The Wellstone (25 page)

Still, the fog thickened around his head, beads of moisture forming here and there on the film. And with every step he could feel his air growing weaker and more foul, and something else, too: a loss of heat. It wasn’t like standing outside on a cold night, where the chill of the air seeped gradually into warm flesh. In fact, he was pretty sure the empty vacuum around him was the best possible insulator. But he was
radiating
heat from his unprotected skin. It was a very distinct sensation, unlike anything he’d ever felt before. He was a man-shaped infrared lamp, shining his energies into the void. A couple of hours out here would, he realized, freeze him solid: a man-shaped block of ice, with no heat energy left to bleed away. But fortunately, he would suffocate long before that happened.

Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three.

He began to worry about the hatch itself, looming dimly in the distance. They would have to uncover it, pulling away tens or even hundreds of meters of folded sail fabric without losing their grip on the barge’s hull. Such a thing was surely possible, but did they have the time? Was there some other way? Should he continue on to the sail’s edge—some thirty meters farther along—and try to crawl back underneath it, with the hatch’s blue beacon lighting the way?

Fifty-six. Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight.

He decided to head straight for the hatch, and see at least briefly what he could accomplish there. They had taken so many crazy, deadly risks already, it seemed silly to try anything other than the direct approach first.

Seventy-one. Seventy-two ...

And when he finally drew even with the circular depression—which please-gods
had
to be a hatch of some sort—the Palace Guard surprised him by striding forward several paces, dragging a twisted-up Ho and Karl behind it. The robot bent at the waist, doubling itself over and extending a finger, which touched the wellstone fabric and parted it. In a funny and quite poetic way, the robot extended itself jackknife style, pushing the finger along and straightening its body, until it stood inside the hatchway depression, its entire body now flush with the hull, framed by a vertical rent in the wellstone. What a trick!

And then, with equal poise, it swept both arms in wide circles, slashing open a pair of flaps in the film that exposed exactly the thing they most hoped to see: beneath the flashing beacon—brighter now that the gray-black film was off it—lay a circular hatch with the word ENTER emblazoned on it in softly glowing letters. The Palace Guard tapped this word lightly, and the hatch slid open with jarring, shocking speed. And then the guard stepped sideways, pivoting forty-five degrees in the hatchway’s circle, and then stepped back, swinging up and out until it was standing on the rim again, vertical to the barge’s hull.

Poor Ho looked like a pretzel, still clinging to the robot’s leg, with his own leg firmly grasped by Karl. Nevertheless, Conrad was spellbound for a moment, astonished by the beauty and economy and swiftness of the robot’s movements. These Palace Guards would make amazing dancers.

Then its arm was moving, and Conrad was struck by the fear that it would simply tear Bascal out of the human chain, stuff him in the airlock, and let the rest of them join Martin in the Great Beyond. But instead it
pointed
, a fluid gesture that conveyed a sense of urgency: get in there, now. And Conrad wasn’t going to argue with it; he felt for a handrail he knew would be there, and dragged himself around and inside, hauling Xmary and Bascal and the others along behind him.

Inside, the hatch was nearly as large—well, half as large—as
Viridity
’s bridge. A white-walled cylindrical chamber, filled with handrails and winking lights and softly glowing paragraphs of text. “Caution.” “Warning.” “Zero Atmosphere and You: a Primer.” There was room for all five of them in here, but not the guard as well. And that was bad, very bad. But when Ho finally let go of that metal leg and bounced fully into the hatchway, the guard itself did not follow. Instead, it bent again at the waist, and tapped the rim of the hole. The hatch slid shut immediately, and the lights came up: bright white.

The Palace Guard had allowed itself to be separated from Prince Bascal. Good gods, what balance of risks and compulsions had prompted
that
? What sensor data was it relying on? Had the thing concluded Bascal needed his friends more than he needed armed escort? Had it suffered a moment of deviant compassion?

Almost immediately, Conrad felt the balloon of his space suit shriveling around him as the chamber filled up with air. This worried him vaguely; rapid changes in pressure weren’t supposed to be good for you, although he couldn’t remember why. He did feel his ears popping, but no other ill effects. Maybe the fax machine, realizing it was dumping them into vacuum, had compensated in some way? Made it all right?

This chain of thought was broken when the “floor” under them—really just another hatch, with the same ENTER sign on it—slid open with a
whoomp!
and a
clang!

“Jesus!” Ho shouted down at the thing, and yeah, of course, they could hear each other now. They weren’t in vacuum.

