The Wellstone

by Wil McCarthy

  Conrad struck some yielding surface, sank in for a moment and then bounced away. Moving and spinning more slowly now. There was nothing resembling a ceiling or floor here, no walls or windows. The braking program had called for a peak deceleration of 260 gee—six and a half “train wrecks” according to Conrad’s mechanics textbook—and under that shock the wood and wellwood of the cabin had been pulverized. From what he could see— which wasn’t much—there weren’t any pieces left larger than his arm. But after that peak, the fetula should slow down rapidly. And as it stopped and reversed, the field strength was supposed to reduce by a factor of a million, so the final docking—the actual physical impact between fetula and barge—would be slow and gentle.

  This vaguely curving flatness to his left—was that the outer hull of the barge? A tiny section of a great, kilometer-long cylinder? Yes, he could see it now: Viridity lay crumpled against the barge like a wadded-up rag. The sail would be flat against the barge’s hull, lightly bonded to it, and the wellstone film enclosing D’rector Jed’s cabin had mostly held together, but had burst at the seams, leaving puffy, labial openings through which the air had fled, and through which splinters of wood and other material were now streaming out into the void of space.

  A hand gripped his elbow. He turned—he’d gotten quite good at turning in zero gravity without having to hold onto anything—and saw Xmary there in the dimness: barefoot in camp culottes and cutoff tee shirt, with her hair poofed out by static electricity and the clear, shiny membrane of space suit swollen around her like a girl-shaped balloon.

  Behind her, holding her in unseemly ways, were Bascal and Karl. And beside them was a single, battered Palace Guard. Conrad didn’t see the other one anywhere. Had it been pulverized? Ejected into space? Dangling from the remaining guard’s foot was Ho, wearing what looked in the poor light like a very frightened expression. Conrad—who was too stunned to be afraid—felt a moment of smugness about that, but when he followed Ho’s gaze to one of the wellstone’s ripped openings, he saw a human-shaped form outside, shrinking and struggling against a backdrop of stars. The missing guard?

  No! Jesus and the little gods, that was Martin, thirty meters away and still going. Conrad could just barely make out his face, twisted into a breathless scream while the arms and legs flailed, pulling and pushing at nothing, swimming helplessly against the vacuum.

  “Gods!” Conrad shrieked at the others. “Help him! Throw him something!” But the others couldn’t hear him—there were no radios in these crude, makeshift suits, and the vacuum around him absorbed the sounds of his voice like a smothering pillow. The Palace Guard— if it was even alive—clearly wasn’t going to help, and a cursory look around told Conrad there was nothing in here to throw, nothing but dust and splinters, a few jagged lightning bolts of former pine log.

  Could Martin catch some pieces of wood, and turn around and throw them behind him? Use them for propulsion? Shaking off Xmary’s grasp, Conrad snatched up one of the fragments and hurled it in Martin’s direction. The throw went wild, though, striking the filmy edge of the rip and spinning away into the void.

  A wet fog began to form on the material in front of Conrad’s face, and he realized he was breathing very heavily, using up his limited oxygen supply. He forced himself to slow down, take this whole thing more carefully and thoughtfully. He wiped uselessly at his face bubble, but of course the fog was on the inside. Slow down. Slow down.

  He took up another, bigger hunk of wood. He moved, very deliberately, right into the opening, so that its suggestive lip-edges were pressing lightly against the balloon of his own space suit. He cocked his arm back, making sure he had room for the swing, and then he lined up on Martin and let fly. This time the shot was good: straight on target and with virtually no spin. Martin saw it coming, and grabbed at it, and seized it firmly the way a drowning man might. Climbing it, practically.

  But that was it. He didn’t turn around, didn’t try to throw it. All Conrad could see of his face now were the whites of his eyes, which seemed impossibly wide and round. He didn’t understand what Conrad was trying to do, and Conrad couldn’t tell him. Did he expect to be reeled in on a line? Was he thinking at all, or simply flailing in a blind panic? The white, wet fog began to expand once more against clear wellstone, and Conrad had to force himself, again, to slow down his breathing.

