It went on like that until his sense of time began to flicker out. A minute? Two? And still it continued on, the pain and struggle, the slow grinding of wood against wood. He could feel his flesh bruising, his blood pooling, his bones and muscles and cartilage stretching and twisting in unnatural ways. The pain grew, and the light dimmed, and his breath came harder and harder, and he knew that if they somehow survived he would be sore for weeks.
Finally—finally!—the pressure began to ease. The sail above them was pure mirror from end to end, reflecting a field of fixed stars and a dwindling violet minisun no brighter than a searchlight. But the pressure eased too slowly, and the pain in every part of his body continued to build. He could tell time by it—a pain clock. He had the luxury now of feeling impatient, and feel it he did, marking the passage of every moment.
As soon as it felt possible and safe, he rolled over onto his side. This brought him face-to-face with Bascal, whose customary grin was long gone. He looked drawn and pained, his brown face shining, his hair matted down with sweat. And yet, his right arm was raised and extended, doing something or other on the control panel.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” Conrad asked.
“Yes,” Bascal replied tightly.
Indeed, the arm looked both bleached and blackened by its ordeal.
“Shouldn’t you stop?”
Bascal grimaced. “Kind of, yeah. I’m ... going to change seats.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Naw. We’re a minute into the run, and we’ll be holding steady at two gees for a couple minutes here. I’ve had worse.”
“A minute?” Conrad found that figure very hard to believe—surely it should be an hour!—but there it was on the panel’s chronometer: 01:08, 01:09, 01:10 ...
The acceleration was steady now, and yes, truthfully, not so terrible. Even so, Bascal groaned in obvious pain as he undid his tie-downs and slithered out of the nav chair. The pale right arm, drained of blood, didn’t seem to be working well; it flopped around numbly while Bascal worked with his left. When he was free of the straps, he scooted his rump along the floor for half a meter, until he was seated beside his empty mattress. He didn’t try to lift or roll himself into it.
“You make me proud,” Ho said to Bascal, in a tired and grating voice. He was struggling to sit up.
Conrad decided to join him in this, but thought better of it when his back screamed in protest. And then thought better of that when he lay back down and felt the sweaty mattress pressing smotheringly against the side of his face. So he did sit up, and really, it didn’t feel too bad. He was alive, and not seriously hurt, although yeah, he was going to be very, very sore.
People were coughing and groaning and crying in the other room. There was the unmistakable clump! clump! of heavy footsteps on the wooden floor, and then Xmary was standing there, framed in the doorway in a pair of camp culottes and a tee shirt cut off to display her navel, and with the reflected purple of the sila’a laser shining down through the skylights, Conrad could distinctly see her nipples and the outline of her hips and thighs. Her hair was pulled back in the kind of topknot the centenarians were wearing lately, and like many young women, she’d subtly nudged her physical development in a compact but adult direction, and did not look at all like a child in this light.
“Bascal,” she said, quickly and seriously, “something’s wrong with Raoul. He’s coughing, and there’s blood coming out.”
“I’m sailing, dear,” Bascal answered tightly. And yeah, he could reach the controls even from his mattress.
“What should we do?”
“Well, if I don’t keep an eye on these heading corrections, there’s going to be something wrong with all of us, hmm? Just hold his hand or something. Ask the guards.”
“Is it a lot of blood?” Conrad asked.
She shook her head. “No, just, like, spots of it. Can you come look? Please?”
“Yeah,” he said, and made a show of rising without any grimaces or groans. This wasn’t actually so difficult—he felt like he was carrying someone on his back, but no longer as if the life were being crushed out of him. It did hurt a lot to walk, though.
The cabin’s main room was like something from an old movie: wounded men sprawling on narrow, filthy beds. There was blood on several of them, and more streaming out from the finger-pinched noses of a couple of scared-looking boys. But it was Raoul who really looked bad— gray and bruised, with dark baggy circles under his eyes and blood-flecked spittle on his chin and tee shirt. His chest rose and fell in rapid, shallow rhythm.
“You okay?” Conrad asked him, stupidly.
Raoul looked up with frightened eyes, and shook his head. Nope.
“He was coughing,” Xmary said.
Awkwardly, Conrad crouched down beside the bloody mattress. “You’re breathing kind of fast. Can you slow it down?”
Again, Raoul shook his head. No. Definitely not.
“Can you talk?”
No.
“It could be his lungs,” Conrad said, although he had no idea. Why was she asking him for help? What could he do? “This goes way beyond first-aid training.”
“How do we help him?” Xmary demanded.
“I don’t know,” Conrad said honestly. The usual treatment for severe injuries was to throw the victim into the nearest fax machine, and print out an undamaged copy. Was that possible in this case, with the network gates disabled and the machinery bound by weird instructions from the king? He glanced up at the fax machine, bolted against the room’s innermost wall. The divider wall separating it from the main room had been removed two days ago. They had clear access if they needed it.
“Fax, will you take him? Repair him?”
“Insufficient buffer mass,” the fax answered. “I can accept a body and correct its pattern, but reinstantiation will not be possible.”
“Why?” Conrad asked. “Can’t you just use his own mass? Disassemble him and then rebuild him?”
The fax spoke slowly, as if inventing the art of conversation as it went along. “My mass buffers have been depleted by recent operations. Sir. The operation you suggest would bring several of them, temporarily, into a negative mass regime, which is not possible.”
Shit. Conrad had shoveled some dirt in there a few days ago, on Bascal’s advice, but he hadn’t checked the levels since then. Hadn’t really thought about it at all. Did dirt even have the right elements in it?
“Can we throw some of the food in?” someone suggested.
“Or take a huge crap in the toilet?” That was Steve Grush, trying to be funny. Or maybe not; the sink and shower and toilet plumbing ran into and out of the fax in a maze of shiny wellstone pipes. A piece of crap would, in fact, be whisked apart into component atoms and stored in the appropriate mass buffers.
“Hurry up,” Xmary said, in a deadly serious tone. And with good reason: Raoul’s eyes had rolled upward, so that only the whites were showing, and those whites—mostly red—were jiggling and jittering in a spasmodic way. His breathing had grown even faster and shallower. He was dying, plain and simple.
“Fax,” Conrad said, “can we just stuff him in there, and print him out later?”
“Certainly.”
Conrad and Xmary shared a quick glance, nodded at each other, and grabbed Raoul by the arms while Steve Grush undid his straps. The only hard part was the confusing mess of bodies and mattresses between them and the fax, but people were scrambling out of the way, or moving to help. Raoul’s legs were grabbed as well, and his bottom, and as a group they gave him the old heave-ho. It seemed very strange, to stuff a limp, twitching body through the solid-looking print plate of the fax. But it wasn’t really solid. Even a cursory inspection showed it was insubstantial, actually a fog of tiny machines sprouting tinier machines sprouting quantum doodads far too small to be visible. And Raoul’s body went right through it, like a diver through the surface of Adventure Lake.