by Wil McCarthy
Peter didn’t wait to be told a third time. Taking half a second to weigh the odds and face reality, he just put his head down and sprinted off, heading east past the rock formations, presumably toward the hills on Camp Friendly’s other side. And though he faced probable injury and certain abandonment, to his credit he did not wail or look back.
“Anyone else?” Bascal asked, looking around pointedly.
Nobody took him up on it. Nobody moved or breathed.
“All right, then. To the cabin. You!” He swept a pointing finger at the boys and robots holding down the bottom of the balloon. “Hang on tight and follow me. Your lives depend on it. We’re stopping right outside the cabin door. Clear?”
Nobody questioned the order. And since Conrad didn’t have a job to do, and couldn’t object, and didn’t care to join Peter in pain and exile, he followed docilely along with the crowd. The moment would be etched in his memory forever, endlessly questioned and reexamined for manliness and sensibility and moral correctness, but the truth was, he didn’t give it much thought at the time. Didn’t have to. His choices were just too limited, his time too short.
The cabin, tightly bound in wellstone film, looked like a badly gift-wrapped toy. The only opening was a vertical slash in the film, just in front of the doorway, which had been rigged to seal itself when the air pressure started dropping. Bascal arrived at the cabin slightly ahead of the others, and bent to snatch something up from the pit of its undermined foundation. A bottle? Green glass with a concave bottom. A wine bottle? Where had he gotten such a thing? Had D’rector Jed, or one of the other counselors, kept a private stash somewhere?
“In honor of my Latin ancestry,” the prince said, “I christen this ship Viridity: the burning green stamina of youth.”
Then he smashed the bottle against the gray-black film and the logs beneath it. The liquid inside was clear, like water. And without further ceremony, he commenced an inspection of the cables—wellstone ribbons, really—that trailed down from the roof, leading off in the direction of the towering column of the balloon. And the balloon was approaching, yes, carefully carried to its launch site at the front of the cabin. The butterflies in Conrad’s stomach were restless indeed.
When he got to the d’rector’s cabin himself, Xmary was there in the doorway, holding the edges of the wellstone aside and looking out with a worried expression. “Six,” she said, touching the shoulder of the boy in front of him—Bertram Wang—then ushering him inside. Next she touched Conrad, acknowledging his solidity without really seeing him. “Seven.”
Conrad went inside, with his robot escort following close behind.
“Are they coming?” she asked with obvious distaste. She pointed to the Palace Guard, then to the corner. “All right, you, over there. Stay out of the way and try not to fall on anyone.”
Her maternal, officious tone was obviously modeled on Her Majesty’s. Clearly she saw herself in that role, at least for this particular time and place, although Conrad doubted very much that Queen Tamra had ever been involved in anything so harebrained. But the guard, for whatever reason, chose to obey her.
“Find a mattress,” she said to Conrad and Bertram. The phrase sounded rehearsed, like she’d said it several times already, and indeed, the floor was littered with mattresses, and the boys who weren’t already on one were looking for one.
Seeing his opportunity, Conrad slipped into Jed’s own room, where a number of empty mattresses lay.
“Testing!” he screeched, and the sound was audible. The robot, with its noise-canceling sonic waves, was on the other side of the wall. But Conrad’s voice was hoarse—nearly gone—from trying to shout.
“Better lie down,” Bertram said. “Fast.”
Belatedly, Conrad remembered that this room was where Bascal had put all the controls. He didn’t want to face Bascal. But how many free mattresses were there in the other room? Was there time to go back and forth, looking? The view through the window was a hazy confusion of moving bodies and gray translucent film. Right now, the film wrapped around the cabin had no orders to be transparent, but even so he could make out the last few boys straggling in to claim their spaces.
“Shit,” he said. And then his Palace Guard reappeared in the doorway, and he could say nothing more. It took up a post in the far corner, looming over Conrad’s makeshift acceleration bed like a chrome-plated angel of death.
“Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen,” he heard Xmary say in the room next door. “We’re one short. Where is Peter?”
