The Wellstone

Chapter nine. Stowage

“Keep your hands off me,” Bertram said, gliding back along the wall.

“Fuck you,” James added. “Both of you shits.”

Ho Ng advanced. “Don’t you talk to the prince that way, bloodfuck. Get in the fax.”

“Nobody’s hurting anybody,” Bascal said, in a tone that fell rather short of reassuring.

“Stay away,” Bert said. He was still calm, but barely.

Ho leaped forward in a long, slow arc, his outstretched hands reaching for James’ shoulders. James tried to duck aside, and made the mistake of throwing a punch in the general direction of Ho’s face. It missed, and the two tumbled upward in a flailing mass, arms and legs against the logs and cement of the cabin wall. And then the Palace Guard was there, having dashed across the floor with characteristic grace, its feet held down by some invisible, gravitylike force. Conrad hadn’t quite seen it happen, but two of the mattresses in the robot’s path were now spilling out dust and flakes of foam rubber, their covers torn in patterns shaped like robot feet.

Conrad had expected the robot to separate the combatants, but in fact it simply restrained James, got his feet back on the floor, and let Ho continue to hang onto his other arm.

“Guard,” Bascal said lazily, “assist the process, please. Thank you.”

“Let go! Let go!” James yelled. His struggles intensified, but against the robot he had little hope of success. He attempted to drag his feet, but this simply resulted in their flailing in the air behind him, with the tie-down laces of his camp sneakers fluttering loose. He began to scream like a condemned man, which might very well be the case, because once he was in the fax there was no specific guarantee that he would be reinstantiated. Some archived copy of him would, sometime, but maybe not this one, with these memories. This particular James Shadat might well be on his way to the gods and the afterlife, or the blank nothingness, or whatever.

He shrieked when they hurled him at the plate, and the sound was cut off as his head passed through, and then there was only the pop and hiss of his body going in, every atom measured and logged and teleported away to a nearby buffer. Or something like that; Conrad didn’t really know how fax machines worked.

“Bascal,” he said, “you’ve got to stop this.” He felt sick. Responsible. The prince had gotten this idea from him!

“Nonsense,” Bascal said, with a wave of the hand. “They’re better off in there, out of trouble and out of harm’s way. Everyone will be happier. Plus, it’s too crowded in here anyway. Ho? If you’ll continue, please?”

“Pleasure,” Ho agreed, turning and leaping at Bertram Wang. The Palace Guard followed at a more stately pace, marching magically along the floor, but it got there only a few moments after Ho did.

Bert opted to retain his dignity, saying only, “Is this how you’ll lead the Queendom, ‘Sire’?”

“We may never know,” Bascal answered. And then Bert was gone.

Khen turned out to be another screamer, and afterward Emilio Roberts, one of the bloody-nose kids, lost his composure and started crying and kicking. “This can’t be happening! You can’t be doing this.” So they chucked him in the fax as well.

When it was done, the room was very quiet, and all eyes were on Bascal. He seemed to sense that he was in trouble, that he’d overstepped and lost the confidence of his followers. Nobody wanted to be next. But when he spoke, it was with a flourish and an easy smile.

“We knew the journey would be difficult, and we probably should have known there’d be friction and hasty compromises. I didn’t foresee this, and I apologize to all of you for the ugly spectacle. I promise, it won’t be repeated. But you know as well as I do: if we let those men wander free, the trouble will be much worse. Would you rather tie them up? Kill them? This seems to me like a prudent compromise. Agreed?”

“What do we do now?” someone asked.

“We sail,” Bascal answered simply. He looked at Xmary. “You, darling, will be administering resources. Can you establish meal schedules and such?”

“Yeah,” she replied, without great enthusiasm.

“Terrific.” He turned and launched himself back toward the bridge in a bounding leap.

Conrad followed him. “What’re you doing, Bas? What’s the grand idea here?”

“Well, first we turn the fetula so the sail is edgewise to Sol. That’ll reduce our risk of detection when we have to opaque it. We don’t want to glint, or blot out any stars. Too much risk of being seen.” Bascal was settling back into the navigator’s chair.

