The Wellstone

Chapter eighteen. An outside chance

Whatever Utopia they were building here, it certainly wasn’t a naturalist one. Some of the foods were hand-picked from the garden: rich avocados and sweet melon tarts, onion grass and bamboo shoots. They even had a peach pie tree. This seemed to be more a matter of convenience and aesthetics than anything else, though— they liked having food plants around, and if the fruits weren’t harvested as they ripened, they would simply rot, or else sprout into additional, unwanted greenery. Eating them was easier.

But the sound baffle’s huge circular chamber had a fifty-meter-thick conduit running floor-to-ceiling through its center, and a maintenance panel on its capward side included a small fax machine, which in fact produced the bulk of this Refuge breakfast. There were cereals with milk, sausages with cheese, and other foods with no natural equivalent at all: sweetpapers and mulm, as well as the rich yellow paste they called “fressen.”

It was a bland but hearty breakfast, served in tiny glass dishes with metal forks and spoons, and the blue nudists gathered these small portions around them in great number. Everyone had a little bit of everything, it seemed, which added up to an awful lot of food.

“Tell me you don’t eat this much for lunch,” Bascal joked.

“Certainly no,” Robert answered seriously. “Breakfast is the energy meal.”

“A spread-out meal, too,” the prince observed.

They were all sitting around the gravity depressions, which turned out to be nice places to eat picnic-style, without any of the hassle of zero-gee dining. Wouldn’t have worked, Conrad suspected, if the dirt were thicker or softer or wetter than it was, or if there’d been bugs, or anything like that. But this place was more like a hydroponics lab than any sort of real garden. Even the dirt was, in some indefinable way, clean.

The Camp Friendlies sat together, with Robert and Money and Agnes, and a sour-faced Brenda, who looked ready to slap the food out of their hands and spit on it. Still, even twisted with anger, her azure features were anything but haggish. Conrad’s impulsive side kept yammering at him to touch, touch, touch these naked women. Karl and Ho, hard-up after weeks aboard Viridity, must be feeling the same; Conrad himself had only once found the privacy to jerk off, and it hadn’t been too terribly satisfying. But touching anyone here without the clearest invitation would likely provoke an incident, and touching Brenda in particular could result in the loss of a limb, or worse.

And what would Xmary think? Not that that should matter to him, but little gods, he wasn’t going to kid himself about it. The symptoms of heartsickness were less pressing here in these open spaces, with life and strangers all around, but the illness itself remained, like a shackle around his chest.

More TSA refugees sat together at the next depression, two hundred meters or so around the donut. It seemed very far away indeed, but not everyone fit there, so still another small crowd was clustered at the next one down. They were only barely visible: tiny figures sitting cross-legged in a cone of light, against a backdrop of dark weeds.

The dogs were here as well, gleefully loping through the air, slipping in and out of the gravity zones with tongues and tails wagging. They, at least, were not blue.

“Yah,” Robert agreed, “it does make a pretty diffuse cafeteria. But we don’t always eat in the same circles. We move around; we mix it up. The variety is nice.”

“What do you do with all these calories?” Xmary asked, picking at the greasy remains of her own breakfast. “You must get a lot of exercise.”

Agnes nodded slightly. “Some, yah. Twice-a-week calisthenics.”

“We had that,” Karl said. “We had it every day for an hour.”

“We used to,” Agnes said, wrinkling her nose. “But I like twice a week better. The ship and the garden keep us busy enough.”

Tucking away a final sausage, Bascal burped, excused himself politely, and asked, “The ship really takes care of itself, though, right?”

“Hardly,” Robert answered with a half-snort. “It isn’t meant for live-in crew, remember. Certainly not this many. Cleaning up after ourselves is a major chore. And you’d be surprised how many things corrode or break or come loose during normal operation, and how little of that shows up in the maintenance logs the shipping company would see. Even with regular inspections and crew rotations, it’s got to add up. When these things pull into port, lugging fifty or a hundred neubles in their groaning bellies, they must be a real shambles. I can only imagine the situation a hundred years from now.”

