The Wellstone

by Wil McCarthy

  “The lizard told the sky spirits how to visit the Earth: slide down a long, thin cable that was anchored in Africa, at the Earth’s equator. Shinny, shinny, slide! Down to Earth you slipped and slid, becoming solid as you went. The sky spirits were so excited they could barely wait their turn to slide down the cable.

  “ ‘But how do we get back home?’ a man asked.

  “ ‘Yes,’ said another. ‘We won’t go unless we can come back home again.’

  “ ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ said the giant lizard, his mouth crooked open in a smile. ‘Just climb back up the cable. It has grooves in it, so any ratcheting mechanism will let you climb up without sliding back down. See?’

  “And he showed the people the teeth and grooves of the cable. ‘Thank you,’ said the sky people. Not everyone went—some believed the lizard’s words and some didn’t. But many, oh so many, chose to go! One by one they attached their skysuits to the cable, and down they slid. They were so excited they didn’t even notice the lizard laughing at them.

  “Earth was gorgeous. Fresh, cool water bubbled up out of the ground. Flowers bobbed in the breeze. Everything the lizard had said was true! The people harvested yams and luscious red fruits. They lit a huge fire and watched it dance and wave like the arms of a hundred happy girls. Later, when they had explored and were ready to rest, the sky people baked their yams in the glowing coals. In the shade of a tree they feasted, dancing and singing and warming themselves by the fire. And they took torches into the caves and drew sooty pictures on the walls. And they found that they could make love, and afterward they slept.

  “But in the morning, something terrible happened: one of the sky people stepped on an ant, crushing it. “Get up,” said the sky person to the ant. But the ant didn’t move. It lay in pieces at the sky man’s feet. Gently, his wife lifted the dead ant. Other ants scurried about, frightened by her huge human shadow. She reached down and smashed another ant between her fingers. All movement stopped. Suddenly she screamed a bloodcurdling yell, and all the people of the tribe came running.

  “ ‘What’s the matter?’ they yelled.

  “ ‘This creature ...’ The woman was panting now. ‘It won’t move. It is ... no more.’ There was no word in their language for death, so she couldn’t even say that it had died. The people began to tremble. What kind of world had they come to?

  “Together the men carved spears and hunted a bird, a gecko, and a pig. ‘We honor your spirit, living creature. May you live forever,’ they chanted. Then they took a heavy rock and killed the bird, the gecko, and the pig. The pig’s dark blood gushed from its neck into the sand. Prayers drifted away in the evening wind. Nothing could bring these creatures back to life.

  “The lizard’s beguiling story had left out one detail: nothing lasted here. The bees made their honey, and then they died. The flowers bloomed, and their open faces shriveled. Dogs and pigs and even wives grew old and died. A lie of omission is still a lie; they knew now that the lizard had betrayed them.

  “Too late for the people of heaven! They had eaten the food of the Earth, killing living things in the process. Now they too would experience all of Earth’s gifts, even the bitter ones: birth, sickness, old age, and death. The sky people huddled together and wept. One brave woman said, ‘Don’t give up! We must climb back to the sky. We don’t need these full bellies. It’s better to live forever!’ The people ran to the base of the cable. It must still be there, waiting for them to slip their skysuit ratchets into the carved notches and climb back to heaven.

  “But no! The evil lizard had bitten through the cable. It lay coiled on the ground, frayed and still dripping with his saliva. ‘Look!’ cried the man who had asked the lizard how they would return to the sky. ‘The notches don’t even go all the way to the ground! All the time he was planning to leave us here!’

  “Sadly, the people turned away. The sound of weeping grew dimmer and dimmer as small groups wandered off by themselves. One group followed the snaky curves of the riverbank. Another walked under the broad-leafed canopy of the forest. A third one climbed up into the hills. They were the ancestors of the people who live today. Because of them you were born, as generation upon generation of them were born, and died.

