The Wellstone

by Wil McCarthy

  “Specifically,” Conrad said, “it explodes down, propelling the bag up and lifting the whole cabin away from the planette. Rather fast.”

  The sim showed this: a flaming balloon dragging a wooden cabin behind it, with the planette falling away against a background of stars and dotted lines.

  “Raw!” Bascal said approvingly. “Conrad, that’s great. You thought of that all by yourself?”

  He felt himself blushing. “Well, the textbooks helped.”

  “Will it work?” Bascal asked Peter.

  Peter shrugged. “I dunno. I guess. Can I check the simulation?”

  “You sure can,” Bascal said, snatching the plate out of Conrad’s hands.

  Conrad was about to be annoyed, and to protest, when suddenly Xmary was there, holding a couple of plastic bowls. “Food science report!” she said excitedly. “I’ve got some new creations from the fax.”

  “Got what?” Conrad asked.

  “Edible paints,” she said. “And papier-mâché. Some of the combinations make a decent porridge.”

  Conrad peered into the bowls and wrinkled his nose. “It looks like shit.” And it did, literally.

  “Well, it tastes like peas and oatmeal,” Xmary shot back, with just a touch of indignant sneer. “Try it.”

  One of the bowls had a spoon in it, and Conrad didn’t want to be too much of an asshole, and anyway the stuff didn’t smell bad. In fact it barely smelled at all, so he picked up the spoon and touched its goo-smeared plastic tip to the end of his tongue. No ill effects presented themselves. Sighing, he shoved the spoon in his mouth and sucked the brown paste off it.

  “Hmm,” he said, trying not to make a face. The taste wasn’t horrible, but this was definitely one of those cases where the texture and color didn’t match. This wasn’t going to be popular, even as a substitute for beans and franks. “We can call it Slop Number Two.”

  Bascal was choking back a laugh. “Well. That’s great, then. Another problem solved.”

  “I’ll keep trying,” promised a slightly crestfallen Xmary.

  “I don’t know about this,” Bertram the sailor boy cut in. He sauntered over to Bascal and Conrad’s table and sat down heavily. “You’ve got a photospinnaker clewed and guyed to a spriting gondola. Using a log cabin for the gondola may not be as bad as it sounds, but you’re still talking about a fairly downsystem design, right? An AU is a long distance to sail, even with real sunlight to propel you. And this planette doesn’t have a real sun, just a pinpoint fusion source. The energy drops off fast as you move away from it.”

  The grin fell off Bascal’s face. “Bert, I like you, but if Ng were here, he’d punch you in the gut for that. How smart do you think you are? I’ve physically been sailing around my family’s planette, which has a lot of other shit orbiting besides a pocket star. Have you ever done that? Have you done anything remotely like that? Tooling around in Earth orbit, hell, I’ll bet you’ve never even heard of laser sail protocol.”

  “No,” Bertram admitted, his voice betraying a slight quaver.

  “Well, I’ll educate you. Out here in the real universe, sila’a have a special protocol, see? Called laser sail protocol. You log your request with the star, and if there are no competing demands then its entire energy output is focused in a laser beam, which does not drop off fast as you move away. In fact, it tracks your sail automatically, for hours if you need it to. Do you know how much speed you can build up that way? Would you care to guess?”

  Bertram was hunching his shoulders now, looking suitably chastised. “I’m ... sorry, Bascal. You know more about this than I do, so if you’ve already worked it out, I ... apologize. How long will this trip take?”

  “Actually, I haven’t worked it out,” the prince said, and burst out laughing.

  There was a layer of wellstone film covering the entire planette, at an average depth of just over two meters. It was a lining of some kind: not only waterproof and shovel-proof but antimagnetic and stuff. Conrad figured the hard part would be getting it up and out of the planette. In fact, truthfully, he’d figured on that step being impossible, at least within the eight weeks remaining in their camp sentence. But Bascal had a lot of tricks up his sleeve; he went down into one of the holes, whispered something to the plasticky material at the bottom, and was presented with the wellstone’s programming interface.