  There were cables out there somewhere: the seven-hundred-meter wellstone guylines that had connected cabin to sail. He fantasized briefly about tying one of these around his waist, and then leaping heroically into the void to snag Martin in a footballer’s two-armed waist hug. He hunted visually for several seconds, his eyes adjusting to the wrinkled gray-black of wellstone sail against the unlit rails and poles and smooth whiteness of the barge’s hull, and the dappled blackness of the larger universe. He quickly found what he was looking for: a snarl of ribbonlike material protruding from beneath the crumple of Viridity’s mortal remains.

  He reached for it, then realized he’d have to step outside to get it. Then realized there were no ends; he’d have to untangle eighty meters of line just to think about jumping. And then he’d have to jump, and then he’d have to climb back down the ribbon, hand-over-hand, probably fighting with a panicky Martin Liss every centimeter of the way. And then he’d be back where he started, right here at the edge of Viridity’s crumple.

  And the thing about that was, he didn’t have enough air. The atmosphere in these suits was pure oxygen—or supposed to be, anyway—but the pressure was really low. The total amount of oxygen was meager, and already he could feel the difference. Already the suit was losing its ability to sustain him, and in another few minutes its oxygen would be gone, and if he hadn’t found some way into some habitable space inside the barge, then he would suffocate, and he and Martin would both be dead.

  At that moment, Conrad made a management decision of his own: he was not going to save Martin. There were unsavory little corollaries to this thought: Martin had understood and agreed to this particular risk. Martin was not key personnel—he didn’t have any specific skills or knowledge that could help keep everyone else alive. There were plenty more Martins where this one had come from—an inexhaustible supply. And anyway, Conrad didn’t like Martin. Didn’t know Martin, and after weeks of sharing the same cramped space together, that said an awful lot. But though he felt rotten inside, these shameful assertions were fleeting and beside the point; Conrad wasn’t prepared to get himself killed for no reason, for no net gain.

  And it struck him then—a kind of premonition—that his life would never be entirely peaceful, that he would never choose a peaceful life. As he turned his back on Martin Liss, he realized that there would be others. In the immorbid infinity of his future, there would be others whom he would knowingly abandon to certain—and horrible—death. He was glad, suddenly, that there were no radios in these suits.

  A hand gripped the meat of his elbow. Xmary again, and this time she held him so firmly that her fingers made contact nearly all the way around, causing the wellstone balloon around his arm to bulge into two separate, sausagey tubes.

  He looked at her. She was pointing. The others were still connected to her in a human chain, with the Palace Guard at its far end, and Xmary was pointing through a different opening in the crumple of wellstone. Something was blinking out there, some sort of blue warning beacon shining up through the folded, beetle-black wellstone of the sail. And beyond the flashing light he could make out the edges of a circular, sail-covered depression. An airlock? A cargo hatch? Waste disposal chute? It hardly mattered, if it offered a way inside.

  The guard wasn’t moving—its feet were still anchored somehow—so that left Conrad to lead the chain. Would the guard follow? It would have to, unless it wanted to scoop Bascal up and carry him personally. Which, come to think of it, was probably exactly what it would do if they took too long about this. Would it scatter the rest of them in the process, spinning them off into the void, or slamming the hatch in their faces?
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br />   The fog deepened on Conrad’s soap bubble of a helmet. That hatch was seventy meters away, and while the barge’s hull had rungs and rails and handholds all over it—as any real spaceship did—they were draped over with folded layers of sail. Fortunately, there was no air trapped between the layers, puffing them out, and the light magnetic bonding held the layers together as well as holding them down against the hull. Still, it looked like a hell of a climb, and it had to happen quickly.

