The Wellstone

Chapter twelve. The battle of conrad

Was that it? Were they done for? Well, maybe. As he stalked off into the other room, Conrad allowed for the possibility that there might be a solution. Might. This did not, of course, excuse Bascal. It didn’t excuse threats of murder backed up by lies, nor the gross endangerment of Viridity’s remaining crew. He felt it now with certainty: there were no excuses for this sort of malice and recklessness. If some species of God was out there somewhere, keeping tally, then Bascal was in big trouble.

But that night at dinner the pilinisi was all smiles, and afterward he told the story of “The Princess and the Satellites,” in which a Tongan king’s daughter, a clever player in pre-Queendom politics, purchased an arc of empty space for almost nothing—for a shipment of glass beads and handwoven mats—and then leased it to the Empire of China for the parking of communication satellites, which were bus-sized things like telecom collapsiters, except they contained no black holes and so could not transmit the quantum interference patterns associated with material objects. The princess made a great deal of money, embarrassed her parents and other enemies, set the kingdom aright, and lived happily ever after.

Hurray.

But then, for the first time since this crazy mission had started, it was Conrad’s turn to tell a story. This was the thirteenth night of their voyage—Bascal had been manipulating the seating patterns and the length of the story hour to shut him out, to keep him from addressing the whole crew. But tonight Conrad had simply gotten up and changed seats while the pilinisi was talking, and sat right down between him and the ever-gorgeous Xmary. Conrad knew better than to blurt out the fact that Viridity was going to crash fatally into its target, or else miss entirely. That sort of outburst would simply get him faxed or killed. And with the reminder of the Palace Guards’ murderous power, open mutiny seemed even farther out of the question. So his story couldn’t simply be “The Bad Prince and the Doomed Fetula.”

But as it happened, he did know a Tongan fairy tale.

“I’m taking you back,” he said. “Back, before the power and whimsy of monarchs had swallowed human society. There were two boys who lived on an island, who were very disobedient. They loved to escape from their house and play in the ocean. They loved to dive deep and swim out far beyond the reef, even when their mother told them not to. Their mother worried endlessly, because the boys were fearless, and never careful.”

“Tik and Lap?” Bascal asked, sounding distinctly unamused.

“Maybe,” Conrad told him. “Tik and Lap. That sounds right.”

“Tik and Lap and the giant fish?”

“Yeah.”

The prince glowered but said nothing.

“Anyway, their mother warned them that the sea was dangerous. They could get swept out by the tide, or get a foot caught in the reef. They could get eaten. But the more she scolded, the farther out they swam. One day they swam all the way out to a neighboring island. The chief of the island was impressed, and sent them home in a boat filled with wonderful foods.

“ ‘Gifts must be repaid in kind,’ the boys’ mother told them. ‘You are good with your spears; you must catch some fish for this chief. But please be careful.’ So the boys went spearfishing, and laughed at their mother’s warning. They knew they could swim like tunas, dive like porpoises, and sail as fast as the wind. ‘We’ll show her,’ they said as they gathered firewood to cook their catch.

“But later, while they were fishing, Lap clowned around and managed to drop his spear. So the two boys swam deep, deep into the ocean to retrieve it, without bothering to check what they were swimming down into. It was a giant cave, and inside the cave lived a giant fish, which swallowed the two boys up.

“ ‘We are eaten!’ cried Tik. ‘We are in this fish’s horrible belly. It stinks like rotting fish guts. What will we do?’

“ ‘I don’t know,’ said Lap. ‘Maybe we should have listened to Mom. Maybe she’s not entirely stupid about these things.’

“ ‘I don’t want to die in this place,’ Tik said. ‘There must be something we can do. Look, I’m still holding the firewood! We’ll light a fire inside this fish.’

“The wood was wet, but the two boys were expert at starting fires, so they rubbed the sticks together until finally they burst into flame.

“ ‘Watch this,’ Lap said, and held a flaming stick against the wall of the fish’s belly. The fish jumped and struggled, flipping over and over in the water trying to rid itself of the horrible burning pain. ‘Get ready for a wild ride!’