  “This stuff comes out of the factory with a few terabytes of programming built in,” he noted over his shoulder, for the edification of Ng and Conrad and Peter, and the three labor-pool boys who’d actually dug this hole.

  Once the interface was there, he tapped at its buttons—bright squares of glowing color printed against the gray-black of the wellstone itself. And he read symbols from its screen, and he cursed at it a few times.

  “No language parser,” he said. “No intelligence. It doesn’t know what I want.”

  Conrad stooped until his hands were on the rim of the hole. The ground was soft and loamy, vaguely wet. He swung his legs out and hopped down. The hole was slightly deeper than he was tall, and narrow for two people to crouch in, although he crouched anyway. “What’s it saying?”

  “I don’t know. Something about static coefficients. It goes by fast and disappears.”

  “What are you trying to do?”

  “Make it slippery,” Bascal said, still tapping lettered keys. “A couple of tacky areas for handholds, and the rest very, very slippery.”

  “Ah.”

  He watched Bascal fiddle with it for a few minutes, then started making suggestions. “Here,” Bascal said finally, edging out of the way to the extent that the dirt wall around them permitted. “You do it.”

  Conrad had never used a manual interface like this one, but grasped the principle well enough. He entered F-R-I-C-T-I-O-N, and then hit the SEARCH key as he’d seen Bascal do. And when the resulting text—in fat yellow letters—rolled up past the top of the display window, he poked and prodded at the window until he’d managed to resize it, and to make the letters smaller so he could read more than twelve at a time.

  “We can turn it to gold,” he said helpfully, as the menu options presented themselves. “We can turn it to impervium. Those are pretty slippery.”

  “Not nearly enough,” Bascal said. “Anyway, they’re elements—we want compounds. There should be a way to just specify the friction, and let the other parameters optimize.”

  It went on like that for a while, but eventually they got it. And when they got it there was no question at all, because their hands and knees went out from under them and they fell together in a pile, screaming with laughter and bouncing back and forth against the walls, which rained dirt down on them.

  “Make a sticky patch!” Bascal shouted. “Make a sticky patch right here!”

  “You’re on my hand,” Conrad shot back, through fresh peals of laughter. He tried tapping at the keys with the fingers of his left hand, as he skittered over and over them. Finally, between the two of them, he and Bascal managed to turn the slipperiness off, then specify the area around them as something called “duramer,” which was strong and flexible and tacky, and that let them gather the wellstone up in their fists. Then they turned the slipperiness back on across the rest of the sheet, and pulled.

  The only really hard part was getting out of the hole while stooping to maintain their handholds. They couldn’t climb without letting go, and the other boys couldn’t reach down far enough to pull them up. Eventually a human chain was attempted, and Conrad and Bascal were hauled out, dragging several meters of wellstone behind them.

  “Our sail,” Bascal beamed.

  “Why do they call it ‘stone’?” someone wondered aloud.

  “It also comes in blocks,” Conrad answered. “Big, heavy silicon blocks, like glass. Like stone. Or light and puffy, like foam. This stuff is better, this film. More versatile.”

  Bascal was tugging on the wellstone, which had grown taut and would not come any farther out of the hole. “We need to split a few seams to p
ull this out any farther. Down the far side of the planette, then halfway up to the equator again on the sides. Peel it like an orange.”

  Conrad grunted. “You know how to do that?”

  “Kind of. Here, help me.”

  With some additional fussing, they called up a schematic of the whole sheet, and marked the cuts they wanted along its spherical form.

  “This’ll make a trilobe sail,” Bascal said. “Also known as a batwing. Very stylish.”

  Conrad nodded, not really listening. “Okay, okay. Ready ... and ... cut!”

  The tension went out of the sheet, and an additional meter of it slid upward in their grasp.

  “All right!” the prince shouted. “Pull, boys, pull!”

  And they did. They pulled and walked and pulled and walked, and the material slithered out like a hollow snake made of clear, wet-looking film. No way they could ever stuff it back in the hole again. And at the rate they were going, they’d have the entire liner pulled out in half an hour—it was that easy to vandalize a world. And wasn’t that a kick in the pants?

