The Wellstone

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?”

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.”

“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.

Conrad, who didn’t realize how tensely he’d been holding himself, also relaxed. Then he grabbed onto a stanchion to stop the slow drift he was accumulating. There was a mild force—gravity, probably—drawing him in toward the middle of the chamber. Maybe down a bit as well, toward the surface he’d identified arbitrarily as “floor.”

“What’s a sound baffle?” the prince asked.

Robert nodded. “Okay, picture the shape of this vessel. A cylinder, right? We’re near the aft end. Engines this way”—he pointed at the ceiling—“and holds that way.” Toward the floor.

“Okay.”

“The bow of the vessel is the snow scoop. Comet fragments go in there, and enter the main hold. It’s nearly full right now: a billion tons of methane and water ice clathrates, plus some coal and chondrite. Doesn’t actually matter what it is, because the hold is really a giant piston that will compress the very atoms into a neutron paste. A few weeks from now, we’ll be ready to squeeze another neuble, and for three days the noise will be awful. This chamber isolates the temporary crew areas from the worst of it. And since the last stage of compression is an antimatter explosion, the chamber also serves as a shock absorber.”

“I see,” Bascal said. “The crew areas being what, a bridge and an engine room?”

“Plus an inventory and two small cabins, yah.”

“That way?” Bascal pointed at the ceiling.

“Right.”

“We’ll see these?”

Robert studied the prince. “We don’t use those areas much. Ander and Nell live there, with their dogs. But if you’re so interested ...”

Brenda muttered something foreign and surly. Conrad added his own glare to the Palace Guard’s. What did this woman expect them to do, disappear? Never exist in the first place?

“Of course we’re interested,” Bascal said.

Robert nodded. “Well, fine. I’ll make sure they know. We need to figure out a place for you all to sleep anyway. I suppose the inventory, or else back there in the corridor where you came in. Obviously, we’re not set up for visitors.”

He pushed off lightly, launching himself on a gentle glide into the jungle of the sound baffle. He called back, “Watch yourselves in here. It’s fun to fly around, but the neutronium hold is right there, behind the forward bulkhead. Five neubles suspended in a magnetic liquid. It’s a pentagon pattern, to distribute the loads evenly. See there and there, where the vegetation is flattened?”

“Yeah,” Bascal said, leaping after him.

“Everyone? Does everyone see those areas?”

They were hard not to see: three-meter disks of flattened grass and vines, each one near the low point between a set of meter-high foamed-metal hills. In point of fact, Robert and “Money” were drifting directly toward one of them, with Bascal trailing behind, looking up between their blue, hairy legs.

“Sure,” Conrad said, and was echoed by Xmary and Karl and Ho. (And wasn’t it great, how quiet and unobtrusive Ho was being? For maybe the first time in his life?)

“Those areas,” Robert explained, “are two gees at the center. Overfly one and you’ll be slammed into the deck before you know what happened. Break your arms if you’re lucky. We’ve never had a fatality, but it’s because we keep it in mind. Always. Five points, in a pentagon around the center. When the next neuble is added, it’ll be six points in a hexagon, and we’ll have to remember all over again.”

His path had begun to curve noticeably, and presently he flapped his arms in a circular motion that brought his legs out below him. And he settled down at the edge of one of the depressions, speeding up at the last moment so that he landed with an audible thump. When he straightened, he was standing at an angle, leaning away from the gravity. Money landed beside him a little farther out, and stood at an even steeper angle.

“That’s how we do it,” Robert said. “Where I’m standing is about a quarter gee, inclined toward the center. The gradient is steep: another step and it’s a full gee, and I’ll be leaning over too far if I’m not careful. Even here, I can hurt myself. Neutronium you don’t take chances with, understand? Five points in a pentagon around the center. Look for the flattened grass.”

“Sure,” Bascal said, alighting almost directly between the two men.

“Good. Good. Everyone try it. This is safety training.” Robert leaped back toward Conrad and the others. Not a leader, right. The human need for hierarchy was supposedly genetic, as inescapable as sex and taxes. And somebody needed to sit at the top—hence the Queendom, right?

While this demonstration unfolded, a substantial audience—at least a dozen people—had filtered out of the weeds and were standing or hanging around gawking at the prince, and at the other campers. The first new people they’d seen in what, three years? Five? Someone barked a question at the soaring Robert, who barked back an answer in the same tone.

Xmary launched herself toward the flat spot, and Conrad, not wanting to be outdone, followed right behind.

“Maybe we should take our clothes off,” he said, in a voice only she could hear. “Just to be polite.”

“Ha ha,” she answered, more loudly.