“Not coming.” Ho laughed with cruel glee.
And then Bascal’s voice: “Lanyards free! Now! Release the bag!”
There were some rustling noises, footsteps, and the slamming of a wooden door. Then the floor lurched and swung, thumped hard against something, lurched and swung again. Conrad threw himself flat.
“Oh, God,” Bertram was saying. “Oh gods and God and gods and God ...”
Conrad wasn’t a praying man, but for the first time in his life in felt the urge, felt the physical attention of the universe, personified. Dear God. Dear God. I have sinned in various ways, and I’m sorry. They—the ever-mysterious “they”—said God was nothing more than an anthropomorphic urge, an impulse of the human brain to impose pattern and personality on random events. Donald and Maybel Mursk, Conrad’s parents, had always thought so, albeit with an Irish tinge of hope and dread. But speculation was inevitable: what happened to the soul, when a body died and fresh copies were printed? Was there a soul at all? There were all kinds of theories about this, and Conrad feared he was about to learn the truth.
Ho and Bascal staggered into the room, sprawling on the two empty mattresses as the cabin swung wide arcs and began, ever so slightly, to twirl. Outside the window, the gray-white, film-obscured sky was growing dark.
“Here we go!” Bascal shouted. “Here we bloody, fucking g—”
The hydrogen ignited with a gut-wrenching whump! that was much louder than any thunder Conrad had ever heard. And the force of the explosion was directed downward, out of the bag, blossoming down along the guy ropes and the cabin roof, storming into the planette’s atmosphere in a roiling cloud of hot steam. Conrad suddenly felt as if five people had fallen on him.
Weak gasps and gurgles and screams rose up all around, and Conrad wanted to scream too. But then there were only four people on his chest, and then two, and then none at all, and he was floating off his mattress, grabbing at the safety straps he’d forgotten to tie around him. They were in outer space. They were in outer fucking space, hurtling toward the planette’s pinpoint fusion “star” at a hundred meters a second. In a log cabin.
I’m sorry, God. This was a really bad idea.
chapter eight
sun ride, sunset
The wrapping of wellstone film had turned a bit clearer, and “above” them, visible through the nearly transparent skylight, the translucent sail was unfurling, both under the pressure of fusion light and by the command of Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. Even without a mirrored surface, the impact of photons had already transferred enough momentum to swing their makeshift boat around. They flew “backward” or “downward” cabinfirst, with the sila’a—the pocket star—shining out of sight beneath the floorboards.
The control panel was just a programmed sheet of wellstone, pasted onto a wooden plank nailed low to the wall. The instruments and controls on it were two-dimensional cartoons, clear and contemporary in design, glowing softly in the primary colors and yet vaguely Polynesian somehow. Here was a gauge like a compass rosette from an old map; over there sat a diagram of the eight guylines connecting the cabin roof to the sail. The stylized images suggested some winching mechanism, as if the cables could be tightened or loosened on command, which they surely could not. But Bascal had mentioned a few times that that was the way to visualize the steering of a fetu’ula , a fetula, a stellar sail craft.
“It’s an issue of control authority,” he’d blathered absently, “very comparable t
o the rigging on a regular sailboat.”
The navigator’s seat was a legless chair, crisscrossed with canvas straps, and Bascal seemed at home there now, sitting with one foot under him and the other stretched out under the console. Despite the lack of gravity and the fact that he was tied down, his posture suggested an attention to balance. He was fussing happily with the controls, glancing up through the skylight every few seconds to watch the sail opening up.
“Keep us safe, Majesty,” Ho Ng said. “I don’t think the boys cared much for that bump.”
His tone was ingratiating and solicitous and shit-nosed, and of course the honorific was both idiotic and illegal, since even a crown prince was not the King of Sol. But Bascal didn’t seem to notice or mind. “You know I will, Ng. A healthy young body, maintained and optimized by fax filters, can handle an awful lot of abuse. I can virtually guarantee that you’ll be fine.”