“Using the flaming sticks, they drove the fish up out of the cave, out of the deeps, up onto the shore of a nearby island. They laughed. ‘We still have more wood. And our spears, and our grass hats. We’ll roast this fish from the inside!’ And that is what they did. Finally, the fish’s mouth opened, and they were able to climb out. And who did they find there, but the chief and his people who had given them the food!

“ ‘Your Majesty,’ they told him, ‘at the request of our mother, we have brought you a gift: a giant roasted fish.’

“ ‘Oh, my. How did you catch him?’ the chief exclaimed.

“ ‘We used ourselves as bait, and cooked him from inside. Now if you don’t mind, we would like to ask you for a ride home. We promised our wise mother we’d never swim that far again.’

“And the chief smiled. ‘You are clever boys to listen to your elders, instead of running wild. Here’s a dollar.’ ”

The next day, Bascal noticed Conrad’s Camp Friendly mural on the sail, and replaced it with a faint, kilometer-wide skull and crossbones, and then followed up by singing the crew a catchy Space Pirate Song of his own invention. And that was bad, because even the boys who’d stopped liking Bacsal took an immediate shine to his song. Instantly, it replaced the Fuck You Song as the national anthem of their doomed, cabin-sized monarchy.

Well, she doesn’t have an engine, and she doesn’t have a fax gate,

And she never had a regs inspector say that she was sound,

And with no acceleration and with no gravitic grapple

We go flying through the cabin ’less we tie our asses down!

It went on like that, for verses and verses, and it was the kind of song anyone could add to at any time. Hell, within a few hours of hearing it Conrad caught his own mouth singing the chorus.

Fortunately, bathroom duty with Xmary that day provided a chance to sort things out. Nobody questioned this, even when he closed the door, because he’d been careful all along to assign himself all the nastiest, least-desirable chores. Who wanted to mess with that? It made everything easier: not only getting privacy, but also getting people to do the work. If they saw him doing it, and saw him seeing them not doing it, well, the shame and boredom took over, and lo and behold, the chores got done.

“Bathroom duty, ugh,” Xmary said.

“We’ll get through it,” Conrad assured her, although with eight teenaged boys using it, it was an awful mess. He was tempted, not for the first time, to devise some sensors in here to catch whoever it was that was leaving actual blobs of shit in the air. In any case, it all had to be cleaned up before anyone could dream of taking a shower, and according to Xmary’s schedule today was definitely shower day.

But the session didn’t start well: Xmary inspected some black marks on the cabin’s wooden wall, and quickly discovered they were a cartoon drawing of herself, naked and engaged in an improbable act whose details were spelled out with arrows and word balloons off to the side.

“Damn!” she said, with surprising vehemence. “Damn, damn, fuck. You boys are so mean. Don’t look at it! Get away from that!”

Conrad saw tears quivering at the corners of her reddening eyes. His brilliant response: “Hey, I didn’t do it.”

“Damn, damn,” she repeated. “This is what I get. This is the price I pay. Being leered at by little boys. This is disgusting. It doesn’t matter who I am, does it? It doesn’t matter how much I do for you people.”

Again, Conrad’s brilliance: “I’m nearly eighteen. I’m not a little boy.” But he hated the way that sounded, so he quickly followed it with, “We can find out who’s responsible. There aren’t that many suspects.”

“Don’t bother,” she said, angrily rubbing her eyes.

“Here’s a sponge,” he tried.

But she was already rubbing at the drawing with her hand. “No, it’s indelible ink. And it’s carved. Great, somebody drew this, then cut it into the log, then drew over it again. Such dedication.”

“We’ll get rid of it,” he tried to assure her.

“There’ll just be more of the same,” she said.

He shook his head. “No. Tonight, everyone gets Slop Number Two for dinner. If it happens again, they get no dinner at all. With Bascal’s help, we can enforce that.”

“I don’t want Bascal’s help,” she said quietly. She’d turned a really amazing shade of red. “I don’t want him to know about this. I don’t want it discussed.”

“Not even—”

“I don’t want it discussed. I’ll just check in here five times a day, with a paintbrush and a sanding block.”

“That shouldn’t be necessary.”

