The Wellstone

by Wil McCarthy

  “I don’t know,” she answered, pulling her hand away and drawing back from the ceiling. “I’m not sure. I’ve lost my interface. Can I ... touch it?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Conrad said, eyeing the mess. Then, raising his voice further: “Nobody touch that.”

  Damn, it could be hot or cold or sticky, or crawling with huge electrical potentials. It could be corrosive with “Lewis hole–pair” acids, or worse. Wellstone’s quantum-dot arrays contained charged particles in huge numbers and all kinds of bizarre arrangements. Some of their reactions were capable of tearing normal matter apart, as Conrad’s programming instructor, Mr. McMorran, had emphasized many times.

  He cleared his throat. “You are, um, aware that matter programming is very dangerous?”

  “I’ve read chapter one, thank you,” Xmary said, sounding ready to punch him.

  It wouldn’t be wise to let her see—let anyone see— how much her anger stung him. So what he said was, “Good.”

  It wasn’t possible to stagger in zero gee, but Bascal’s entrance had something of that quality. He was staring at the ceiling and holding his head, not really watching where or how he was going as he kicked along the walls and floor. “What did you do, Conrad? What happened?”

  “We’re trying to figure that out,” he answered nervously.

  “Make it stop. You’re hurting my brain with that.”

  “I don’t want to touch it. I can use ... I can use the environment controls. The panel is connected to ... well, all of it connects one way or another.”

  Which was bad, because Xmary’s unsupervised tinkering had the potential to pollute the entire fetula, from wrapping to rigging to sail. If they ceased being airtight, or a variety of other things happened, this kind of pattern pollution could easily and instantly kill everyone on board.

  Being very careful not to bounce himself upward with no way to stop, Conrad glided over to the environmental control panel. Once there, he laid some wires around to the tortured ceiling, and passed a simple text encoding along them: UNDO.

  The hissing stopped, and the ceiling reverted immediately to gold.

  “Little fucking gods,” Bascal said, eyeing it uneasily. He took his hands off his head and glared alternately at Xmary and Conrad. “Whatever you guys are doing, quit it. Seriously. A spaceship is not a fucking toy.”

  Which was true.

  After that, Xmary was ready to quit her programming experiments altogether, but Conrad persuaded her to practice on a sketchplate instead, and to stand by the fax so she could hurl it to oblivion if it did anything funny, anything she didn’t immediately like or expect. So her studies continued, at a lower and more cautious intensity, through the next several days. If only she could ask questions right out in the open. If only they could sit down together! But he couldn’t schedule her in again so soon without people noticing, and she was probably attracting enough curious attention as it was.

  For his own part, Conrad passed through the week in a kind of low-grade panic. Did he really believe he had a handle on his fears? Every time he thought that, the danger to life and limb and memory simply ratcheted up another notch, threatening to paralyze him. He went through the motions, filling duty rosters and working his shifts, trying to act normal. But people were noticing. How could they not? Bascal hadn’t pulled him off helm duty or anything, mainly because there was so little the helm could accomplish anyway, but the tension between the two of them must be screamingly obvious.

  No way out. No alternatives. No hope? Was there a god of lightsails to watch over them, or a plain-old God, merciless and remote but still observing? Or were they truly on their own, pitting their frail selves against a universe that didn’t know them from any other speck of matter?

  He wondered what it was like to die. Everyone wondered that, of course, but not everyone had to face it as an immediate short-term prospect. Not everyone had heard the order given for his or her own robotic execution. Hitting the barge would at least be instantaneous; they’d see it looming behind the sail, swelling as they approached, and the very end would come quickly, the barge expanding toward them like a shockwave. There’d be maybe a momentary glimpse of its close-up hull, frozen in cameraflash detail: pipes and light housings, a planette-sized registration number, and then ...

