The Wellstone

by Wil McCarthy

  To Conrad’s surprise, Bascal set right to work on Karl, pulling up a programming interface on his back and tapping in a series of commands or menu selections.

  “Shit,” he said once. And then, a few seconds later, “Come on, you.” Then he was silent for a while, working.

  “Do we know the air is good?” Xmary asked.

  “Do we care?” Bascal singsonged back in a snotty way.

  And then, suddenly, a light flickered on Karl’s back, and seams appeared all around the garment, and it was falling open into man-shaped cutouts, the hood peeling back, the gloves splitting open. Karl gasped, and gasped again, and if there’d been any kind of real gravity here he’d’ve fallen to his knees. Instead, he relaxed into a fetal curl.

  Taking the hint, Conrad tapped his arm, trying to pull up a programming interface of his own. But that sort of bottom-level interface was more Bascal’s specialty than Conrad’s. He’d opened exactly one seam before in his life—in the liner of Camp Friendly—and he realized with sudden panic that he couldn’t remember how to do it.

  But then, with a whoosh! and a clang! the airlock’s inner door slammed open again, and there was the Palace Guard framed in the hatchway lights. Back with its prince again, after that shocking dereliction of duty. It seemed for the slightest fraction of a moment to consider the scene in front of it, but then, with a whoosh! of its own, it was in motion.

  It threw itself at Bascal with such ferocity that it might have been attacking him, except that it missed, and in passing it dragged a finger vertically along his chest, then slashed it horizontally across his neck. The Guard’s trajectory carried it into the far wall, where it rebounded immediately on a path that carried it past Ho and Xmary. The slashing motions of its hand were almost too quick to see, and then its feet were on the ceiling and it was running or jumping or something, and it swung away on an arc heading straight for Conrad. Slash! Slash! For a moment, its arm and finger loomed large in his sight.

  And then, as quickly as the robot had launched itself, it froze in place, assuming its usual statuesque pose with arms hanging down at its sides. And then, maybe a second after the opening of the hatch, all the seams had a chance to separate, and everyone’s space suits were peeling open like clear plastic flowers.

  Was the air good? Hell if he cared; Conrad drew the deepest breath of his life, then let it out, then drew it in again. He was fighting his way free of the space suit, stripping it away from his sweat-chilled arms and legs, away from his tee shirt and shorts, away from his shoes. He was yanking it off and kicking it away like it was hot or poisonous, and he was breathing deeply of the barge’s air. And yeah, it was good.

  “Fuck,” he said. “Oh, fuck. Oh fuck. We almost didn’t make it.”

  “Almost, hell,” Bascal said, throwing himself at the wall and kissing it hard. “It’s a fucking miracle.”

  And it was, too. They’d left eleven brothers behind— nine dead and two missing—but they’d pulled off a journey of such daring and gall that even they themselves couldn’t believe it. How amazing, how amazing it was to be standing inside a neutronium barge 140 million kilometers from the ruins of Camp Friendly. No one had caught them, stopped them, probably even seen them, and the fact that anyone had survived at all was ... well, miraculous.

  “Today we make fuckin’ history,” Ho Ng said, with a greater depth of conviction than Conrad would have imagined he could muster.

  And Karl and Xmary were hugging each other and laughing, and Bascal came forward and slapped Conrad on the cheek twice, just hard enough to convey a sense of manly camaraderie.

  “We did it,” he said. “We fucking did it.”

  “Well, congratulations,” said a deep, loud, unfamiliar and quite angry voice in the corridor behind them. “Just who the hell are you?”

  chapter seventeen

  the secret garden

  Conrad turned around, expecting to see navy troopers or Royal Constabulary there. He even raised his arms partway in surrender, before noticing it was a bunch of naked human beings. Blue ones, with the pastel shade of artificial skin pigment rather than paint, and the kinky hair and broad features to suggest their natural coloration would be rather darker. But any reassurance he might have felt at this comical sight quickly evaporated when he noticed the weapons: dart guns and heavy wrenches.

  “Jesus!” Karl squawked.

