“Track it how?”
“With sensors. A radiometer or something. Ask a block of wellstone, boyo; we live in a programmable universe.”
“Uh-huh,” Conrad said skeptically. “And where do we get all this wellstone? Weave it out of beans and franks?”
Bascal punched him, not that lightly. “You’re the fucking building inspector. What’s underneath us, right now?”
“Grass,” Conrad said. “Dirt. Liquid neutronium in diamond shells, with probably a layer of rock in between.”
“And a point-one-mil sheet of wellstone,” Bascal added, stamping on the ground for emphasis. “Shovel-proof, about two meters down. Bet you a dollar it covers the whole planette, pole to pole. That’s, like, over a square kilometer of material. Just about perfect for a sail.”
They started back toward the cabins.
“You really are serious,” Conrad said again.
“Very. Are you in?”
He shrugged. “I guess so, yeah. What about space suits?”
“An arts-and-crafts project. Snip a corner off the sail, cut out some life-sized paper dolls, and seal them at the edges.”
“How long is all this going to take?”
“I dunno. Not long. I’m not sure about the actual ship, how we’re going to build it. What materials to use.”
Conrad laughed. “How about D’rector Jed’s cabin? It’s big enough, and God knows it’s the best furnished.”
“Hey,” Bascal agreed, laughing along with him, “that’s a great idea. We can just shrink-wrap the whole thing.”
Nothing on Camp Friendly was far away from anything else; from the orchards was only a minute or two to the Boys’ Cabins and the central offices. Almost as soon as they’d started, the two of them were there at the Piss Hall. Bascal threw the door open.
“Honey! I’m home!” The irony in his voice couldn’t conceal an undercurrent of genuine affection.
“Hi,” Xmary said, looking up from her carrot chopping. “What have you brought me? Peach pies? Over there.” She pointed with the knife.
“Yes’m,” Bascal said, his voice bubbling at the edge of giggles. The Palace Guard, with liquid-quick movements, flowed in behind him, briefly crowding Conrad out of the doorway. He tried not to take it personally; the machine simply would not let Bascal out of its sight, even for a moment. You didn’t get in the way of that, not if you were paying attention.
“Firewood here,” she added, pointing to a different surface, adjacent to the table she was working on. “You didn’t get pie filling on it, did you? That would be bad for the revolution.”
The revolution, ah. She said it in a joking way, but behind the light tone Conrad suspected a lurking seriousness. Shaking things up wasn’t a game to her, but some sort of weird social duty. Very solemn.
“Why are you here, again?” he prodded, hoping to get a rise out of her.
But her answer was straight enough. “Back home, I’ve got six more years of school before I can put my name in to be the assistant to somebody’s assistant. I used to make furniture as a hobby, and later on it was holiday decorations. But who needs handmade things? Who can even tell if they’re real or copied? There’s nothing to do back home, and there never will be. I feel so sorry for my other self back there.”
“Hey,” he told her, putting his hands up, “I’m just giving you a hard time. Trying to. I get enough politics in my diet.”
“Well, the hell with you, then,” she said, butting him hard with her hip. She resumed her chopping.
Early on in the week, Conrad had been certain that Xmary was going to get caught, that she was going to get all of them in even worse trouble. Smuggling a girl into an all-boys camp! But since she’d sneaked a copy of herself out of the house to visit Café 1551 in the first place, her parents didn’t know she was gone. In fact, she wasn’t gone; she was presumably still back there under their watchful eyes, attending summer school and sighing a lot.
And Feck somehow hadn’t tipped their hand, hadn’t gone to the Constabulary or home to his own parents and explained why he wasn’t at camp. And if the camp itself was under observation—which seemed likely—then it obviously wasn’t under the sort of really close observation that would reveal the presence of a female camper who was not Yinebeb Fecre. Bascal’s own Palace Guard clearly saw her standing there, but didn’t care. Hadn’t been asked to. This was not only hilarious, but also lent some credence to Bascal’s insistence that it really was possible, now and then, to put one over on the Queendom authorities.
Either that, or Xmary and the boys were being run like rats through a maze—a notion Bascal had mentioned but didn’t seem to believe. There would be too many variables to control, too many spontaneities to account for. If the authorities were that clever then there was no hope at all. So her presence here was an accident, abetted by her own weird sense of initiative.
There was, of course, the jealousy thing; Xmary was an arts-and-crafts project in her own right, pretty and sassy and with all sorts of surprising talents. Cooking, of all things, in this age of flash-and-bang! And you had to wonder what other talents came out, when she and Bascal shut themselves up in “their” cabin. It was a subject of riotous speculation when Bascal wasn’t around. Hell, Steve Grush had teased Xmary about it right to her blushing face.
“When’s dinner?” the prince asked.
“When I ring the bell, moron,” she fired back. “Just like yesterday and the day before. What are you, slow?”
“Well, I hope not. Conrad and I have a plan to get us off this egg.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Solar sail?”
“Yep. I’ll make the announcement tonight.” He sauntered up to the fax machine—a vertical, doorway-sized plate of gray-black material. The visible portion was the phantom-action lux generator, or something like that, tapping out waves that dreamed they were matter. It was the only intelligent device in the room, unless you counted the robot. “Fax, give me a bowl of taro curry, please. With coconut.”
“Disallowed,” the fax replied, in the loud, sexless tones of somebody trying to piss people off.
“Yeah? Fuck you. Give me a textbook on sailing.”
“Please specify the type of sailing,” the fax said.
Bascal shot a nodding smile back at Conrad—getting somewhere!—then said to the fax, “Solar sailing, you fucked-up piece of shit. I need it for arts and crafts.”
“My internal library contains four titles on solar sailing. Access to external libraries through the Nescog is disallowed.”
“Fine. I’ll take all four. And a map showing all known fax gates within ten AU of this planette.”
“Disallowed,” the fax replied, spitting four paper books into Bascal’s waiting arms.
“Ah. Then allow me to invoke royal override.”
“Disallowed. That function is reserved for the King and Queen of Sol.”
“Which I will never be. Fine, you anus, give me a map of known shipping and habitation.”
A rolled-up sheet of wellstone film tumbled out, missing Bascal’s arms and spilling to the floor.
“Thank you,” Bascal said.
“It pleases me to serve,” the device replied, without feeling.
“I know it, fax. I know it. And believe me, someday I’ll reward you for it.”
Ah, the creaky, breezy squalor of Young Men’s Cabin #2. Ah, the smell of intestinal gas, and the constant fear of pranking and punches, of hurled objects, of name-calling that hurt, truthfully, as much as sticks and stones ever could. Such was life after dark at Camp Friendly.