by Wil McCarthy
The royal cooks opened the bundle, and quickly gasped in horror. They fell to their knees, trembling in fear.
“The king roared. ‘Why this disobedience? Shall I have you thrown into the fire with the fish?’
“ ‘Look for yourself,’ said the cooks. ‘It is not a fish. It is your own son, our royal prince Polua-le-uli-gana! With a mango in his mouth!’
“The king’s face went as pale as an Englishman’s. He stared at his beloved son. The prince continued to sit, head bowed, not saying a word, waiting for a killing blow. But the blow did not happen. The prince looked up at his father. Only then did the father understand the sorrow and anguish he had so many times caused.
“The king looked at the bowed heads of his cooks and chiefs, waiting in perfect silence for his next command. ‘Rejoice!’ he cried out. ‘Let this day begin a new feast, a new celebration. My son has risked his life so I might see. From this day forward, the Elders’ Day feast shall be fish and chicken, fruits and plump tasty pigs!’
“The great king Malietoa kept his word. Of course, so did his sons and grandsons after him. Thus it is told and retold, that because of the brave and loving act of Prince Polu, the people of the Kingdom of Tonga finally stopped feeding on their own children.”
The pecking order worked out like this: Bascal at the top, of course, with Ho and Xmary sharing the next level down. Whatever they wanted done, got done. At the bottom were Preston and Martin and Karl—Karl taking this status the hardest and complaining about it the most. But not too much, not too loudly, for fear of faxwise cannibalism; he could easily be the stuff of the ship’s future meals, recycled endlessly into food and shit and more food and more shit, and maybe eventually restored to his former self, or maybe not. It was an effective deterrent.
Slightly above them was Jamil Gazzaniga, who had a bit of mechanical aptitude thanks to his bicycle fetish. He also had a sense of humor—very important under conditions like these—and despite some wisecracking he did seem to enjoy taking orders. He’d always seemed to have a bit of a submissive streak, or a masochistic one, and like most Queendom citizens he was a staunch monarchist at heart.
And above him, hovering uncertainly in the middle somewhere, was Conrad. Surely an expert: a helmsman and mission planner, a sometime associate of the prince. One of only two matter programmers aboard the ship, and indispensable as such, and yet also a constant focus of royal irritation. How many times had Bascal shouted a hole in him already?
On the face of it, Conrad was needed but not wanted, respected but not loved, and so he served as a kind of executive officer, taking the dictates from on high and translating them into individual actions and duty assignments, however unpopular.
Viridity’s crew seemed not only to accept this role for him, but actually to push him into it with active nagging. “How do we do that, Conrad?” “What’s first, Conrad?” “What’s next, Conrad?” It made their day easier, and gave them someone safe to blame for the things they were unhappy about. But if Conrad was the organizer of work, then Steve Grush was its enforcer. He’d decided all of a sudden to quit being Ho’s buddy and had simply kissed up to him subordinately instead, with immediate payoff. Ah, the triumph of the flattering mediocrities: as the bad cop’s bad cop, Steve could now enjoy all the freedom and social status of a prison trustee.
And this was a prison; Conrad wondered why he’d ever expected otherwise. If he’d chafed at the fresh air and open spaces of Camp Friendly, how could he possibly have seen this as an alternative? The “freedom” of an infinite universe was the worst sort of illusion: they were locked on a single trajectory fixed by energy and gravity, with less freedom even than a railroad car or a river raft, or a motorcar driving along some endless, arrow-straight bridge.
There was a reason his father’s roads meandered across the countryside, wasting time and energy and paving stone, doubling and tripling the length of a journey—because it masked this dearth of freedom. People traveled on a road for the sport of it, the adventure, the sense of exploration. But it could only lead them to the road’s other end, or maybe another road with ends of its own. Whereas a fax gate could take you anywhere.