“That’s not what I mean,” Conrad said.

“Nevertheless, that’s what we have to do.”

“He bothering you, Majesty?” Ho said from the doorway.

“Nah. He needs to be in here, to pick up the art of steering. We’ll take it in shifts from here on.”

“No concern,” Ho said self-importantly. “You need me, I’ll be right out here.”

“Good. I’ll call when I do.”

The other Palace Guard was still in here, standing motionless in the corner. Between it and Ho, there was considerable reason to avoid antagonizing the prince.

Nevertheless, Conrad crossed his arms. “So I’m steering now, am I? You’ve been making a lot of decisions for a lot of people, Bas. You haven’t done much asking. Why don’t you let your buddy Ho pilot the ship?”

Without looking up from the controls, Bascal said, “Come off it, boyo. Anyone can steer—well, almost anyone—but you’re the only one here with a basic understanding of wellstone. How the system works together, collectively. And you’ve driven vehicles before. You and I are the only qualified pilots.”

“Get fucked.”

“I’m sure I will,” the prince said, then turned to face Conrad. “Look, I can do this without you. It’s inconvenient, but it’s not impossible. If you want to be useless and annoying, that’s your decision.”

“Yeah? You too, Mr. Cone-of-Silence. Are you helping the people on this ... this so-called spaceship? Supporting their interests, fighting for their rights? I used to think so.”

“Watch yourself,” Bascal said, then sighed. “I would like your help, all right? I’d like your support. I’m asking nicely.”

With his arms still folded, Conrad shook his head. “You can’t behave this way, Bas.”

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do.” Bascal’s voice was mild. “I understand your problem: you keep thinking this is a lark. Some kind of joyride. But it really isn’t. We’re not doing this for our amusement; we’re doing it for the next million years of our eternal lives. We’ve got to start those lives off strong and hard, or we’ll never be taken seriously. I wish you could just get that fact into your head and keep it there.”

“Fine, it’s not a game. It’s serious, million-year business. That doesn’t mean you’re free to abuse people. It’s”—Conrad groped for the right word—“counterproductive. It hurts our cause. What will people say if your own followers wind up denouncing you?”

“It depends how the PR ladies spin it,” Bascal answered. But he at least appeared to be thinking it over.

Conrad pressed the point: “You either have support or you don’t, Bas. I’m not sure you understand. I can be on your side and still not agree with ... all this. There’s a right way and a wrong way.”

That made the prince angry. “Oh, so now I’m stupid? I understand exactly what you’re saying, Conrad, but it’s possible I know more about this than you do. If I remember correctly, you’re not the Queendom’s finest student.”

“And you are,” Conrad sneered. It was a stupid thing to say, because yeah, everyone knew what a prodigy Prince Bascal was, and always had been. It was kind of amazing, actually, that a Poet Prince could be friends with a Cork County disappointment like Conrad Mursk. Which helped his argument not at all.

Bascal spread his hands apologetically. “Look, I’m not convinced I can trust you. First you’re in favor, then you’re against; then you’ve got backbone, and now you don’t. . . . I don’t know, Conrad. How smart is that? Unless you’re a genius of epic proportion, what I really need is somebody who listens to my informed opinion.”

“Like Ho Ng.”

“Well, yeah. Actually.”

“You don’t want to listen to him, Bas. You really don’t. Nothing he says or does is for the good of other people.”

Bascal sighed and relaxed his hands, setting them adrift in a low-gravity gesture oddly reminiscent of Feck. “Just let it go. Your opinion is noted, but we’ve got to turn the fetula now, before the sail gives us away. At the moment it’s aimed almost directly downsystem—that’s toward the sun—and any decent astronomer or traffic controller is going to pick it up sooner or later. We’ve got to disappear before they realize we’re gone. Will you take a few minutes to learn something? Please?”

It was Conrad’s turn to sigh. Was there a choice? Would his refusal help anything at all? Regardless of politics, there should be more than one person on board the ship who knew how to operate it. That was just basic safety.

