The Wellstone (27 page)

Bascal eyed the room and the fax and the doorway, nodding in satisfaction. “It’s great, yeah. No material restrictions? Other than legal limits, I mean?”

Robert shrugged. “None that we’ve ever encountered, no.”

“Little gods, I wish we’d’ve had one of these on Camp Friendly. Life would have been so much easier. How’s your buffer mass? Will you object if we cart away a few tons? Mostly silicon?”

A white grin brightened Robert’s blue face. “We’ve got
eight hundred tons
of buffer mass, Your Highness. With all that neutronium to push around, the engines aren’t going to notice an amount like that. Each neuble masses ten times the dry weight of the ship.”

Bascal looked both impressed and appalled. “Jesus. You must burn a lot of fuel pushing it around.”

“That’s so,” Robert agreed. “Loaded, we have to abandon the fusion drives for anything other than attitude control. Course changes are made by the antimatter drive, usually during squeezing operations.”

“Wow. Fuck. These barges should be ertially shielded.”

“Can’t,” Robert said. “First off, that’d be a lot more expensive than antimatter, especially since we need the antimatter anyway to compress the neubles. We get twice the work out of it. Efficient. Whereas ertial shielding for something this big would take, what, a million gigatons of collapsium? It’d take hundreds of years for this thing just to gather its own shield mass.”

“Or hundreds of barges,” the prince suggested, “to equip one superbarge, which you could push around with flashlights and fart gas. No inertia, no fuss.”

But Robert was shaking his head. “Still can’t, no. The bow of the ship has to be
open
, right? It’s a scoop. Put a collapsium cap over it and suddenly you can’t gather snow anymore.”

“So put it on the stern.”

“Then you can’t run the engines.”

“So use gravity hooks. Little gods, we’ve had inertialess grappleships for centuries.”

“Wouldn’t work,” Robert said. “For a lot of reasons. Maybe if there was infinite money you could set up a better system. But this one is practical, and self-sustaining. Been working since even before your father’s time, or he’d have never invented collapsium in the first place. Right? No Nescog. No Queendom.”

“Hmm.”

“How,” Conrad interrupted, “do you get the neutronium
out
?”

“At port? They use magnets; big ones. Like you smacked us with.”

“Oh.” Conrad took the hint. “Our braking system caused you some trouble, did it?”

“Banged the cargo out of alignment,” Money Izolo confirmed. “Gravity fluctuations and a hell of a loud noise. That Plasma discharge was something to see! There may be some structural damage as well, though we can’t get into the chamber to confirm it. We’d have to drain the working fluid, which would be challenging out here in Kuiper wilderness. If something is broken, we’ll know soon enough.”

“You sound just like a mass wrangler,” Conrad said.

Izolo shrugged. “We live here. The ship’s systems are our whole world.”

“I wasn’t making fun. You’ve probably spent more time at it than the real wranglers. Are you going to get jobs when all this is over?”

Izolo laughed. “I doubt it. Jail time, most likely.” “Does the barge have a name?”

“It has a registration number,” Robert said. “But we call it
Refuge
.”

“
Refuge
. Hmm. Catchy.”

Bascal was still studying the room, but now his eyes were looking back in the direction of the bridge, and flicking occasionally forward, toward the holds. “What happens in an emergency?” he asked. “Say you’ve got to change course in a hurry.”

Robert turned toward the prince, looking skeptical and suspicious. “We don’t have emergencies. Everything happens very deliberately here.”

“
We
didn’t,” the prince pointed out. “We came fast, out of the black.”

Robert clicked his tongue.

“Look,” Bascal said, in the utterly reasonable tone that told Conrad he was scheming madly inside. “I’m just asking. You can’t dump the cargo, right? Because it would just keep going, along the same vector that was carrying you toward trouble.”

“Dumping neubles into unassigned orbits is a serious offense,” Robert said. “Much worse than crashing a loaded barge. Neubles have to be accounted for, hunted down and retrieved. That costs money, and in the meantime the traffic hazard is enormous. If anything
hits
one ... There’ve only been two neutronium spills in the history of the Queendom—as of the time we left, anyway. But both of them involved massive damage and loss of life. Imagine a billion tons of matter going from this big”—he held his fingers a couple of centimeters apart— “to this big”—he swept his arms to indicate the neutronium barge as a whole—“in a couple of milliseconds. With all kinds of radiation spewing out.”

“Bad,” the prince said, nodding. “There’s no network gate to escape through. No abandoning ship. So what
do
you do?”