Turned away from the sun and with the pinpoint fusion sila’a now millions of kilometers distant, Viridity could alter its course by starlight alone. The feather-touch of a few weary microwatts was barely enough to turn the sail. And yet, its cumulative effect was the only thing keeping them precisely on course. Even the tiniest drift up or down or left or right would “derail” them, causing them to miss their final stop—the neutronium barge—and continue helplessly on toward the sun.
And that was a bad thing not only in terms of being caught, but more seriously, of not being caught. The Queendom’s outermost permanent settlements—around the orbits of Pluto and Neptune and such—were eighteen months away at present speed, and sparsely scattered across the vastness of space. The fetula would likely sail right through without ever getting close to anything. The sun would be nearer and brighter, of course, pressing harder on the sail, but at this speed they could well reach the orbit of Mars before gaining enough control authority to set a new course.
So while manning the helm was boring duty, it was genuinely vital to their survival, and what little remained of their freedom. They’d at least managed to restore transparency to the windows, so there was a view—the illusion of vastness and freedom, the stars beckoning, the huge sail responding to his slightest touch at the controls. It was exhilarating at first, and then bearable for maybe as much as twenty minutes at a time.
To break up the day, Conrad would periodically kick up to the ceiling, stick his head in the center of the outward-bulging skylight, and spend a few minutes just looking at the stars. Not with a navigator’s eye, although he was beginning to learn the constellations, and Viridity’s own path among them like an imaginary line. Mostly what he wanted and needed was the sense of space. He couldn’t step outside, couldn’t take a walk or climb a tree, but at least he could do this.
The brightest stars, when he looked them up, were Sirius, Canopus, and Rigil Kentaurus, which was actually a three-star system better known as Alpha Centauri—the nearest neighbor to the Queendom of Sol. There was something magical about that one. Most of the other bright ones were big rather than close: Sirius and Procyon were two and three times farther out—with many dimmer stars in between—while Vega and Arcturus were dozens of light-years (or tens of millions of AU) farther still. As a budding sailor, Conrad found it barely plausible that some sort of ship—ertially shielded or whatever— might someday reach those distant shores. The rest— Canopus and Capella, Rigel and Achernar—were simply decorations in the sky, so distant that the numbers made little sense.
Still, he learned their patterns, until he was able to judge the ship’s orientation from these nine stars alone. The constellations were a fiction, especially out here in the deep dark, where so many more stars were visible, cluttering up the supposed pictures. But to shut Bascal up about it, he’d spent their fifth day in space memorizing the brightest and clearest of the images. Similarly, the distinction of a northern and southern hemisphere struck him as arbitrary and foolish, whether in Earth or solar coordinates. What really mattered—what really showed— was the blue-white slash of the Milky Way, bisecting the sky all around, and dividing the bright stars into three groups: above it, below it, and swathed within it. He wished they could simply navigate in galactic coordinates, although Bascal assured him it was a lot more work in the long run.
Not that he really cared what Bascal thought, except insofar as it threatened his safety. One thing was clear: Conrad had misjudged the prince, and had put his own fate—along with a dozen others’—in less-than-trustworthy hands. He didn’t know what to do about that.
But the sky did not judge him, or lay fresh worries at his feet. The sheer number of stars out there was boggling, especially when he considered the Milky Way itself: a spiral of stars so dense and numerous and distant that they blurred toge
ther into a haze. And how many other galaxies were there? Did anyone even know?
Were there Queendoms, or the equivalent of Queendoms, around any of these billions of billions of pinpoints? It seemed there must be, although no one had ever detected one. Were there runaway children out there, making the best of a bad situation? Did they look like squidgy slugs, or ravenous flesh-eating spiders? Hell, he’d greet them anyway.
Inevitably, though, he grew bored with stargazing as well. That sense of awe was the only anchor he had right now, so when he felt it fading even slightly, he would kick back down to the helmsman’s seat again. He would check the labe and gnomon, the register and chronometer. He did this three times, slowly and carefully making sure he wasn’t ignoring a problem. Then he’d look straight up and check the sail, and the whole cycle would start anew.