“Why?” Bascal said. “What happens a hundred years from now?”

“The lower Kuiper gets depleted. We’ve already wrangled a third of it. You see, the Nescog uses lots of collapsium, and the mass has to come from somewhere. Finite supply. Next century, the barges will be trolling in the higher bands, where the distances are greater and comet density is lower. Consequently, missions will be longer and more difficult to support.”

“Oh. I see.” Bascal nodded. “You know, if it helps, we saw a couple of big icebergs on our way down. Near-contact binary, maybe a hundred kilometers each. That’s got to be, what, a few thousand neubles’ worth?”

“At least,” Robert said, nodding. “You’re probably talking about the Cyades, which are a landmark in this part of the belt. If so, it’s more like half a million neubles. So thank you for the tip, but of course we can’t swallow mass in such big chunks. Our orbit crosses the Cyades in about five years, and we’ll do the same thing everyone else does when they pass it: fire the laser a few times to knock off a gigaton of snow. One free neuble, maybe two, for our trouble. Eventually Mass Industries will send an engineering team to blow the thing up, and park a fleet of crushers right there on the site.”

Bascal snorted. “Some way to treat a landmark. Not very sentimental, eh?”

“No,” Robert agreed. “They can’t afford to be. The Queendom’s appetite is perhaps not bottomless, but certainly no one has found the bottom of it yet.”

Here was an issue Conrad had never thought about— he’d always heard the Kuiper’s resources described as “limitless.” But of course, in reality nothing ever was. He’d also thought, naïvely, that all this time they were sailing across a vast, empty wilderness. Were they really just sneaking through a construction site? Could all their trials and tribulations really boil down to something as banal as that?

No, he decided, they could not. As an act of will, he stated it to himself axiomatically: the drama of their journey was inherent in the journey itself, and could not be divided or diminished. The alternative—that they were wasting their time—implied that their individual and collective actions had no meaning, and perhaps never would. And if he believed that, then why do anything at all?

“What happens when the higher bands are depleted?” he asked pointedly.

Money Izolo nodded with approval. “Yah, it’s going to be a real concern. At present growth rates we see maybe a thousand years of Kuiper left to harvest. After that, it’s up to the Oort Cloud for another few thousand, but that’s a lot farther away. We may need ertial shielding on the barges just to make the journey economical. Either that, or a lot more barges.”

“Or less demand for neutronium,” Conrad said.

“Or that, yah. And after the Oort is gone, it’s the comets and wanderers and failed stars of near interstellar space, where the economics get even thinner. I think about this a lot. We’re immortal, right?”

“Immorbid,” Bascal corrected apologetically. “We can die.”

“But we can’t be unhealthy,” Izolo said, grasping the meaning of the term. “All right, but we will live to see these things, yah? The empty Kuiper, the vanished Oort. And then what?”

Nobody had an answer for him.

“This is good food,” Xmary thought to say. “If perhaps a bit heavy.”

“Oh, gods yeah,” Karl agreed. “Much better than that crap we had on the ship. Thank you.”

“That reminds me!” Bascal said. “Our fax machine survived the crash. A bit worse for wear, I’m sure, but if it’s still out there in the wreckage, we should probably go retrieve it at some point. Even a battered, restricted fax is better than none.”

“For the journey onwards?” Robert asked. “You’ve decided to leave, then?”

Bascal looked around at his crew. “We haven’t decided anything. We haven’t had a chance to talk, or even shower. I’m just thinking ahead. We certainly don’t want to let good equipment go to waste.”

“No,” Robert agreed. Among the handful of things a fax machine couldn’t produce were neutronium, collapsium, antimatter, or any product or component bigger than itself. The list even included that most commonplace of objects: the print plate of another fax machine. In a Queendom of plenty, these were hard-currency items, not lightly cast away. “But those little plastic space suits you came in are frightful. And you didn’t use lines? Or safety clips? Dangerous.”

“We know,” Bascal said. “We lost a man on the way in.”

“You did? Jesus and the little gods. I’m sorry. Can you send your robot out?”

