So that was two. Two people Conrad could use, could help, could deal with. Not trust or rely on, but that was okay. He would just have to craft the right circumstances, so all the right choices went all the right ways. That was a tall order, and he wished he could doodle and sketch and make notes about the possibilities. But the game was dangerous enough already.
When the sweeping was done, Martin went on his way, leaving Conrad alone again until shift change, when Bascal came in with Ho and one of the Palace Guards.
“Conrad, my man,” the prince said. “How goes our course?”
“Two centimeters north of optimal,” Conrad answered in their accepted parlance. “I’ve been compensating all day, but I don’t want to overdo it and have to spend next week swinging back.”
“Good, good.” Bascal motioned for him to vacate the chair.
“And the barge hasn’t tried to turn,” Conrad said, in his umpteenth attempt to get Bascal thinking about that.
“Fine. That’s good. We want to hit it square, eh?”
“Well,” Conrad said, “we don’t want to hit it at all, right? We want to rendezvous. Our relative speed is ... oh, crap. Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“Our relative speed is twenty kips. How are we supposed to slow down? How do we match velocities with the barge, when we have no rockets and no sunlight?”
Bascal waved a hand. “Relax. We’ll throw a lanyard.”
Conrad gaped at the stupidity of that. Had those words really come from the mouth of Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui? “We’ll what? Excuse me?”
“We steer the fetula so it just misses the barge,” Bascal said, “but we tag it with a very sticky rope.”
“That doesn’t help us decelerate.”
“Oh. Hmm.” Bascal scratched his chin, then pinched it. “These speeds are a lot higher than I’m used to. That trick works if you’re just burning off a couple of kips; you wind up swinging in a wide arc, then reeling the line in. I guess in our case the rope will need to be elastic.”
“How elastic?” Conrad demanded. Then he strode to the instrument console and called up a hypercomputer to answer the question himself. He was suddenly furious: here was yet another surprise, yet another critical detail dropped or ignored. Bascal’s got-it-figured-out act was total sham. Other than computing their initial course and setting up the sail controls, he’d figured out exactly nothing. “Do you even care? Are you trying to get us all martyred for the goddamned cause?”
“Steady, there, me boyo.” Bascal’s tone was ominous.
Conrad fiddled with parameters for a few minutes before extracting an answer. His skin went cold. “Well. It looks like a survivable ten-gee deceleration will stretch your cable over three thousand kilometers in four minutes. The wellstone’s not going to stand up to that; it stretches maybe twice its length. Maybe. It’s fucking silicon, Bascal; it’s like glass. It’s a woven mat of glass fibers. Little gods!”
“We’ll think of something,” Bascal snapped. “Jesus, if you’re so smart all of a sudden—”
“Yeah, we’ll think of something! I already have. We give up now and call for help!”
“We what?”
“We mirrorize every surface, and start flashing signals in every possible frequency. I’m very sure the navy’s looking for us already; it shouldn’t take long to trip their sensors.”
“That’s treason,” Bascal said simply. “That’s mutiny.”
“It’s common sense,” Conrad countered.
But Bascal was shaking his head and gesturing wearily. “Guard, my life is in danger from forces outside this fetula. If the hull is mirrorized, or generates any broadcast in any frequency, kill this man. Don’t stuff him in the fax, kill him. Is that understood?”
The guard cocked its blank-faced head at Bascal. “What is the nature of the threat?”
“Despair,” Bascal told it. “They will attempt to drive me to suicide. And they may well succeed.”
The guard thought it over, and said nothing.
“You’ve finished us,” Conrad murmured, loud enough so only Bascal could hear. “Oh, you lazy, selfish bastard. You’ve just nailed our coffin shut.”
Chapter twelve.
The battle of conrad
Was that it? Were they done for? Well, maybe. As he stalked off into the other room, Conrad allowed for the possibility that there might be a solution. Might. This did not, of course, excuse Bascal. It didn’t excuse threats of murder backed up by lies, nor the gross endangerment of Viridity’s remaining crew. He felt it now with certainty: there were no excuses for this sort of malice and recklessness. If some species of God was out there somewhere, keeping tally, then Bascal was in big trouble.
But that night at dinner the pilinisi was all smiles, and afterward he told the story of “The Princess and the Satellites,” in which a Tongan king’s daughter, a clever player in pre-Queendom politics, purchased an arc of empty space for almost nothing—for a shipment of glass beads and handwoven mats—and then leased it to the Empire of China for the parking of communication satellites, which were bus-sized things like telecom collapsiters, except they contained no black holes and so could not transmit the quantum interference patterns associated with material objects. The princess made a great deal of money, embarrassed her parents and other enemies, set the kingdom aright, and lived happily ever after.
Hurray.
But then, for the first time since this crazy mission had started, it was Conrad’s turn to tell a story. This was the thirteenth night of their voyage—Bascal had been manipulating the seating patterns and the length of the story hour to shut him out, to keep him from addressing the whole crew. But tonight Conrad had simply gotten up and changed seats while the pilinisi was talking, and sat right down between him and the ever-gorgeous Xmary. Conrad knew better than to blurt out the fact that Viridity was going to crash fatally into its target, or else miss entirely. That sort of outburst would simply get him faxed or killed. And with the reminder of the Palace Guards’ murderous power, open mutiny seemed even farther out of the question. So his story couldn’t simply be “The Bad Prince and the Doomed Fetula.”
But as it happened, he did know a Tongan fairy tale.
“I’m taking you back,” he said. “Back, before the power and whimsy of monarchs had swallowed human society. There were two boys who lived on an island, who were very disobedient. They loved to escape from their house and play in the ocean. They loved to dive deep and swim out far beyond the reef, even when their mother told them not to. Their mother worried endlessly, because the boys were fearless, and never careful.”
“Tik and Lap?” Bascal asked, sounding distinctly unamused.
“Maybe,” Conrad told him. “Tik and Lap. That sounds right.”
“Tik and Lap and the giant fish?”
“Yeah.”
The prince glowered but said nothing.
“Anyway, their mother warned them that the sea was dangerous. They could get swept out by the tide, or get a foot caught in the reef. They could get eaten. But the more she scolded, the farther out they swam. One day they swam all the way out to a neighboring island. The chief of the island was impressed, and sent them home in a boat filled with wonderful foods.