  “Greetings, naked people,” Bascal said, with remarkable aplomb. He pushed off with a foot, then caught himself with a hand, positioning himself in front of the others, in good light where his face could be clearly seen.

  “Who are you?” one of the naked men repeated. He looked about twenty or twenty-five years old, which could mean anything. There were two other men beside him, and two women lurking behind them at a bend in the corridor. Both were painfully pretty despite their blueness (or because of it?), and although one had a wrench and the other a dart gun, Conrad couldn’t keep his eyes off their faces and breasts, the darker blue of their lips and nipples and pubic hair.

  “I’m the Prince of Sol,” Bascal replied, sounding surprised.

  “Sure you are,” the man answered tightly. His voice was very deep, and it seemed to Conrad that that was a natural feature as well. The Queendom was full of poseurs who altered their looks and sound and smell with special fax machines and genome appendices, but unless it was subtle you could always kind of tell. So: natural voice, natural hair, natural facial features, all packaged in a decidedly unnatural skin. The guy sounded angry, too, and kind of scared. The gun he held wasn’t aimed at anything specific, but he was ready with it. And his blue cock and balls, now that Conrad noticed, were shriveled up against him, cowering.

  “Wait a minute,” one of the women said. “I think he is.”

  “Stay out, Agnes,” the man answered nervously.

  “No, really,” the woman said. “That’s Bascal Edward. He’s just older, is all. That robot is his bodyguard!”

  Seizing the initiative, Bascal said, “I’d move very slowly if I were you. It’s a state-of-the-art Palace Guard. So when exactly did the neutronium industry go Blue Nudist? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Cute,” the man said, gesturing a little with the gun. It was the wrong thing to do; immediately, the Palace Guard raised a finger and nailed the little weapon with a bolt of energy. The man screamed, flinging the piece away, and Conrad thought for a moment that he saw quicksilver drops of molten metal splashing where it hit the wall.

  “Ow! Crap! What are you doing here? Who sent you?”

  “Sent?” Bascal’s mask of certainty slipped a bit. “We came here to use the fax. We’re castaways.”

  “From what? Prison? Piracy?”

  “Summer camp.”

  The naked people stared back blankly, unable to process that comment into anything useful.

  “Maybe you should explain,” the man said finally. He was holding a rail with his uninjured hand and another with his free, naked foot. The hand that had held the gun now trembled against his chest.

  “Who are you people?” Bascal couldn’t seem to help asking.

  The man’s gaze narrowed. “What? You first, kid. Prince. What are you doing here? Why did you attack our ship?”

  “Your ship?” Bascal repeated.

  “Attack?” Conrad said. “We crashed here. Well, sort of crashed.”

  There was another brief silence, and then Xmary said, “You seem nervous. Sir. We’re not here on any sort of official business. We were marooned on a planette, and escaped in a homemade fetula.”

  One of the women said something in a clicky, guttural language Conrad was certain he’d never heard before. Something angry and menacing, which included the English words “Jolly Roger” and “magnet ray.”

  “We came here to use the fax,” Bascal said again. “We’re trying to get to Denver.”

  “Why?” the man demanded.

  The prince held up a hand, his voice hardening. “All right, look. What’s your name?”

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nbsp; The man’s frown deepened for a moment, and then partially relaxed. “I’m Robert. Robert M’chunu.”

  “Our leader,” said the woman named Agnes, in a half-joking tone.

  “There are no leaders here,” Robert called back over his shoulder, in a weary way that suggested he said this often, and would be happy if he never had to say it again. Then, turning back, he seemed for the first time to notice the Camp Friendly tee shirts that everyone except smelly Ho had on. He rubbed his lips with his gun hand, thinking about that. “Summer camp. You came to use the fax? There’s no network gate, you know. We sabotaged it a long time ago.”

  “No gate?” Bascal said. “No gate? Why the hell not? That’s the whole reason we came here!”

  “We didn’t want anyone following us,” Agnes said. “We didn’t want to be found.”