  To pluck the eyes that rest beneath thy brow,

  And celebrate red fountains in a sonnet,

  or heckle farmer’s labor at his plow,

  in field that hath such trammeled soil upon it!

  I wonder, Shakespeare, didst thou never see

  A napalm blossom sprung from human skin,

  Or noble stick of Nobel TNT

  That hath such fire encapsulated in?

  In images of violence we seek,

  Through gasoline and knives and powder burns,

  For cities built and sacked, and havoc wreaked,

  By reptile mind that, all unseeing, yearns.

  A damsel with a rifle in a vision once I saw,

  O Xanadu, thy twice-five-miles are trampled into straw.

  — “The Modern Era”3

  BASCAL EDWARD DE TOWAJI LUTUI, age 10

  chapter seven

  freedom blast

  The sheet weighed three tons, and took twelve people two whole days to fold up. When they were done, it was forty layers thick, bulging chest-high with air pockets, and still bigger than the furrowed field of the Hobby Farm, some eighty-five meters across. With its waterproof liner gone, the lake drained alarmingly during this time, finally bottoming out at about half its original depth, and there were reports—unconfirmed by anyone reliable—that the hills and plateau on the planette’s eastern hemisphere had begun to slump as well. Meanwhile, Xmary and her crew were canning food and fermenting jugs of cider and cutting/pasting/sealing the fifteen space suits, which everyone agreed were a good idea in case the ship sprang a leak or something. Bascal had to help with that part, though, because it turned out he and Conrad were the only ones who knew the first thing about matter programming.

  It began to dawn on Conrad that they were going to get caught. There was no way to hide this much activity, even from an apathetic Queendom that considered them helpless. At some point, the Palace Guards were going to report all this. Hell, even a telescope would reveal the changes in the planette’s appearance. At any moment, the fax gates would pour out a sea of Constabulary officers, or broadcast new instructions to the robots that were already here, and it would all be over. Again.

  “We need to sabotage the gates,” Bascal said to him, as if reading his thoughts. The two of them were up on the easternmost rock formation, overlooking the nowlandlocked boathouse and—just barely peeking over the horizon—the docks, which stood now in only a meter of dirty-looking water. In theory the two of them were surveying the launch site; to the south, D’rector Jed’s cabin was also just barely visible, and the guy ropes would sprawl from there to the docks, with the balloon itself curling off to the northeast, almost reaching the paved path they facetiously referred to as the Holy Fuckway,4 which circled wide around the lake.

  “Where will we get our supplies?” Conrad asked. His voice sounded higher and squeakier than usual; they were almost six meters up, and the air was thinner.

  Bascal waved a hand impatiently. “Not the fax machines, the gates. The telecom hardware that links them to the Nescog. There are only two of them on the planette.”

  “Oh. So how do we sabotage them?”

  “With a crowbar, idiot. Or a sledgehammer. Anything, really. They’re wellstone, but they’re not programmed to withstand an attack. Circuitry is delicate.”

  “You’ve smashed one before,” Conrad speculated.

  Bascal nodded. He was looking up now, at the sky, at the “sun,” and at the dull, starlike speck of Sol that, from up here, could readily be discerned in broad daylight. “Yeah. Twice.”

  Then he looked back at the ground, picked out Ho Ng in the not-so-distance, cupped his hands, and began calling out directions. “Ng! Ng! Get a crowbar or something and meet me by the boathouse!”

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” Conrad asked. The knot of unease in his stomach had not loosened. If anything, it was getting tighter. “If we smash the gates, we’re really committing.”

  “Committing a crime?” Bascal said. He could turn a sneer into something friendly, an assurance that you were smart enough and raw enough to see the error in your statement. For some reason, Conrad suddenly found this power vaguely frightening.

  “Well, y... it is a crime, yes. But we’re in plenty of trouble already. What I meant was, it commits us. There’ll be no other way off the planette, and if we’ve made any sort of mistake...” His voice withered under Bascal’s glare; it took real effort to finish. “This could be very dangerous. We could be killed.”