“This thing? This Palace Guard? It won’t leave my side. Ever, as long as I live.”

Except that it had, just this morning, to save the lives of Bascal’s remaining shipmates. Conrad’s mind kept returning to that small miracle, mulling it over, scanning it for meaning. He was not a big believer in luck, but what did that leave? The god of lightsails?

“What about Martin?” he said. “There should still be a fresh image of him in the machine, minus only the death by suffocation. We should get him out of there while we still can. From what I saw, there’s not much holding it down. If it drifts away, we’re going to lose him again.”

“Oh. Good point.” Xmary groaned. “I hate to say it—I really hate to say it—but we need to go back out there. Now.”

Gaping, Robert shook his head. “You? Jesus, no. You stay here, my fellows. Inside. Money and I—all of us here—we’re experienced in this sort of vacuum work. We’ll equip up at the inventory and mount a proper retrieval. Bring your fax machine back in one piece.”

“Well, thank you,” Bascal said. “That’s very kind.”

“No, not at all.” Robert’s grin was uneasy. “You’re the prince, yah? I ask you, truly, how’s it going to look if we get you killed?”

An hour later, five of the men and two of the women had assembled at the inventory, and were quickly surrounding themselves with an astonishing assortment of gear. Space suits and ropes and harnesses, yes, but also strap-on tool kits, emergency tents and rescue bubbles, leak patch compound, wellstone sketchplates ... Gravity was much lower here, so while the stuff drifted slowly fore, toward the neubles and the swallowed comet, it did so more slowly than the new stuff was being added. So it formed heaps and piles, right there in midair.

“How long are you planning to be out?” Karl asked them wonderingly.

“Forty minutes exactly,” Money Izolo answered. “The limit of our fine-LIDAR scan.”

“The radar scan reaches farther,” Robert explained, “but it’s not so good at spotting fine particles, not unless they’re in fairly substantial clouds. LIDAR uses a violet beam—very good resolution. By definition, we’re in a high-density band—that’s where you go to gather snow— but at two kips, the right kind of snowflake can knock a man right off the hull. Or worse.”

“Such foresight,” Bascal marveled. “Such prudence.” Conrad couldn’t tell if that was a sneer or a compliment, or maybe both.

With a flicker of self-consciousness, Robert looked around at the tangles of equipment, then back at Karl and Conrad and Bascal. “I guess it does seem excessive. But a lot can happen out there, as you’ve seen. We go prepared, with plans and fallbacks and emergency scripts. We’ve never lost anyone, and God with us we never will. That reminds me: everybody store a fresh copy, or your blue ass is going nowhere.”

What a shame, Conrad thought, if all this youthful vigor—this viridity—goes to jail and idleness instead of to industry. What “genuine” mass wrangler ever worked so hard? So enthusiastically? Their jobs consisted of day trips, or couple-of-day trips, from their cushy, ordinary Queendom homes.

Robert waved a sketchplate, a schematic diagram of the barge’s fat cylinder, with the rumpled sail and shattered cabin marked against its surface with yellow lines, and a red asterisk pinpointing the site of the fax machine itself.

“We’ll egress from the same lock you folks entered through. It’s the closest, although the wreckage of your sail presents some problems. You cut through it on your way in, yah? The images confirm this, but it looks like there might still be some difficulty bringing equipment through.”

“I’m carrying five kinds of cutters,” Money Izolo said.

“Good. We’ll assemble in the lock, and you and I will be first out. Anyone object?”

There were some shrugs and murmurs, but no commentary, no objection. These blue people liked and trusted their Robert, and would happily do his nonbidding.

He looked at Bascal. “There is room on the bridge if you’d like to observe. The suits broadcast a holie signal for safety purposes.”

“Oh, yeah,” the prince agreed at once. “This I’ve got to see.”

Robert latched his tool belt and bandoliers, and finally snapped his helmet dome into place. The space suits were thick, heavy garments of gray-white wellstone and woven nanomachinery, vaguely reminiscent of the early-Queendom battle armor His Majesty had worn during the Fall, and was still frequently pictured in. They had a certain nobility about them.