“Guys, I’m running out of air,” Karl panted, grabbing at the plasticky material over his head and trying, with plasticky hands, to pull it off. Conrad didn’t see how that could work—even as a thin film, wellstone was tough stuff—but he understood Karl’s anxiety, and in fact couldn’t resist tugging at his own hood a little.

“Me too. Me too. How do we get these off?” Their voices were muffled by the thin barrier of space suit.

“You have to pull up the programming interface,” Bascal said. “It’ll take a few minutes.”

“I don’t
have
a few minutes,” Karl said, tugging harder, panting harder.

“You’re fine,” Bascal reassured him, though he sounded far from certain.

Conrad was panting as well, and looking at the world through the ever-thickening haze inside his bubble hood. The blobs of moisture there were crawling, ever so slowly, toward his left. Was there a bit of gravity here? It
was
a neutronium barge, loaded with supercondensed matter, so probably, yeah. But that didn’t help him breathe.

“You’re the only one,” he told Bascal, “who knows how to work these. There isn’t enough time. For everybody. Is there?”

And here, damn all the little gods, was yet another life-and-death triage operation. Bascal would take his own suit off first, and then Xmary’s, and then Ho or Conrad, and Karl—who clearly needed it the most—would have to come last. Could he live that long? Hell, he was turning blue already.

“The robot,” Conrad said, as the thought struck him. “It can open all of them. Quickly.”

“Robot isn’t here,” said Ho, not even bothering to append any sort of threat or insult. He was at the mercy of external forces—his life had just been saved by Conrad Mursk—and it was having a marked effect on his attitude.

“We’ve got to get out of the airlock chamber,” Bascal said, raising his arm up to shoo them all down, into the darkness of the barge’s interior.

Xmary was the first to go, and as she exited the cylindrical chamber, additional lights came on at the other side, revealing a sort of maintenance corridor or oversized crawl space: all waffled metal and access panels. Ho quickly followed her, and then Conrad, with Bascal trailing along behind, pulling a gasping Karl along with him.

But when they exited the chamber, the inner door didn’t automatically close, and Xmary had to hunt for the controls and then burn precious seconds reading the instructions—whatever they were—before deciding on a particular button and slapping it with her hand.
Then
the hatch closed, and next came a series of clanking and whooshing noises, followed by silence.

To Conrad’s surprise, Bascal set right to work on Karl, pulling up a programming interface on his back and tapping in a series of commands or menu selections.

“Shit,” he said once. And then, a few seconds later, “Come on, you.” Then he was silent for a while, working.

“Do we know the air is good?” Xmary asked.

“Do we care?” Bascal singsonged back in a snotty way.

And then, suddenly, a light flickered on Karl’s back, and seams appeared all around the garment, and it was falling open into man-shaped cutouts, the hood peeling back, the gloves splitting open. Karl gasped, and gasped again, and if there’d been any kind of real gravity here he’d’ve fallen to his knees. Instead, he relaxed into a fetal curl.

Taking the hint, Conrad tapped his arm, trying to pull up a programming interface of his own. But that sort of bottom-level interface was more Bascal’s specialty than Conrad’s. He’d opened exactly one seam before in his life—in the liner of Camp Friendly—and he realized with sudden panic that he couldn’t remember how to do it.

But then, with a
whoosh!
and a
clang!
the airlock’s inner door slammed open again, and there was the Palace Guard framed in the hatchway lights. Back with its prince again, after that shocking dereliction of duty. It seemed for the slightest fraction of a moment to consider the scene in front of it, but then, with a
whoosh!
of its own, it was in motion.

It threw itself at Bascal with such ferocity that it might have been attacking him, except that it missed, and in passing it dragged a finger vertically along his chest, then slashed it horizontally across his neck. The Guard’s trajectory carried it into the far wall, where it rebounded immediately on a path that carried it past Ho and Xmary. The slashing motions of its hand were almost too quick to see, and then its feet were on the ceiling and it was running or jumping or something, and it swung away on an arc heading straight for Conrad. Slash! Slash! For a moment, its arm and finger loomed large in his sight.

And then, as quickly as the robot had launched itself, it froze in place, assuming its usual statuesque pose with arms hanging down at its sides. And
then
, maybe a second after the opening of the hatch, all the seams had a chance to separate, and everyone’s space suits were peeling open like clear plastic flowers.

Was the air good? Hell if he cared; Conrad drew the deepest breath of his life, then let it out, then drew it in again. He was fighting his way free of the space suit, stripping it away from his sweat-chilled arms and legs, away from his tee shirt and shorts, away from his shoes. He was yanking it off and kicking it away like it was hot or poisonous, and he was breathing deeply of the barge’s air. And yeah, it was good.