“We stay out of trouble,” Robert answered. He paused for an uncomfortable moment and then said, “Well, that’s pretty much the tour. Unless you want to see four more corridors exactly like the one you entered through?”

“Nah,” Bascal said. “We’ll figure the rest out as we go. Should we, uh, start moving ourselves into the inventory?”

“I suppose you should, yah. Here on
Refuge
, though, we’re overdue for breakfast. I thought perhaps you would like to join us.”

A: Whether Bascal is a “great” or even a “good” poet is
hardly a fair question.

Q: But you’re a literature critic!

A: Nevertheless.

Q: Oh, don’t be tedious. We’re paying for this.

A: He’s certainly a
precocious
poet—I don’t think
anyone would dispute that. And if he were to publish
pseudonymously, it might be possible after the fact to
decouple his position from his creations. Failing that,
I make no claims to impartiality, and am skeptical of
those who do.

Q: Do you
like
the poems?

A: Oh, absolutely! We all do. But that’s the point, right?
We can’t help it.

—Critic Laureate Julia Aimes,
in a Q281 interview with FUSILIERS magazine

chapter eighteen

an outside chance

Whatever Utopia they were building here, it certainly wasn’t a naturalist one. Some of the foods were hand-picked from the garden: rich avocados and sweet melon tarts, onion grass and bamboo shoots. They even had a peach pie tree. This seemed to be more a matter of convenience and aesthetics than anything else, though— they liked having food plants around, and if the fruits weren’t harvested as they ripened, they would simply rot, or else sprout into additional, unwanted greenery. Eating them was easier.

But the sound baffle’s huge circular chamber had a fifty-meter-thick conduit running floor-to-ceiling through its center, and a maintenance panel on its capward side included a small fax machine, which in fact produced the bulk of this
Refuge
breakfast. There were cereals with milk, sausages with cheese, and other foods with no natural equivalent at all: sweetpapers and mulm, as well as the rich yellow paste they called “fressen.”

It was a bland but hearty breakfast, served in tiny glass dishes with metal forks and spoons, and the blue nudists gathered these small portions around them in great number. Everyone had a little bit of everything, it seemed, which added up to an awful lot of food.

“Tell me you don’t eat this much for lunch,” Bascal joked.

“Certainly no,” Robert answered seriously. “Breakfast is the energy meal.”

“A spread-out meal, too,” the prince observed.

They were all sitting around the gravity depressions, which turned out to be nice places to eat picnic-style, without any of the hassle of zero-gee dining. Wouldn’t have worked, Conrad suspected, if the dirt were thicker or softer or wetter than it was, or if there’d been bugs, or anything like that. But this place was more like a hydroponics lab than any sort of real garden. Even the dirt was, in some indefinable way, clean.

The Camp Friendlies sat together, with Robert and Money and Agnes, and a sour-faced Brenda, who looked ready to slap the food out of their hands and spit on it. Still, even twisted with anger, her azure features were anything but haggish. Conrad’s impulsive side kept yammering at him to touch, touch, touch these naked women. Karl and Ho, hard-up after weeks aboard
Viridity
, must be feeling the same; Conrad himself had only once found the privacy to jerk off, and it hadn’t been too terribly satisfying. But touching anyone here without the clearest invitation would likely provoke an incident, and touching Brenda in particular could result in the loss of a limb, or worse.

And what would Xmary think? Not that that should matter to him, but little gods, he wasn’t going to kid himself about it. The symptoms of heartsickness were less pressing here in these open spaces, with life and strangers all around, but the illness itself remained, like a shackle around his chest.

More TSA refugees sat together at the next depression, two hundred meters or so around the donut. It seemed very far away indeed, but not everyone fit there, so still another small crowd was clustered at the next one down. They were only barely visible: tiny figures sitting cross-legged in a cone of light, against a backdrop of dark weeds.

The dogs were here as well, gleefully loping through the air, slipping in and out of the gravity zones with tongues and tails wagging. They, at least, were not blue.

“Yah,” Robert agreed, “it does make a pretty diffuse cafeteria. But we don’t always eat in the same circles. We move around; we mix it up. The variety is nice.”

“What do you do with all these calories?” Xmary asked, picking at the greasy remains of her own breakfast. “You must get a lot of exercise.”

Agnes nodded slightly. “Some, yah. Twice-a-week calisthenics.”

“We had that,” Karl said. “We had it every day for an hour.”

“We used to,” Agnes said, wrinkling her nose. “But I like twice a week better. The ship and the garden keep us busy enough.”

Tucking away a final sausage, Bascal burped, excused himself politely, and asked, “The ship really takes care of itself, though, right?”