Behind them, Ho and Karl took the leap.

The maneuver turned out to be almost as easy as it looked; Conrad could distinctly feel the gravity setting in as he approached. He was still in freefall—just curving along an altered trajectory—but it was a different kind of freefall somehow. Stretchy, tingly, slippery. He couldn’t put a word to it, but the feeling was there just the same. The rotation, so his feet were underneath him, was not quite a zero-gee movement. Once his feet got close the gravity seemed to seize and center them of its own accord. His only error was in judging the angle of his body; it wasn’t steep enough, so he came in a bit wrongly when his feet slapped into the baffle wall—the hilly, foamed-metal floor that attracted him like a magnet, grabbing firmly at the last instant. He felt glued.

He wasn’t leaning enough, though. He was perpendicular to the floor, not to the gravity, and for a moment he felt as if he were standing on a steep incline, about to tumble downhill or pull right out of his shoes. But he caught himself, straightening in the proper way, and a few moments later he caught Xmary, who’d landed in front of him and leaned too far out. She flailed briefly, then fell backward into his arms.

“Oof,” she said.

“Wow. Weird,” Conrad agreed, his voice on the verge of breaking. Her waist and the small of her back, bare beneath the cropped camp shirt, felt alarmingly soft in his hands, both cool and warm, completely unlike the skin of a boy or a man, or his mother for that matter. She smelled sweaty, and somehow that was nice, too. The fax might arrest the Queendom’s women in a state of permanent youth, but was that enough? Was there more to the feel and scent of a person than the cells and molecules of their skin? Could you feel the youthful soul raging inside?

He’d kept his distance from her; now the contact both soothed and agonized him.

“No touching, bloodfuck,” Ho said quietly, drifting in behind them. “How many times I have to tell you?” But he’d gotten his approach all confused, and he went past them—nearly over their heads—and came in not only too steep but also too close to the center, and with his feet in the wrong place. He hung in the air a moment, and then fell fast and hard with the definite clunk! of bone against metal. “Ow! Fuck! Donkey fuck!”

“You mind your own self,” Xmary said to him, picking her way out of Conrad’s arms.

“Bitch,” he answered quietly.

And there was a word Conrad had never liked. It basically meant “dog,” a description that bore no resemblance to any girl or woman Conrad had ever met. His father, Donald Mursk, used that word sometimes when things weren’t going his way. Used it once or twice to his wife’s own face, and once to describe the Queen of Sol cavorting regally on the wellstone holie screen of the TV. Donald Mursk was not by any means a bad guy, but Conrad personally found it unmanly for him to use that kind of language.

Conrad felt the urge to lash out, not with a slur or a slap but with the full force of his body, using himself as a weapon. At first he held back—when had such impulse ever served him? When had fighting? But then, bowing to fury’s slower cousins—righteous anger and the desire to impress—he considered carefully. He did have a perfect opening, and passing it up would be every bit as portentous and consequential as acting on it. Right?

Maybe it was just impulse again, masquerading as a rational decision, but he leaned in toward the center of the flattened grass, until he could feel the neuble down there, maybe four meters under the floor. And he drew back his sneakered foot—not easy in the steep gravity—and snapped it forward into the side of Ho Ng’s head. Not hard enough to damage him seriously, but plenty hard enough to hurt.

“That’s no way to talk,” he said.

And then, like magic, the Palace Guard was there, and Conrad felt the warm circle of a guide laser on his arm, half an instant before the tazzer beam made jellied agony of his muscles. He could feel the neuble again as he fell; the sharp, steep field of its gravity all around him, rushing by. Then he hit the floor, and the pain flared brighter, and he was—out for a moment. Then back in again, buzzing and ringing. But when he sat up, the pain was fading (except in his elbow, which he’d apparently banged hard), and Bascal and Karl and Xmary were all kneeling around him in a ring, with Robert M’chunu looking on worriedly from a few meters away. And behind him, the Palace Guard, standing upright like a battered chrome statue. Not smug or righteous, not concerned for Conrad’s welfare. Just there.

“What was that all about?” Bascal asked him, sounding half worried and half amused.

“Difference of opinion,” Conrad answered vaguely, fighting not to swoon. He was tempted to play it up—to be melodramatic. Swoon, sure, and groan, and ask everyone what happened. All that stuff you usually did when you unexpectedly got hurt. But there was too damned much going on today—people had died—and frankly he was embarrassed to draw any attention at all, much less by picking a fight in front of strangers.

“What were you trying to do?”

“Nothing, Bas. I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“It was out of line. Won’t happen again.”

“All right,” the prince said, tentatively accepting that without quite understanding.

