The Wellstone

by Wil McCarthy

  “Uh-huh,” Conrad said skeptically. “And where do we get all this wellstone? Weave it out of beans and franks?”

  Bascal punched him, not that lightly. “You’re the fucking building inspector. What’s underneath us, right now?”

  “Grass,” Conrad said. “Dirt. Liquid neutronium in diamond shells, with probably a layer of rock in between.”

  “And a point-one-mil sheet of wellstone,” Bascal added, stamping on the ground for emphasis. “Shovel-proof, about two meters down. Bet you a dollar it covers the whole planette, pole to pole. That’s, like, over a square kilometer of material. Just about perfect for a sail.”

  They started back toward the cabins.

  “You really are serious,” Conrad said again.

  “Very. Are you in?”

  He shrugged. “I guess so, yeah. What about space suits?”

  “An arts-and-crafts project. Snip a corner off the sail, cut out some life-sized paper dolls, and seal them at the edges.”

  “How long is all this going to take?”

  “I dunno. Not long. I’m not sure about the actual ship, how we’re going to build it. What materials to use.”

  Conrad laughed. “How about D’rector Jed’s cabin? It’s big enough, and God knows it’s the best furnished.”

  “Hey,” Bascal agreed, laughing along with him, “that’s a great idea. We can just shrink-wrap the whole thing.”

  Nothing on Camp Friendly was far away from anything else; from the orchards was only a minute or two to the Boys’ Cabins and the central offices. Almost as soon as they’d started, the two of them were there at the Piss Hall. Bascal threw the door open.

  “Honey! I’m home!” The irony in his voice couldn’t conceal an undercurrent of genuine affection.

  “Hi,” Xmary said, looking up from her carrot chopping. “What have you brought me? Peach pies? Over there.” She pointed with the knife.

  “Yes’m,” Bascal said, his voice bubbling at the edge of giggles. The Palace Guard, with liquid-quick movements, flowed in behind him, briefly crowding Conrad out of the doorway. He tried not to take it personally; the machine simply would not let Bascal out of its sight, even for a moment. You didn’t get in the way of that, not if you were paying attention.

  “Firewood here,” she added, pointing to a different surface, adjacent to the table she was working on. “You didn’t get pie filling on it, did you? That would be bad for the revolution.”

  The revolution, ah. She said it in a joking way, but behind the light tone Conrad suspected a lurking seriousness. Shaking things up wasn’t a game to her, but some sort of weird social duty. Very solemn.

  “Why are you here, again?” he prodded, hoping to get a rise out of her.

  But her answer was straight enough. “Back home, I’ve got six more years of school before I can put my name in to be the assistant to somebody’s assistant. I used to make furniture as a hobby, and later on it was holiday decorations. But who needs handmade things? Who can even tell if they’re real or copied? There’s nothing to do back home, and there never will be. I feel so sorry for my other self back there.”

  “Hey,” he told her, putting his hands up, “I’m just giving you a hard time. Trying to. I get enough politics in my diet.”

  “Well, the hell with you, then,” she said, butting him hard with her hip. She resumed her chopping.

  Early on in the week, Conrad had been certain that Xmary was going to get caught, that she was going to get all of them in even worse trouble. Smuggling a girl into an all-boys camp! But since she’d sneaked a copy of herself out of the house to visit Café 1551 in the first place, her parents didn’t know she was gone. In fact, she wasn’t gone; she was presumably still back there under their watchful eyes, attending summer school and sighing a lot.

  And Feck somehow hadn’t tipped their hand, hadn’t gone to the Constabulary or home to his own parents and explained why he wasn’t at camp. And if the camp itself was under observation—which seemed likely—then it obviously wasn’t under the sort of really close observation that would reveal the presence of a female camper who was not Yinebeb Fecre. Bascal’s own Palace Guard clearly saw her standing there, but didn’t care. Hadn’t been asked to. This was not only hilarious, but also lent some credence to Bascal’s insistence that it really was possible, now and then, to put one over on the Queendom authorities.