“There’s room for two,” Robert’s voice said, through wellstone speakers. “I wouldn’t recommend fitting any more than that.”

“And I wouldn’t dream,” Bascal said with a bow, “of doing anything you didn’t recommend. You look quite dashing, by the way. Conrad, will you join me? Karl, join the others at the sound baffle?”

“Um, sure,” Conrad said.

Karl grumbled less agreeably, though, and Conrad didn’t blame him for it. Helping out with the breakfast cleanup sounded a lot less interesting than watching these amateur mass wranglers in action.

With the clank of equipment and the rustle of fabrics against the corridor walls, the Refugees launched themselves foreward, toward the baffle and the hold and the airlocks. Karl trailed sullenly behind them, and turned off to one side just as they were rounding the corner out of sight.

“Interesting bunch of people,” the prince observed.

Conrad nodded. “Very.”

Together they drifted to the bridge, entered, and socketed themselves into the seats like puzzle pieces snapping into place. In front of them was a holie screen, which Bascal addressed. “Display Robert M’chunu’s video signal, please.”

Obediently, the screen showed them a corridor scene, jumping and jostling, the view apparently from a sensor in the wellstone of Robert’s helmet dome. The Refugees were at the inner airlock, and presently its door whooshed open in that too-fast way it had. At first Conrad thought there was no audio in the signal, but as the space-suited figures glided one by one into the airlock, Robert’s voice called out crisply, “Secure handholds and prepare for hatch closure.”

And then Agnes’ voice: “Atmospheric pressure nominal. The bleed valve lights are green.”

And then Robert again: “Acknowledged, bleed valves green.”

And then they were silent again, although now that he was listening for it Conrad could make out the sound of Robert’s breathing over the hum and hiss of the bridge equipment itself.

The operation was interesting to watch: everything happened slowly and with crisp precision, yet none of the spacewalkers were idle for long. Once the lock was depressurized and the outer hatch opened, they began clearing away sections of sailcloth, and setting up tripods in little depressions around the lock which appeared to exist there for exactly this purpose. And then pulleys were attached to the tripods, and cables to the pulleys, and hooks and carabiners to the cables.

Then Robert and Money were standing guard at the airlock’s lip, held down against it by magnets in their boots, while the others carefully rappelled along the hull, in the direction of Viridity’s remains, ignoring the handholds Conrad and the others had used. He supposed those were only for the most desperate of emergencies, of which there were no doubt very few. Still, it took the Refugees longer to reach the cabin than it had taken the Camp Friendlies to reach the airlock from it. When they got there, they began attaching still more cables to it, and clearing away more of the sail, and attaching more tripods to the hull, until the whole area began to look like the inside of a grand piano.

And yet, despite these fascinations, the process was deliberate and methodical enough to be boring at the same time. Conrad found himself glancing at the scene rather than staring—his mind dividing it up into a series of still images, a few every minute. Meanwhile, his attention wandered, taking in the walls and the floor and the ceiling, the bridge controls, the wellstone edges of the holie screen itself. This cramped little bridge was an interesting exercise in its own right, with hardly a millimeter wasted anywhere.

“Hey, look,” he said at one point, eyeing the control panel in front of him. “There is a button to dump the neutronium.”

Bascal rubbed his nose. “You noticed that, eh? You knew there had to be one. Robert can talk all he wants about the barge being less valuable than the cargo, being essentially a protective cocoon for it, but this is a semi-crewed vessel, and certain safety concessions have got to be made. There’s also a self-destruct and a cargo-destruct, although they look complicated to operate.”

“Why would they need a self-destruct?”

“I dunno. Loss of helm control, on a direct course for a population center? Fully loaded, these barges are bringing in a hundred gigatons; that’s a tenth of a good-sized planette. Imagine dropping that in the middle of the Irish Sea.”

“Hmm. I suppose.”

On the screen, the Refugees were assembling some kind of sled, with pulleys of its own that hooked onto the cables linking cabin and airlock.