  Bascal digested that for a couple of seconds, and then said, “I think it’s time you explain this to me. Why are there naked stowaways on a Mass Industries neutronium barge? Vandalizing a neutronium barge, and threatening visitors?”

  That charge took some serious gall, Conrad thought. But it seemed to have the desired effect; Robert and his people shrank back ever so slightly, cowed by the imaginary authority of a figurehead prince. But then again, the threat of the Palace Guard was real enough. Conrad was frankly surprised the thing had reacted as mildly as it did. Emotionally, it must be in some robotic equivalent of righteous fury, prepared at any moment to lash out against these looming figures who dared to threaten. But something stayed its hand, some impulse of curiosity or diplomacy or decorum, some intuitive balance between danger and opportunity. There was no point trying to understand these monsters; Conrad watched them and watched them, and yet their inner machinations remained inscrutable. Not human, no, but not simplistic either.

  It was the man to Robert M’chunu’s right who answered, “We’re castaways as well. The South African Territories are no place for a child these days.”

  Bascal considered that. “You brought children with you?”

  “We are children. We were.”

  And then a look of understanding bloomed over Bascal’s features, and he smiled. “Runaways! Ah! You left copies at home, yes? Nobody knows you’re here.”

  Warily, resignedly, Robert nodded. “Correct, yah.” He was nursing his hand, which sported angry, growing welts on the palm and fingers.

  “Why here?” Xmary asked.

  He shrugged. “No place more remote. We jam the gates, why, we’re on our own until the holds are full of neubles and the barge heads back to the Queendom. Twenty years, maybe. A lifetime.”

  Still grinning, Bascal shook an accusing finger. “You’ve got your own little Bluetopia here. No leaders, no clothes ... Or did we blunder into the middle of something? An orgy? A ceremony?”

  “We’re nudists,” Agnes confirmed.

  “It’s restricted in TSA,” Robert explained. “You have to be twenty-five before you can even apply for the permits. I tried a different body plan for a while—two extra legs and a short coat of hair to cover the naughty bits. Never got ticketed—the cops thought it was cute—but I needed this big horse’s behind to fit the legs on, and I just got tired of it. I want to be me, not some creature. They just don’t want a young man’s dongle hanging out.”

  “Unconscionable,” Bascal said. “So you escaped! Went as far and as free as the Nescog would carry you, and cut yourselves off. When you finally return, and reintegrate with your original selves, you’ll be gifting them with the precious memory of twenty years of freedom . There might be some fines and penalties involved, but that’s okay— your selves will never be the same. Nobody who even hears about it will ever see their lives in quite the same way. This is brilliant; this is great! How many of you are there?”

  Robert examined his injured hand, then glowered at the prince. “Don’t pretend to understand, Your Highness. This is our private business.”

  “And ours,” Bascal said, spreading his arms a bit. “We’ve lost our only transportation.”

  “Robert,” Agnes said, “I don’t think he’s Tamra’s perfect little Poet Prince anymore. He said it himself: he’s a runaway, too.”

  “You have been away a long time,” Xmary observed. “He’s well known as a troublemaker.”

  “If nobody knows they’re here,” the other woman said menacingly, “we can safely put them out the airlock.” The Palace Guard, turning its head with a faint click and whirr, rewarded this comment with a hard, faceless robotic stare. Try it, lady.

  Bascal, for his part, chose to ignore her. “What time of the day is it here? I suggest introductions, and then a tour. Well, maybe a bathroom break as well.” He looked around at the surviving campers, as if gathering consensus. “We’re very eager to see what you people are up to.”

  Agnes Moloi turned out to be “not Robert’s girlfriend” in the same way that Robert M’chunu was “not the leader” of this band of expatriates. Robert’s not-a-lieutenant was Money Izolo—Conrad didn’t catch whether that was a nickname or if his parents had simply had a sense of humor. The angry woman was Brenda Bohobe, and the other man was named Tsele or something. There were twenty people here altogether, and once upon a time they’d all gone to the same school—Johannesburg Prep. They’d left it in their middle teens, in a cleverer, quieter way than Bascal’s crew had chosen.

