the barge’s entire purpose was to slurp up Kuiper Belt matter and supercompress it. The vessel would follow its sensor-laden nose, ponderously seeking out new gas and dust concentrations, as well as the odd iceball or comet. Course changes would be small and exacting and optimized for minimum effort, but that didn’t mean a mere fetula would be able to keep up. Conrad lived in fear of this, and checked for it several times every hour.

But the mere existence of danger didn’t make helm duty interesting, and it didn’t keep Conrad from inventing games around it. One of these involved remapping the reflectivity of the sail. At any given time, only about ninety percent of it was actually mirrored. The rest was a shifting pattern of clear and black squares that kept the forces and torques properly balanced, so the sail would maintain proper alignment.

And it occurred to Conrad in the first couple of days that he could maintain these same precise forces while carefully using the dark and clear patches to draw dim, flickering pictures on the wellstone of the sail. So far, to his amazement, no one had noticed. Or if they’d noticed, they hadn’t said anything.

Conrad wasn’t much of an artist, and at first he’d restricted himself to geometric patterns. Circles, squares, polygons, simple flags ... Once he’d gotten the hang of it, though, he became more ambitious, and during one particular peek out the window he had looked at the batwing shape of the sail and seen it for what it was: the unrolled and flattened skin of a sphere, exactly like the spiky projecting lozenge shapes of some planetary maps. Every point on the sail corresponded to a point on (or just under) the surface of Camp Friendly. So for several days, in a haze of boredom and odd, nostalgialike enthusiasm, he carefully reconstructed the map of that homely, lovely planette, which he had helped to deface.

Adventure Lake was the easy part: he knew its shape and position very well, having circumnavigated it with a locator and sketchplate during a camp exercise. How Bascal, the Tongan, had chafed at that one! “At the age of five I was sailing in a crater lake that could drown this whole planette!”

The rest of it was much more difficult than Conrad had expected at first. He could reconstruct the locations of a few key buildings by recalling the views from their windows, or the rock formations jutting above the curving horizon, or the length of time required to walk or run between them. But there were actually a lot of buildings in the camp complex, and varied landscape features all over the planette, and his memory of them was surprisingly imperfect.

Still, here was the hobby farm, and the plateau, and the central landmark of the rock formations themselves. Here was the northern outpost of the Young Men’s Camp, and the sprawl of the Boys’ Camp and administrative offices. D’rector Jed’s wayward cabin got a little star to mark its former location. Conrad was working on the forest, to the northeast of Adventure Lake, when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

He yelped and jumped.

“Sorry!” Martin Liss said, quickly and sheepishly.

“No concern. It’s my fault,” Conrad told him, turning to look.

“Am I early?”

Conrad glanced at the clock. “No. It’s completely my fault.”

He’d carefully arranged the duty roster so that every single day he’d have at least a few minutes alone, in private, with a different member of the crew. Not to sow the seeds of open mutiny—not yet anyway—but just to talk and work together. To reinforce their acquaintance, to get a better feel for their character and concerns. If a time for mutiny came, or even a time for more subtle action, he wanted to know where the lines would break.

Was it egotistical of him? Possibly, but he wasn’t taking anything on faith anymore. So far he’d learned that Ho was every bit as stupid and shallow and dangerous as he seemed. He also stank, since he refused to give up the clothes he’d gotten in Denver. When pressed on the point, he explained it thusly: if he threw them in the fax, he’d get back a Camp Friendly shirt and culottes, which would suck. He did wash his Denver clothes in the sink every few days, but the smell factor was definitely building up. “I can’t punch; I can’t kick,” he lamented. “But I can stink up the place, and look good doing it.”

Ah.

By contrast, Steve Grush was, if not smarter and nicer, then at least more careful than Ho. Steve was well aware that their odds of success—and perhaps even survival— were slim. He just didn’t have any better prospects, and figured space piracy was worth a shot. People would probably get hurt, but so what? That was what backups were for. It was an unimaginative but pragmatic view. Karl Smoit, for his part, didn’t like being on this mission at all, and was happy to complain about it when nobody else was in earshot.

There was of course the possibility that the wellstone ceiling was spying on them, and nothing was out of earshot, but Conrad didn’t know how to detect that, or what to do about it if he did. Besides, that would be a difficult thing to program into naïve wellstone. Jed was at least “roughing it” to that extent: his ceiling’s library was nearly as limited as the sail fabric itself.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Martin said.

Conrad waved the apology away. “In theory, I was expecting you. In practice, I got distracted.”

This was another thing he’d learned, as part of this underground personnel campaign: that he was terrible at remembering upcoming appointments and events. It was the sort of character flaw that could get a person killed under circumstances like these. He resolved to work on it.

“I see you brought the dust mops,” he said to Martin, who shrugged and handed him one. He took it, disentangled himself from the navigator’s chair, and “stood up” in the zero gravity. He proceeded to brush out the space under the instrument console, and glanced back at Martin. “Shall we?”