  Either that, or Xmary and the boys were being run like rats through a maze—a notion Bascal had mentioned but didn’t seem to believe. There would be too many variables to control, too many spontaneities to account for. If the authorities were that clever then there was no hope at all. So her presence here was an accident, abetted by her own weird sense of initiative.

  There was, of course, the jealousy thing; Xmary was an arts-and-crafts project in her own right, pretty and sassy and with all sorts of surprising talents. Cooking, of all things, in this age of flash-and-bang! And you had to wonder what other talents came out, when she and Bascal shut themselves up in “their” cabin. It was a subject of riotous speculation when Bascal wasn’t around. Hell, Steve Grush had teased Xmary about it right to her blushing face.

  “When’s dinner?” the prince asked.

  “When I ring the bell, moron,” she fired back. “Just like yesterday and the day before. What are you, slow?”

  “Well, I hope not. Conrad and I have a plan to get us off this egg.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Solar sail?”

  “Yep. I’ll make the announcement tonight.” He sauntered up to the fax machine—a vertical, doorway-sized plate of gray-black material. The visible portion was the phantom-action lux generator, or something like that, tapping out waves that dreamed they were matter. It was the only intelligent device in the room, unless you counted the robot. “Fax, give me a bowl of taro curry, please. With coconut.”

  “Disallowed,” the fax replied, in the loud, sexless tones of somebody trying to piss people off.

  “Yeah? Fuck you. Give me a textbook on sailing.”

  “Please specify the type of sailing,” the fax said.

  Bascal shot a nodding smile back at Conrad—getting somewhere!—then said to the fax, “Solar sailing, you fucked-up piece of shit. I need it for arts and crafts.”

  “My internal library contains four titles on solar sailing. Access to external libraries through the Nescog is disallowed.”

  “Fine. I’ll take all four. And a map showing all known fax gates within ten AU of this planette.”

  “Disallowed,” the fax replied, spitting four paper books into Bascal’s waiting arms.

  “Ah. Then allow me to invoke royal override.”

  “Disallowed. That function is reserved for the King and Queen of Sol.”

  “Which I will never be. Fine, you anus, give me a map of known shipping and habitation.”

  A rolled-up sheet of wellstone film tumbled out, missing Bascal’s arms and spilling to the floor.

  “Thank you,” Bascal said.

  “It pleases me to serve,” the device replied, without feeling.

  “I know it, fax. I know it. And believe me, someday I’ll reward you for it.”

  Ah, the creaky, breezy squalor of Young Men’s Cabin #2. Ah, the smell of intestinal gas, and the constant fear of pranking and punches, of hurled objects, of name-calling that hurt, truthfully, as much as sticks and stones ever could. Such was life after dark at Camp Friendly.

  Conrad found it difficult to relax with a Palace Guard looming menacingly in the corner, its blank metal skin reflecting the room’s electric/incandescent lights. It might have been a statue—utterly silent and unmoving—except you knew it was watching and hearing and feeling everything around it, and could fly into action at any moment. In that sense, it was more like a stretched-to-breaking cable, or a heavy mass teetering on a window ledge—not the least bit statuesque or reassuring.

  This is our punishment, Conrad reminded himself. We’re not supposed to like it, we’re supposed to be intimidated.

>   Peter, who was looking intently at his wristwatch, said, “Five. Four. Three. Two. One.” Then he pointed his finger like a stage cue.

  “Lights out, time to sleep,” the robot announced flatly, right on schedule. Its speaking voice was loud and grating and without inflection, really just an emergency thing, not intended for such trivial everyday use. Robots had never been the best conversationalists, but these seemed especially cold, especially disinterested in the task. The idea that they were “counselors” was totally hilarious, in a not-funny kind of way. Moments later, and also on schedule, the room was cast into darkness as the power to the electric lightbulbs cut off.

  Through the window, Conrad could see the lights of Young Men’s Cabin #1 go out as well, presumably casting Bascal and Xmary into their own blissful darkness. Damn them both.