“Hardly,” Robert answered with a half-snort. “It isn’t meant for live-in crew, remember. Certainly not this many. Cleaning up after ourselves is a major chore. And you’d be surprised how many things corrode or break or come loose during normal operation, and how little of that shows up in the maintenance logs the shipping company would see. Even with regular inspections and crew rotations, it’s got to add up. When these things pull into port, lugging fifty or a hundred neubles in their groaning bellies, they must be a real shambles. I can only imagine the situation a hundred years from now.”

“Why?” Bascal said. “What happens a hundred years from now?”

“The lower Kuiper gets depleted. We’ve already wrangled a third of it. You see, the Nescog uses lots of collapsium, and the mass has to come from somewhere. Finite supply. Next century, the barges will be trolling in the higher bands, where the distances are greater and comet density is lower. Consequently, missions will be longer and more difficult to support.”

“Oh. I see.” Bascal nodded. “You know, if it helps, we saw a couple of big icebergs on our way down. Near-contact binary, maybe a hundred kilometers each. That’s got to be, what, a few thousand neubles’ worth?”

“At least,” Robert said, nodding. “You’re probably talking about the Cyades, which are a landmark in this part of the belt. If so, it’s more like half a million neubles. So thank you for the tip, but of course we can’t swallow mass in such big chunks. Our orbit crosses the Cyades in about five years, and we’ll do the same thing everyone else does when they pass it: fire the laser a few times to knock off a gigaton of snow. One free neuble, maybe two, for our trouble. Eventually Mass Industries will send an engineering team to blow the thing up, and park a fleet of crushers right there on the site.”

Bascal snorted. “Some way to treat a landmark. Not very sentimental, eh?”

“No,” Robert agreed. “They can’t afford to be. The Queendom’s appetite is perhaps not bottomless, but certainly no one has found the bottom of it yet.”

Here was an issue Conrad had never thought about— he’d always heard the Kuiper’s resources described as “limitless.” But of course, in reality nothing ever was. He’d also thought, naïvely, that all this time they were sailing across a vast, empty wilderness. Were they really just sneaking through a construction site? Could all their trials and tribulations really boil down to something as banal as that?

No, he decided, they could not. As an act of will, he stated it to himself axiomatically: the drama of their journey was inherent in the journey itself, and could not be divided or diminished. The alternative—that they were wasting their time—implied that their individual and collective actions had no meaning, and perhaps never would. And if he believed
that
, then why do anything at all?

“What happens when the higher bands are depleted?” he asked pointedly.

Money Izolo nodded with approval. “Yah, it’s going to be a real concern. At present growth rates we see maybe a thousand years of Kuiper left to harvest. After that, it’s up to the Oort Cloud for another few thousand, but that’s a
lot
farther away. We may need ertial shielding on the barges just to make the journey economical. Either that, or a lot more barges.”

“Or less demand for neutronium,” Conrad said.

“Or that, yah. And after the Oort is gone, it’s the comets and wanderers and failed stars of near interstellar space, where the economics get even thinner. I think about this a lot. We’re immortal, right?”

“Immorbid,” Bascal corrected apologetically. “We can die.”

“But we can’t be unhealthy,” Izolo said, grasping the meaning of the term. “All right, but we will live to see these things, yah? The empty Kuiper, the vanished Oort. And then what?”

Nobody had an answer for him.

“This is good food,” Xmary thought to say. “If perhaps a bit heavy.”

“Oh, gods yeah,” Karl agreed. “Much better than that crap we had on the ship. Thank you.”

“That reminds me!” Bascal said. “Our fax machine survived the crash. A bit worse for wear, I’m sure, but if it’s still out there in the wreckage, we should probably go retrieve it at some point. Even a battered, restricted fax is better than none.”

“For the journey onwards?” Robert asked. “You’ve decided to leave, then?”

Bascal looked around at his crew. “We haven’t
decided
anything. We haven’t had a chance to talk, or even shower. I’m just thinking ahead. We certainly don’t want to let good equipment go to waste.”

“No,” Robert agreed. Among the handful of things a fax machine couldn’t produce were neutronium, collapsium, antimatter, or any product or component bigger than itself. The list even included that most commonplace of objects: the print plate of another fax machine. In a Queendom of plenty, these were hard-currency items, not lightly cast away. “But those little plastic space suits you came in are frightful. And you didn’t use lines? Or safety clips? Dangerous.”

“We know,” Bascal said. “We lost a man on the way in.”

“You did? Jesus and the little gods. I’m sorry. Can you send your robot out?”

“This thing? This Palace Guard? It won’t leave my side. Ever, as long as I live.”