Even with the sail newly configured as a one-way mirror, transparent in one direction and reflective in the other, the push of starlight across the entire sail wasn’t much more than the Earth-weight of an eyelash. Not much to work with. But there was only one perfect path to the neutronium barge—that invisible line slicing through otherwise empty space—and the push of this weak source against frictionless space did add up over time. Over the weeks of their journey it could drive them hundreds of kilometers toward or away from the path. And because the barge was only twelve hundred meters long—a tiny target in the vastness of Kuiper wilderness— this fine-tuning could literally mean the difference between life and death.
So Conrad took the duty seriously, and so did Bascal, and they were each careful to check up on the other at shift change, to make sure Viridity hadn’t drifted a few meters this way or that. The closer they got to the target, the less time they’d have to make up those errors. And gods help them all if anything happened to the hypercomputers, which were the only thing making these absurdly precise calculations even vaguely possible!
And gods help them, also, if the neutronium barge decided to change course, to deviate from its gravitationally expected path. This would not be done lightly—the energies involved were enormous—but of course the barge’s entire purpose was to slurp up Kuiper Belt matter and supercompress it. The vessel would follow its sensor-laden nose, ponderously seeking out new gas and dust concentrations, as well as the odd iceball or comet. Course changes would be small and exacting and optimized for minimum effort, but that didn’t mean a mere fetula would be able to keep up. Conrad lived in fear of this, and checked for it several times every hour.
But the mere existence of danger didn’t make helm duty interesting, and it didn’t keep Conrad from inventing games around it. One of these involved remapping the reflectivity of the sail. At any given time, only about ninety percent of it was actually mirrored. The rest was a shifting pattern of clear and black squares that kept the forces and torques properly balanced, so the sail would maintain proper alignment.
And it occurred to Conrad in the first couple of days that he could maintain these same precise forces while carefully using the dark and clear patches to draw dim, flickering pictures on the wellstone of the sail. So far, to his amazement, no one had noticed. Or if they’d noticed, they hadn’t said anything.
Conrad wasn’t much of an artist, and at first he’d restricted himself to geometric patterns. Circles, squares, polygons, simple flags ... Once he’d gotten the hang of it, though, he became more ambitious, and during one particular peek out the window he had looked at the batwing shape of the sail and seen it for what it was: the unrolled and flattened skin of a sphere, exactly like the spiky projecting lozenge shapes of some planetary maps. Every point on the sail corresponded to a point on (or just under) the surface of Camp Friendly. So for several days, in a haze of boredom and odd, nostalgialike enthusiasm, he carefully reconstructed the map of that homely, lovely planette, which he had helped to deface.
Adventure Lake was the easy part: he knew its shape and position very well, having circumnavigated it with a locator and sketchplate during a camp exercise. How Bascal, the Tongan, had chafed at that one! “At the age of five I was sailing in a crater lake that could drown this whole planette!”
The rest of it was much more difficult than Conrad had expected at first. He could reconstruct the locations of a few key buildings by recalling the views from their windows, or the rock formations jutting above the curving horizon, or the length of time required to walk or run between them. But there were actually a lot of buildings in the camp complex, and varied landscape features all over the planette, and his memory of them was surprisingly imperfect.
Still, here was the hobby farm, and the plateau, and the central landmark of the rock formations themselves. Here was the northern outpost of the Young Men’s Camp, and the sprawl of the Boys’ Camp and administrative offices. D’rector Jed’s wayward cabin got a little star to mark its former location. Conrad was working on the forest, to the northeast of Adventure Lake, when someone tapped him on the shoulder.
He yelped and jumped.
“Sorry!” Martin Liss said, quickly and sheepishly.
“No concern. It’s my fault,” Conrad told him, turning to look.
“Am I early?”
Conrad glanced at the clock. “No. It’s completely my fault.”
He’d carefully arranged the duty roster so that every single day he’d have at least a few minutes alone, in private, with a different member of the crew. Not to sow the seeds of open mutiny—not yet anyway—but just to talk and work together. To reinforce their acquaintance, to get a better feel for their character and concerns. If a time for mutiny came, or even a time for more subtle action, he wanted to know where the lines would break.