  The corridor Robert was leading them down had a kinky, dogleg shape to it. It ran from one end of the barge to the other, he told them, but there were “certain machineries” it had to divert around. “These corridors are just access ways for maintenance. It’s not supposed to be pretty.”

  “Are there other inhabited barges?” a visibly excited Bascal was asking.

  “Must be,” Robert said with a shrug. “We didn’t invent this plan, just heard about it. The first two barges we tried had already dropped off the net.”

  “I see,” Bascal said gleefully. “A plague of mysterious gate failures. Never fully investigated, or they’d’ve traced you here by now. All they have to do is fly some gate hardware out here, dock it, and poof! You’re back on the network. But if that costs more than just paying the fines, the shipyard’s parent corporation has probably just written it off. Fix ’em when they get back.”

  Maybe it was just Conrad, but he found it vaguely offensive to be following behind two naked men in a weightless (or nearly weightless) corridor. Their dongles hanging out, yeah—it wasn’t exactly the view he wanted, especially because the women were bringing up the rear, so to speak, along with the other man, Tsele. There was a smell, too—not dirt or sweat or anything like that, but some vague spiciness he couldn’t identify, and couldn’t ignore. A crude perfume or something—surely not another genome amendment. Here were people who’d abandoned Queendom hygiene standards—and decency standards, and presumably other standards as well—in the push to build some weird culture of their own.

  “Does your fax machine work?” Karl inquired. “We’ve been eating a really limited diet.”

  “Oh, they work,” Robert said. “We have two: a big and a small.”

  Then the woman named Brenda—the surly one—cut in. “You people have authorities looking for you?”

  “One never knows,” Bascal hedged. “Our fetula was as invisible as we could make it.”

  “You leave copies behind? Are you officially missing?”

  “I don’t know if they’re looking for us or not.”

  She rolled her blue eyes. “Wonderful. That’s exquisite. If they don’t find you, even then they might find us.”

  “Listen, lady,” Bascal said. “We didn’t even know you existed until ten minutes ago. Even if we had, I’m not sure we could’ve done anything different. We’ve been clever enough so far, thank you very much.”

  Unless you count the seventy percent casualty rate, Conrad thought.

  “You expect to fit in here? Hide here? Stay indefinitely?”

  “I don’t expect anything,” Bascal answered. “We were going to Denver.�
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  “We’ll show them around, Brenda,” Robert said. “Show them how we do things here. Then talk about it.”

  “Talk about what?” Brenda demanded. “They can’t leave! We’re stuck with ’em!”

  “I wouldn’t be so quick about that,” Bascal told her. “We’ve gotten out of tougher places. There’s nothing preventing us from repairing our ship, or building another.”

  “Oh, hell. Hell with you. Damn royalty.”

  “You may have to live here with us,” Robert echoed. “It may not be so easy. There may not be a choice.”

  “With a fully working fax machine at our disposal, there’s always a choi— Whoa.”

  The corridor turned seventy degrees, and opened out into a broad space, maybe ten meters high and at least a hundred meters wide. No, scratch that; a fifty-meter-thick cylinder ran through the room’s center, floor to ceiling, blocking the view of the other side. The chamber was donut-shaped, fully and exactly as wide as the ship. Its floor and ceiling were covered in regular, rolling hills of what looked like foamed metal, lit from both the top and bottom by occasional spotlights: vertical cones of bright yellow light shining up and down, leaving relative dimness in the spaces between.

  And there were plants everywhere—a veritable jungle of them, sprouting from pots and from pools of mesh-covered dirt in the regular valleys between the hills. The greenery sprang from both floor and ceiling, and was long enough in a few places to meet in the middle. And there were people lurking among the plants: armed, naked people making only a nominal effort to conceal themselves. The blue did kind of stand out against the green and brown and gray.

  “This is the sound baffle,” Robert said. “Where most of us live. Let me, uh, introduce you.” Facing out into the chamber he called out a long string of foreign syllables, and Conrad saw the people out there relaxing, shouldering and even setting aside their weapons.