by Wil McCarthy
Bascal nodded at him. “Yeah. Ng, would you please escort Khen and James and Bert into the fax for safekeeping?”
He took her promise, for a start,
And took her hand in his, and,
In love he took her heart.
He took her lips against his own,
He took that girl apart!
— “Male-Ordered Bride”
BASCAL EDWARD DE TOWAJI LUTUI, age 12
chapter nine
stowage
“Keep your hands off me,” Bertram said, gliding back along the wall.
“Fuck you,” James added. “Both of you shits.”
Ho Ng advanced. “Don’t you talk to the prince that way, bloodfuck. Get in the fax.”
“Nobody’s hurting anybody,” Bascal said, in a tone that fell rather short of reassuring.
“Stay away,” Bert said. He was still calm, but barely.
Ho leaped forward in a long, slow arc, his outstretched hands reaching for James’ shoulders. James tried to duck aside, and made the mistake of throwing a punch in the general direction of Ho’s face. It missed, and the two tumbled upward in a flailing mass, arms and legs against the logs and cement of the cabin wall. And then the Palace Guard was there, having dashed across the floor with characteristic grace, its feet held down by some invisible, gravitylike force. Conrad hadn’t quite seen it happen, but two of the mattresses in the robot’s path were now spilling out dust and flakes of foam rubber, their covers torn in patterns shaped like robot feet.
Conrad had expected the robot to separate the combatants, but in fact it simply restrained James, got his feet back on the floor, and let Ho continue to hang onto his other arm.
“Guard,” Bascal said lazily, “assist the process, please. Thank you.”
“Let go! Let go!” James yelled. His struggles intensified, but against the robot he had little hope of success. He attempted to drag his feet, but this simply resulted in their flailing in the air behind him, with the tie-down laces of his camp sneakers fluttering loose. He began to scream like a condemned man, which might very well be the case, because once he was in the fax there was no specific guarantee that he would be reinstantiated. Some archived copy of him would, sometime, but maybe not this one, with these memories. This particular James Shadat might well be on his way to the gods and the afterlife, or the blank nothingness, or whatever.
He shrieked when they hurled him at the plate, and the sound was cut off as his head passed through, and then there was only the pop and hiss of his body going in, every atom measured and logged and teleported away to a nearby buffer. Or something like that; Conrad didn’t really know how fax machines worked.
“Bascal,” he said, “you’ve got to stop this.” He felt sick. Responsible. The prince had gotten this idea from him!
“Nonsense,” Bascal said, with a wave of the hand. “They’re better off in there, out of trouble and out of harm’s way. Everyone will be happier. Plus, it’s too crowded in here anyway. Ho? If you’ll continue, please?”
“Pleasure,” Ho agreed, turning and leaping at Bertram Wang. The Palace Guard followed at a more stately pace, marching magically along the floor, but it got there only a few moments after Ho did.
Bert opted to retain his dignity, saying only, “Is this how you’ll lead the Queendom, ‘Sire’?”
“We may never know,” Bascal answered. And then Bert was gone.
Khen turned out to be another screamer, and afterward Emilio Roberts, one of the bloody-nose kids, lost his composure and started crying and kicking. “This can’t be happening! You can’t be doing this.” So they chucked him in the fax as well.
When it was done, the room was very quiet, and all eyes were on Bascal. He seemed to sense that he was in trouble, that he’d overstepped and lost the confidence of his followers. Nobody wanted to be next. But when he spoke, it was with a flourish and an easy smile.
“We knew the journey would be difficult, and we probably should have known there’d be friction and hasty compromises. I didn’t foresee this, and I apologize to all of you for the ugly spectacle. I promise, it won’t be repeated. But you know as well as I do: if we let those men wander free, the trouble will be much worse. Would you rather tie them up? Kill them? This seems to me like a prudent compromise. Agreed?”
“What do we do now?” someone asked.
“We sail,” Bascal answered simply. He looked at Xmary. “You, darling, will be administering resources. Can you establish meal schedules and such?”
“Yeah,” she replied, without great enthusiasm.
“Terrific.” He turned and launched himself back toward the bridge in a bounding leap.
