“This stuff comes out of the factory with a few terabytes of programming built in,” he noted over his shoulder, for the edification of Ng and Conrad and Peter, and the three labor-pool boys who’d actually dug this hole.
Once the interface was there, he tapped at its buttons—bright squares of glowing color printed against the gray-black of the wellstone itself. And he read symbols from its screen, and he cursed at it a few times.
“No language parser,” he said. “No intelligence. It doesn’t know what I want.”
Conrad stooped until his hands were on the rim of the hole. The ground was soft and loamy, vaguely wet. He swung his legs out and hopped down. The hole was slightly deeper than he was tall, and narrow for two people to crouch in, although he crouched anyway. “What’s it saying?”
“I don’t know. Something about static coefficients. It goes by fast and disappears.”
“What are you trying to do?”
“Make it slippery,” Bascal said, still tapping lettered keys. “A couple of tacky areas for handholds, and the rest very, very slippery.”
“Ah.”
He watched Bascal fiddle with it for a few minutes, then started making suggestions. “Here,” Bascal said finally, edging out of the way to the extent that the dirt wall around them permitted. “You do it.”
Conrad had never used a manual interface like this one, but grasped the principle well enough. He entered F-R-I-C-T-I-O-N, and then hit the SEARCH key as he’d seen Bascal do. And when the resulting text—in fat yellow letters—rolled up past the top of the display window, he poked and prodded at the window until he’d managed to resize it, and to make the letters smaller so he could read more than twelve at a time.
“We can turn it to gold,” he said helpfully, as the menu options presented themselves. “We can turn it to impervium. Those are pretty slippery.”
“Not nearly enough,” Bascal said. “Anyway, they’re elements—we want compounds. There should be a way to just specify the friction, and let the other parameters optimize.”
It went on like that for a while, but eventually they got it. And when they got it there was no question at all, because their hands and knees went out from under them and they fell together in a pile, screaming with laughter and bouncing back and forth against the walls, which rained dirt down on them.
“Make a sticky patch!” Bascal shouted. “Make a sticky patch right here!”
“You’re on my hand,” Conrad shot back, through fresh peals of laughter. He tried tapping at the keys with the fingers of his left hand, as he skittered over and over them. Finally, between the two of them, he and Bascal managed to turn the slipperiness off, then specify the area around them as something called “duramer,” which was strong and flexible and tacky, and that let them gather the wellstone up in their fists. Then they turned the slipperiness back on across the rest of the sheet, and pulled.
The only really hard part was getting out of the hole while stooping to maintain their handholds. They couldn’t climb without letting go, and the other boys couldn’t reach down far enough to pull them up. Eventually a human chain was attempted, and Conrad and Bascal were hauled out, dragging several meters of wellstone behind them.
“Our sail,” Bascal beamed.
“Why do they call it ‘stone’?” someone wondered aloud.
“It also comes in blocks,” Conrad answered. “Big, heavy silicon blocks, like glass. Like stone. Or light and puffy, like foam. This stuff is better, this film. More versatile.”
Bascal was tugging on the wellstone, which had grown taut and would not come any farther out of the hole. “We need to split a few seams to pull this out any farther. Down the far side of the planette, then halfway up to the equator again on the sides. Peel it like an orange.”
Conrad grunted. “You know how to do that?”
“Kind of. Here, help me.”
With some additional fussing, they called up a schematic of the whole sheet, and marked the cuts they wanted along its spherical form.
“This’ll make a trilobe sail,” Bascal said. “Also known as a batwing. Very stylish.”
Conrad nodded, not really listening. “Okay, okay. Ready ... and ... cut!”
The tension went out of the sheet, and an additional meter of it slid upward in their grasp.
“All right!” the prince shouted. “Pull, boys, pull!”
And they did. They pulled and walked and pulled and walked, and the material slithered out like a hollow snake made of clear, wet-looking film. No way they could ever stuff it back in the hole again. And at the rate they were going, they’d have the entire liner pulled out in half an hour—it was that easy to vandalize a world. And wasn’t that a kick in the pants?
To pluck the eyes that rest beneath thy brow,
And celebrate red fountains in a sonnet,
or heckle farmer’s labor at his plow,
in field that hath such trammeled soil upon it!
I wonder, Shakespeare, didst thou never see
A napalm blossom sprung from human skin,
Or noble stick of Nobel TNT
That hath such fire encapsulated in?
In images of violence we seek,
Through gasoline and knives and powder burns,
For cities built and sacked, and havoc wreaked,
By reptile mind that, all unseeing, yearns.
A damsel with a rifle in a vision once I saw,
O Xanadu, thy twice-five-miles are trampled into straw.
— “The Modern Era”3
BASCAL EDWARD DE TOWAJI LUTUI, age 10
Chapter seven.
Freedom blast
The sheet weighed three tons, and took twelve people two whole days to fold up. When they were done, it was forty layers thick, bulging chest-high with air pockets, and still bigger than the furrowed field of the Hobby Farm, some eighty-five meters across. With its waterproof liner gone, the lake drained alarmingly during this time, finally bottoming out at about half its original depth, and there were reports—unconfirmed by anyone reliable—that the hills and plateau on the planette’s eastern hemisphere had begun to slump as well. Meanwhile, Xmary and her crew were canning food and fermenting jugs of cider and cutting/pasting/sealing the fifteen space suits, which everyone agreed were a good idea in case the ship sprang a leak or something. Bascal had to help with that part, though, because it turned out he and Conrad were the only ones who knew the first thing about matter programming.
It began to dawn on Conrad that they were going to get caught. There was no way to hide this much activity, even from an apathetic Queendom that considered them helpless. At some point, the Palace Guards were going to report all this. Hell, even a telescope would reveal the changes in the planette’s appearance. At any moment, the fax gates would pour out a sea of Constabulary officers, or broadcast new instructions to the robots that were already here, and it would all be over. Again.
“We need to sabotage the gates,” Bascal said to him, as if reading his thoughts. The two of them were up on the easternmost rock formation, overlooking the nowlandlocked boathouse and—just barely peeking over the horizon—the docks, which stood now in only a meter of dirty-looking water. In theory the two of them were surveying the launch site; to the south, D’rector Jed’s cabin was also just barely visible, and the guy ropes would sprawl from there to the docks, with the balloon itself curling off to the northeast, almost reaching the paved path they facetiously referred to as the Holy Fuckway,4 which circled wide around the lake.