  Here, it wasn’t so blissful. Some of the boys obeyed right away, climbing sullenly into their bunks. Others made a point of openly defying the guard; as their eyes adjusted to starlight, Karl and Bertram began a noisy game of shirtball soccer, and several other boys quickly joined in. Part of the fun of this game was the lousiness of the ball: a tied-up camp shirt of only roughly spherical shape. To kick it straight was a real challenge—especially in motion, especially in the dark—and to kick it hard was even harder, so the chaos level got pretty high, pretty fast.

  The thing was, the Palace Guard didn’t care. It had discharged its duty—its program—with the announcement itself, and was now simply waiting for some new trigger condition to make it do something else. Shirtball soccer did not interest it, and for this reason, didn’t interest Conrad either. He didn’t see the point in razzing a dispassionate machine. Or even a passionate one, for that matter.

  “We could actually sleep,” he suggested vainly.

  “Shut up,” said one of the players.

  But it was Ho Ng who decided the matter. The game seemed for some reason to infuriate him, so that he threw himself out of bed and into Karl’s path, and then lashed out in the darkness with a fist that caught the other boy hard in the stomach. Or would have, anyway, except that with a single lightning-quick movement, the Palace Guard raised an arm and pointed a finger. There was the purple flash of a guide laser, the pop and sparkle of tazzer fire, and then Ho Ng was going down in a heap, directly in the path of a still-charging Karl, who tripped over him and went down as well.

  In the gloom, Conrad couldn’t see what happened after that, except that it involved a lot of squawking, and a lot of bodies scurrying hastily into bed. A bit of giggling, but not much. There wasn’t much funny about this. If the robot had decided to wade physically into the fray, there was no telling what might’ve happened.

  A minute later, Ho himself crawled into bed—which was no small feat since he had a top bunk and was still recovering from the tazzer. It must’ve hurt, judging by the way he grunted and cursed on the way up.

  “Bastards,” he was saying quietly. “Goddamn blood-fucky bastards.”

  But even he didn’t want to push his luck any farther, so in another few minutes the room was quiet. And peaceful, yeah, right. Conrad kept his eyes open, and focused on the Palace Guard, its skin now mirroring the starlit windows. Perfectly motionless, a coiled spring of perfect, violent action.

  This was going to be another long night.

  The Piss Hall fax seemed content to provide any educational materials—even those pertaining to explosives and poisons and dirty matter-programming tricks—so the next day, suddenly, everyone was a scientist. Arts-and-crafts time consisted of everyone sitting around the mess hall scribbling diagrams. It couldn’t last, of course; by the second day only half the boys were scientists, and by the third day it was down to just Bascal, Conrad, Xmary, and Bertram Wang, plus Peter Kolb, who was the son of two laureates and fancied himself a real smarty-pants. Granted, one parent was a sculptor and the other an actress, which didn’t exactly make him Bruno de Towaji, but he knew more math than Conrad did, and seemed to be pulling his intellectual weight. More so than Bertram, who came from an actual sailing family and seemed to believe his opinion counted for more than anyone else’s facts and figures, except possibly Bascal’s.

  But half the other boys were still in the labor pool, running errands and digging holes and such, so the work progressed well enough. As for the rest, well, maybe there was some truth to it: these were delinquent kids, who couldn’t be bothered even to defy authority, if the cost of defiance was anything like work. It was hard enough to get them to feed themselves, although Steve Grush seemed happy enough putting arrows into the geese. The notable exception was Ho Ng, who was easily the most delinquent kid here, but stood attentively at Bascal’s elbow, taking instructions like some kind of soft, brown robot.

  “I need test holes here and here,” Bascal told him, pointing out two empty sites along the equator of a Camp Friendly map. “Verify the wellstone layer, and record its exact depth.”

  “Sure,” Ho agreed, nodding. “We’re expecting two hundred and five centimeters, right? I’ll make it happen.”

  And there was the secret: letting Bascal boss him around gave Ho the authority to boss anyone else around. Some other boys would get dirty and blistered doing the actual work, and then Ho would report back here to deliver the findings and collect the credit.

  There was no question that his will would be done. Not only was it an echo of Bascal’s will, but ironically, the Palace Guards had only enhanced Ho’s air of violence. His second attempt to punch someone had ended even more shamefully than the first—with Ho quivering on the ground in a fetal position for nearly a minute—but since that time the guards had kept a particularly close eye, and there was nearly always one within four meters of him.