Conrad followed him. “What’re you doing, Bas? What’s the grand idea here?”
“Well, first we turn the fetula so the sail is edgewise to Sol. That’ll reduce our risk of detection when we have to opaque it. We don’t want to glint, or blot out any stars. Too much risk of being seen.” Bascal was settling back into the navigator’s chair.
“That’s not what I mean,” Conrad said.
“Nevertheless, that’s what we have to do.”
“He bothering you, Majesty?” Ho said from the doorway.
“Nah. He needs to be in here, to pick up the art of steering. We’ll take it in shifts from here on.”
“No concern,” Ho said self-importantly. “You need me, I’ll be right out here.”
“Good. I’ll call when I do.”
The other Palace Guard was still in here, standing motionless in the corner. Between it and Ho, there was considerable reason to avoid antagonizing the prince.
Nevertheless, Conrad crossed his arms. “So I’m steering now, am I? You’ve been making a lot of decisions for a lot of people, Bas. You haven’t done much asking. Why don’t you let your buddy Ho pilot the ship?”
Without looking up from the controls, Bascal said, “Come off it, boyo. Anyone can steer—well, almost anyone—but you’re the only one here with a basic understanding of wellstone. How the system works together, collectively. And you’ve driven vehicles before. You and I are the only qualified pilots.”
“Get fucked.”
“I’m sure I will,” the prince said, then turned to face Conrad. “Look, I can do this without you. It’s inconvenient, but it’s not impossible. If you want to be useless and annoying, that’s your decision.”
“Yeah? You too, Mr. Cone-of-Silence. Are you helping the people on this ... this so-called spaceship? Supporting their interests, fighting for their rights? I used to think so.”
“Watch yourself,” Bascal said, then sighed. “I would like your help, all right? I’d like your support. I’m asking nicely.”
With his arms still folded, Conrad shook his head. “You can’t behave this way, Bas.”
“Don’t tell me what I can’t do.” Bascal’s voice was mild. “I understand your problem: you keep thinking this is a lark. Some kind of joyride. But it really isn’t. We’re not doing this for our amusement; we’re doing it for the next million years of our eternal lives. We’ve got to start those lives off strong and hard, or we’ll never be taken seriously. I wish you could just get that fact into your head and keep it there.”
“Fine, it’s not a game. It’s serious, million-year business. That doesn’t mean you’re free to abuse people. It’s”—Conrad groped for the right word—“counterproductive. It hurts our cause. What will people say if your own followers wind up denouncing you?”
“It depends how the PR ladies spin it,” Bascal answered. But he at least appeared to be thinking it over.
Conrad pressed the point: “You either have support or you don’t, Bas. I’m not sure you understand. I can be on your side and still not agree with ... all this. There’s a right way and a wrong way.”
That made the prince angry. “Oh, so now I’m stupid? I understand exactly what you’re saying, Conrad, but it’s possible I know more about this than you do. If I remember correctly, you’re not the Queendom’s finest student.”
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“And you are,” Conrad sneered. It was a stupid thing to say, because yeah, everyone knew what a prodigy Prince Bascal was, and always had been. It was kind of amazing, actually, that a Poet Prince could be friends with a Cork County disappointment like Conrad Mursk. Which helped his argument not at all.
Bascal spread his hands apologetically. “Look, I’m not convinced I can trust you. First you’re in favor, then you’re against; then you’ve got backbone, and now you don’t. . . . I don’t know, Conrad. How smart is that? Unless you’re a genius of epic proportion, what I really need is somebody who listens to my informed opinion.”
“Like Ho Ng.”
“Well, yeah. Actually.”
“You don’t want to listen to him, Bas. You really don’t. Nothing he says or does is for the good of other people.”
Bascal sighed and relaxed his hands, setting them adrift in a low-gravity gesture oddly reminiscent of Feck. “Just let it go. Your opinion is noted, but we’ve got to turn the fetula now, before the sail gives us away. At the moment it’s aimed almost directly downsystem—that’s toward the sun—and any decent astronomer or traffic controller is going to pick it up sooner or later. We’ve got to disappear before they realize we’re gone. Will you take a few minutes to learn something? Please?”