“Um, sure.”

“It’s amazing how much dust accumulates, how quickly. I hear it’s mostly human skin cells. We shed, like dogs and cats.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Try over there,” Conrad said, pointing. Then: “So how’s it going, anyway?”

“Good,” Martin replied, in a voice suggesting otherwise.

“Keeping busy?”

“Sure.”

“Obeying the rules?”

Martin snorted. “That’s like a joke, right? Only not really. Yes, I’m obeying the rules. Is there a choice?”

“Why?” Conrad asked. “Is someone giving you a hard time?”

Sullenly: “No.”

“Are you sure? If there is, you can let me know.”

“There isn’t.”

It went on like that for a while. Conrad wished more than once that they could both just come out and say what needed saying, but of course that could endanger either or both of them unless there was already perfect trust. Which there never could be, because they couldn’t really talk. And coming right out with it would also tip Conrad’s hand prematurely, which helped nothing.

But over the hour he developed a clear sense that yeah, Martin did have a problem with all this, and that yeah, to the extent that he trusted anyone in Viridity’s authority chain, he trusted Conrad the most. Not that he’d risk his life for Conrad or anything—probably not for anyone here—but he wouldn’t support the prince if an opportunity came up where he had any choice about it.

So that was two. Two people Conrad could use, could help, could deal with. Not trust or rely on, but that was okay. He would just have to craft the right circumstances, so all the right choices went all the right ways. That was a tall order, and he wished he could doodle and sketch and make notes about the possibilities. But the game was dangerous enough already.

When the sweeping was done, Martin went on his way, leaving Conrad alone again until shift change, when Bascal came in with Ho and one of the Palace Guards.

“Conrad, my man,” the prince said. “How goes our course?”

“Two centimeters north of optimal,” Conrad answered in their accepted parlance. “I’ve been compensating all day, but I don’t want to overdo it and have to spend next week swinging back.”

“Good, good.” Bascal motioned for him to vacate the chair.

“And the barge hasn’t tried to turn,” Conrad said, in his umpteenth attempt to get Bascal thinking about that.

“Fine. That’s good. We want to hit it square, eh?”

“Well,” Conrad said, “we don’t want to hit it at all, right? We want to rendezvous. Our relative speed is ... oh, crap. Oh, shit.”

“What?”

“Our relative speed is twenty kips. How are we supposed to slow down? How do we match velocities with the barge, when we have no rockets and no sunlight?”

Bascal waved a hand. “Relax. We’ll throw a lanyard.”

Conrad gaped at the stupidity of that. Had those words really come from the mouth of Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui? “We’ll what? Excuse me?”

“We steer the fetula so it just misses the barge,” Bascal said, “but we tag it with a very sticky rope.”

“That doesn’t help us decelerate.”

“Oh. Hmm.” Bascal scratched his chin, then pinched it. “These speeds are a lot higher than I’m used to. That trick works if you’re just burning off a couple of kips; you wind up swinging in a wide arc, then reeling the line in. I guess in our case the rope will need to be elastic.”

“How elastic?” Conrad demanded. Then he strode to the instrument console and called up a hypercomputer to answer the question himself. He was suddenly furious: here was yet another surprise, yet another critical detail dropped or ignored. Bascal’s got-it-figured-out act was total sham. Other than computing their initial course and setting up the sail controls, he’d figured out exactly nothing. “Do you even care? Are you trying to get us all martyred for the goddamned cause?”

“Steady, there, me boyo.” Bascal’s tone was ominous.

Conrad fiddled with parameters for a few minutes before extracting an answer. His skin went cold. “Well. It looks like a survivable ten-gee deceleration will stretch your cable over three thousand kilometers in four minutes. The wellstone’s not going to stand up to that; it stretches maybe twice its length. Maybe. It’s fucking silicon, Bascal; it’s like glass. It’s a woven mat of glass fibers. Little gods!”

“We’ll think of something,” Bascal snapped. “Jesus, if you’re so smart all of a sudden—”

“Yeah, we’ll think of something! I already have. We give up now and call for help!”

“We what?”

“We mirrorize every surface, and start flashing signals in every possible frequency. I’m very sure the navy’s looking for us already; it shouldn’t take long to trip their sensors.”

“That’s treason,” Bascal said simply. “That’s mutiny.”

“It’s common sense,” Conrad countered.

But Bascal was shaking his head and gesturing wearily. “Guard, my life is in danger from forces outside this fetula. If the hull is mirrorized, or generates any broadcast in any frequency, kill this man. Don’t stuff him in the fax, kill him. Is that understood?”

The guard cocked its blank-faced head at Bascal. “What is the nature of the threat?”

“Despair,” Bascal told it. “They will attempt to drive me to suicide. And they may well succeed.”

The guard thought it over, and said nothing.

“You’ve finished us,” Conrad murmured, loud enough so only Bascal could hear. “Oh, you lazy, selfish bastard. You’ve just nailed our coffin shut.”