  What? Stepping out of a fax with the last ten weeks missing from his backup memories? No, he would never experience that. Some other Conrad Mursk would, while he, while this Conrad Mursk, would be dead and gone. Waking up in heaven, or in the big nothing where he wouldn’t even know he was dead. Wouldn’t know he had ever lived at all. Did it matter, if there was somebody exactly like him to carry on? Wasn’t it really just the same thing as being disintegrated and reborn during fax transport?

  No, he decided. It wasn’t the same. One of him had died once before, and the twenty-day hole that had left was an unhealed wound in his life, even now. He’d never mourned for that dead brother, exactly, but he had very definitely wondered what he went through. What it felt like, what he thought about. Last words, last images, last fleeting shreds of emotion. Did he scream?

  And gods, it was crippling having this kind of shit bouncing around in his head. Maybe it wouldn’t bother him so much without the Xmary factor, this stupid, pointless pining he’d taken up lately. Or maybe it would, but since their little talk—since her little revelation—it seemed increasingly clear that no thought or action or circumstance could be relevant except in relation to her. Which was crazy, obviously, but there you had it. Death was bad enough, but when it meant the loss of her, every memory and trace of her, that was just too high a price to pay for Bascal’s glory.

  And Conrad couldn’t arrange another meeting with her so soon, and wouldn’t know what to do with it if he did. So instead he watched her out of the corners of his eyes, and listened to the lilt of her speech, taking what pleasure he could. Stupid, yes, but he needed an anchor.

  It occurred to him that this feeling had a name: he was heartsick . It wasn’t just a word, or even just a feeling, but something that had stolen upon him with all the grinding hallmarks of a genuine illness. Maybe the only illness left, in an age of perfect and permanent health, and it weighed him down as surely as gravity. Even going through the motions of daily life was exhausting. But what else was there? If he simply gave up without a struggle, then he and she and all the others would die, no doubt about it. So he met with the boys one by one, prodding gently and hearing them out, slotting them mentally into factions. Loyalists: Ho and Steve. Neutrals: Preston and Jamil. Mutineers: Xmary, Karl, and Martin. And Conrad himself, sure. That made it four against three, except the “three” also had two Palace Guards on their side, so really the mutiny was already over. No contest. They’d lost.

  Could the guards be subverted? On the face of it, it seemed unlikely. They took their orders directly from Bascal, and simply ignored anyone else’s. But then again, those orders were constrained by the words of the king, and other “standing orders,” and the robots’ own inherent instincts and programming. They wouldn’t interfere with the prince’s freedom of action, but they also wouldn’t allow him to harm himself, if they understood what was happening and saw a way to prevent it.

  Conceivably, Conrad could simply talk to them. They wouldn’t obey him, or probably even acknowledge that he was speaking to them. But they weren’t deaf. On the contrary, they were perceptive, finely tuned for the gleaning of information. For all he knew, they’d already figured the whole thing out, or at least figured out that something was wrong. They would listen to his words, weigh them, add them to the vast database of their paranoid and hyperprotective worldview.

  So the idea wasn’t absurd. It was a matter of picking his moment and his exact argument, of getting the right words out before Bascal could find a way to stop him.

  And meanwhile, he hadn’t given up on the physics of it. Not that he was any expert on physics—not by a long shot—but he didn’t have to solve the equations, just look them up and feed them in
to a simulation. It was more like asking a scientist than being one.

  Anyway, a collision at twenty kilometers per second would vaporize ordinary materials like flesh and bone and wood, but properly rigidized wellstone could survive it under some conditions. Working feverishly on his little sketchplate hypercomputer, he’d identified eight different prefab settings that stood a good chance of coming through intact. Adamantium, obviously—that was the toughest pseudomaterial known to science. There were two superreflectors: impervium and its fee-for-use cousin Bunkerlight. And two transparents: superglass and Wexlan.

  The others were more obscure, and had weird properties like superconductivity and phosphorescence, that he wasn’t at all sure about. But it didn’t matter anyway, because an impregnable hull wouldn’t save the ship’s insides. Wouldn’t slow them down, wouldn’t cushion them, wouldn’t protect them in any way. That hull would simply be the last thing any of them saw, in the microseconds before they slammed into it at twenty kips.