Except that it had, just this morning, to save the lives of Bascal’s remaining shipmates. Conrad’s mind kept returning to that small miracle, mulling it over, scanning it for meaning. He was not a big believer in luck, but what did that leave? The god of lightsails?

“What about Martin?” he said. “There should still be a fresh image of him in the machine, minus only the death by suffocation. We should get him out of there while we still can. From what I saw, there’s not much holding it down. If it drifts away, we’re going to lose him again.”

“Oh. Good point.” Xmary groaned. “I hate to say it—I
really
hate to say it—but we need to go back out there. Now.”

Gaping, Robert shook his head. “You? Jesus, no. You stay here, my fellows. Inside. Money and I—all of us here—we’re experienced in this sort of vacuum work. We’ll equip up at the inventory and mount a proper retrieval. Bring your fax machine back in one piece.”

“Well, thank you,” Bascal said. “That’s very kind.”

“No, not at all.” Robert’s grin was uneasy. “You’re the prince, yah? I ask you, truly, how’s it going to look if we get you killed?”

An hour later, five of the men and two of the women had assembled at the inventory, and were quickly surrounding themselves with an astonishing assortment of gear. Space suits and ropes and harnesses, yes, but also strap-on tool kits, emergency tents and rescue bubbles, leak patch compound, wellstone sketchplates ... Gravity was much lower here, so while the stuff drifted slowly fore, toward the neubles and the swallowed comet, it did so more slowly than the new stuff was being added. So it formed heaps and piles, right there in midair.

“How long are you planning to be out?” Karl asked them wonderingly.

“Forty minutes exactly,” Money Izolo answered. “The limit of our fine-LIDAR scan.”

“The radar scan reaches farther,” Robert explained, “but it’s not so good at spotting fine particles, not unless they’re in fairly substantial clouds. LIDAR uses a violet beam—very good resolution. By definition, we’re in a high-density band—that’s where you go to gather snow— but at two kips, the right kind of snowflake can knock a man right off the hull. Or worse.”

“Such foresight,” Bascal marveled. “Such prudence.” Conrad couldn’t tell if that was a sneer or a compliment, or maybe both.

With a flicker of self-consciousness, Robert looked around at the tangles of equipment, then back at Karl and Conrad and Bascal. “I guess it does seem excessive. But a lot can happen out there, as you’ve seen. We go prepared, with plans and fallbacks and emergency scripts.
We’ve
never lost anyone, and God with us we never will. That reminds me: everybody store a fresh copy, or your blue ass is going nowhere.”

What a shame, Conrad thought, if all this youthful vigor—this viridity—goes to jail and idleness instead of to industry. What “genuine” mass wrangler ever worked so hard? So enthusiastically?
Their
jobs consisted of day trips, or couple-of-day trips, from their cushy, ordinary Queendom homes.

Robert waved a sketchplate, a schematic diagram of the barge’s fat cylinder, with the rumpled sail and shattered cabin marked against its surface with yellow lines, and a red asterisk pinpointing the site of the fax machine itself.

“We’ll egress from the same lock you folks entered through. It’s the closest, although the wreckage of your sail presents some problems. You cut through it on your way in, yah? The images confirm this, but it looks like there might still be some difficulty bringing equipment through.”

“I’m carrying five kinds of cutters,” Money Izolo said.

“Good. We’ll assemble in the lock, and you and I will be first out. Anyone object?”

There were some shrugs and murmurs, but no commentary, no objection. These blue people liked and trusted their Robert, and would happily do his nonbidding.

He looked at Bascal. “There is room on the bridge if you’d like to observe. The suits broadcast a holie signal for safety purposes.”

“Oh, yeah,” the prince agreed at once. “This I’ve got to see.”

Robert latched his tool belt and bandoliers, and finally snapped his helmet dome into place. The space suits were thick, heavy garments of gray-white wellstone and woven nanomachinery, vaguely reminiscent of the early-Queendom battle armor His Majesty had worn during the Fall, and was still frequently pictured in. They had a certain nobility about them.

“There’s room for two,” Robert’s voice said, through wellstone speakers. “I wouldn’t recommend fitting any more than that.”

“And I wouldn’t dream,” Bascal said with a bow, “of doing anything you didn’t recommend. You look quite dashing, by the way. Conrad, will you join me? Karl, join the others at the sound baffle?”

“Um, sure,” Conrad said.

Karl grumbled less agreeably, though, and Conrad didn’t blame him for it. Helping out with the breakfast cleanup sounded a lot less interesting than watching these amateur mass wranglers in action.