“Fuck,” he said. “Oh, fuck. Oh fuck. We almost didn’t make it.”

“Almost, hell,” Bascal said, throwing himself at the wall and kissing it hard. “It’s a
fucking miracle
.”

And it was, too. They’d left eleven brothers behind— nine dead and two missing—but they’d pulled off a journey of such daring and gall that even they themselves couldn’t believe it. How amazing, how
amazing
it was to be standing inside a neutronium barge 140 million kilometers from the ruins of Camp Friendly. No one had caught them, stopped them, probably even
seen
them, and the fact that anyone had survived at all was ... well, miraculous.

“Today we make fuckin’ history,” Ho Ng said, with a greater depth of conviction than Conrad would have imagined he could muster.

And Karl and Xmary were hugging each other and laughing, and Bascal came forward and slapped Conrad on the cheek twice, just hard enough to convey a sense of manly camaraderie.

“We did it,” he said. “We fucking did it.”

“Well, congratulations,” said a deep, loud, unfamiliar and quite angry voice in the corridor behind them. “Just who the hell are you?”

chapter seventeen

the secret garden

Conrad turned around, expecting to see navy troopers or Royal Constabulary there. He even raised his arms partway in surrender, before noticing it was a bunch of naked human beings. Blue ones, with the pastel shade of artificial skin pigment rather than paint, and the kinky hair and broad features to suggest their natural coloration would be rather darker. But any reassurance he might have felt at this comical sight quickly evaporated when he noticed the weapons: dart guns and heavy wrenches.

“Jesus!” Karl squawked.

“Greetings, naked people,” Bascal said, with remarkable aplomb. He pushed off with a foot, then caught himself with a hand, positioning himself in front of the others, in good light where his face could be clearly seen.

“Who are you?” one of the naked men repeated. He looked about twenty or twenty-five years old, which could mean anything. There were two other men beside him, and two women lurking behind them at a bend in the corridor. Both were painfully pretty despite their blueness (or because of it?), and although one had a wrench and the other a dart gun, Conrad couldn’t keep his eyes off their faces and breasts, the darker blue of their lips and nipples and pubic hair.

“I’m the Prince of Sol,” Bascal replied, sounding surprised.

“Sure you are,” the man answered tightly. His voice was very deep, and it seemed to Conrad that that was a natural feature as well. The Queendom was full of poseurs who altered their looks and sound and smell with special fax machines and genome appendices, but unless it was subtle you could always kind of tell. So: natural voice, natural hair, natural facial features, all packaged in a decidedly unnatural skin. The guy sounded angry, too, and kind of scared. The gun he held wasn’t aimed at anything specific, but he was ready with it. And his blue cock and balls, now that Conrad noticed, were shriveled up against him, cowering.

“Wait a minute,” one of the women said. “I think he is.”

“Stay out, Agnes,” the man answered nervously.

“No, really,” the woman said. “That’s Bascal Edward. He’s just older, is all. That robot is his bodyguard!”

Seizing the initiative, Bascal said, “I’d move very slowly if I were you. It’s a state-of-the-art Palace Guard. So when exactly did the neutronium industry go Blue Nudist? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Cute,” the man said, gesturing a little with the gun. It was the wrong thing to do; immediately, the Palace Guard raised a finger and nailed the little weapon with a bolt of energy. The man screamed, flinging the piece away, and Conrad thought for a moment that he saw quicksilver drops of molten metal splashing where it hit the wall.

“Ow! Crap! What are you doing here? Who sent you?”

“Sent?” Bascal’s mask of certainty slipped a bit. “We came here to use the fax. We’re castaways.”

“From what? Prison? Piracy?”

“Summer camp.”

The naked people stared back blankly, unable to process that comment into anything useful.

“Maybe you should explain,” the man said finally. He was holding a rail with his uninjured hand and another with his free, naked foot. The hand that had held the gun now trembled against his chest.

“Who
are
you people?” Bascal couldn’t seem to help asking.

The man’s gaze narrowed. “What? You first, kid. Prince. What are you doing here? Why did you attack our ship?”

“
Your
ship?” Bascal repeated.

“Attack?” Conrad said. “We
crashed
here. Well, sort of crashed.”

There was another brief silence, and then Xmary said, “You seem nervous. Sir. We’re not here on any sort of official business. We were marooned on a planette, and escaped in a homemade
fetula
.”

One of the women said something in a clicky, guttural language Conrad was certain he’d never heard before. Something angry and menacing, which included the English words “Jolly Roger” and “magnet ray.”

“We came here to use the fax,” Bascal said again. “We’re trying to get to Denver.”

“Why?” the man demanded.