“Well, apparently it is,” she snapped. Then she waved a hand. “Just go over there or something. Clean. I’ll take care of this.”

“Okay. Okay. See, I’m going. I’m over here.”

Wordlessly, she left the room, returning a few minutes later and closing the door most of the way behind her. She busied herself with the drawing’s noisy expungement.

“You don’t know many girls,” she observed sourly.

Conrad wanted to deny that—to be snitty about it, even. Why, there were several girls at the School of West Europe who were in his general age bracket, and with whom he’d had conversations more than once. More than twice! And he saw girls out in public of course, and wasn’t afraid to smile or wave, to introduce himself or to kiss them without invitation. But he had the uncomfortable sense that this information would not impress her, or change her opinion in any way.

“I know you,” he said instead, as offhandedly as he could manage.

“How splendid for you,” was her reply.

Ouch. He gave her another minute to cool off, not wanting to touch that temper any earlier than necessary. But he did want to talk to her. More importantly, he needed to, because he didn’t have a reading on her yet, and without one he couldn’t plan a single thing that involved the crew in any way. The situation was dire.

“Other than this,” he said finally, “other than graffiti and innuendo and ingratitude, how are you?”

“Get processed, Conrad.” She sighed in irritation and, after a pause of ten seconds or so, answered with a quiet voice. “Truthfully? Not good. Bascal and I aren’t getting along.”

“No?”

“He isn’t like this on TV. Holding court, pushing people around ... Pushing me around.”

“He’s not himself,” Conrad said, hoping it didn’t sound like a speculation. Truthfully, he didn’t know the prince that well either, not in his own element, and was still surprised by his behavior more often than not. “I’ve never seen him like this. He’s, like, drunk on the drama of it all. Yesterday he threatened to kill me.”

“To kill you? Why?”

Conrad took a breath and released it, deciding all at once to confide in her and let the chips fall. “I wanted to send a distress call. We have no plan for safe landing at the barge. No way to accomplish it. We’re doomed to miss it or to crash, and I’m seriously concerned that Bascal knew this all along. Even if he didn’t, that’s just as bad. He doesn’t care, or he isn’t really trying. Either way, it’s big trouble for the rest of us.”

Still cleaning, still wrinkling her nose and curling her lip, she absorbed that. Conrad found himself puzzled and concerned: he’d expected her to react more strongly, one way or the other. What did it mean that she didn’t?

“That doesn’t surprise you?” he asked.

“No,” she said, with a hint of despair. “It’s about what I figured. The signs are everywhere. Do you ... think maybe he’s gone crazy?”

Conrad felt as if he’d lost his balance. Which was nonsense, of course, in zero gravity. Dizzily, he whispered back, “That’s not something I’d say out loud, even in private. But yes. He wants this so badly, he doesn’t care if it’s impossible, or who gets hurt. I’d call that crazy.”

“Let him perish if that’s what he wants.” She sulked. “My heart is heavy enough. But I didn’t give him permission to take me.”

“No. Nor I. I’m ... glad to hear you speaking your mind on this. Don’t be afraid to talk to me.”

Xmary’s eyes met his. “I haven’t let him touch me,” she whispered. “Not for weeks.” She was hanging close to him, her brush-wielding hand only a few centimeters from his. Still clenched with the rage and stress of it all.

Now he felt his own cheeks burning. Speaking her mind, okay, but why had she told him that? What possible use was the information? He fantasized briefly that it meant she liked him. In that way, yes. She’d gone for the big score—the pilinisi—only to realize that his erstwhile sidekick was the real Prince Charming around here. Yeah, certainly. Stuff like that happened all the time. And even if there was somehow a particle of truth to it, what good was that? What could he do, make a play for the girlfriend of an unbalanced and openly murderous monarch?

He touched her hair for a wistful moment. She didn’t object, which surprised him so much that he pulled away and said loudly, “Damn it’s ugly in here. Some fucker on this ship needs flushing lessons.”

Then he whispered to Xmary, “We’ve got to do something about this. You and I, maybe some others. Learn matter programming, all right? Quickly.”

And she whispered back, “I will.”