They helped him up, brushing the grass off him, and Xmary caught his eye and mouthed the words “Thank you.” He didn’t know how to respond, and in thinking about it he used up the opportunity.

“Is he all right?” Robert asked nervously. Seeing the Palace Guard in action again had shaken him. Maybe reminded him what a close brush he’d had himself—how lucky he was to have painfully blistered fingers instead of no fingers at all.

“He’s fine,” Bascal answered. “Just a mild tazzing. We’re not allowed to fight.”

A murmur went through the South Africans, and Conrad could hear some of the tension going out of them. What a clever thing for Bascal to say: turning an incident of double violence into an advertisement for their cherubic harmlessness. Never mind that killer robot, that kick to the head, that poisoned glare Ho was aiming in Conrad’s direction. Just boys having fun, eh?

“Oh. Huh. Well maybe we should continue the tour, yah?”

“I quite agree. Boys, behave yourselves.”

Obediently, Ho came forward and put a brotherly arm around Conrad’s shoulders.

“We’ll see, bloodfuck,” he murmured quietly, squeezing a little. “We’ll see when I catch you alone.”

“Or I catch you,” Conrad murmured back. “Or someone else does.” There was no bravado in the statement. Conrad couldn’t win a fair fight, but as he’d just demonstrated, he could launch a sneak attack as well as the next guy. Or defend himself at cost, sure, landing a punch or kick or wrench-to-the-knee that Ho would not soon forget. Really, Ho was going to pound the crap out of him either way, so it was in his best interest to pound as much out of Ho first as he physically, possibly could. By whatever means, fairly or un-. And the barge was big enough and empty enough that the opportunity wouldn’t be long in coming.

This message got through, too: Ho blinked and pulled his arm away, thinking it over. He’d made two enemies just now, and maybe more. In a foreign place. When he owed his life to their efforts.

“Be useful,” Conrad advised. And his words brought color to Ho Ng’s cheeks, and suddenly Conrad had the upper hand again, fight or no fight.

Score another point for rational thought.

The bridge turned out to be a surprisingly cramped little chamber, with pilot and nav/logistics stations on opposite sides: one chair facing up and the other facing down from above, skewed one meter to the side so the two operators’ heads wouldn’t collide. The arrangement made maximum possible use of a tiny space, but it seemed kind of crazy given the hugeness of the rest of the ship. Even the corridors were wider.

Conrad took this as a vote of confidence for the on-board hypercomputers. This was an automated barge, after all, and while it was clearly expected to need cleaning and tuning from time to time, it was apparently not expected to require human piloting. Maybe there was a regulation or something, stating that it had to be possible, so this token of a bridge was shoehorned in between the two much larger crew cabins.

The cabins themselves were no big deal—just a zero-gee sleep pallet and a toilet/shower enclosure, with a wardrobe, sink, and mirrored necessities cabinet. No fax, no wasted space, no program in the wellstone aside from lights and bare metal. D’rector Jed’s bathroom was more lavish. But Nell and Ander—the cabins’ two residents— had clearly made themselves at home; the walls were brightly decorated, one with waves and splatters of paint and the other with hundreds of printed 2-D and 3-D pictures—mostly landscapes with people in the foreground, mostly on Earth but a few from Mars and Venus, as well as some less identifiable locales. Rock tunnels? Space platforms?

Both rooms stank of dog, although the animals themselves were not in evidence.

The empty inventory, on the other hand, was rather a large room, with rather a large fax machine dominating its aft wall. “Some big equipment has to go through here,” Robert explained. “When this thing pulls into port they have to change out all the gases and fluids. The fittings are instantiated as needed. This is also where the crew transfers in and out, nominally, when the gate is working. And it’s the main medical facility as well.”

Bascal eyed the room and the fax and the doorway, nodding in satisfaction. “It’s great, yeah. No material restrictions? Other than legal limits, I mean?”

Robert shrugged. “None that we’ve ever encountered, no.”

“Little gods, I wish we’d’ve had one of these on Camp Friendly. Life would have been so much easier. How’s your buffer mass? Will you object if we cart away a few tons? Mostly silicon?”

A white grin brightened Robert’s blue face. “We’ve got eight hundred tons of buffer mass, Your Highness. With all that neutronium to push around, the engines aren’t going to notice an amount like that. Each neuble masses ten times the dry weight of the ship.”

Bascal looked both impressed and appalled. “Jesus. You must burn a lot of fuel pushing it around.”

“That’s so,” Robert agreed. “Loaded, we have to abandon the fusion drives for anything other than attitude control. Course changes are made by the antimatter drive, usually during squeezing operations.”