The prince held up a hand, his voice hardening. “All right, look. What’s your name?”

The man’s frown deepened for a moment, and then partially relaxed. “I’m Robert. Robert M’chunu.”

“Our leader,” said the woman named Agnes, in a half-joking tone.

“There are no leaders here,” Robert called back over his shoulder, in a weary way that suggested he said this often, and would be happy if he never had to say it again. Then, turning back, he seemed for the first time to notice the Camp Friendly tee shirts that everyone except smelly Ho had on. He rubbed his lips with his gun hand, thinking about that. “Summer camp. You came to use the fax? There’s no network gate, you know. We sabotaged it a long time ago.”

“No gate?” Bascal said. “No
gate
? Why the hell not? That’s the whole reason we came here!”

“We didn’t want anyone following us,” Agnes said. “We didn’t want to be found.”

Bascal digested that for a couple of seconds, and then said, “I think it’s time you explain this to me. Why are there naked stowaways on a Mass Industries neutronium barge?
Vandalizing
a neutronium barge, and threatening visitors?”

That
charge took some serious gall, Conrad thought. But it seemed to have the desired effect; Robert and his people shrank back ever so slightly, cowed by the imaginary authority of a figurehead prince. But then again, the threat of the Palace Guard was real enough. Conrad was frankly surprised the thing had reacted as mildly as it did. Emotionally, it must be in some robotic equivalent of righteous fury, prepared at any moment to lash out against these looming figures who dared to threaten. But something stayed its hand, some impulse of curiosity or diplomacy or decorum, some intuitive balance between danger and opportunity. There was no point trying to understand these monsters; Conrad watched them and watched them, and yet their inner machinations remained inscrutable. Not human, no, but not simplistic either.

It was the man to Robert M’chunu’s right who answered, “We’re castaways as well. The South African Territories are no place for a child these days.”

Bascal considered that. “You brought children with you?”

“We
are
children. We were.”

And then a look of understanding bloomed over Bascal’s features, and he smiled. “Runaways! Ah! You left copies at home, yes? Nobody knows you’re here.”

Warily, resignedly, Robert nodded. “Correct, yah.” He was nursing his hand, which sported angry, growing welts on the palm and fingers.

“Why
here
?” Xmary asked.

He shrugged. “No place more remote. We jam the gates, why, we’re on our own until the holds are full of neubles and the barge heads back to the Queendom. Twenty years, maybe. A lifetime.”

Still grinning, Bascal shook an accusing finger. “You’ve got your own little Bluetopia here. No leaders, no clothes ... Or did we blunder into the middle of something? An orgy? A ceremony?”

“We’re nudists,” Agnes confirmed.

“It’s restricted in TSA,” Robert explained. “You have to be twenty-five before you can even apply for the permits. I tried a different body plan for a while—two extra legs and a short coat of hair to cover the naughty bits. Never got ticketed—the cops thought it was cute—but I needed this big horse’s behind to fit the legs on, and I just got tired of it. I want to be
me
, not some creature. They just don’t want a young man’s dongle hanging out.”

“Unconscionable,” Bascal said. “So you escaped! Went as far and as free as the Nescog would carry you, and cut yourselves off. When you finally return, and reintegrate with your original selves, you’ll be gifting them with the precious memory of
twenty years of freedom
. There might be some fines and penalties involved, but that’s okay— your selves will never be the same. Nobody who even
hears
about it will ever see their lives in quite the same way. This is brilliant; this is great! How many of you are there?”

Robert examined his injured hand, then glowered at the prince. “Don’t pretend to understand, Your Highness. This is our private business.”

“And ours,” Bascal said, spreading his arms a bit. “We’ve lost our only transportation.”

“Robert,” Agnes said, “I don’t think he’s Tamra’s perfect little Poet Prince anymore. He said it himself: he’s a runaway, too.”

“You
have
been away a long time,” Xmary observed. “He’s well known as a troublemaker.”

“If nobody knows they’re here,” the other woman said menacingly, “we can safely put them out the airlock.” The Palace Guard, turning its head with a faint click and whirr, rewarded this comment with a hard, faceless robotic stare. Try it, lady.

Bascal, for his part, chose to ignore her. “What time of the day is it here? I suggest introductions, and then a tour. Well, maybe a bathroom break as well.” He looked around at the surviving campers, as if gathering consensus. “We’re very eager to see what you people are up to.”