  “But eventually, the people grew wise and clever, and strung their own cable back to heaven, and filled the heavens and the Earth with holes which connected to each other. Thus they brought all the delights of Earth into heaven, and all the delights of heaven back down to Earth, and all the horrors were buried and forgotten, and the giant lizard fled and has not been seen again.”

  Bascal surveyed his audience before adding, in a less sanguine tone, “And everyone lives forever, and every day is the same as every other day, until the end of time.”

  The campers sat quietly, digesting the tale.

  “You made that up,” Conrad said finally.

  “Parts of it,” Bascal admitted with a shrug. “The guts are traditional.” He addressed the circle. “Now, you’ve got to imagine there’s a bowl of kava, a numbing pepper-root drink that will literally loosen your tongue and lips. And brain. I pass it to the man on my left—or sometimes woman—who drains it and then tells the next story.”

  The person sitting on Bascal’s left was Ho Ng, his faithful companion.

  “What?” Ho asked brilliantly.

  “Tell a story,” Bascal repeated.

  “Oh. Bloodcrap.” Ho thought for a minute or two, and then launched into a disjointed rendition of “Little Red Riding Hood.” The next in line was Steve Grush, who did a slightly better job with “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” although Jamil and Karl teased him for it until Bascal told them to stop.

  And then it was Jamil’s own turn, and instead of a fairy tale he related the plot of some holie drama he’d seen on TV, about a Christian priest fighting corruption in early Antarctica, during the height of the Fax Wars when it was still possible to steal someone’s identity and get away with it. There was no Constabulary then to enforce the new Queendom standards and brighten up the worlds’ gray areas. Outside of the old nation-states the regulatory situation was murky at best—frontier justice being the norm. All this was much to the woe of the priest, who had just escaped from an even worse situation on Mars. It actually sounded like a pretty good movie, although Jamil couldn’t remember any of the characters’ names, so everyone was “the guy” or “the other guy” or “the guy’s girlfriend’s friend.”

  Finally, Bascal laughed and told him to stop. “This guy has heard enough from that guy about those other guys,” he said. Then he added, more seriously, “It’s been a big day for all of us, probably the biggest day of our lives. We’re tired, we’re hurt—and if you think you’re sore now, just wait till tomorrow. That’s all the story time we probably need. Now, I suggest we turn the lights down and start getting ready for bed.”

  This was done: the soft glow of the wellstone was halved, then halved again, and in the gloom Conrad watched Bascal and Xmary quietly slip into the bridge, and close the door behind the single Palace Guard that slipped in after them. The other guard stayed behind, to monitor potential threats here in the main cabin. Someone might drill a peephole and gas the couple to death! Conrad wanted to brood about that, to have some time to feel jealous and worried and angry with Bascal for being such an unholy jerk about everything. Except that Ho, when he realized he’d been closed out of the bridge, got a baleful look on his face and started kicking mattresses.

  “Hey,” Preston Midrand said, when his own was kicked.

  “Yeah?” Ho demanded, rotating in the air and stopping himself on Preston’s shoulders, so the two of them were eye-to-eye but upside down from each other. And when Preston declined to answer, Ho pushed himself away and collided “accidentally” with Jamil.

  “Watch it, you shit,” Jamil called out.

  “Still crowded in here,” Ho said, although with the loss of bodies and the addition of a third dimension the exact opposite was true: even with seven of them in here, it felt
kind of cold and empty. “There’s room in the storage closet. Some bloodfuck should sleep in there.”

  “Sleep there yourself,” Conrad told him, causing Ho to look up and shoot him an evil glare. It seemed for a moment that some sort of confrontation was about to gel. Not physical, with a Palace Guard still standing in silent watch over the room, but possibly a moment of open power struggle. Then Ho seemed to think better of it, and leveled his ire at Preston instead.

  “You. Go on.”

  Conrad sighed. “Oh, for the love of little gods, Ho. Will you leave him alone?”