  “That’s what backups are for. The Friendly Products Corporation took an image of you on your way up here, right?”

  “I don’t want to be restored from backups.”

  Bascal studied him quietly, for several seconds. “Are you losing your nerve?”

  Conrad couldn’t keep himself from shrugging. “Not losing it, I just ... What is it again, that we’re trying to accomplish? Suddenly I’m not sure. Revolution?”

  “Revolution,” Bascal agreed.

  “But that’s crazy, isn’t it? I mean, we can’t win. We can cost them time and money and stuff; we can make a statement. But we can’t overthrow them or anything. Not by building a sailboat.”

  “You don’t understand,” Bascal said, and he sounded a little sad.

  “So explain it.”

  “Explain it? It ought to explain itself. Our revolt isn’t something they’ll lose; it’s something they’ll regret. They have such an easy time forgetting about us, putting us off. Which is ironic, considering the cultural patterns they’re working from. If you asked the Old Moderns about paradise, some would have said it was a tropical stone age full of gatherers and hunters and fishermen. Some would say a network of small farming towns, or a medieval pocket monarchy straight out of fairy tales. Others, maybe a Modern, democratic nation-state held together by information technology. But Tonga was unique in the Modern world: it was all these things at the same time, in the same place. It was everyone’s paradise.

  “By the end of the Modern period, the entire human race had its eyes on the Kingdom as, I dunno, a model for a new kind of civilization. Really it was all the old kinds, living right on top of each other. And to be fair, those Utopian ambitions genuinely have succeeded. They’ve smothered the original and lost its spirit—they’ve practically enslaved my parents—but along the way they’ve created something ... else. Something better, at least for them. They just forgot about their unborn, is all. You have to remember, the Old Moderns are still alive, and always will be, walking around in a state of constant amazement. But their paradise was built at our expense—happy children as part of the scenery, the hoped-for future, not part of the machine itself. Not part of the present.

  “So, we’ve got to remind them every day, that we’re current human beings, not future ones, not potential ones, not pretend ones. What do people fear when they can’t die or be maimed? Slavery. Oppression. Meaninglessness. Even i
n the old days, most people would rather die than live by the will of someone else. Even for a decade or two. They fought wars to prevent it. They murdered their own children in their beds. With eternity ahead of us, do we dare to be timid? We need a place in society, a set of roles to grow into that aren’t bogged down by the weight of bureaucracy and prior humanity. We deserve a chance to live and breathe, as our parents have done, and if we die a few times—nobly and defiantly—it only strengthens the point.”

  Conrad sat down. He had to think about that, to think it over in those terms.

  “Do you hear what I’m saying?” Bascal pressed.

  “I do. Yes. You’ve thought a lot about this.”

  “Every day of my life.” The prince nodded, considering and then agreeing with his own words. “Last summer I got sent to Niuafo’ou, the remotest and old-fashionedest of the Niua Islands, at the northern extreme of the old Kingdom. The name means ‘Exotic Coconuts,’ and believe me, it’s not referring to a fruit. Those people are serious: no gates, no wellstone, no TV or fax machines. You eat what you catch, and wear what you grow. And what you grow is one hundred percent Earth Original, no recombos or faxable mods. I used to love that island—I learned to sail in its central crater when I was five—but last year all I could think of was how small it was. How narrow-minded and closed. I had a boat; I could’ve sailed it to Vava’u in a couple of days. But there was never a right time to start, and soon the season was over and I was back at school. Opportunity lost.”

  Conrad kicked some dirt off the gray cragginess of the rock. He wasn’t a coward; he knew that much. And what Bascal said was ... well, it put words to the feeling that had driven him into so much trouble already. Conrad had never tried to put it in words, didn’t even realize it could be done. But: if the words were accurate, did that necessarily make them true?

  “How long,” he finally asked, “will this journey take? Seriously.”

  “Two months,” Bascal answered.