She was true to her word, pulling a textbook out of the fax and poring through it for days. Finally, the cabin’s ceiling began suffering pattern and color changes at random intervals. One day it was mostly gold, with little sparkles of light dancing across it. Pretty, in a garish sort of way, though it made a poor light source and an even poorer environmental control. Fortunately, that one was only up for a couple of hours.

Unfortunately, what replaced it was a popping, snapping, hissing field of black and white dots that cast the cabin into flickering gloom, and gave an instant headache to everyone who looked at it.

“What did you do?” Conrad asked Xmary. They were on opposite sides of the main room, and he had to raise his voice to be heard over the complaints and groans and sudden intense discussions of the other boys, and the hissing of the wellstone itself.

“I don’t know,” she answered, pulling her hand away and drawing back from the ceiling. “I’m not sure. I’ve lost my interface. Can I ... touch it?”

“I wouldn’t,” Conrad said, eyeing the mess. Then, raising his voice further: “Nobody touch that.”

Damn, it could be hot or cold or sticky, or crawling with huge electrical potentials. It could be corrosive with “Lewis hole–pair” acids, or worse. Wellstone’s quantum-dot arrays contained charged particles in huge numbers and all kinds of bizarre arrangements. Some of their reactions were capable of tearing normal matter apart, as Conrad’s programming instructor, Mr. McMorran, had emphasized many times.

He cleared his throat. “You are, um, aware that matter programming is very dangerous?”

“I’ve read chapter one, thank you,” Xmary said, sounding ready to punch him.

It wouldn’t be wise to let her see—let anyone see— how much her anger stung him. So what he said was, “Good.”

It wasn’t possible to stagger in zero gee, but Bascal’s entrance had something of that quality. He was staring at the ceiling and holding his head, not really watching where or how he was going as he kicked along the walls and floor. “What did you do, Conrad? What happened?”

“We’re trying to figure that out,” he answered nervously.

“Make it stop. You’re hurting my brain with that.”

“I don’t want to touch it. I can use ... I can use the environment controls. The panel is connected to ... well, all of it connects one way or another.”

Which was bad, because Xmary’s unsupervised tinkering had the potential to pollute the entire fetula, from wrapping to rigging to sail. If they ceased being airtight, or a variety of other things happened, this kind of pattern pollution could easily and instantly kill everyone on board.

Being very careful not to bounce himself upward with no way to stop, Conrad glided over to the environmental control panel. Once there, he laid some wires around to the tortured ceiling, and passed a simple text encoding along them: UNDO.

The hissing stopped, and the ceiling reverted immediately to gold.

“Little fucking gods,” Bascal said, eyeing it uneasily. He took his hands off his head and glared alternately at Xmary and Conrad. “Whatever you guys are doing, quit it. Seriously. A spaceship is not a fucking toy.”

Which was true.

After that, Xmary was ready to quit her programming experiments altogether, but Conrad persuaded her to practice on a sketchplate instead, and to stand by the fax so she could hurl it to oblivion if it did anything funny, anything she didn’t immediately like or expect. So her studies continued, at a lower and more cautious intensity, through the next several days. If only she could ask questions right out in the open. If only they could sit down together! But he couldn’t schedule her in again so soon without people noticing, and she was probably attracting enough curious attention as it was.

For his own part, Conrad passed through the week in a kind of low-grade panic. Did he really believe he had a handle on his fears? Every time he thought that, the danger to life and limb and memory simply ratcheted up another notch, threatening to paralyze him. He went through the motions, filling duty rosters and working his shifts, trying to act normal. But people were noticing. How could they not? Bascal hadn’t pulled him off helm duty or anything, mainly because there was so little the helm could accomplish anyway, but the tension between the two of them must be screamingly obvious.

No way out. No alternatives. No hope? Was there a god of lightsails to watch over them, or a plain-old God, merciless and remote but still observing? Or were they truly on their own, pitting their frail selves against a universe that didn’t know them from any other speck of matter?

He wondered what it was like to die. Everyone wondered that, of course, but not everyone had to face it as an immediate short-term prospect. Not everyone had heard the order given for his or her own robotic execution. Hitting the barge would at least be instantaneous; they’d see it looming behind the sail, swelling as they approached, and the very end would come quickly, the barge expanding toward them like a shockwave. There’d be maybe a momentary glimpse of its close-up hull, frozen in cameraflash detail: pipes and light housings, a planette-sized registration number, and then ...

