In any case, the prince had had to institute emergency mandatory agricultural duties—four hours a day for all campers, himself included. It was a daily calamity for the geese on Adventure Lake, who bore the brunt of the prior eight weeks’ archery practice. Also for the potatoes and carrots and cabbages in the hobby farm, which were being eaten much faster than they could grow back. Well, fuck it. The boys weren’t here forever, and they had never agreed to be responsible stewards.
But veggies and slop, raw goose and candy did not a dinner make. So here the two of them were, picking fresh pies for dessert up in the high branches of a peach pie tree, and also gathering deadwood for the fire. A ways down the row of trees, Ho and Steve were doing the same, and off in the northern part of the orchard another four or six other boys could be heard singing the Fuck You Song while they gathered apples and pecans. It was hard work, reaching the good pies, so Conrad really wished they hadn’t spent the early summer having nightly pie fights. Putting the orchards next to the Young Men’s Cabins was a highly stupid idea in that regard.
“I mean it,” Bascal said. “The toil of a troublous voyage, the bitter wind at our backs.” He reached his hand up toward the sky, grasping at its indigo blankness— much darker than Earth’s—as if he could pick that too, and carry it home in his bucket. “We’re so close. Even a tall ladder would get us out of this atmosphere.”
“Yeah?” Conrad growled. “A two-hundred-meter ladder. Then what?” His voice was satisfyingly deep—one of the few clear benefits of life on Camp Friendly. The air was full of xenon, some really heavy gas to hold the atmosphere down or something, and it was almost the exact opposite of breathing helium. Everyone here sounded grown-up and serious, with the bigger kids actually sounding like crooners and senators, or barrel-chested lumberjacks from that old American TV drama.
“Then a spaceship,” Bascal said with a shrug. “You think we couldn’t build one? All it has to do is hold air long enough to get us someplace with a working fax.”
“Which is probably a long, long way. What about propulsion?”
Bascal shook the branch beneath them. “Are you doubting me, punk?” He grinned. “We build a sail. Just a big, rigid sheet of wellstone film, superreflective on one side and superabsorptive on the other. Haven’t you ever been solar sailing?”
Conrad snorted. “Or owned my own island? No, Bas, we’re not all children of unimaginable privilege.”
The branch shook again, harder, and Bascal’s expression was less amused. “I’ll break this if you’re not careful.” He was on the trunk side, with Conrad out flapping in the breeze.
“All right, all right,” Conrad said, climbing down to a lower branch, worried about losing his balance and falling on something vital. The peach pie tree was only four meters high, but it was twisty, offering lots of opportunities to bang or snag yourself on the way down. And he couldn’t fight back, with a Palace Guard right down there at the tree’s base, watching for even the slightest threat against the pilinisi. “Solar sail, fine.”
“Fetu’ula, actually. Stellar sail.”
“Whatever. Does it steer anything like a bulldozer?”
“I don’t know,” Bascal said. “Who drives a bulldozer? You?”
“Well, yeah. Many times.”
“Sitting in Daddy’s lap?” The prince sneered goodnaturedly.
Conrad shrugged. As County Paver, Donald Mursk supervised the maintenance of quaint country roads, and had free use of all sorts of infernal machines. It was a shame to give Bascal the satisfaction of being exactly right, but Conrad was surprised and pleased just the same, to find something he himself had done which the Pilinisi Sola had not. “Haven’t you?” he sneered back, eager to rub in his petty victory. But Bascal just started shaking the tree again.
“Okay! Cut it out! What about life support?”
“Steal the fax machine out of the Piss Hall,” Bascal said. “If we’re short on oxygen, it should crank some out automatically. Along with fresh water and slop.”
Mess Hall, he meant. After the indignity of being returned here, the first thing they’d done was repaint all the signs, giving each building and landmark a proper name for the occasion. “It’s an arts-and-crafts project,” Bascal had told the Palace Guards, when they’d studied the action and looked like they might intervene. And that explanation had seemed to satisfy them. Even more so than most robots, Palace Guards were enormously intelligent and perceptive. But they weren’t human, and didn’t care about things unless specifically instructed to.
Initially, the robots had tried to impose all sorts of structured activities on the boys. Canoeing, basket weaving, group sing-along ... They were like caricatures of the real counselors, interchangeable and blank-faced, devoid of vocal inflection and bristling with the potential for violence. But it turned out they had no programming to enforce these edicts; if you told them to fuck themselves, they’d just stand there unconcerned while you went about your business.
“Okay,” Conrad allowed, finally getting into the spirit of it. “There isn’t a single spot on this planette I haven’t seen at least twice. I’m all in favor of fresh scenery. So we throw some wet dirt in a hold somewhere, as a mass buffer for the fax. That works. What about energy?”
“Capacitors,” Bascal answered. “That’s what a real sailboat uses anyway. Wellstone panels to absorb energy— mainly from the sun—and capacitors to store it.”
“You know how to make a capacitor?”
Bascal laughed. “Ask a block of wellstone, boyo. You do think too much.”
“All right, whatever,” Conrad conceded. “Are we done here?” He was still climbing down, swinging and twisting a little on every branch just for fun, though being careful not to spill his bucket. The boys would not look kindly on squooshed pies, and they had their ways of letting you know.
“Done enough,” Bascal said with a shrug. He started down himself.
“So you’re actually serious about this.”
“You bet. Dead serious. Our elders need to understand they have zero ability to push us around.”
Conrad reached the ground, glanced briefly at the mirrored skin of the Palace Guard, and then set about rearranging the contents of his bucket, making sure the kindling wasn’t crushing the pies, that the pies weren’t splitting their bready coats and dripping on the kindling. Later on, he’d light the fire with his bow drill and some dried grass, just like Rock Dengle had taught him. He loved lighting the fire, and tending it, feeding in larger and larger sticks until finally it was hot enough to stew a goose. Actually tending the cooking pot was a duty Xmary had taken for herself, for what she called “Neolithic reasons.” I.e., she didn’t trust the boys to do a good job of it, and probably also wanted to make sure nobody spat in it or anything.
“What about navigation?”
Bascal hopped down beside him. “You’re speaking to a Tongan, boyo. Greatest navigators who ever lived.”
“Your father’s European.”
“Catalan Spaniard,” Bascal said. “Another great mariner race. My father invented the ertially shielded grappleship, and sailed the first one alone for over thirty AU. I think there were two of him on board, actually, but still.”
“You know what I mean, Bas. Where do we go, and how?”
Smiling, the prince made a gesture of mock humility. “I’ve sailed alone, with no electronics, from Tongatapu to Eua on a moonless night. For that matter, I’ve sailed from LEO to Luna on a Tongaless night. Steering is easy—you just adjust the transparency of the sail. A mirror here means a push there, and vice versa. Easy as cream custard. As far as where to steer, these days there’s a lot of shipping in Kuiper space. We should be able to track the emissions of a neutronium barge or something. Unmanned, or manned only part-time.”