  In effect, the guards had declared him both royal and criminal. They were his golden handcuffs, his personal guard. And of course, they were scary in their own right, so even if you knew in your mind that they weren’t going to hurt you, the sight of one striding toward you, with Ho Ng beside it, did in fact strike fear and encourage obedience. And you’d better believe Ho liked it that way.

  “What a creep,” Conrad observed when Ho was gone. “I genuinely hate that guy.”

  “Hmm?” Bascal said, looking up absentmindedly from his diagrams. “Ng? Yeah, he’s definitely got a way of moving things along.” He looked back down for a moment, then added, “I think I’ve got this nearly worked out. There’s a relay station about five AU from here, associated with a major telecom collapsiter about half an AU farther on. Normal crew is probably zero. There’s also scattered cometary debris—we are in the Kuiper Belt, after all—but snowballs aren’t going to help us any. We need facilities. Our best bet is probably this here: an unmanned neutronium barge just under one AU away, which probably has everything we need. Namely, the maintenance fax they use to load workers on and off when something breaks. That should take us right back to fucking Denver.”

  And then what? The question hung unspoken. Revolution, right? Unite with the underground armies of Feck the Fairy, and cause some sort of mischief? Conrad wasn’t sure of the exact reason for this, or what exactly was supposed to happen afterward. Prison? More summer camp? The glorious collapse of Queendom society?

  “What’s an AU?” he asked.

  “Distance from the Earth to the sun,” Bascal said, in a tone suggesting he found the question a bit stupid.

  “Isn’t that a long way?”

  “Not out here it isn’t. We’re fifty AU from the sun, and almost twenty from the orbit of Neptune. Stuff is a lot more spread out in the upper system. Have you gotten us off the planette, by the way?”

  “Um, yeah,” Conrad said, turning and rummaging through his growing pile of notes. “If the sail is folded into a thirteen-meter sphere, we can fill it with hydrogen.” He plucked a simulation sketchplate from the pile and held it up, showing a little cartoon balloon rising up through the cartoon atmosphere of a cartoon planette. “That’s enough to lift the cabin, fifteen people, and about two tons of cargo.”


  “Raw. Where do we get the hydrogen?”

  Conrad pointed to a patch of blue on Bascal’s Camp Friendly map. “Adventure Lake. We move some solar panels onto the dock, and run the current down into the water on metal cables. Oxygen bubbles up on one side, and hydrogen on the other. We just throw the oxygen away, and fill the bag directly from the dock.”

  “Hmm,” Bascal said, pinching his chin and nodding. “Peter, are you listening to this?”

  “Yeah,” Peter Kolb replied, from the next table over. He had his back to the prince, and didn’t turn. “Hydrogen’s a fire hazard, you know. Explosion hazard.”

  “That’s true,” Bascal said, and turned back to Conrad with an expectant look.

  Conrad shrugged. “You didn’t let me finish.”

  “Please do.”

  It was hard not to smile. They were doing a good job, acting all mature and businessy, like real engineers and scientists. On the other hand, they really were coming up with answers, so maybe it wasn’t completely an act. “We can’t lift out of the atmosphere with just a balloon. It isn’t physically possible. We let the bag up to its full height— about a hundred meters if it’s going to reach from the docks to the d’rector’s cabin—and it’ll only rise another hundred meters or so before its density matches the air, and it stops.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So, the density of xenon drops off a lot faster than the density of oxygen does. It hugs the ground, not the sky. And the whole time the balloon is rising, the gas inside it is also expanding, until finally it starts leaking out the bottom.”

  “And? I’m not following.”

  Conrad inched the simulation forward, second by second. In the cartoon, the open-bottomed bag of wellstone film rose and swelled with yellow, false-colored gas, until little swirls of it were coming out as promised. “And, it’s two hundred kilos of hydrogen, spilling into a pure oxygen atmosphere.”

  “It explodes,” Peter said, and now he was turning around to look, just in time to see the simulated blast on the wellstone sketchplate.