“Wow. Fuck. These barges should be ertially shielded.”

“Can’t,” Robert said. “First off, that’d be a lot more expensive than antimatter, especially since we need the antimatter anyway to compress the neubles. We get twice the work out of it. Efficient. Whereas ertial shielding for something this big would take, what, a million gigatons of collapsium? It’d take hundreds of years for this thing just to gather its own shield mass.”

“Or hundreds of barges,” the prince suggested, “to equip one superbarge, which you could push around with flashlights and fart gas. No inertia, no fuss.”

But Robert was shaking his head. “Still can’t, no. The bow of the ship has to be open, right? It’s a scoop. Put a collapsium cap over it and suddenly you can’t gather snow anymore.”

“So put it on the stern.”

“Then you can’t run the engines.”

“So use gravity hooks. Little gods, we’ve had inertialess grappleships for centuries.”

“Wouldn’t work,” Robert said. “For a lot of reasons. Maybe if there was infinite money you could set up a better system. But this one is practical, and self-sustaining. Been working since even before your father’s time, or he’d have never invented collapsium in the first place. Right? No Nescog. No Queendom.”

“Hmm.”

“How,” Conrad interrupted, “do you get the neutronium out?”

“At port? They use magnets; big ones. Like you smacked us with.”

“Oh.” Conrad took the hint. “Our braking system caused you some trouble, did it?”

“Banged the cargo out of alignment,” Money Izolo confirmed. “Gravity fluctuations and a hell of a loud noise. That Plasma discharge was something to see! There may be some structural damage as well, though we can’t get into the chamber to confirm it. We’d have to drain the working fluid, which would be challenging out here in Kuiper wilderness. If something is broken, we’ll know soon enough.”

“You sound just like a mass wrangler,” Conrad said.

Izolo shrugged. “We live here. The ship’s systems are our whole world.”

“I wasn’t making fun. You’ve probably spent more time at it than the real wranglers. Are you going to get jobs when all this is over?”

Izolo laughed. “I doubt it. Jail time, most likely.” “Does the barge have a name?”

“It has a registration number,” Robert said. “But we call it Refuge.”

“Refuge. Hmm. Catchy.”

Bascal was still studying the room, but now his eyes were looking back in the direction of the bridge, and flicking occasionally forward, toward the holds. “What happens in an emergency?” he asked. “Say you’ve got to change course in a hurry.”

Robert turned toward the prince, looking skeptical and suspicious. “We don’t have emergencies. Everything happens very deliberately here.”

“We didn’t,” the prince pointed out. “We came fast, out of the black.”

Robert clicked his tongue.

“Look,” Bascal said, in the utterly reasonable tone that told Conrad he was scheming madly inside. “I’m just asking. You can’t dump the cargo, right? Because it would just keep going, along the same vector that was carrying you toward trouble.”

“Dumping neubles into unassigned orbits is a serious offense,” Robert said. “Much worse than crashing a loaded barge. Neubles have to be accounted for, hunted down and retrieved. That costs money, and in the meantime the traffic hazard is enormous. If anything hits one ... There’ve only been two neutronium spills in the history of the Queendom—as of the time we left, anyway. But both of them involved massive damage and loss of life. Imagine a billion tons of matter going from this big”—he held his fingers a couple of centimeters apart— “to this big”—he swept his arms to indicate the neutronium barge as a whole—“in a couple of milliseconds. With all kinds of radiation spewing out.”

“Bad,” the prince said, nodding. “There’s no network gate to escape through. No abandoning ship. So what do you do?”

“We stay out of trouble,” Robert answered. He paused for an uncomfortable moment and then said, “Well, that’s pretty much the tour. Unless you want to see four more corridors exactly like the one you entered through?”

“Nah,” Bascal said. “We’ll figure the rest out as we go. Should we, uh, start moving ourselves into the inventory?”

“I suppose you should, yah. Here on Refuge, though, we’re overdue for breakfast. I thought perhaps you would like to join us.”

A: Whether Bascal is a “great” or even a “good” poet is hardly a fair question.

Q: But you’re a literature critic!

A: Nevertheless.

Q: Oh, don’t be tedious. We’re paying for this.

A: He’s certainly a precocious poet—I don’t think anyone would dispute that. And if he were to publish pseudonymously, it might be possible after the fact to decouple his position from his creations. Failing that, I make no claims to impartiality, and am skeptical of those who do.

Q: Do you like the poems?

A: Oh, absolutely! We all do. But that’s the point, right? We can’t help it.

—Critic Laureate Julia Aimes,

in a Q281 interview with FUSILIERS magazine