“All right,” he said. “Show me.”

“Good man.”

By way of a primer, Bascal pointed out the ordinal directions: port/starboard, fore/aft, and boots/caps. And the cardinal ones: upsystem/downsystem, north/south, and clock/counter.

“When I say ‘boots aft,’ it means a negative pitch along this axis, see? When I say ‘correct north,’ it means we add velocity that way, out of the ecliptic plane where the planets all orbit. Until further notice and regardless of orientation. You see? It’s actually very simple. There are galactic coordinates as well, but we won’t need those. Now sit, and watch what I do.”

Conrad watched and listened, as patiently as his fear and ambivalence would permit. And he saw that the control of a fetula—and by extension, a sailboat—was nothing at all like the control of a construction tractor. The eight guylines were distant cousins to the track clutches of a bulldozer, or the front-end hydraulics of a steam-roller, but they pointed off in so many different directions! And there was nothing akin to a brake or throttle, unless you counted the sail itself, whose transparency could be varied on demand.

Still, there was one piece of his father’s advice that seemed perfectly apropos: Horse around with this thing, lad, and you’re bound to regret what happens next.

Having lost Feck and Peter, and five others besides, they were down to just Xmary and eight boys. In addition to Bascal, Ho, and Steve Grush, there were Preston Midrand and Martin Liss, two quiet kids Conrad had never really talked to. And there was Jamil Gazzaniga, who talked incessantly about bicycles, and Karl Smoit, the budding young sports nut who had invented the game of shirtball soccer.

Unfortunately, the last of their acceleration had gone away when Bascal turned the sail, and you couldn’t play kickball in zero gravity, so Karl was driving everyone crazy with his imaginary ball and goal.

“He lines up! He kicks!”

“He spins ass-over-elbows,” Steve observed acidly, stretching a foot out for Karl to collide with.

“Get fucked, you shit,” Karl said to him, grabbing and twisting the foot. This was actually sort of brave, and under other circumstances Conrad would have admired him for it. But it had the potential to escalate into a full-blooded fight, and from there maybe even a feud, and it was way too early in way too cramped a voyage to be starting with that kind of thing.

“The men are already bored,” he said loudly, to both Xmary and Bascal. Xmary because he figured she’d care; Bascal because he might actually know what to do about it. He’d had every possible kind of leadership training, right?

“Knock it off, guys,” Bascal said.

Steve now had an arm around Karl’s shoulder and neck, and said, “Tell him to quit with the acrobatics.”

Bascal tapped his chin. “No, I don’t think so. Let him go; let him do what he’s doing. We’ll have acrobatics for the next hour, and then dinner, and then story time and lights out. Xmary will draw up a formal schedule in the morning.”

“Schedule! Just like camp!” Jamil Gazzaniga sneered. “We’ll get the Palace Guards to announce it!”

“Story time?” Steve complained. “What are we, six?”

Bascal just smiled. “The Tongan people used to spend months at a time in outrigger canoes. They were the greatest mariners of their day, much better than the Greeks or the Romans or even the English and French who eventually conquered the rest of Polynesia. They could hit an island the size of Camp Friendly from a thousand miles away. Without compasses, without anything. They even had a navy. Conquered Fiji and Samoa a couple of times in hundred-man sailboats. Charted the seas as far away as America and Madagascar.”

“So?” Jamil said.

“So, an outrigger or catamaran has a lot less space— less volume—than this fetula. There was no exercise hour, and story time lasted all day. You should feel lucky.”

“Oh, we do,” Jamil answered, in the same mocking tone.

“Stow that shit,” Ho Ng told him from across the room. “Or I’ll stow you.”

“Nyu nyu nyu,” Jamil told him—a brilliant comeback if Conrad had ever heard one. But afterward, Jamil was smart enough to stay quiet, and Karl kept his exercises to himself.

Mealtime was interesting: you had to unstow and unpack the food, keep track of it long enough to eat it, and then clean up after yourself without leaving crumbs and greasy/sticky blobs all over the place. Nobody really had the hang of it—not even Bascal—but Conrad supposed they had plenty of time to practice.