He turned to Conrad. “We’ve got about ten more minutes of freefall before I opaque the sail. The planette is forty-seven kilometers from the sila’a. Ordinarily I’d just hail the star from here and call up its laser sail protocol, but without a network gate, or even a radio, that would be tricky. You know what we do about that?”
He waited for a long moment, but Conrad, tied down crookedly on his mattress, could only look back at him and shrug.
“Oh. Right,” Bascal said. Then, to the guard—whose feet were somehow still anchored to the floorboards— “Remove the cone of silence, please.” And then to Conrad again: “Sorry about all that. Really.”
The lifting of the silence was a physical sensation, like a breath of wind. “You’re a shit,” Conrad rasped.
Bascal turned back to his controls. “All that is necessary will be done, my friend. I’d rather you were on the right side of that principle.”
“Dead, shitty bodies,” Ho agreed.
Conrad saw no reason to reply. Above, the sail was almost fully open now, and billowing with underwater slowness. Worse: with honeyed, glacial slowness.
From the other room came sounds of commotion, followed by nervous laughter and hoots of dismay. “Hey, do not fuck around back there,” Bascal called out. “Ten gees can kill you falling ten centimeters. You motherless bastards tie down and shut up.”
“Ten gees?” Conrad repeated, his hoarse voice ringing with the worry of all these unpleasant surprises. He’d somehow envisioned the actual sailing as a graceful, languid affair.
“Quit whining, you baby. We’re young and strong, and fit as the morbidity filters can make us. We’ve been faxed; we’re immortal. Well, immorbid, anyway. And anyway, it’s more like eight and a half gees. I am rigidizing the sail ... Now.”
Like mandolin strings, the guylines jinged and sproinged, sending quasi-musical vibrations down through the cabin roof. The lazy batwing of the sail, arched away from the cabin and the guy ropes like a dome-tent roof, began to pull downward and spread out, becoming a flat translucent ceiling a hundred meters above them, its wings stretching out of sight beyond the edges of the skylight, extending more than seven hundred meters on either side, and half that much from top to bottom. The process took about twenty seconds, and chewed up only a tiny fraction of the solar energy raining up to them from the pocket star.
“Now I’m commencing rotation,” the prince announced.
“Why?”
“Because we’re flying backward, idiot. We have to point where we’re fucking going, and the sail needs to be in front of us when we mirrorize it, or the light pressure will push it against the cabin and we’ll get all fouled up in the ropes. You want that? No?”
“Why not just rigidize the lines?”
“They are rigidized.” Bascal huffed impatiently. “There’s a control issue, all right? It isn’t stable, pushing backwards like that. It’s ... look, just shut up and let me sail.”
Above, the left half of the wellstone took on a brighter shade of the same gray color, slightly less transparent than the right half. The guylines spanged and sproinged again, and Conrad felt himself pressed lightly against his tie-downs on the left side. The ship was heeling around, turning to face its rear—and its sail—at the sila’a. Presently, it bloomed at the edge of the skylight, a miniature sun no more than a few meters across. Just a pinpoint, really, yellow-orange and painfully bright, even through the veil of the wellstone.
Then the sail’s colors shifted again, swapping sides, and Conrad felt himself pressed the other way. The sila’a, though, continued its way across the skylight, finally pausing just past its left edge, eclipsed by the cabin’s wall and roof. Then the wellstone sail fabric was edge-on to the light, no longer illuminated like a lamp shade, and through its sudden translucence Conrad could make out the stars gliding gently to a halt.
Deep space, here we come, he breathed silently.
“Now this,” Bascal said, to no one in particular, “is the hard part. You ever try to back up a sailboat against the wind? The trick is to angle in, null your orbital velocity, and then use the sail itself as a brake, kind of like a parachute.”
Conrad couldn’t make sense of that remark. “A parachute? What are we, diving into the sun?”
“Onto the sila’a, yes. The fusing hydrogen sits on top of a neuble core, and there’s a solid wellstone surface on top of that, to hold it all in. We need to make contact with that outer shell in order to communicate with the machinery. But there’s an advantage in doing that: it gets us close enough to reflect the laser beam right back at the sila’a. Set up our own little resonating chamber, for extra pressure, extra thrust. It’ll be like shooting a rocket out of a bottle.”