  But Preston was holding up his hands. “No, no, it’s all right. I’ll go. Maybe there’s a little privacy in there. Maybe it’s warmer.”

  “Yeah?” Ho said, perking up. “I forgot about that. Never mind, bloodfuck, I’ll sleep in the closet. My own private room.”

  “Until we need toilet paper,” Jamil added sourly.

  These arrangements were finalized, and Conrad drifted over to the little environmental control panel he’d prepared in a rare moment of forethought. It was just a flimsy sheet of wellstone, connected by a ribbon to the cabin’s exterior wrapping, but it would do for now. He turned the lights down the rest of the way, so there was only the starlight shining down through the sail, through the wellstone wrapping around the cabin, through the clear plastic of the skylight itself. He thought for a while that his eyes would adjust, but they didn’t seem to. It was just too dark: not enough of an opening to really let the starlight in. So he got up again and added a soft night-light glow to the ceiling in the ’toir, then settled down and strapped back into his bedding again.

  And then, finally, he had a free moment to stew over the day’s events. It was a lot to take in: the silencing and stranding, the involuntary storage, the ascension of Ho Ng to a position of ... something. It was all so shallowly, transparently unnecessary. Bascal was listening to his own dark voices, and to Ho’s, when being nasty offered no actual benefit. It wasn’t like he needed to bury all dissenters; he’d simply felt like it.

  And that, that was the critical issue. “Evil” as a concept had never much interested Conrad—he’d been assured of its existence but had never once seen a clear example. Until today. But the way he saw it, you had your basic “tough decision,” where one person got something—say, a nice apartment in Denver—and that meant someone else couldn’t have it. Then you had your “management decision,” where somebody decided how many apartments there were going to be in Denver, based on the available resources and the various implications of their use. How individual people felt was not much of a deciding factor. And yet there was nothing intentionally nasty about it; such decisions were necessary.

  But then there was the selfish decision, where some jackass kept the good stuff for himself, or swiped it from other people, as Ho had just done. And that was the dividing line, where goodness and indifference left off and something else began. Not evil per se—the reasons behind it were too clear and ordinary for that—but something. Not nice. And spiteful decisions, like throwing Bert into the fax, were worse than that, and worse still were the dangerous and malicious and harmful decisions, like marooning Peter on the ruined planette, with fire and rain and gods knew what else.

  So Bascal hadn’t simply crossed the good/bad line in a moment of weakness; he’d leaped right over it, and loitered there for hours. Of course there were worse things, much worse things, that a person could do. There was murder; there was torture; there was genocide.... Conrad didn’t want to overreact—it wasn’t all or nothing, but a matter of degrees. Bascal had decided to be somewhat malicious in pursuit of his goals. Was that all? Was there more to it than that?

  Certainly there was no grand design to it. No matter what Bascal said, he was just making it up along the way, doing what felt right. They all were. Peter felt like staying and Bascal felt like going, so that’s what happened. Ho felt like taking something from Preston, so that’s what he did. And nobody stopped it from happening, because nobody was planning that far ahead. And that was a critical point as well: could you simply outplan the petty evils of the universe? Surprise them, catch them off guard? Make sure the right thing was easier to do?

  For some reason, this idea made him shiver. Then he decided it wasn’t so much the idea as the fact that it really was getting cold in here. So he got back up and went to his control panel and mirrorized the cabin’s wrapping, to reflect all their body heat back inside instead of letting it escape into cold Kuiper Belt space. This blocked the starlight entirely, forcing him to turn more night-lights on. He would have turned a heater on as well, but he didn’t have any idea how much energy this took, or how much was actually on board, or how exactly it was stored in the wellstone. Or where. And he suspected Bascal didn’t know either, and the last thing Conrad wanted to do was find out the answer in some dumbass way that froze or burned or starved them all to death.

