“Fine, it’s not a game. It’s serious, million-year business. That doesn’t mean you’re free to abuse people. It’s”—Conrad groped for the right word—“counterproductive. It hurts our cause. What will people say if your own followers wind up denouncing you?”
“It depends how the PR ladies spin it,” Bascal answered. But he at least appeared to be thinking it over.
Conrad pressed the point: “You either have support or you don’t, Bas. I’m not sure you understand. I can be on your side and still not agree with ... all this. There’s a right way and a wrong way.”
That made the prince angry. “Oh, so now I’m stupid? I understand exactly what you’re saying, Conrad, but it’s possible I know more about this than you do. If I remember correctly, you’re not the Queendom’s finest student.”
“And you are,” Conrad sneered. It was a stupid thing to say, because yeah, everyone knew what a prodigy Prince Bascal was, and always had been. It was kind of amazing, actually, that a Poet Prince could be friends with a Cork County disappointment like Conrad Mursk. Which helped his argument not at all.
Bascal spread his hands apologetically. “Look, I’m not convinced I can trust you. First you’re in favor, then you’re against; then you’ve got backbone, and now you don’t. . . . I don’t know, Conrad. How smart is that? Unless you’re a genius of epic proportion, what I really need is somebody who listens to my informed opinion.”
“Like Ho Ng.”
“Well, yeah. Actually.”
“You don’t want to listen to him, Bas. You really don’t. Nothing he says or does is for the good of other people.”
Bascal sighed and relaxed his hands, setting them adrift in a low-gravity gesture oddly reminiscent of Feck. “Just let it go. Your opinion is noted, but we’ve got to turn the fetula now, before the sail gives us away. At the moment it’s aimed almost directly downsystem—that’s toward the sun—and any decent astronomer or traffic controller is going to pick it up sooner or later. We’ve got to disappear before they realize we’re gone. Will you take a few minutes to learn something? Please?”
It was Conrad’s turn to sigh. Was there a choice? Would his refusal help anything at all? Regardless of politics, there should be more than one person on board the ship who knew how to operate it. That was just basic safety.
“All right,” he said. “Show me.”
“Good man.”
By way of a primer, Bascal pointed out the ordinal directions: port/starboard, fore/aft, and boots/caps. And the cardinal ones: upsystem/downsystem, north/south, and clock/counter.
“When I say ‘boots aft,’ it means a negative pitch along this axis, see? When I say ‘correct north,’ it means we add velocity that way, out of the ecliptic plane where the planets all orbit. Until further notice and regardless of orientation. You see? It’s actually very simple. There are galactic coordinates as well, but we won’t need those. Now sit, and watch what I do.”
Conrad watched and listened, as patiently as his fear and ambivalence would permit. And he saw that the control of a fetula—and by extension, a sailboat—was nothing at all like the control of a construction tractor. The eight guylines were distant cousins to the track clutches of a bulldozer, or the front-end hydraulics of a steam-roller, but they pointed off in so many different directions! And there was nothing akin to a brake or throttle, unless you counted the sail itself, whose transparency could be varied on demand.
Still, there was one piece of his father’s advice that seemed perfectly apropos: Horse around with this thing, lad, and you’re bound to regret what happens next.
Having lost Feck and Peter, and five others besides, they were down to just Xmary and eight boys. In addition to Bascal, Ho, and Steve Grush, there were Preston Midrand and Martin Liss, two quiet kids Conrad had never really talked to. And there was Jamil Gazzaniga, who talked incessantly about bicycles, and Karl Smoit, the budding young sports nut who had invented the game of shirtball soccer.
Unfortunately, the last of their acceleration had gone away when Bascal turned the sail, and you couldn’t play kickball in zero gravity, so Karl was driving everyone crazy with his imaginary ball and goal.
“He lines up! He kicks!”
“He spins ass-over-elbows,” Steve observed acidly, stretching a foot out for Karl to collide with.
“Get fucked, you shit,” Karl said to him, grabbing and twisting the foot. This was actually sort of brave, and under other circumstances Conrad would have admired him for it. But it had the potential to escalate into a full-blooded fight, and from there maybe even a feud, and it was way too early in way too cramped a voyage to be starting with that kind of thing.
“The men are already bored,” he said loudly, to both Xmary and Bascal. Xmary because he figured she’d care; Bascal because he might actually know what to do about it. He’d had every possible kind of leadership training, right?
“Knock it off, guys,” Bascal said.
Steve now had an arm around Karl’s shoulder and neck, and said, “Tell him to quit with the acrobatics.”
Bascal tapped his chin. “No, I don’t think so. Let him go; let him do what he’s doing. We’ll have acrobatics for the next hour, and then dinner, and then story time and lights out. Xmary will draw up a formal schedule in the morning.”
“Schedule! Just like camp!” Jamil Gazzaniga sneered. “We’ll get the Palace Guards to announce it!”
“Story time?” Steve complained. “What are we, six?”
Bascal just smiled. “The Tongan people used to spend months at a time in outrigger canoes. They were the greatest mariners of their day, much better than the Greeks or the Romans or even the English and French who eventually conquered the rest of Polynesia. They could hit an island the size of Camp Friendly from a thousand miles away. Without compasses, without anything. They even had a navy. Conquered Fiji and Samoa a couple of times in hundred-man sailboats. Charted the seas as far away as America and Madagascar.”
“So?” Jamil said.
“So, an outrigger or catamaran has a lot less space— less volume—than this fetula. There was no exercise hour, and story time lasted all day. You should feel lucky.”
“Oh, we do,” Jamil answered, in the same mocking tone.
“Stow that shit,” Ho Ng told him from across the room. “Or I’ll stow you.”
“Nyu nyu nyu,” Jamil told him—a brilliant comeback if Conrad had ever heard one. But afterward, Jamil was smart enough to stay quiet, and Karl kept his exercises to himself.
Mealtime was interesting: you had to unstow and unpack the food, keep track of it long enough to eat it, and then clean up after yourself without leaving crumbs and greasy/sticky blobs all over the place. Nobody really had the hang of it—not even Bascal—but Conrad supposed they had plenty of time to practice.
Afterward, at precisely the moment Peter would have predicted if Peter had been there, the motionless Palace Guards announced, in stereo, “Lights out, time to sleep.”
“We’re not at camp anymore,” Bascal told them impatiently. “You can stop all that.”