  All right, then. Trying hard to keep his breathing slow, trying not to think about Martin or Bascal or anything else, he moved toward the opening, groping with his free hand. Even in the dimness he spotted the rail before he felt it; closing his hand around it was like grabbing a window sash with the curtains down. And while the filmy material was light and flexible, it had no stretch to it. Pressing a few centimeters of it in around the rail, he had to push hard enough to straighten out wrinkles for meters in every direction. Fortunately, the stuff wasn’t slippery, and neither was the clear, balloony glove around his hand. Air pressure wanted to keep his fingers straight, but he was stronger than it was. The wellstone bulged over the backs of his fingers as he tightened his grip on the handrail.

  “One,” he said to himself.

  The next move was trickier, as it involved his right arm. He literally had to drag Xmary and the others along as he reached for the further handhold. But though they had inertia, they didn’t have weight. It took no real strength to move them, just precision and patience. He looked over his shoulder and saw the Palace Guard take a step, to keep the chain from tightening dangerously. He sighed. With that rock-solid footing, it could easily lead the way, dragging the rest of them along behind it. As it was, he supposed it could at least serve as a safety anchor.

  His hand closed around the second rail. “Two.”

  Rails three and four were much the same, although Xmary was finding her own grip on “one” with her free left hand. But by the time he got to six, the human chain hanging onto him was like a mutant centipede with half its legs torn off, moving in jerks and thrashes. It took more concentration to get his handholds right, especially since these rails were cocked toward him at a funny angle. There was a row of them leading directly to the hatch, though, and when he finally got onto it—and straightened the chain behind him—the going was easier.

  Still, the fog thickened around his head, beads of moisture forming here and there on the film. And with every step he could feel his air growing weaker and more foul, and something else, too: a loss of heat. It wasn’t like standing outside on a cold night, where the chill of the air seeped gradually into warm flesh. In fact, he was pretty sure the empty vacuum around him was the best possible insulator. But he was radiating heat from his unprotected skin. It was a very distinct sensation, unlike anything he’d ever felt before. He was a man-shaped infrared lamp, shining his energies into the void. A couple of hours out here would, he realized, freeze him solid: a man-shaped block of ice, with no heat energy left to bleed away. But fortunately, he would suffocate long before that happened.

  Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three.

  He began to worry about the hatch itself, looming dimly in the distance. They would have to uncover it, pulling away tens or even hundreds of meters of folded sail fabric without losing their grip on the barge’s hull. Such a thing was surely possible, but did they have the time? Was there some other way? Should he continue on to the sail’s edge—some thirty meters farther along—and try to crawl back underneath it, with the hatch’s blue beacon lighting the way?

  Fifty-six. Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight.

  He decided to head straight for the hatch, and see at least briefly what he could accomplish there. They had taken so many crazy, deadly risks already, it seemed silly to try anything other than the direct approach first.

  Seventy-one. Seventy-two ...

  And when he finally drew even with the circular depression—which please-gods had to be a hatch of some sort—the Palace Guard surprised him by striding forward several paces, dragging a twisted-up Ho and Karl behind it. The robot bent at the waist, doubling itself over and extending a finger, which touched the wellstone fabric and parted it. In a funny and quite poetic way, the robot extended itself jackknife style, pushing the finger along and straightening its body, until it stood inside the hatchway depression, its entire body now flush with the hull, framed by a vertical rent in the wellstone. What a trick!

  And then, with equal poise, it swept both arms in wide circles, slashing open a pair of flaps in the film that exposed exactly the thing they most hoped to see: beneath the flashing beacon—brighter now that the gray-black film was off it—lay a circular hatch with the word ENTER emblazoned on it in softly glowing letters. The Palace Guard tapped this word lightly, and the hatch slid open with jarring, shocking speed. And then the guard stepped sideways, pivoting forty-five degrees in the hatchway’s circle, and then stepped back, swinging up and out until it was standing on the rim again, vertical to the barge’s hull.

  Poor Ho looked like a pretzel, still clinging to the robot’s leg, with his own leg firmly grasped by Karl. Nevertheless, Conrad was spellbound for a moment, astonished by the beauty and economy and swiftness of the robot’s movements. These Palace Guards would make amazing dancers.