What? Stepping out of a fax with the last ten weeks missing from his backup memories? No, he would never experience that. Some other Conrad Mursk would, while he, while this Conrad Mursk, would be dead and gone. Waking up in heaven, or in the big nothing where he wouldn’t even know he was dead. Wouldn’t know he had ever lived at all. Did it matter, if there was somebody exactly like him to carry on? Wasn’t it really just the same thing as being disintegrated and reborn during fax transport?

No, he decided. It wasn’t the same. One of him had died once before, and the twenty-day hole that had left was an unhealed wound in his life, even now. He’d never mourned for that dead brother, exactly, but he had very definitely wondered what he went through. What it felt like, what he thought about. Last words, last images, last fleeting shreds of emotion. Did he scream?

And gods, it was crippling having this kind of shit bouncing around in his head. Maybe it wouldn’t bother him so much without the Xmary factor, this stupid, pointless pining he’d taken up lately. Or maybe it would, but since their little talk—since her little revelation—it seemed increasingly clear that no thought or action or circumstance could be relevant except in relation to her. Which was crazy, obviously, but there you had it. Death was bad enough, but when it meant the loss of her, every memory and trace of her, that was just too high a price to pay for Bascal’s glory.

And Conrad couldn’t arrange another meeting with her so soon, and wouldn’t know what to do with it if he did. So instead he watched her out of the corners of his eyes, and listened to the lilt of her speech, taking what pleasure he could. Stupid, yes, but he needed an anchor.

It occurred to him that this feeling had a name: he was heartsick . It wasn’t just a word, or even just a feeling, but something that had stolen upon him with all the grinding hallmarks of a genuine illness. Maybe the only illness left, in an age of perfect and permanent health, and it weighed him down as surely as gravity. Even going through the motions of daily life was exhausting. But what else was there? If he simply gave up without a struggle, then he and she and all the others would die, no doubt about it. So he met with the boys one by one, prodding gently and hearing them out, slotting them mentally into factions. Loyalists: Ho and Steve. Neutrals: Preston and Jamil. Mutineers: Xmary, Karl, and Martin. And Conrad himself, sure. That made it four against three, except the “three” also had two Palace Guards on their side, so really the mutiny was already over. No contest. They’d lost.

Could the guards be subverted? On the face of it, it seemed unlikely. They took their orders directly from Bascal, and simply ignored anyone else’s. But then again, those orders were constrained by the words of the king, and other “standing orders,” and the robots’ own inherent instincts and programming. They wouldn’t interfere with the prince’s freedom of action, but they also wouldn’t allow him to harm himself, if they understood what was happening and saw a way to prevent it.

Conceivably, Conrad could simply talk to them. They wouldn’t obey him, or probably even acknowledge that he was speaking to them. But they weren’t deaf. On the contrary, they were perceptive, finely tuned for the gleaning of information. For all he knew, they’d already figured the whole thing out, or at least figured out that something was wrong. They would listen to his words, weigh them, add them to the vast database of their paranoid and hyperprotective worldview.

So the idea wasn’t absurd. It was a matter of picking his moment and his exact argument, of getting the right words out before Bascal could find a way to stop him.

And meanwhile, he hadn’t given up on the physics of it. Not that he was any expert on physics—not by a long shot—but he didn’t have to solve the equations, just look them up and feed them into a simulation. It was more like asking a scientist than being one.

Anyway, a collision at twenty kilometers per second would vaporize ordinary materials like flesh and bone and wood, but properly rigidized wellstone could survive it under some conditions. Working feverishly on his little sketchplate hypercomputer, he’d identified eight different prefab settings that stood a good chance of coming through intact. Adamantium, obviously—that was the toughest pseudomaterial known to science. There were two superreflectors: impervium and its fee-for-use cousin Bunkerlight. And two transparents: superglass and Wexlan.

