Colin said, "And how about you, robot-man? What have you been doing all day, Victor?"
Vanity said, "I saw him. He was napping."
Victor smiled, an event I no longer thought of as rare. "Not quite. I went up to their business call center here on ship. They have mechanisms for allowing computer uplinks through satellite systems to ashore-based stations. So that businessmen can send electronic mail, I suppose, or encrypted phone calls. I studied the wave-forms and the 'handshake' procedure, till I thought I could imitate it just with the neurocircuitry in my head."
Colin said, "Oh my God! Victor was surfing the Net! He was downloading porn! Go, Victor!"
Victor said, "Not quite. I did not have an account. I only had limited access. But there were still other channels of radio traffic being used by the satellites, and my signals were traveling faster than the pulses they use to talk to each other, so I was able to dither them and break in. I was listening in on military satellites talking to each other."
I said, "What do you mean, faster?"
"Their broadcasts were only moving at 186,000 miles per second. I simply added more velocity to my return signals."
I said, "But nothing moves faster than that."
"Of course it does. Light is only made of atoms, like everything else. Little hard pellets. Any object, no matter how fast, if you add speed, moves faster. I do not know why they all limited themselves to that one speed. It allowed me to intercept their lock-and-key signals, so I could hear what password they wanted me to give back before they could call down to their synchronous command center to get confirmation."
Colin saw I was about to start arguing physics, and he waved his hand to me to shush me up, saying to Victor, "You believed in your ability to break in more firmly than they believed in your ability to keep you out. What did you find out?"
"Branshead estate does not exist. I saw reconnaissance photographs, and examined electronic maps.
Everything is mapped on this planet, down to the meter. There is no village called Abertwyi. There is a town called Rhossily in about the position our village is supposed to be. But there are no huge burial mounds to the north, no tall hills to the west, no forest to the south. Arthur's Table is in a place called Tefn Mawr, which is about fifteen miles away. The highways are there, but in the wrong positions. There is an Oxwich Green, a Swansea, and a Bristol, however."
Colin looked very smug and leaned back in his seat, and said, "I am the only one who has a right not to be surprised by the news. Didn't I always say the Earth we were learning about was not the Earth on which the estate stood? And I knew that a village with a dumb name like Abertwyi was something made up by Boggin. And I bet he let Mr. Glum make up that dumb island called Worm's Head. That cannot be a real name."
Victor said, "Worm's Head is real."
Quentin said, "It is the skull of the dragon whose spine forms the land throughout the peninsula." Then he muttered to himself. "I wonder on what world I stood when I opened the old mound at midnight? Or what king he was, who rose up before me, pale and glimmering in the moon?"
3,
I made a new discovery on the third day; there was a place to rent something like a roller skate, but the wheels were lined up in a line, like the blade of an ice skate, and the whole affair was encased in this huge plastic boot with snaps and clasps going halfway up one's thigh. Helmets and elbow pads and knee pads and thick gloves completed the kit, so the skater looked like some crazed warrior who had thrown away his breastplate, but kept his gauntlets and greaves.
There were only certain places and times where one was supposed to skate. Being released from so many arbitrary rules in my life, and not being Colin, I obeyed the traffic laws and stayed on the track and certain areas of deck set aside for this sport.
It was my turn to buddy up with Victor that day. I provoked him into racing me on skates. I won the first lap, but he figured out an energy-conserving glide step to use, and he had more mass to throw into the sharp turns. Awkward at first, he mastered the skill with effortless grace, as he did every thing he put his mind to.
Afterwards, over lemonade, I brought up a topic that had been gnawing at me.
I began with an apology. He just looked puzzled. We sat at a small cafe table, which was set along a balcony overlooking the indoor swimming pool (or "the great lake" as it should have been called). Sharp echoes reflected from the roof. Below us, there were sedate old men and women moving with timid pleasure through the water.
Victor had a towel around his neck, and he glowed from the sweat of our skate-race. A thin shirt of skintight stuff showed off the sculpted planes of his shoulders and chest. He was muscled like a swimmer, built for streamlined endurance, not for bulk. Yellow sunlight slanted through polarized windows and gave his contours a hard look, as if he were a statue of cast gold, or fine copper, machine-lathed to a perfect shape and hand-polished.
I said, "I'll never question your leadership again. If it hadn't been for me—"
He said, "Is this about the thing on the dock? Glum's attack?"
"If we had all gotten in a circle like you said, he would not have been able to carry off both me and Vanity. If he had only gotten one of us, you could have stopped him. I saw him turn visible when you demagnetized the ring of Gyges…"
"I'd like to point out that you are merely speculating about might-have-beens. Were we in a circle with our backs to the spot where he smashed up through the boards. It might have gone better or worse if you had been closer; I don't see that your conclusion is at all clear."
"If we had all been in the boat as I said, he would have capsized us and maybe killed us all."
"Possibly. On the other hand, we don't know what his swimming speed was. Again, you are speculating.
Since the situation is unlikely to rise again, the speculation does not seem to be one to lead to a provable theory one way or the other. Is there some experiment you can think of that would settle the question as to whether things would have gone better or worse had we acted otherwise?"
"Quentin was right, and I should have listened to him! I should not have been arguing with the leader!"
"I am not sure, legally, I was the leader at that moment in time. We attempted to settle the question of leadership by vote, and came to a tie. As far as that goes, everything was done by proper Robert's rules.
My only criticism against you is that you resigned leadership before an unambiguous next leader was chosen." He looked thoughtful, saying, half to himself, "Although, since you had appointed me second-in-command previously, I do not know if resigning your commission would have elevated me to leader or would have acted as my resignation, as well…"
I broke in on his ruminations: "You are our leader! Our chief. Only you; you always have been. There was no ambiguity."
He smiled and sipped his lemonade. "Amelia, when we were young, you and I had to be the ones leading the others, just because we were older. We had the self-control they lacked; we knew things they didn't.
I don't think those conditions obtain anymore. If anyone, Quentin is the natural leader at this point; the information in his book is giving him insights the rest of us don't have. I have made several suggestions as to how to defend ourselves against the next attack, which we have reason to believe will be a lethal one.
Mostly, I have been ignored." His eyes twinkled, and he threw back his head to drain the sour and sweet dregs of the lemonade.
He stood, as if preparing to have us depart. I put my hand out and took his hand. It was still warm and sweat-touched by the exertion of skating.
I said, "Wait. There's something I want to ask you."
He looked down at me, his gaze level and patient.