And above him, hovering uncertainly in the middle somewhere, was Conrad. Surely an expert: a helmsman and mission planner, a sometime associate of the prince. One of only two matter programmers aboard the ship, and indispensable as such, and yet also a constant focus of royal irritation. How many times had Bascal shouted a hole in him already?
On the face of it, Conrad was needed but not wanted, respected but not loved, and so he served as a kind of executive officer, taking the dictates from on high and translating them into individual actions and duty assignments, however unpopular.
Viridity’s crew seemed not only to accept this role for him, but actually to push him into it with active nagging. “How do we do that, Conrad?” “What’s first, Conrad?” “What’s next, Conrad?” It made their day easier, and gave them someone safe to blame for the things they were unhappy about. But if Conrad was the organizer of work, then Steve Grush was its enforcer. He’d decided all of a sudden to quit being Ho’s buddy and had simply kissed up to him subordinately instead, with immediate payoff. Ah, the triumph of the flattering mediocrities: as the bad cop’s bad cop, Steve could now enjoy all the freedom and social status of a prison trustee.
And this was a prison; Conrad wondered why he’d ever expected otherwise. If he’d chafed at the fresh air and open spaces of Camp Friendly, how could he possibly have seen this as an alternative? The “freedom” of an infinite universe was the worst sort of illusion: they were locked on a single trajectory fixed by energy and gravity, with less freedom even than a railroad car or a river raft, or a motorcar driving along some endless, arrow-straight bridge.
There was a reason his father’s roads meandered across the countryside, wasting time and energy and paving stone, doubling and tripling the length of a journey—because it masked this dearth of freedom. People traveled on a road for the sport of it, the adventure, the sense of exploration. But it could only lead them to the road’s other end, or maybe another road with ends of its own. Whereas a fax gate could take you anywhere.
Turned away from the sun and with the pinpoint fusion sila’a now millions of kilometers distant, Viridity could alter its course by starlight alone. The feather-touch of a few weary microwatts was barely enough to turn the sail. And yet, its cumulative effect was the only thing keeping them precisely on course. Even the tiniest drift up or down or left or right would “derail” them, causing them to miss their final stop—the neutronium barge—and continue helplessly on toward the sun.
And that was a bad thing not only in terms of being caught, but more seriously, of not being caught. The Queendom’s outermost permanent settlements—around the orbits of Pluto and Neptune and such—were eighteen months away at present speed, and sparsely scattered across the vastness of space. The fetula would likely sail right through without ever getting close to anything. The sun would be nearer and brighter, of course, pressing harder on the sail, but at this speed they could well reach the orbit of Mars before gaining enough control authority to set a new course.
So while manning the helm was boring duty, it was genuinely vital to their survival, and what little remained of their freedom. They’d at least managed to restore transparency to the windows, so there was a view—the illusion of vastness and freedom, the stars beckoning, the huge sail responding to his slightest touch at the controls. It was exhilarating at first, and then bearable for maybe as much as twenty minutes at a time.
To break up the day, Conrad would periodically kick up to the ceiling, stick his head in the center of the outward-bulging skylight, and spend a few minutes just looking at the stars. Not with a navigator’s eye, although he was beginning to learn the constellations, and Viridity’s own path among them like an imaginary line. Mostly what he wanted and needed was the sense of space. He couldn’t step outside, couldn’t take a walk or climb a tree, but at least he could do this.
The brightest stars, when he looked them up, were Sirius, Canopus, and Rigil Kentaurus, which was actually a three-star system better known as Alpha Centauri—the nearest neighbor to the Queendom of Sol. There was something magical about that one. Most of the other bright ones were big rather than close: Sirius and Procyon were two and three times farther out—with many dimmer stars in between—while Vega and Arcturus were dozens of light-years (or tens of millions of AU) farther still. As a budding sailor, Conrad found it barely plausible that some sort of ship—ertially shielded or whatever— might someday reach those distant shores. The rest— Canopus and Capella, Rigel and Achernar—were simply decorations in the sky, so distant that the numbers made little sense.
Still, he learned their patterns, until he was able to judge the ship’s orientation from these nine stars alone. The constellations were a fiction, especially out here in the deep dark, where so many more stars were visible, cluttering up the supposed pictures. But to shut Bascal up about it, he’d spent their fifth day in space memorizing the brightest and clearest of the images. Similarly, the distinction of a northern and southern hemisphere struck him as arbitrary and foolish, whether in Earth or solar coordinates. What really mattered—what really showed— was the blue-white slash of the Milky Way, bisecting the sky all around, and dividing the bright stars into three groups: above it, below it, and swathed within it. He wished they could simply navigate in galactic coordinates, although Bascal assured him it was a lot more work in the long run.
Not that he really cared what Bascal thought, except insofar as it threatened his safety. One thing was clear: Conrad had misjudged the prince, and had put his own fate—along with a dozen others’—in less-than-trustworthy hands. He didn’t know what to do about that.
But the sky did not judge him, or lay fresh worries at his feet. The sheer number of stars out there was boggling, especially when he considered the Milky Way itself: a spiral of stars so dense and numerous and distant that they blurred together into a haze. And how many other galaxies were there? Did anyone even know?
Were there Queendoms, or the equivalent of Queendoms, around any of these billions of billions of pinpoints? It seemed there must be, although no one had ever detected one. Were there runaway children out there, making the best of a bad situation? Did they look like squidgy slugs, or ravenous flesh-eating spiders? Hell, he’d greet them anyway.
Inevitably, though, he grew bored with stargazing as well. That sense of awe was the only anchor he had right now, so when he felt it fading even slightly, he would kick back down to the helmsman’s seat again. He would check the labe and gnomon, the register and chronometer. He did this three times, slowly and carefully making sure he wasn’t ignoring a problem. Then he’d look straight up and check the sail, and the whole cycle would start anew.
Even with the sail newly configured as a one-way mirror, transparent in one direction and reflective in the other, the push of starlight across the entire sail wasn’t much more than the Earth-weight of an eyelash. Not much to work with. But there was only one perfect path to the neutronium barge—that invisible line slicing through otherwise empty space—and the push of this weak source against frictionless space did add up over time. Over the weeks of their journey it could drive them hundreds of kilometers toward or away from the path. And because the barge was only twelve hundred meters long—a tiny target in the vastness of Kuiper wilderness— this fine-tuning could literally mean the difference between life and death.