The others were more obscure, and had weird properties like superconductivity and phosphorescence, that he wasn’t at all sure about. But it didn’t matter anyway, because an impregnable hull wouldn’t save the ship’s insides. Wouldn’t slow them down, wouldn’t cushion them, wouldn’t protect them in any way. That hull would simply be the last thing any of them saw, in the microseconds before they slammed into it at twenty kips.

He had felt a few brief hours of giddy relief when he’d stumbled on “magtal,” a family of transuranic metals that were not tough enough to survive the collision per se, but whose features included “superferromagnetism.” This was significant, because the neutronium inside the barge was, according to his fax-provided reference materials, also highly magnetic. And Conrad had done enough fiddling with magnets to know that they repelled as well as they attracted. Could they decelerate the fetula slowly, on a springy magnetic cushion?

Alas, his hopes were short-lived. First of all, the net magnetic field of the barge would have to be lined up with Viridity’s incoming trajectory—which as far as he could determine, it wasn’t. And anyway, his simulations showed the cushion was unstable, like a steep, springy, hilltop of slippery gel. Instead of slowing down, the fetula would simply slide sideways around the magnetic obstacle until the field strength dropped off. If they tried it, they would miss the barge by many thousands of kilometers. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but didn’t solve the larger problem of having nowhere else to go.

More promising was the prospect of just missing the barge, and then turning on the magnets in an attractive mode. This was basically just Bascal’s lanyard plan, with magnets instead of fragile ropes. Up close, this worked very well indeed; there’d be absolutely no problem getting ten gees of deceleration out of it. Unfortunately, the force of attraction between the two ships dropped off fast as they drew apart. At a hundred kilometers, the force was huge, but at a hundred thousand it was barely more than the eyelash press of starlight.

And there was the problem: if he throttled the acceleration to a survivable level, then the magnetic “lanyard” would snap and the fetula would keep on sailing away, somewhat more slowly than before. If he adjusted the magnets to ensure capture, the fetula would bounce a thousand kilometers past the barge, and then stop and sproing back. But the acceleration would peak at hundreds of gee, and Viridity’s insides would be so much grape jelly and wood pulp. He tried the simulation a dozen times in a dozen different ways before giving up. Magnets weren’t going to save them.

He stewed about this for a day and a night, tantalized and frustrated. There were so many options, so many almosts. Just different ways to die. And since Bascal would rather die than surrender, that left capture by Queendom forces as their only hope for survival. Conrad began to pray for this, to fantasize about it. And was it really so far-fetched? The navy or Constabulary could well have retrieved Peter by now, and if Peter was still alive then he would tell them the plan. And even if he didn’t, or couldn’t, the evidence was as plain as the face of the murdered planette: they had built a fetula and sailed away. To where? To an empty comet? To the distant Queendom, years away? Or to the nearest fax machine, on the nearest neutronium barge!

From there, it was just a matter of computing the path, and then hunting along it for signs of an invisible spaceship. How hard could that be? They still had mass, right? They would show up on a gravity detector. And they weren’t perfectly invisible, especially in the very long wavelengths, like radio, and the very short ones, like X rays. And he was amazed, amazed, to hear these kind of thoughts in his own dumb-as-rocks head. How many science classes had he flunked? But here he was, out in the universe, living it firsthand.

And it seemed to him, more and more every day, that Viridity ’s discovery and capture was a scientific certainty. When it didn’t come, he simply reset his expectations for the next day, and the next, and the one after that. But then came the day of reckoning: the last day when starlight power alone could push them out of the barge’s path. If they didn’t do it now, then they never could, and the Queendom’s navy still hadn’t come to the rescue.

Jesus H. Bloodfuck, he said to himself. The mutiny has to happen. Today.

Is’t balm for us, this void of sky?

The stars have no network address.

A bit of you for me, I fear, be toxin more than bliss.

Where love of metal nannies warms,

the love of flesh doth mock.

And whence the blame? What leads us ’stray?

What claim have you or I, to shock?

Don’t take my hand. Where could we jump?

That no one’s been a thousand times?

I’ve faxed myself to Saturn’s rings; your love hath broke

my pump.

— “Because Lilly”

BASCAL EDWARD DE TOWAJI LUTUI, age 14