“Of course, if that were going to happen the navy would just vaporize the barge with a nasen beam, releasing all that mass-energy as far from humanity as possible. But having to would not amuse them.”

“I don’t think they amuse easily,” Conrad said.

Bascal seemed to find that funny.

And then, on the holie screen, the space-suited figures were packing it in: stowing equipment on their belts and backs, and slowly rappelling back in the direction of the airlock again.

“They didn’t get it,” the prince said, sounding surprised.

Conrad checked a chronometer. “Their forty minutes are up.”

“They should let us work the LIDAR for them. If we get a clean scan, they can stay out longer.”

“I’ll bet there’s some reason they won’t do things that way. Otherwise they’d’ve stationed one of their own people in here to do exactly that, right?”

Bascal didn’t reply, just watched the screen as the spacewalkers climbed back into the airlock again, and reentered the barge.

“You didn’t get it,” he said to Robert, when the mob of them arrived in the corridor outside the bridge.

Robert’s helmet was under his arm. He looked content enough, and smiled at the prince. “We weren’t trying to. We can’t fit all that into one space walk, not safely. That was just our setup run.”

“I see. So what happens now?”

“Now we take a LIDAR scan, pick up some more equipment, and go back out again.”

“Because you don’t have enough equipment out there already.”

“Right,” Robert said, unfazed by the irony. “Oh, before I forget.” He dug a gauntleted hand into a pouch on his belt, and pulled out a carefully folded square of wellstone film, several dozen layers thick. “A little souvenir from your journey.”

“Oh. Thanks,” Bascal said, sounding pleasantly surprised as he accepted the gift. “This is from the sail?”

“Yah. I thought you might want some. We’re trying to minimize the damage, in case you still need it for something, but these pieces had to come out.”

“You’re very thoughtful,” the prince commended.

“Funny, that’s not what the prudes back in TSA used to say.”

The second space walk was, if anything, even slower and more methodical than the first, although there was slightly more talking as the work progressed into areas outside the routine. The Refugees found it necessary to slice away large pieces of D’rector Jed’s shattered cabin, and to carry them around to the fore end of the barge for disposal in the great, all-consuming maw of the mass crusher. Luckily, there wasn’t a snowball storm while they did this, although—of course—there was no luck involved. These people knew the location and course of every snowflake within five million kilometers!

It occurred to Conrad that Martin’s lifeless body, along with the missing Palace Guard, must be among those cataloged objects. In the hours since the crash, they probably hadn’t drifted far. For all he knew, the guard might still be alive, an angry monster adrift in the nothingness, struggling in vain to return to its prince. Or maybe it had swept in front of the barge and been eaten.

“If we have to dispose of any evidence,” Bascal noted, obviously thinking along similar lines, “that crusher would be the place. Neutronium tells no tales, and preserves no information about the atoms and molecules which formed it.”

“Great,” Conrad said, just loving the sound of that. The Poet Prince was drinking in every sight and sound, every datum, every stray thought anyone had given voice to. He was scheming, and the gist of it was already unsavory.

And then, once again, the spacewalkers were stowing their gear and climbing back inside.

“They still didn’t get it,” Bascal grumbled. Then later, to Robert: “You people are awfully patient.”

Money Izolo smiled at that. “We got time, Your Majesty. The machine is secure, and as far as we can tell your boy is safe in there. So we got nothing but time.”

Fortunately, the third space walk hit pay dirt almost immediately, as Viridity’s fax machine was winched aboard the little sled, webbed and strapped in place, and transported without further fuss to the airlock. After that it was just the anticlimactic—ha!—disassembly of all the cables and pulleys and trusses and tripods, which for some reason went much faster than their setup had.

And then Robert’s jolly crew were carting their prize through the hallways on a complicated sort of hand truck, and soon enough they were back at the inventory again, grinning and thumping each other, and tossing heaps of equipment back into the fax machine.

“Well done,” Bascal told them sincerely. “Very, painfully well done. You’re an example to us all.”

