“Other than this,” he said finally, “other than graffiti and innuendo and ingratitude, how are you?”
“Get processed, Conrad.” She sighed in irritation and, after a pause of ten seconds or so, answered with a quiet voice. “Truthfully? Not good. Bascal and I aren’t getting along.”
“No?”
“He isn’t like this on TV. Holding court, pushing people around ... Pushing me around.”
“He’s not himself,” Conrad said, hoping it didn’t sound like a speculation. Truthfully, he didn’t know the prince that well either, not in his own element, and was still surprised by his behavior more often than not. “I’ve never seen him like this. He’s, like, drunk on the drama of it all. Yesterday he threatened to kill me.”
“To kill you? Why?”
Conrad took a breath and released it, deciding all at once to confide in her and let the chips fall. “I wanted to send a distress call. We have no plan for safe landing at the barge. No way to accomplish it. We’re doomed to miss it or to crash, and I’m seriously concerned that Bascal knew this all along. Even if he didn’t, that’s just as bad. He doesn’t care, or he isn’t really trying. Either way, it’s big trouble for the rest of us.”
Still cleaning, still wrinkling her nose and curling her lip, she absorbed that. Conrad found himself puzzled and concerned: he’d expected her to react more strongly, one way or the other. What did it mean that she didn’t?
“That doesn’t surprise you?” he asked.
“No,” she said, with a hint of despair. “It’s about what I figured. The signs are everywhere. Do you ... think maybe he’s gone crazy?”
Conrad felt as if he’d lost his balance. Which was nonsense, of course, in zero gravity. Dizzily, he whispered back, “That’s not something I’d say out loud, even in private. But yes. He wants this so badly, he doesn’t care if it’s impossible, or who gets hurt. I’d call that crazy.”
“Let him perish if that’s what he wants.” She sulked. “My heart is heavy enough. But I didn’t give him permission to take me.”
“No. Nor I. I’m ... glad to hear you speaking your mind on this. Don’t be afraid to talk to me.”
Xmary’s eyes met his. “I haven’t let him touch me,” she whispered. “Not for weeks.” She was hanging close to him, her brush-wielding hand only a few centimeters from his. Still clenched with the rage and stress of it all.
Now he felt his own cheeks burning. Speaking her mind, okay, but why had she told him that? What possible use was the information? He fantasized briefly that it meant she liked him. In that way, yes. She’d gone for the big score—the pilinisi—only to realize that his erstwhile sidekick was the real Prince Charming around here. Yeah, certainly. Stuff like that happened all the time. And even if there was somehow a particle of truth to it, what good was that? What could he do, make a play for the girlfriend of an unbalanced and openly murderous monarch?
He touched her hair for a wistful moment. She didn’t object, which surprised him so much that he pulled away and said loudly, “Damn it’s ugly in here. Some fucker on this ship needs flushing lessons.”
Then he whispered to Xmary, “We’ve got to do something about this. You and I, maybe some others. Learn matter programming, all right? Quickly.”
And she whispered back, “I will.”
She was true to her word, pulling a textbook out of the fax and poring through it for days. Finally, the cabin’s ceiling began suffering pattern and color changes at random intervals. One day it was mostly gold, with little sparkles of light dancing across it. Pretty, in a garish sort of way, though it made a poor light source and an even poorer environmental control. Fortunately, that one was only up for a couple of hours.
Unfortunately, what replaced it was a popping, snapping, hissing field of black and white dots that cast the cabin into flickering gloom, and gave an instant headache to everyone who looked at it.
“What did you do?” Conrad asked Xmary. They were on opposite sides of the main room, and he had to raise his voice to be heard over the complaints and groans and sudden intense discussions of the other boys, and the hissing of the wellstone itself.
“I don’t know,” she answered, pulling her hand away and drawing back from the ceiling. “I’m not sure. I’ve lost my interface. Can I ... touch it?”
“I wouldn’t,” Conrad said, eyeing the mess. Then, raising his voice further: “Nobody touch that.”
Damn, it could be hot or cold or sticky, or crawling with huge electrical potentials. It could be corrosive with “Lewis hole–pair” acids, or worse. Wellstone’s quantum-dot arrays contained charged particles in huge numbers and all kinds of bizarre arrangements. Some of their reactions were capable of tearing normal matter apart, as Conrad’s programming instructor, Mr. McMorran, had emphasized many times.
He cleared his throat. “You are, um, aware that matter programming is very dangerous?”
“I’ve read chapter one, thank you,” Xmary said, sounding ready to punch him.
It wouldn’t be wise to let her see—let anyone see— how much her anger stung him. So what he said was, “Good.”
It wasn’t possible to stagger in zero gee, but Bascal’s entrance had something of that quality. He was staring at the ceiling and holding his head, not really watching where or how he was going as he kicked along the walls and floor. “What did you do, Conrad? What happened?”
“We’re trying to figure that out,” he answered nervously.
“Make it stop. You’re hurting my brain with that.”
“I don’t want to touch it. I can use ... I can use the environment controls. The panel is connected to ... well, all of it connects one way or another.”
Which was bad, because Xmary’s unsupervised tinkering had the potential to pollute the entire fetula, from wrapping to rigging to sail. If they ceased being airtight, or a variety of other things happened, this kind of pattern pollution could easily and instantly kill everyone on board.
Being very careful not to bounce himself upward with no way to stop, Conrad glided over to the environmental control panel. Once there, he laid some wires around to the tortured ceiling, and passed a simple text encoding along them: UNDO.
The hissing stopped, and the ceiling reverted immediately to gold.
“Little fucking gods,” Bascal said, eyeing it uneasily. He took his hands off his head and glared alternately at Xmary and Conrad. “Whatever you guys are doing, quit it. Seriously. A spaceship is not a fucking toy.”
Which was true.
After that, Xmary was ready to quit her programming experiments altogether, but Conrad persuaded her to practice on a sketchplate instead, and to stand by the fax so she could hurl it to oblivion if it did anything funny, anything she didn’t immediately like or expect. So her studies continued, at a lower and more cautious intensity, through the next several days. If only she could ask questions right out in the open. If only they could sit down together! But he couldn’t schedule her in again so soon without people noticing, and she was probably attracting enough curious attention as it was.
For his own part, Conrad passed through the week in a kind of low-grade panic. Did he really believe he had a handle on his fears? Every time he thought that, the danger to life and limb and memory simply ratcheted up another notch, threatening to paralyze him. He went through the motions, filling duty rosters and working his shifts, trying to act normal. But people were noticing. How could they not? Bascal hadn’t pulled him off helm duty or anything, mainly because there was so little the helm could accomplish anyway, but the tension between the two of them must be screamingly obvious.