It was Conrad’s turn to sigh. Was there a choice? Would his refusal help anything at all? Regardless of politics, there should be more than one person on board the ship who knew how to operate it. That was just basic safety.
“All right,” he said. “Show me.”
“Good man.”
By way of a primer, Bascal pointed out the ordinal directions: port/starboard, fore/aft, and boots/caps. And the cardinal ones: upsystem/downsystem, north/south, and clock/counter.
“When I say ‘boots aft,’ it means a negative pitch along this axis, see? When I say ‘correct north,’ it means we add velocity that way, out of the ecliptic plane where the planets all orbit. Until further notice and regardless of orientation. You see? It’s actually very simple. There are galactic coordinates as well, but we won’t need those. Now sit, and watch what I do.”
Conrad watched and listened, as patiently as his fear and ambivalence would permit. And he saw that the control of a fetula—and by extension, a sailboat—was nothing at all like the control of a construction tractor. The eight guylines were distant cousins to the track clutches of a bulldozer, or the front-end hydraulics of a steam-roller, but they pointed off in so many different directions! And there was nothing akin to a brake or throttle, unless you counted the sail itself, whose transparency could be varied on demand.
Still, there was one piece of his father’s advice that seemed perfectly apropos: Horse around with this thing, lad, and you’re bound to regret what happens next.
Having lost Feck and Peter, and five others besides, they were down to just Xmary and eight boys. In addition to Bascal, Ho, and Steve Grush, there were Preston Midrand and Martin Liss, two quiet kids Conrad had never really talked to. And there was Jamil Gazzaniga, who talked incessantly about bicycles, and Karl Smoit, the budding young sports nut who had invented the game of shirtball soccer.
Unfortunately, the last of their acceleration had gone away when Bascal turned the sail, and you couldn’t play kickball in zero gravity, so Karl was driving everyone crazy with his imaginary ball and goal.
“He lines up! He kicks!”
“He spins ass-over-elbows,” Steve observed acidly, stretching a foot out for Karl to collide with.
“Get fucked, you shit,” Karl said to him, grabbing and twisting the foot. This was actually sort of brave, and under other circumstances Conrad would have admired him for it. But it had the potential to escalate into a full-blooded fight, and from there maybe even a feud, and it was way too early in way too cramped a voyage to be starting with that kind of thing.
“The men are already bored,” he said loudly, to both Xmary and Bascal. Xmary because he figured she’d care; Bascal because he might actually know what to do about it. He’d had every possible kind of leadership training, right?
“Knock it off, guys,” Bascal said.
Steve now had an arm around Karl’s shoulder and neck, and said, “Tell him to quit with the acrobatics.”
Bascal tapped his chin. “No, I don’t think so. Let him go; let him do what he’s doing. We’ll have acrobatics for the next hour, and then dinner, and then story time and lights out. Xmary will draw up a formal schedule in the morning.”
“Schedule! Just like camp!” Jamil Gazzaniga sneered. “We’ll get the Palace Guards to announce it!”
“Story time?” Steve complained. “What are we, six?”
Bascal just smiled. “The Tongan people used to spend months at a time in outrigger canoes. They were the greatest mariners of their day, much better than the Greeks or the Romans or even the English and French who eventually conquered the rest of Polynesia. They could hit an island the size of Camp Friendly from a thousand miles away. Without compasses, without anything. They even had a navy. Conquered Fiji and Samoa a couple of times in hundred-man sailboats. Charted the seas as far away as America and Madagascar.”
“So?” Jamil said.
“So, an outrigger or catamaran has a lot less space— less volume—than this fetula. There was no exercise hour, and story time lasted all day. You should feel lucky.”
“Oh, we do,” Jamil answered, in the same mocking tone.
“Stow that shit,” Ho Ng told him from across the room. “Or I’ll stow you.”
“Nyu nyu nyu,” Jamil told him—a brilliant comeback if Conrad had ever heard one. But afterward, Jamil was smart enough to stay quiet, and Karl kept his exercises to himself.