  It seemed like an egotistical thought, but also a true one: if there was to be any sanity on this insane voyage of theirs, Conrad’s own not-so-bright efforts would have to provide it.

  chapter ten

  winds of permutation

  From the desk at her bedroom window, Xmary gazed eastward at the towers of Denver. Moping, because the sun was shining and there was happy trumpet music playing somewhere. Moping, because she wanted to go, to hang out and be raw and silly and fun. The Gravity Towers beckoned to her; the Cola Dome mocked. And the plain, bright colors of her desk—red and green and yellow and blue, tiles of fired ceramic mortared in place by the child she had been a decade ago—were the punchline of the joke. A handmade object, a hundred hours of labor. Indistinguishable from a fax-to-order design.

  She wanted to snort love drugs and flirt, or rent a little car and just drive it around. She’d been cooped up all month—all summer, really—humoring her parents with chores and schoolwork, saving her allowance for that bright, fulfilling future they imagined she was building toward. As what? As whom?

  She deserved an afternoon on the town. And a night, and maybe a morning. Gods, did she ever! But she was due at history class in fifteen minutes, and her absence would be noted and logged and forwarded to the attention of Mummy and Da.

  By itself, this was not a problem. In the best of months, she faxed up an illicit copy of herself every week, and sneaked away to do her own bidding. In mediocre times she’d get by doing it every two or three weeks, but even in the driest, lamest of months—like this one, for example—she always gave herself the last Friday off. And today—today!—was the day.

  There was nothing difficult about the procedure; the fax machine was right outside her bedroom door, and when she stepped into it she’d simply specify two simultaneous destinations: Childrens’ City College, and Market Street Station. Or maybe River Station, if she felt like hitting the kiddie cafés again.

  But there exactly was the problem: she’d sent a copy of herself off to River Street on the last Friday of June, and said copy had met briefly with Cherry and Tom, in the upstairs balcony at Café 1551. And then the Unexplained Thing had happened—the building simply collapsing in a heap—and dearest Xmary had passed on into some new phase of existence. Not dead or injured as far as she knew, but simply not listed among the casualties. Simply not there. Covert messages on the network had failed to garner any response, and no friend or relation had yet admitted to seeing or hearing from her.

  She feared the worst: raped and murdered out of sight of the world’s sensors and censors and sense. Dumped in a shallow grave, covered over with rocks and dirt, her memories rotting into the earth instead of coming home where they belonged. How melodramatic! How fitting an end for such a wayward and disobedient little girl! It was everything Mummy had warned her about: seeking out the vile haunts of sleaze—of privacy—and wiggling her assets for the leering eyes of the wrong sort of people.

  But fitting or no, the idea terrified her. Shouldn’t it? Not simply because the same thing might happen again, but because Mummy’s being right would
be the end of everything. No more life of her own. No more hopes or dreams or casual flings, no guilty pleasures that weren’t chosen for her from some carefully vetted menu! We know what’s best for you, dear. Having lived in a world much harder than yours, we know exactly what you should do next.

  What did she want to be when she grew up? Anything. Anything but that. She put a shaky hand to the window, caressing the view. Her unrequited lover. If rape and murder were the price of freedom, she supposed she would just have to pay up.

  Was that a decision? It surely felt like one, so she stood up, grabbed her sketchplate and purse, and threw open the bedroom door to face the world.

  But just to be safe, she printed the copy first, and checked her over, and gave her a tight hug and a kiss on the cheek. Xmary was dear to her, obviously, though they didn’t spend much time together. Being identical down to the slightest foible and follicle, she could be difficult and often snotty, and she had a remarkable talent for trouble. Last year she had even managed, during an otherwiseforgettable romp with a boy they barely knew, to play an elaborate and rather disgusting prank on herself. How does it taste, dear? She was still amazed she’d pulled that off, concealing her intentions from herself and knowing all the while that there would not only be payback, but that she’d have to reconverge her copies in the fax at some point, winding up as the victim of both the original crime and its retaliation! In the face of that kind of determined mischief, there was only so much of her own company she could take.

  “Be careful,” she told herself.