“I ... have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve done this before?”
“Hmm? Oh, gods no. Nobody has.”
Conrad wanted to object: the very idea of backing into a star—even a miniature one—seemed like craziness of the highest order. And bouncing laser beams back into it, for extra thrust? Something had gone awry in their plans, some deeply fucked failure of communication, because he sure hadn’t agreed to any of this. But here and now, did they have a choice? Could they get back to the planette even if they wanted to? Even if Bascal would let them try?
“Okay,” Bascal said, “I’m going to turn us again.”
It was a stately process, and while it transpired Conrad couldn’t help noticing how bright it was getting outside, as the light of the sila’a drew ever nearer, illuminating the guylines and the translucent shrink-wrapping around the cabin. The sail itself was mostly invisible now, a batwing of utterly transparent material, with little squares of silver flitting across it, and clustering in particular on its right-hand side, like a swarm of sun-seeking insects.
“Asymmetric pressure,” Bascal explained, catching Conrad’s look. “The light pushes on the starboard half of the sail but not the port. That’s what turns us, pulls us around.”
“Why does it flicker like that?”
“Stability. The control system is keeping the sail from fluttering or sliding out sideways against the guylines. It’s like the tensioning springs on a spinnaker tack.... Well, you’ve never been sailing, so never mind. But yeah, it’s supposed to do that.”
Gradually, the flickering squares of silver diminished in number, and spread themselves more evenly across the sail, and began to gleam in a really painful way as the sila’a brightened and neared behind them.
“Boy, that’s bright,” Bascal observed. He did something to the controls on his panel, and the squares of silver became squares of bronze, and the shrink-wrapping above the skylight turned a translucent shade of black that was very close to the natural color of wellstone. It blotted out the remaining stars, and made a shimmery halo of the sail and guylines.
Conrad began to notice a sensation of weight, pulling and pressing him into the mattress again.
“Gravity,” Ho Ng said. “Is that the star I’m feeling underneath me, Sire?”
“Yeah,” Bascal told him absently. He was still fiddling with the controls, looking annoyed ab
out something. “Well, it’s also our deceleration. We’re sort of hovering right now. Or we will be in another minute. I’m trying not to bump us too hard.”
Against the surface of a star. Good God. Against the solid surface of a manmade star that was so unimaginably hot that it could warm a planette, could cook a dinner or burn a young man’s face, from forty-seven kilometers away. And yes, it was definitely getting warmer in here!
“Are we going to be cooked, Bas?” he couldn’t help asking.
“No,” the prince said, sounding even more annoyed. But he fiddled some more, and the view outside the windows went totally black for a moment, and then mirror-bright, reflecting the cabin’s interior lighting back in lumpy, funhouse-mirror ways.
Then he looked alarmed, and had time to say “Whoops” in the moment before something very solid and very heavy slammed up into the center of the cabin’s floor.
BAM!
Even as he was slammed into his mattress and jerked against its straps, Conrad was aware of the sounds of cracking and splintering. He even had time to note that these sounds, however brief and mild, were just about the most alarming thing you could possibly hear on board a wooden spaceship. And even when the cracking stopped, the floor itself groaned. Something was bending it in a way it had never been bent before, and the force of gravity— the invisible hand pressing Conrad into his padding— seemed much too strong. Much stronger than at the surface of Camp Friendly.
“Get us off this thing!” he shouted at Bascal. “It’s breaking, it’s going to break! How do you talk to the star?”
“Verbally, I assume,” Bascal said, sounding a bit shaken himself. “Otherwise we’re in real trouble.” Then he turned his head toward the floor and shouted, “Hello? Sila’a? Can you give us laser sail protocol, please?”
Nothing happened.
Nothing except that Conrad felt his rage boil over. This was their plan? Ramming a star and then shouting at it? Asking nicely? This was their fucking plan?