Ho and Bascal staggered into the room, sprawling on the two empty mattresses as the cabin swung wide arcs and began, ever so slightly, to twirl. Outside the window, the gray-white, film-obscured sky was growing dark.
“Here we go!” Bascal shouted. “Here we bloody, fucking g—”
The hydrogen ignited with a gut-wrenching whump! that was much louder than any thunder Conrad had ever heard. And the force of the explosion was directed downward, out of the bag, blossoming down along the guy ropes and the cabin roof, storming into the planette’s atmosphere in a roiling cloud of hot steam. Conrad suddenly felt as if five people had fallen on him.
Weak gasps and gurgles and screams rose up all around, and Conrad wanted to scream too. But then there were only four people on his chest, and then two, and then none at all, and he was floating off his mattress, grabbing at the safety straps he’d forgotten to tie around him. They were in outer space. They were in outer fucking space, hurtling toward the planette’s pinpoint fusion “star” at a hundred meters a second. In a log cabin.
I’m sorry, God. This was a really bad idea.
Chapter eight.
Sun ride, sunset
The wrapping of wellstone film had turned a bit clearer, and “above” them, visible through the nearly transparent skylight, the translucent sail was unfurling, both under the pressure of fusion light and by the command of Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. Even without a mirrored surface, the impact of photons had already transferred enough momentum to swing their makeshift boat around. They flew “backward” or “downward” cabinfirst, with the sila’a—the pocket star—shining out of sight beneath the floorboards.
The control panel was just a programmed sheet of wellstone, pasted onto a wooden plank nailed low to the wall. The instruments and controls on it were two-dimensional cartoons, clear and contemporary in design, glowing softly in the primary colors and yet vaguely Polynesian somehow. Here was a gauge like a compass rosette from an old map; over there sat a diagram of the eight guylines connecting the cabin roof to the sail. The stylized images suggested some winching mechanism, as if the cables could be tightened or loosened on command, which they surely could not. But Bascal had mentioned a few times that that was the way to visualize the steering of a fetu’ula , a fetula, a stellar sail craft.
“It’s an issue of control authority,” he’d blathered absently, “very comparable to the rigging on a regular sailboat.”
The navigator’s seat was a legless chair, crisscrossed with canvas straps, and Bascal seemed at home there now, sitting with one foot under him and the other stretched out under the console. Despite the lack of gravity and the fact that he was tied down, his posture suggested an attention to balance. He was fussing happily with the controls, glancing up through the skylight every few seconds to watch the sail opening up.
“Keep us safe, Majesty,” Ho Ng said. “I don’t think the boys cared much for that bump.”
His tone was ingratiating and solicitous and shit-nosed, and of course the honorific was both idiotic and illegal, since even a crown prince was not the King of Sol. But Bascal didn’t seem to notice or mind. “You know I will, Ng. A healthy young body, maintained and optimized by fax filters, can handle an awful lot of abuse. I can virtually guarantee that you’ll be fine.”
He turned to Conrad. “We’ve got about ten more minutes of freefall before I opaque the sail. The planette is forty-seven kilometers from the sila’a. Ordinarily I’d just hail the star from here and call up its laser sail protocol, but without a network gate, or even a radio, that would be tricky. You know what we do about that?”
He waited for a long moment, but Conrad, tied down crookedly on his mattress, could only look back at him and shrug.
“Oh. Right,” Bascal said. Then, to the guard—whose feet were somehow still anchored to the floorboards— “Remove the cone of silence, please.” And then to Conrad again: “Sorry about all that. Really.”
The lifting of the silence was a physical sensation, like a breath of wind. “You’re a shit,” Conrad rasped.
Bascal turned back to his controls. “All that is necessary will be done, my friend. I’d rather you were on the right side of that principle.”
“Dead, shitty bodies,” Ho agreed.
Conrad saw no reason to reply. Above, the sail was almost fully open now, and billowing with underwater slowness. Worse: with honeyed, glacial slowness.
From the other room came sounds of commotion, followed by nervous laughter and hoots of dismay. “Hey, do not fuck around back there,” Bascal called out. “Ten gees can kill you falling ten centimeters. You motherless bastards tie down and shut up.”
“Ten gees?” Conrad repeated, his hoarse voice ringing with the worry of all these unpleasant surprises. He’d somehow envisioned the actual sailing as a graceful, languid affair.
“Quit whining, you baby. We’re young and strong, and fit as the morbidity filters can make us. We’ve been faxed; we’re immortal. Well, immorbid, anyway. And anyway, it’s more like eight and a half gees. I am rigidizing the sail ... Now.”
Like mandolin strings, the guylines jinged and sproinged, sending quasi-musical vibrations down through the cabin roof. The lazy batwing of the sail, arched away from the cabin and the guy ropes like a dome-tent roof, began to pull downward and spread out, becoming a flat translucent ceiling a hundred meters above them, its wings stretching out of sight beyond the edges of the skylight, extending more than seven hundred meters on either side, and half that much from top to bottom. The process took about twenty seconds, and chewed up only a tiny fraction of the solar energy raining up to them from the pocket star.
“Now I’m commencing rotation,” the prince announced.
“Why?”
“Because we’re flying backward, idiot. We have to point where we’re fucking going, and the sail needs to be in front of us when we mirrorize it, or the light pressure will push it against the cabin and we’ll get all fouled up in the ropes. You want that? No?”
“Why not just rigidize the lines?”
“They are rigidized.” Bascal huffed impatiently. “There’s a control issue, all right? It isn’t stable, pushing backwards like that. It’s ... look, just shut up and let me sail.”
Above, the left half of the wellstone took on a brighter shade of the same gray color, slightly less transparent than the right half. The guylines spanged and sproinged again, and Conrad felt himself pressed lightly against his tie-downs on the left side. The ship was heeling around, turning to face its rear—and its sail—at the sila’a. Presently, it bloomed at the edge of the skylight, a miniature sun no more than a few meters across. Just a pinpoint, really, yellow-orange and painfully bright, even through the veil of the wellstone.
Then the sail’s colors shifted again, swapping sides, and Conrad felt himself pressed the other way. The sila’a, though, continued its way across the skylight, finally pausing just past its left edge, eclipsed by the cabin’s wall and roof. Then the wellstone sail fabric was edge-on to the light, no longer illuminated like a lamp shade, and through its sudden translucence Conrad could make out the stars gliding gently to a halt.
Deep space, here we come, he breathed silently.