Agnes Moloi turned out to be “not Robert’s girlfriend” in the same way that Robert M’chunu was “not the leader” of this band of expatriates. Robert’s not-a-lieutenant was Money Izolo—Conrad didn’t catch whether that was a nickname or if his parents had simply had a sense of humor. The angry woman was Brenda Bohobe, and the other man was named Tsele or something. There were twenty people here altogether, and once upon a time they’d all gone to the same school—Johannesburg Prep. They’d left it in their middle teens, in a cleverer, quieter way than Bascal’s crew had chosen.

The corridor Robert was leading them down had a kinky, dogleg shape to it. It ran from one end of the barge to the other, he told them, but there were “certain machineries” it had to divert around. “These corridors are just access ways for maintenance. It’s not supposed to be pretty.”

“Are there other inhabited barges?” a visibly excited Bascal was asking.

“Must be,” Robert said with a shrug. “We didn’t invent this plan, just heard about it. The first two barges we tried had already dropped off the net.”

“I see,” Bascal said gleefully. “A plague of mysterious gate failures. Never fully investigated, or they’d’ve traced you here by now. All they have to do is fly some gate hardware out here, dock it, and
poof!
You’re back on the network. But if that costs more than just paying the fines, the shipyard’s parent corporation has probably just written it off. Fix ’em when they get back.”

Maybe it was just Conrad, but he found it vaguely offensive to be following behind two naked men in a weightless (or nearly weightless) corridor. Their dongles hanging out, yeah—it wasn’t exactly the view he wanted, especially because the women were bringing up the rear, so to speak, along with the other man, Tsele. There was a smell, too—not dirt or sweat or anything like that, but some vague spiciness he couldn’t identify, and couldn’t ignore. A crude perfume or something—surely not another genome amendment. Here were people who’d abandoned Queendom hygiene standards—and decency standards, and presumably other standards as well—in the push to build some weird culture of their own.

“Does your fax machine work?” Karl inquired. “We’ve been eating a really limited diet.”

“Oh, they work,” Robert said. “We have two: a big and a small.”

Then the woman named Brenda—the surly one—cut in. “You people have authorities looking for you?”

“One never knows,” Bascal hedged. “Our
fetula
was as invisible as we could make it.”

“You leave copies behind? Are you officially missing?”

“I don’t know if they’re looking for us or not.”

She rolled her blue eyes. “Wonderful. That’s exquisite. If they don’t find you, even then they might find us.”

“Listen, lady,” Bascal said. “We didn’t even know you existed until ten minutes ago. Even if we had, I’m not sure we could’ve done anything different. We’ve been clever enough so far, thank you very much.”

Unless you count the seventy percent casualty rate, Conrad thought.

“You expect to fit in here? Hide here? Stay indefinitely?”

“I don’t
expect
anything,” Bascal answered. “We were going to Denver.”

“We’ll show them around, Brenda,” Robert said. “Show them how we do things here. Then talk about it.”

“Talk about what?” Brenda demanded. “They can’t leave! We’re stuck with ’em!”

“I wouldn’t be so quick about that,” Bascal told her. “We’ve gotten out of tougher places. There’s nothing preventing us from repairing our ship, or building another.”

“Oh, hell. Hell with you. Damn royalty.”

“You may have to live here with us,” Robert echoed. “It may not be so easy. There may not be a choice.”

“With a fully working fax machine at our disposal, there’s always a choi— Whoa.”

The corridor turned seventy degrees, and opened out into a broad space, maybe ten meters high and at least a hundred meters wide. No, scratch that; a fifty-meter-thick cylinder ran through the room’s center, floor to ceiling, blocking the view of the other side. The chamber was donut-shaped, fully and exactly as wide as the ship. Its floor and ceiling were covered in regular, rolling hills of what looked like foamed metal, lit from both the top and bottom by occasional spotlights: vertical cones of bright yellow light shining up and down, leaving relative dimness in the spaces between.

And there were
plants
everywhere—a veritable jungle of them, sprouting from pots and from pools of mesh-covered dirt in the regular valleys between the hills. The greenery sprang from both floor and ceiling, and was long enough in a few places to meet in the middle. And there were people lurking among the plants: armed, naked people making only a nominal effort to conceal themselves. The blue did kind of stand out against the green and brown and gray.

“This is the sound baffle,” Robert said. “Where most of us live. Let me, uh, introduce you.” Facing out into the chamber he called out a long string of foreign syllables, and Conrad saw the people out there relaxing, shouldering and even setting aside their weapons.

Conrad, who didn’t realize how tensely he’d been holding himself, also relaxed. Then he grabbed onto a stanchion to stop the slow drift he was accumulating. There was a mild force—gravity, probably—drawing him in toward the middle of the chamber. Maybe down a bit as well, toward the surface he’d identified arbitrarily as “floor.”