  Then its arm was moving, and Conrad was struck by the fear that it would simply tear Bascal out of the human chain, stuff him in the airlock, and let the rest of them join Martin in the Great Beyond. But instead it pointed, a fluid gesture that conveyed a sense of urgency: get in there, now. And Conrad wasn’t going to argue with it; he felt for a handrail he knew would be there, and dragged himself around and inside, hauling Xmary and Bascal and the others along behind him.

  Inside, the hatch was nearly as large—well, half as large—as Viridity’s bridge. A white-walled cylindrical chamber, filled with handrails and winking lights and softly glowing paragraphs of text. “Caution.” “Warning.” “Zero Atmosphere and You: a Primer.” There was room for all five of them in here, but not the guard as well. And that was bad, very bad. But when Ho finally let go of that metal leg and bounced fully into the hatchway, the guard itself did not follow. Instead, it bent again at the waist, and tapped the rim of the hole. The hatch slid shut immediately, and the lights came up: bright white.

  The Palace Guard had allowed itself to be separated from Prince Bascal. Good gods, what balance of risks and compulsions had prompted that? What sensor data was it relying on? Had the thing concluded Bascal needed his friends more than he needed armed escort? Had it suffered a moment of deviant compassion?

  Almost immediately, Conrad felt the balloon of his space suit shriveling around him as the chamber filled up with air. This worried him vaguely; rapid changes in pressure weren’t supposed to be good for you, although he couldn’t remember why. He did feel his ears popping, but no other ill effects. Maybe the fax machine, realizing it was dumping them into vacuum, had compensated in some way? Made it all right?

  This chain of thought was broken when the “floor” under them—really just another hatch, with the same ENTER sign on it—slid open with a whoomp! and a clang!

  “Jesus!” Ho shouted down at the thing, and yeah, of course, they could hear each other now. They weren’t in vacuum.

  “Guys, I’m running out of air,” Karl panted, grabbing at the plasticky material over his head and trying, with plasticky hands, to pull it off. Conrad didn’t see how that could work—even as a thin film, wellstone was tough stuff—but he understood Karl’s anxiety, and in fact couldn’t resist tugging at his own hood a little.

  “Me too. Me too. How do we get these off?” Their voices were muffled by the thin barrier of space suit.

  “You have to pull up the programming interface,” Bascal said. “It’ll take a few minutes.”

  “I don’t have a few minutes,” Karl said, tugging harder, panting harder.

  “You’re fine,” Bascal reassured him, though he sounded far from certain.

  Conrad was
panting as well, and looking at the world through the ever-thickening haze inside his bubble hood. The blobs of moisture there were crawling, ever so slowly, toward his left. Was there a bit of gravity here? It was a neutronium barge, loaded with supercondensed matter, so probably, yeah. But that didn’t help him breathe.

  “You’re the only one,” he told Bascal, “who knows how to work these. There isn’t enough time. For everybody. Is there?”

  And here, damn all the little gods, was yet another life-and-death triage operation. Bascal would take his own suit off first, and then Xmary’s, and then Ho or Conrad, and Karl—who clearly needed it the most—would have to come last. Could he live that long? Hell, he was turning blue already.

  “The robot,” Conrad said, as the thought struck him. “It can open all of them. Quickly.”

  “Robot isn’t here,” said Ho, not even bothering to append any sort of threat or insult. He was at the mercy of external forces—his life had just been saved by Conrad Mursk—and it was having a marked effect on his attitude.

  “We’ve got to get out of the airlock chamber,” Bascal said, raising his arm up to shoo them all down, into the darkness of the barge’s interior.

  Xmary was the first to go, and as she exited the cylindrical chamber, additional lights came on at the other side, revealing a sort of maintenance corridor or oversized crawl space: all waffled metal and access panels. Ho quickly followed her, and then Conrad, with Bascal trailing along behind, pulling a gasping Karl along with him.

  But when they exited the chamber, the inner door didn’t automatically close, and Xmary had to hunt for the controls and then burn precious seconds reading the instructions—whatever they were—before deciding on a particular button and slapping it with her hand. Then the hatch closed, and next came a series of clanking and whooshing noises, followed by silence.