“But no! The evil lizard had bitten through the cable. It lay coiled on the ground, frayed and still dripping with his saliva. ‘Look!’ cried the man who had asked the lizard how they would return to the sky. ‘The notches don’t even go all the way to the ground! All the time he was planning to leave us here!’
“Sadly, the people turned away. The sound of weeping grew dimmer and dimmer as small groups wandered off by themselves. One group followed the snaky curves of the riverbank. Another walked under the broad-leafed canopy of the forest. A third one climbed up into the hills. They were the ancestors of the people who live today. Because of them you were born, as generation upon generation of them were born, and died.
“But eventually, the people grew wise and clever, and strung their own cable back to heaven, and filled the heavens and the Earth with holes which connected to each other. Thus they brought all the delights of Earth into heaven, and all the delights of heaven back down to Earth, and all the horrors were buried and forgotten, and the giant lizard fled and has not been seen again.”
Bascal surveyed his audience before adding, in a less sanguine tone, “And everyone lives forever, and every day is the same as every other day, until the end of time.”
The campers sat quietly, digesting the tale.
“You made that up,” Conrad said finally.
“Parts of it,” Bascal admitted with a shrug. “The guts are traditional.” He addressed the circle. “Now, you’ve got to imagine there’s a bowl of kava, a numbing pepper-root drink that will literally loosen your tongue and lips. And brain. I pass it to the man on my left—or sometimes woman—who drains it and then tells the next story.”
The person sitting on Bascal’s left was Ho Ng, his faithful companion.
“What?” Ho asked brilliantly.
“Tell a story,” Bascal repeated.
“Oh. Bloodcrap.” Ho thought for a minute or two, and then launched into a disjointed rendition of “Little Red Riding Hood.” The next in line was Steve Grush, who did a slightly better job with “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” although Jamil and Karl teased him for it until Bascal told them to stop.
And then it was Jamil’s own turn, and instead of a fairy tale he related the plot of some holie drama he’d seen on TV, about a Christian priest fighting corruption in early Antarctica, during the height of the Fax Wars when it was still possible to steal someone’s identity and get away with it. There was no Constabulary then to enforce the new Queendom standards and brighten up the worlds’ gray areas. Outside of the old nation-states the regulatory situation was murky at best—frontier justice being the norm. All this was much to the woe of the priest, who had just escaped from an even worse situation on Mars. It actually sounded like a pretty good movie, although Jamil couldn’t remember any of the characters’ names, so everyone was “the guy” or “the other guy” or “the guy’s girlfriend’s friend.”
Finally, Bascal laughed and told him to stop. “This guy has heard enough from that guy about those other guys,” he said. Then he added, more seriously, “It’s been a big day for all of us, probably the biggest day of our lives. We’re tired, we’re hurt—and if you think you’re sore now, just wait till tomorrow. That’s all the story time we probably need. Now, I suggest we turn the lights down and start getting ready for bed.”
This was done: the soft glow of the wellstone was halved, then halved again, and in the gloom Conrad watched Bascal and Xmary quietly slip into the bridge, and close the door behind the single Palace Guard that slipped in after them. The other guard stayed behind, to monitor potential threats here in the main cabin. Someone might drill a peephole and gas the couple to death! Conrad wanted to brood about that, to have some time to feel jealous and worried and angry with Bascal for being such an unholy jerk about everything. Except that Ho, when he realized he’d been closed out of the bridge, got a baleful look on his face and started kicking mattresses.
“Hey,” Preston Midrand said, when his own was kicked.
“Yeah?” Ho demanded, rotating in the air and stopping himself on Preston’s shoulders, so the two of them were eye-to-eye but upside down from each other. And when Preston declined to answer, Ho pushed himself away and collided “accidentally” with Jamil.
“Watch it, you shit,” Jamil called out.
“Still crowded in here,” Ho said, although with the loss of bodies and the addition of a third dimension the exact opposite was true: even with seven of them in here, it felt kind of cold and empty. “There’s room in the storage closet. Some bloodfuck should sleep in there.”
“Sleep there yourself,” Conrad told him, causing Ho to look up and shoot him an evil glare. It seemed for a moment that some sort of confrontation was about to gel. Not physical, with a Palace Guard still standing in silent watch over the room, but possibly a moment of open power struggle. Then Ho seemed to think better of it, and leveled his ire at Preston instead.
“You. Go on.”
Conrad sighed. “Oh, for the love of little gods, Ho. Will you leave him alone?”
But Preston was holding up his hands. “No, no, it’s all right. I’ll go. Maybe there’s a little privacy in there. Maybe it’s warmer.”
“Yeah?” Ho said, perking up. “I forgot about that. Never mind, bloodfuck, I’ll sleep in the closet. My own private room.”
“Until we need toilet paper,” Jamil added sourly.
These arrangements were finalized, and Conrad drifted over to the little environmental control panel he’d prepared in a rare moment of forethought. It was just a flimsy sheet of wellstone, connected by a ribbon to the cabin’s exterior wrapping, but it would do for now. He turned the lights down the rest of the way, so there was only the starlight shining down through the sail, through the wellstone wrapping around the cabin, through the clear plastic of the skylight itself. He thought for a while that his eyes would adjust, but they didn’t seem to. It was just too dark: not enough of an opening to really let the starlight in. So he got up again and added a soft night-light glow to the ceiling in the ’toir, then settled down and strapped back into his bedding again.
And then, finally, he had a free moment to stew over the day’s events. It was a lot to take in: the silencing and stranding, the involuntary storage, the ascension of Ho Ng to a position of ... something. It was all so shallowly, transparently unnecessary. Bascal was listening to his own dark voices, and to Ho’s, when being nasty offered no actual benefit. It wasn’t like he needed to bury all dissenters; he’d simply felt like it.
And that, that was the critical issue. “Evil” as a concept had never much interested Conrad—he’d been assured of its existence but had never once seen a clear example. Until today. But the way he saw it, you had your basic “tough decision,” where one person got something—say, a nice apartment in Denver—and that meant someone else couldn’t have it. Then you had your “management decision,” where somebody decided how many apartments there were going to be in Denver, based on the available resources and the various implications of their use. How individual people felt was not much of a deciding factor. And yet there was nothing intentionally nasty about it; such decisions were necessary.
But then there was the selfish decision, where some jackass kept the good stuff for himself, or swiped it from other people, as Ho had just done. And that was the dividing line, where goodness and indifference left off and something else began. Not evil per se—the reasons behind it were too clear and ordinary for that—but something. Not nice. And spiteful decisions, like throwing Bert into the fax, were worse than that, and worse still were the dangerous and malicious and harmful decisions, like marooning Peter on the ruined planette, with fire and rain and gods knew what else.