The Wellstone (19 page)

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.”

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.