Was it egotistical of him? Possibly, but he wasn’t taking anything on faith anymore. So far he’d learned that Ho was every bit as stupid and shallow and dangerous as he seemed. He also stank, since he refused to give up the clothes he’d gotten in Denver. When pressed on the point, he explained it thusly: if he threw them in the fax, he’d get back a Camp Friendly shirt and culottes, which would suck. He did wash his Denver clothes in the sink every few days, but the smell factor was definitely building up. “I can’t punch; I can’t kick,” he lamented. “But I can stink up the place, and look good doing it.”
Ah.
By contrast, Steve Grush was, if not smarter and nicer, then at least more careful than Ho. Steve was well aware that their odds of success—and perhaps even survival— were slim. He just didn’t have any better prospects, and figured space piracy was worth a shot. People would probably get hurt, but so what? That was what backups were for. It was an unimaginative but pragmatic view. Karl Smoit, for his part, didn’t like being on this mission at all, and was happy to complain about it when nobody else was in earshot.
There was of course the possibility that the wellstone ceiling was spying on them, and nothing was out of earshot, but Conrad didn’t know how to detect that, or what to do about it if he did. Besides, that would be a difficult thing to program into naïve wellstone. Jed was at least “roughing it” to that extent: his ceiling’s library was nearly as limited as the sail fabric itself.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Martin said.
Conrad waved the apology away. “In theory, I was expecting you. In practice, I got distracted.”
This was another thing he’d learned, as part of this underground personnel campaign: that he was terrible at remembering upcoming appointments and events. It was the sort of character flaw that could get a person killed under circumstances like these. He resolved to work on it.
“I see you brought the dust mops,” he said to Martin, who shrugged and handed him one. He took it, disentangled himself from the navigator’s chair, and “stood up” in the zero gravity. He proceeded to brush out the space under the instrument console, and glanced back at Martin. “Shall we?”
“Um, sure.”
“It’s amazing how much dust accumulates, how quickly. I hear it’s mostly human skin cells. We shed, like dogs and cats.”
&
nbsp; “Uh-huh.”
“Try over there,” Conrad said, pointing. Then: “So how’s it going, anyway?”
“Good,” Martin replied, in a voice suggesting otherwise.
“Keeping busy?”
“Sure.”
“Obeying the rules?”
Martin snorted. “That’s like a joke, right? Only not really. Yes, I’m obeying the rules. Is there a choice?”
“Why?” Conrad asked. “Is someone giving you a hard time?”
Sullenly: “No.”
“Are you sure? If there is, you can let me know.”
“There isn’t.”
It went on like that for a while. Conrad wished more than once that they could both just come out and say what needed saying, but of course that could endanger either or both of them unless there was already perfect trust. Which there never could be, because they couldn’t really talk. And coming right out with it would also tip Conrad’s hand prematurely, which helped nothing.
But over the hour he developed a clear sense that yeah, Martin did have a problem with all this, and that yeah, to the extent that he trusted anyone in Viridity’s authority chain, he trusted Conrad the most. Not that he’d risk his life for Conrad or anything—probably not for anyone here—but he wouldn’t support the prince if an opportunity came up where he had any choice about it.
So that was two. Two people Conrad could use, could help, could deal with. Not trust or rely on, but that was okay. He would just have to craft the right circumstances, so all the right choices went all the right ways. That was a tall order, and he wished he could doodle and sketch and make notes about the possibilities. But the game was dangerous enough already.
When the sweeping was done, Martin went on his way, leaving Conrad alone again until shift change, when Bascal came in with Ho and one of the Palace Guards.
“Conrad, my man,” the prince said. “How goes our course?”
“Two centimeters north of optimal,” Conrad answered in their accepted parlance. “I’ve been compensating all day, but I don’t want to overdo it and have to spend next week swinging back.”