Afterward, at precisely the moment Peter would have predicted if Peter had been there, the motionless Palace Guards announced, in stereo, “Lights out, time to sleep.”

“We’re not at camp anymore,” Bascal told them impatiently. “You can stop all that.”

Still, at the pilinisi’s insistence, the wellstone ceiling’s glow was turned down and reddened, and everyone gathered around to hear him tell the evening’s first story. It felt a bit foolish, and Conrad was still uneasy about this whole thing, and about Bascal in particular. But then again there was no TV here, and no quiet place to read a book, so what the hell.

“Tonga has no king,” Bascal said, sitting cross-legged with his feet twisted up in a strap. “There is no Tonga.”

“I thought that was your dad,” Steve Grush cut in, provoking nods and murmurs from several others around the circle.

“No,” Bascal said, looking annoyed. “My father may be the King of Sol, but never has been and never will be the Tu’i Tonga. Technically speaking, he can’t even own property there, although I doubt the courts would see it that way. My mother is the Kuini Tonga, and there is no king. There never will be again. But I was actually referring to the story I’m trying to tell, about the first people in the world, before Tonga even existed.”

He paused, glancing around the circle both to make sure he had his audience’s full attention, and for dramatic effect. The Poet Prince in action. Then he began.

“Imagine that we’re on the open ocean. Waves rolling all around us, the hot sun beginning to set. The horizon is a dividing line between the sky and the sea. Imagine a catamaran sailboat: two huge canoe hulls with a sturdy platform lashed between them, as big as Viridity’s cabin here around us, though it’s open to the sky and the sea. And there’s a mast we can raise or lower as needed. There may be enclosed buildings on the platform, or a whole second level, or both. The sail is woven pandanus fiber, which depending on how you prepare it can be anything from tough basket wicker to a soft cloth, like silk. It’s the wellstone of its day. The rigging is a line of twisted coconut husk.

“This is not a primitive vessel; the largest versions can carry a hundred armed men, with months of provisions. It simply lacks metal, or clay, or any of the thousands of materials other civilizations take for granted. If it isn’t a plant or a bone or a volcanic rock, we’ve never seen it, but we know as much geometry as any Greek philosopher, and we can sail as fast and as far as a Spanish galleon. By night, we watch the stars. By day, we watch the sun and moon, and the cloud formations. In the right light, the clouds reflect the color of the sea and land beneath them. We also look for birds, for flowers and coconuts drifting in the current. Most importantly, we feel the waves beneath us. The ocean swells reflect off the land, and their ripples can be felt even two hundred kilometers away. The contour map is in our heads—we feel our way along, using the only programmable substance available. Brains.

“And we tell stories. We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time. I’m taking you back, back, back before the sun god Tangaloa fathered the first Tu’i Tonga, before Maui, the god of fire and trickery, fished the islands up from the ocean with his magic hook. Before there were people, before there was time, the spirits of the people lived in their own special network in the sky. These sky spirits were never born and could never die. Every day was the same as every other day.”

“Cool,” someone said, half-seriously.

“Shut up,” Ho Ng warned.

And the prince went on: “But there were some among the sky spirits who grew restless, who wanted something to happen. The spirit of a lizard also lived in the sky, and was thought to be wise and helpful, although not entirely trustworthy. He had a streak of cruelty which he sometimes indulged. But he was always forgiven, because the sky spirits had to live together forever, and couldn’t afford to hold grudges.

“When the hot Earth had cooled and living things came out of the ocean to take root and grow in its soil, and different creatures had evolved to shape the ecosystem, the lizard told the sky people about the amazing beauty and sensuous delight of the Earth, which he said had been prepared especially for them. Earth’s land cradled all the colors of the rainbow, and its waters and winds flowed with sweet songs. And there were tastes as well! Sweet coconut and hearty yams, taro and breadfruit, and best of all, the flesh of fish and animals. Even the caves echoed your name when you called out to them.

“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.