And then, while the Refugees got naked again and chatted about their various adventures outside, Bascal took Conrad by the elbow and led him back into the corridor, stopping halfway between the inventory and the bridge.

Conrad groaned inwardly. Conspiracy time. “What is it?” he asked.

“I have a plan.”

Wearily: “I know you do, Bascal. But for crying out loud, why don’t you just ask these people for help? They might give it. If you trick them or force their hand, and something goes wrong ...”

“Yes?” Bascal was annoyed again, impatient.

“Why do I talk to you, Bas? Never mind. Let’s hear it.”

“Thank you so much, me boyo. Just out of curiosity, if I really do get us back to Denver, against all odds, against all hope ... If I do that, will you bow down to me as your monarch?”

Conrad sighed. “It isn’t the deed, Bas, it’s the means. If you can do great things without losing your honor, that’s when I’ll bow. I’ll stand on my head if you do that.”

“I see. Hmm. So you, a paver’s boy from County Cork, are giving me advice on how to behave nobly. Is that it?”

Conrad thought for a moment before answering, “Absolutely. It’s my right as a citizen. Your job as monarch is to fulfill my expectations, however unreasonable. These people seem to have their shit together. Why can’t we?”

“Ah.” Despite his impatience, Bascal actually smiled at that. Actually seemed interested, even maybe a little bit grateful, for the observation. “Promise me you’ll never change, Conrad.”

“I will change,” Conrad answered. “That’s the whole idea. That’s the very right we’re fighting for.”

“Oh, so now we’re fighting again? How curious. Does that mean you’re ready to hear my plan?”

“Sure. Enlighten me.”

“I’m thinking we rebuild Viridity, then dump this vessel’s neutronium overboard. We hide behind a rigidized sail, right? Then go back into fax storage and detonate a neuble. The energy release will be huge . It could push us back into Queendom space in just a few months.”

Conrad sighed. “Bascal, you’re crazy. I mean crazy. Never mind the danger—to these people as much as ourselves—or the legal ramifications. Think of the cost. Even your splendid allowance doesn’t cover these kind of big-ticket items. Does it?”

“It doesn’t need to,” the prince said, his eyes sparkling merrily.

But at that very moment, there was a sound from the bridge: a shrill, insistent pinging.

Bascal stiffened. “Proximity alarm. Shit. Something’s approaching from the stern. Probably stealthed, or the scans would’ve—”

Then came a huge, hollow groaning noise from one end of the barge to the other. And its walls shimmered for an instant, and then laid themselves out in a series of broad metal traces against a green-white insulative background. Something was reprogramming all the wellstone, making connections through it, tracing out the Queendom’s largest circuit board. Then the barge groaned again, and Conrad heard clanking noises from far away, as if something very large were attaching itself very firmly to the barge’s other end.

They were back on the network.

And then the fax machine in the inventory gave off a sizzle and a flash, moments before a swarm of armored, black-and-bronze SWAT robots began pouring out of it— literally pouring like a fluid, rolling and swirling through the inventory chamber and the corridor beyond it, flowing onward and outward to fill the human spaces of the ship. An army of beetle-black, statue-bronze man-things, overwhelming in number, built up from the eight hundred tons of base matter in the ship’s mass buffers. Faxborn for this very moment, this very instance, this very fight.

One of the bronze troopers restrained Conrad, grabbing him gently but firmly by the wrist and ankles. Another pair grabbed Bascal, and a struggling, space-suited Robert M’chunu drifted by with three of them attached, swarming and grabbing at his arms and legs.

“Please remain calm,” said a high, mechanical voice in Conrad’s ear. “By authority of the Queen’s Navy and the Royal Constabulary, you are under arrest on suspicion of vandalism, hijack, and space piracy. You have the right to consult with an attorney. You have the right to be interrogated by disposable copies. As a minor, you do not have the right to commit suicide without entering a plea, but you do have the right to blame your parents. Do you understand these rights?”

“Fucking finally,” Conrad snarled at the robot that held him. “Thank you, you’re welcome, and Jesus H. Bloodfuck. What took you guys so long?”