Mealtime was interesting: you had to unstow and unpack the food, keep track of it long enough to eat it, and then clean up after yourself without leaving crumbs and greasy/sticky blobs all over the place. Nobody really had the hang of it—not even Bascal—but Conrad supposed they had plenty of time to practice.
Afterward, at precisely the moment Peter would have predicted if Peter had been there, the motionless Palace Guards announced, in stereo, “Lights out, time to sleep.”
“We’re not at camp anymore,” Bascal told them impatiently. “You can stop all that.”
Still, at the pilinisi’s insistence, the wellstone ceiling’s glow was turned down and reddened, and everyone gathered around to hear him tell the evening’s first story. It felt a bit foolish, and Conrad was still uneasy about this whole thing, and about Bascal in particular. But then again there was no TV here, and no quiet place to read a book, so what the hell.
“Tonga has no king,” Bascal said, sitting cross-legged with his feet twisted up in a strap. “There is no Tonga.”
“I thought that was your dad,” Steve Grush cut in, provoking nods and murmurs from several others around the circle.
“No,” Bascal said, looking annoyed. “My father may be the King of Sol, but never has been and never will be the Tu’i Tonga. Technically speaking, he can’t even own property there, although I doubt the courts would see it that way. My mother is the Kuini Tonga, and there is no king. There never will be again. But I was actually referring to the story I’m trying to tell, about the first people in the world, before Tonga even existed.”
He paused, glancing around the circle both to make sure he had his audience’s full attention, and for dramatic effect. The Poet Prince in action. Then he began.
“Imagine that we’re on the open ocean. Waves rolling all around us, the hot sun beginning to set. The horizon is a dividing line between the sky and the sea. Imagine a catamaran sailboat: two huge canoe hulls with a sturdy platform lashed between them, as big as Viridity’s cabin here around us, though it’s open to the sky and the sea. And there’s a mast we can raise or lower as needed. There may be enclosed buildings on the platform, or a whole second level, or both. The sail is woven pandanus fiber, which depending on how you prepare it can be anything from tough basket wicker to a soft cloth, l
ike silk. It’s the wellstone of its day. The rigging is a line of twisted coconut husk.
“This is not a primitive vessel; the largest versions can carry a hundred armed men, with months of provisions. It simply lacks metal, or clay, or any of the thousands of materials other civilizations take for granted. If it isn’t a plant or a bone or a volcanic rock, we’ve never seen it, but we know as much geometry as any Greek philosopher, and we can sail as fast and as far as a Spanish galleon. By night, we watch the stars. By day, we watch the sun and moon, and the cloud formations. In the right light, the clouds reflect the color of the sea and land beneath them. We also look for birds, for flowers and coconuts drifting in the current. Most importantly, we feel the waves beneath us. The ocean swells reflect off the land, and their ripples can be felt even two hundred kilometers away. The contour map is in our heads—we feel our way along, using the only programmable substance available. Brains.
“And we tell stories. We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time. I’m taking you back, back, back before the sun god Tangaloa fathered the first Tu’i Tonga, before Maui, the god of fire and trickery, fished the islands up from the ocean with his magic hook. Before there were people, before there was time, the spirits of the people lived in their own special network in the sky. These sky spirits were never born and could never die. Every day was the same as every other day.”
“Cool,” someone said, half-seriously.
“Shut up,” Ho Ng warned.
And the prince went on: “But there were some among the sky spirits who grew restless, who wanted something to happen. The spirit of a lizard also lived in the sky, and was thought to be wise and helpful, although not entirely trustworthy. He had a streak of cruelty which he sometimes indulged. But he was always forgiven, because the sky spirits had to live together forever, and couldn’t afford to hold grudges.
“When the hot Earth had cooled and living things came out of the ocean to take root and grow in its soil, and different creatures had evolved to shape the ecosystem, the lizard told the sky people about the amazing beauty and sensuous delight of the Earth, which he said had been prepared especially for them. Earth’s land cradled all the colors of the rainbow, and its waters and winds flowed with sweet songs. And there were tastes as well! Sweet coconut and hearty yams, taro and breadfruit, and best of all, the flesh of fish and animals. Even the caves echoed your name when you called out to them.