  He had felt a few brief hours of giddy relief when he’d stumbled on “magtal,” a family of transuranic metals that were not tough enough to survive the collision per se, but whose features included “superferromagnetism.” This was significant, because the neutronium inside the barge was, according to his fax-provided reference materials, also highly magnetic. And Conrad had done enough fiddling with magnets to know that they repelled as well as they attracted. Could they decelerate the fetula slowly, on a springy magnetic cushion?

  Alas, his hopes were short-lived. First of all, the net magnetic field of the barge would have to be lined up with Viridity’s incoming trajectory—which as far as he could determine, it wasn’t. And anyway, his simulations showed the cushion was unstable, like a steep, springy, hilltop of slippery gel. Instead of slowing down, the fetula would simply slide sideways around the magnetic obstacle until the field strength dropped off. If they tried it, they would miss the barge by many thousands of kilometers. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but didn’t solve the larger problem of having nowhere else to go.

  More promising was the prospect of just missing the barge, and then turning on the magnets in an attractive mode. This was basically just Bascal’s lanyard plan, with magnets instead of fragile ropes. Up close, this worked very well indeed; there’d be absolutely no problem getting ten gees of deceleration out of it. Unfortunately, the force of attraction between the two ships dropped off fast as they drew apart. At a hundred kilometers, the force was huge, but at a hundred thousand it was barely more than the eyelash press of starlight.

  And there was the problem: if he throttled the acceleration to a survivable level, then the magnetic “lanyard” would snap and the fetula would keep on sailing away, somewhat more slowly than before. If he adjusted the magnets to ensure capture, the fetula would bounce a thousand kilometers past the barge, and then stop and sproing back. But the acceleration would peak at hundreds of gee, and Viridity’s insides would be so much grape jelly and wood pulp. He tried the simulation a dozen times in a dozen different ways before giving up. Magnets weren’t going to save them.

  He stewed about this for a day and a night, tantalized and frustrated. There were so many options, so many almosts. Just different ways to die. And since Bascal would rather die than surrender, that left capture by Queendom forces as their only hope for survival. Conrad began to pray for this, to fantasize about it. And was it really so far-fetched? The navy or Constabulary could well have retrieved Peter by now, and if Peter was still alive then he would tell them the plan. And even if he didn’t, or couldn’t, the evidence was as plain as the face of the murdered planette: they had built a fetula and sailed away. To where? To an empty comet? To the distant Queendom, years away? Or to the nearest fax machine, on the nearest neutronium barge!

  From there, it was just a matter of computing the path, and then hunting along it for signs of an invisible spaceship. How hard could that be? They still had mass, right? They would show up on a gravity detector. And they weren’t perfectly invisible, especially in the very long wavelengths, like radio, and the very short ones, like X rays. And he was amazed, amazed, to hear these kind of thoughts in his own dumb-as-rocks head. How many science classes had he flunked? But here he was, out in the universe, living it firsthand.

  And it seemed to him, more and more every day, that Viridity ’s discovery and capture was a scientific certainty. When it didn’t come, he simply reset his expectations for the next day, and the next, and the one after that. But then came the day of reckoning: the last day when starlight power alone could push them out of the barge’s path. If they didn’t do it now, then they never could, and the Queendom’s navy still hadn’t come to the rescue.

  Jesus H. Bloodfuck, he said to himself. The mutiny has to happen. Today.

  Is’t balm for us, this void of sky?

  The stars have no network address.

  A bit of you for me, I fear, be toxin more than bliss.

  Where love of metal nannies warms,

  the love of flesh doth mock.

  And whence the blame? What leads us ’stray?

  What claim have you or I, to shock?

  Don’t take my hand. Where could we jump?

  That no one’s been a thousand times?

  I’ve faxed myself to Saturn’s rings; your love hath broke

  my pump.

