As if in answer, one of the Palace Guards danced forward and grabbed the bottom of the balloon. Another of them did the same.
“Guards,” Bascal said, annoyed, “in about five minutes that material is going to become very slippery. You will not be able to hold it. The balloon will rise and explode, possibly injuring me. You must escort me to a safe place: a wellstone-reinforced structure which is not anchored to the planette.”
The guards, watched closely and nervously by everyone, pondered this.
“All children must enter the structure,” they finally said.
“I’m not going up in that thing,” Peter insisted. “I’m not.”
There were guards all around now, and one of them took hold of Peter’s wrist. Preparing to drag him to safety.
“Let go of him,” Bascal said impatiently. “Do you have any instruction to protect him from himself?”
“No,” the guard admitted.
“Then let him go. He’s not welcome among us. Run away, Peter. Head for the hills. You have about two minutes.”
“You’re a shit, Bascal!” Peter screamed. He was crying now, and Conrad didn’t blame him a bit. He realized what should have been obvious all along: that Bascal was crazy. He’d inherited his father’s driving passions and his mother’s easy charm, plus an artistic sensibility that seemed to come straight out of nowhere. But where was the de Towaji compassion that had won Bruno three Medals of Salvation in the days before his kingship? Where was the Lutui common sense, or the Tongan tradition of respect?
In that moment, it seemed that young Bascal would do anything, pay any price, to shock and embarrass his Queendom. He was enjoying Peter’s fear. And suddenly there were no safe options, not for Peter, not for any of them.
“Garbage pussy bloodfuck,” Ho Ng replied, sounding outraged on his monarch’s behalf. “You better run, little fucker.”
“Yeah,” Steve Grush added. Apparently he was back on the management team again.
Peter didn’t wait to be told a third time. Taking half a second to weigh the odds and face reality, he just put his head down and sprinted off, heading east past the rock formations, presumably toward the hills on Camp Friendly’s other side. And though he faced probable injury and certain abandonment, to his credit he did not wail or look back.
“Anyone else?” Bascal asked, looking around pointedly.
Nobody took him up on it. Nobody moved or breathed.
“All right, then. To the cabin. You!” He swept a pointing finger at the boys and robots holding down the bottom of the balloon. “Hang on tight and follow me. Your lives depend on it. We’re stopping right outside the cabin door. Clear?”
Nobody questioned the order. And since Conrad didn’t have a job to do, and couldn’t object, and didn’t care to join Peter in pain and exile, he followed docilely along with the crowd. The moment would be etched in his memory forever, endlessly questioned and reexamined for manliness and sensibility and moral correctness, but the truth was, he didn’t give it much thought at the time. Didn’t have to. His choices were just too limited, his time too short.
The cabin, tightly bound in wellstone film, looked like a badly gift-wrapped toy. The only opening was a vertical slash in the film, just in front of the doorway, which had been rigged to seal itself when the air pressure started dropping. Bascal arrived at the cabin slightly ahead of the others, and bent to snatch something up from the pit of its undermined foundation. A bottle? Green glass with a concave bottom. A wine bottle? Where had he gotten such a thing? Had D’rector Jed, or one of the other counselors, kept a private stash somewhere?
“In honor of my Latin ancestry,” the prince said, “I christen this ship Viridity: the burning green stamina of youth.”
Then he smashed the bottle against the gray-black film and the logs beneath it. The liquid inside was clear, like water. And without further ceremony, he commenced an inspection of the cables—wellstone ribbons, really—that trailed down from the roof, leading off in the direction of the towering column of the balloon. And the balloon was approaching, yes, carefully carried to its launch site at the front of the cabin. The butterflies in Conrad’s stomach were restless indeed.
When he got to the d’rector’s cabin himself, Xmary was there in the doorway, holding the edges of the wellstone aside and looking out with a worried expression. “Six,” she said, touching the shoulder of the boy in front of him—Bertram Wang—then ushering him inside. Next she touched Conrad, acknowledging his solidity without really seeing him. “Seven.”
Conrad went inside, with his robot escort following close behind.
“Are they coming?” she asked with obvious distaste. She pointed to the Palace Guard, then to the corner. “All right, you, over there. Stay out of the way and try not to fall on anyone.”
Her maternal, officious tone was obviously modeled on Her Majesty’s. Clearly she saw herself in that role, at least for this particular time and place, although Conrad doubted very much that Queen Tamra had ever been involved in anything so harebrained. But the guard, for whatever reason, chose to obey her.
“Find a mattress,” she said to Conrad and Bertram. The phrase sounded rehearsed, like she’d said it several times already, and indeed, the floor was littered with mattresses, and the boys who weren’t already on one were looking for one.
Seeing his opportunity, Conrad slipped into Jed’s own room, where a number of empty mattresses lay.
“Testing!” he screeched, and the sound was audible. The robot, with its noise-canceling sonic waves, was on the other side of the wall. But Conrad’s voice was hoarse—nearly gone—from trying to shout.
“Better lie down,” Bertram said. “Fast.”
Belatedly, Conrad remembered that this room was where Bascal had put all the controls. He didn’t want to face Bascal. But how many free mattresses were there in the other room? Was there time to go back and forth, looking? The view through the window was a hazy confusion of moving bodies and gray translucent film. Right now, the film wrapped around the cabin had no orders to be transparent, but even so he could make out the last few boys straggling in to claim their spaces.
“Shit,” he said. And then his Palace Guard reappeared in the doorway, and he could say nothing more. It took up a post in the far corner, looming over Conrad’s makeshift acceleration bed like a chrome-plated angel of death.
“Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen,” he heard Xmary say in the room next door. “We’re one short. Where is Peter?”
“Not coming.” Ho laughed with cruel glee.
And then Bascal’s voice: “Lanyards free! Now! Release the bag!”
There were some rustling noises, footsteps, and the slamming of a wooden door. Then the floor lurched and swung, thumped hard against something, lurched and swung again. Conrad threw himself flat.
“Oh, God,” Bertram was saying. “Oh gods and God and gods and God ...”
Conrad wasn’t a praying man, but for the first time in his life in felt the urge, felt the physical attention of the universe, personified. Dear God. Dear God. I have sinned in various ways, and I’m sorry. They—the ever-mysterious “they”—said God was nothing more than an anthropomorphic urge, an impulse of the human brain to impose pattern and personality on random events. Donald and Maybel Mursk, Conrad’s parents, had always thought so, albeit with an Irish tinge of hope and dread. But speculation was inevitable: what happened to the soul, when a body died and fresh copies were printed? Was there a soul at all? There were all kinds of theories about this, and Conrad feared he was about to learn the truth.