“Where will we get our supplies?” Conrad asked. His voice sounded higher and squeakier than usual; they were almost six meters up, and the air was thinner.
Bascal waved a hand impatiently. “Not the fax machines, the gates. The telecom hardware that links them to the Nescog. There are only two of them on the planette.”
“Oh. So how do we sabotage them?”
“With a crowbar, idiot. Or a sledgehammer. Anything, really. They’re wellstone, but they’re not programmed to withstand an attack. Circuitry is delicate.”
“You’ve smashed one before,” Conrad speculated.
Bascal nodded. He was looking up now, at the sky, at the “sun,” and at the dull, starlike speck of Sol that, from up here, could readily be discerned in broad daylight. “Yeah. Twice.”
Then he looked back at the ground, picked out Ho Ng in the not-so-distance, cupped his hands, and began calling out directions. “Ng! Ng! Get a crowbar or something and meet me by the boathouse!”
“Are you sure you want to do that?” Conrad asked. The knot of unease in his stomach had not loosened. If anything, it was getting tighter. “If we smash the gates, we’re really committing.”
“Committing a crime?” Bascal said. He could turn a sneer into something friendly, an assurance that you were smart enough and raw enough to see the error in your statement. For some reason, Conrad suddenly found this power vaguely frightening.
“Well, y... it is a crime, yes. But we’re in plenty of trouble already. What I meant was, it commits us. There’ll be no other way off the planette, and if we’ve made any sort of mistake...” His voice withered under Bascal’s glare; it took real effort to finish. “This could be very dangerous. We could be killed.”
“That’s what backups are for. The Friendly Products Corporation took an image of you on your way up here, right?”
“I don’t want to be restored from backups.”
Bascal studied him quietly, for several seconds. “Are you losing your nerve?”
Conrad couldn’t keep himself from shrugging. “Not losing it, I just ... What is it again, that we’re trying to accomplish? Suddenly I’m not sure. Revolution?”
“Revolution,” Bascal agreed.
“But that’s crazy, isn’t it? I mean, we can’t win. We can cost them time and money and stuff; we can make a statement. But we can’t overthrow them or anything. Not by building a sailboat.”
“You don’t understand,” Bascal said, and he sounded a little sad.
“So explain it.”
“Explain it? It ought to explain itself. Our revolt isn’t something they’ll lose; it’s something they’ll regret. They have such an easy time forgetting about us, putting us off. Which is ironic, considering the cultural patterns they’re working from. If you asked the Old Moderns about paradise, some would have said it was a tropical stone age full of gatherers and hunters and fishermen. Some would say a network of small farming towns, or a medieval pocket monarchy straight out of fairy tales. Others, maybe a Modern, democratic nation-state held together by information technology. But Tonga was unique in the Modern world: it was all these things at the same time, in the same place. It was everyone’s paradise.
“By the end of the Modern period, the entire human race had its eyes on the Kingdom as, I dunno, a model for a new kind of civilization. Really it was all the old kinds, living right on top of each other. And to be fair, those Utopian ambitions genuinely have succeeded. They’ve smothered the original and lost its spirit—they’ve practically enslaved my parents—but along the way they’ve created something ... else. Something better, at least for them. They just forgot about their unborn, is all. You have to remember, the Old Moderns are still alive, and always will be, walking around in a state of constant amazement. But their paradise was built at our expense—happy children as part of the scenery, the hoped-for future, not part of the machine itself. Not part of the present.
“So, we’ve got to remind them every day, that we’re current human beings, not future ones, not potential ones, not pretend ones. What do people fear when they can’t die or be maimed? Slavery. Oppression. Meaninglessness. Even in the old days, most people would rather die than live by the will of someone else. Even for a decade or two. They fought wars to prevent it. They murdered their own children in their beds. With eternity ahead of us, do we dare to be timid? We need a place in society, a set of roles to grow into that aren’t bogged down by the weight of bureaucracy and prior humanity. We deserve a chance to live and breathe, as our parents have done, and if we die a few times—nobly and defiantly—it only strengthens the point.”
Conrad sat down. He had to think about that, to think it over in those terms.
“Do you hear what I’m saying?” Bascal pressed.
“I do. Yes. You’ve thought a lot about this.”
“Every day of my life.” The prince nodded, considering and then agreeing with his own words. “Last summer I got sent to Niuafo’ou, the remotest and old-fashionedest of the Niua Islands, at the northern extreme of the old Kingdom. The name means ‘Exotic Coconuts,’ and believe me, it’s not referring to a fruit. Those people are serious: no gates, no wellstone, no TV or fax machines. You eat what you catch, and wear what you grow. And what you grow is one hundred percent Earth Original, no recombos or faxable mods. I used to love that island—I learned to sail in its central crater when I was five—but last year all I could think of was how small it was. How narrow-minded and closed. I had a boat; I could’ve sailed it to Vava’u in a couple of days. But there was never a right time to start, and soon the season was over and I was back at school. Opportunity lost.”
Conrad kicked some dirt off the gray cragginess of the rock. He wasn’t a coward; he knew that much. And what Bascal said was ... well, it put words to the feeling that had driven him into so much trouble already. Conrad had never tried to put it in words, didn’t even realize it could be done. But: if the words were accurate, did that necessarily make them true?
“How long,” he finally asked, “will this journey take? Seriously.”
“Two months,” Bascal answered.
“Two months? With fifteen of us in a log cabin? That’s crazy. That’s a long time.”
“If it were easy, there wouldn’t be much point. Think of the statement that makes. Not boohoo, I hate summer camp, but fuck you if you think this is over. It isn’t over. The system needs shocking, and we simply will not be controlled.”
Conrad let out a breath. “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay. Let’s do it. Fucking space pirates.”
“All right! That’s the spirit! That’s the Conrad Mursk I know,” Bascal said, throwing an arm over Conrad’s shoulder and breaking out in probably the widest grin Conrad had ever seen on anyone.
Two days later, they were ready to fill the balloon. Ready to pile into D’rector Jed’s cabin, ready to launch. Ready to face the dangers and deprivations of their long voyage.