  — “Because Lilly”

  BASCAL EDWARD DE TOWAJI LUTUI, age 14

  chapter thirteen

  the cold rebellion

  The hard part was letting Xmary know. They hadn’t agreed on any sort of signal for the start of hostilities, but if he didn’t get word to her—to someone—then Bascal could simply put the guards on him again, and that would be that. No speaking, no gesturing, no pounding on the walls.... But she needed to know what was happening, and what the teams were, and it wasn’t like he could just tell her right in front of everybody, and it wasn’t like he could whisper in her ear or lead her off for a private conference, or pass her a note. Not Xmary, not without attracting a lot of attention.

  That left Martin and Karl, and Conrad wasn’t really sure he trusted Martin. The kid was too quiet; beyond expressing “grave doubts about the present regime,” he hadn’t said much. There was no real clue as to the inner workings of his head, or even if he had much of an inner life. Some people seemed to get by without one. If it came down to a simple brawl, Conrad was pretty sure Martin would at least stick a foot out or something— some small gesture in his own self-interest. But initiating any action seemed unlikely. It was too much to ask.

  That left Karl. And because Conrad’s shift at the helm was about to begin, there was no time to lose, and no point in delaying. And no reason to be especially afraid, since the price of failure—death—was identical to the price of doing nothing. But he was afraid. He’d never done anything like this before. He didn’t know how to approach it, where to start, how to keep himself from fucking up along the way. And the threat of immediate bodily harm seemed for some reason more viscerally real than the prospect of crashing and vaporizing in a week and a half.

  But the sketchy outlines of a plan were taking shape in his mind, and the time to act was now.

  He looked around, studying the room. It was “day,” with the ceiling—now off-limits to Xmary—giving off a diffuse, warm, vaguely sunny glow. Conrad would have preferred to turn the power down on that—they didn’t need that much light—but there was enough stored energy in the capacitors to keep it lit for a year or so, and since that was a lot longer than they had to live, he wasn’t going to make an issue out of it.

  And in spite of the “daylight,” Ho was asleep in his closet, or maybe whacking off, and Preston Midrand was cinched down on his mattress and also apparently asleep. Bascal was on the bridge, of course, along with one of the Palace Guards. The other guard was in here, rooted to the spot where it had stood, motionless, for most of the past month. And hovering near it with a sketchplate tucked under her arm was Xmary, half-seriously chewing
out Martin for “farting again.”

  She must be really bored, really sick of her studies, because their shipboard diet had always centered around beans and franks—one the gassiest and most diarrheic food combos in the known universe. Fortunately, any fart gas that touched the fax machine was absorbed and disassembled and whisked into the mass buffers, so the air never had a chance to grow too foul. But yeah, it was a problem they’d all been living with and grown used to, although it had grown steadily worse as they’d depleted their other meager food supplies.

  Which, by the way, Conrad strongly suspected Ho of playing more than his fair part in. He did sleep with the food, after all, and memorize its inventory, and guard it jealously against unauthorized access. The one time Karl had sneaked a handful of pecans out, Ho had looked ready to murder him for it, and probably would have if not for the Guards. But two days later the pecans were gone, and Ho said nothing.

  Jamil and Karl and Steve Grush were solemnly playing the handball game Karl had invented as a zero-gee alternative to shirtball soccer. The idea was to bat the shirtball to the next person with an open hand, and keep a three-or four-way volley going for as long as possible. Not terribly exciting, and just like shirtball soccer it lent itself to certain abuses, such as the constant and deliberate targeting of noncombatants. But it passed the time.

  Karl’s last duty had been swabbing the main cabin’s ceiling and skylights, so Conrad launched himself to the ceiling, gave it a cursory inspection, and said, “Little gods, it’s filthy up here. Who cleaned this?”

  This was delivered in Leadership Tone, a bit of play-acting Conrad had adopted based on studies of Bascal. Far from commanding or stern, it was actually sort of jovial. And yet, when you did it properly there was an edge to it, a not-so-casual hinting at potential consequences that seemed, for whatever reason, to yield maximum response. Steve and Jamil and Karl looked up; their shirtball went skittering off into a corner.