No way out. No alternatives. No hope? Was there a god of lightsails to watch over them, or a plain-old God, merciless and remote but still observing? Or were they truly on their own, pitting their frail selves against a universe that didn’t know them from any other speck of matter?
He wondered what it was like to die. Everyone wondered that, of course, but not everyone had to face it as an immediate short-term prospect. Not everyone had heard the order given for his or her own robotic execution. Hitting the barge would at least be instantaneous; they’d see it looming behind the sail, swelling as they approached, and the very end would come quickly, the barge expanding toward them like a shockwave. There’d be maybe a momentary glimpse of its close-up hull, frozen in cameraflash detaiclass="underline" pipes and light housings, a planette-sized registration number, and then ...
What? Stepping out of a fax with the last ten weeks missing from his backup memories? No, he would never experience that. Some other Conrad Mursk would, while he, while this Conrad Mursk, would be dead and gone. Waking up in heaven, or in the big nothing where he wouldn’t even know he was dead. Wouldn’t know he had ever lived at all. Did it matter, if there was somebody exactly like him to carry on? Wasn’t it really just the same thing as being disintegrated and reborn during fax transport?
No, he decided. It wasn’t the same. One of him had died once before, and the twenty-day hole that had left was an unhealed wound in his life, even now. He’d never mourned for that dead brother, exactly, but he had very definitely wondered what he went through. What it felt like, what he thought about. Last words, last images, last fleeting shreds of emotion. Did he scream?
And gods, it was crippling having this kind of shit bouncing around in his head. Maybe it wouldn’t bother him so much without the Xmary factor, this stupid, pointless pining he’d taken up lately. Or maybe it would, but since their little talk—since her little revelation—it seemed increasingly clear that no thought or action or circumstance could be relevant except in relation to her. Which was crazy, obviously, but there you had it. Death was bad enough, but when it meant the loss of her, every memory and trace of her, that was just too high a price to pay for Bascal’s glory.
And Conrad couldn’t arrange another meeting with her so soon, and wouldn’t know what to do with it if he did. So instead he watched her out of the corners of his eyes, and listened to the lilt of her speech, taking what pleasure he could. Stupid, yes, but he needed an anchor.
It occurred to him that this feeling had a name: he was heartsick . It wasn’t just a word, or even just a feeling, but something that had stolen upon him with all the grinding hallmarks of a genuine illness. Maybe the only illness left, in an age of perfect and permanent health, and it weighed him down as surely as gravity. Even going through the motions of daily life was exhausting. But what else was there? If he simply gave up without a struggle, then he and she and all the others would die, no doubt about it. So he met with the boys one by one, prodding gently and hearing them out, slotting them mentally into factions. Loyalists: Ho and Steve. Neutrals: Preston and Jamil. Mutineers: Xmary, Karl, and Martin. And Conrad himself, sure. That made it four against three, except the “three” also had two Palace Guards on their side, so really the mutiny was already over. No contest. They’d lost.
Could the guards be subverted? On the face of it, it seemed unlikely. They took their orders directly from Bascal, and simply ignored anyone else’s. But then again, those orders were constrained by the words of the king, and other “standing orders,” and the robots’ own inherent instincts and programming. They wouldn’t interfere with the prince’s freedom of action, but they also wouldn’t allow him to harm himself, if they understood what was happening and saw a way to prevent it.
Conceivably, Conrad could simply talk to them. They wouldn’t obey him, or probably even acknowledge that he was speaking to them. But they weren’t deaf. On the contrary, they were perceptive, finely tuned for the gleaning of information. For all he knew, they’d already figured the whole thing out, or at least figured out that something was wrong. They would listen to his words, weigh them, add them to the vast database of their paranoid and hyperprotective worldview.
So the idea wasn’t absurd. It was a matter of picking his moment and his exact argument, of getting the right words out before Bascal could find a way to stop him.
And meanwhile, he hadn’t given up on the physics of it. Not that he was any expert on physics—not by a long shot—but he didn’t have to solve the equations, just look them up and feed them into a simulation. It was more like asking a scientist than being one.
Anyway, a collision at twenty kilometers per second would vaporize ordinary materials like flesh and bone and wood, but properly rigidized wellstone could survive it under some conditions. Working feverishly on his little sketchplate hypercomputer, he’d identified eight different prefab settings that stood a good chance of coming through intact. Adamantium, obviously—that was the toughest pseudomaterial known to science. There were two superreflectors: impervium and its fee-for-use cousin Bunkerlight. And two transparents: superglass and Wexlan.
The others were more obscure, and had weird properties like superconductivity and phosphorescence, that he wasn’t at all sure about. But it didn’t matter anyway, because an impregnable hull wouldn’t save the ship’s insides. Wouldn’t slow them down, wouldn’t cushion them, wouldn’t protect them in any way. That hull would simply be the last thing any of them saw, in the microseconds before they slammed into it at twenty kips.
He had felt a few brief hours of giddy relief when he’d stumbled on “magtal,” a family of transuranic metals that were not tough enough to survive the collision per se, but whose features included “superferromagnetism.” This was significant, because the neutronium inside the barge was, according to his fax-provided reference materials, also highly magnetic. And Conrad had done enough fiddling with magnets to know that they repelled as well as they attracted. Could they decelerate the fetula slowly, on a springy magnetic cushion?
Alas, his hopes were short-lived. First of all, the net magnetic field of the barge would have to be lined up with Viridity’s incoming trajectory—which as far as he could determine, it wasn’t. And anyway, his simulations showed the cushion was unstable, like a steep, springy, hilltop of slippery gel. Instead of slowing down, the fetula would simply slide sideways around the magnetic obstacle until the field strength dropped off. If they tried it, they would miss the barge by many thousands of kilometers. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but didn’t solve the larger problem of having nowhere else to go.
More promising was the prospect of just missing the barge, and then turning on the magnets in an attractive mode. This was basically just Bascal’s lanyard plan, with magnets instead of fragile ropes. Up close, this worked very well indeed; there’d be absolutely no problem getting ten gees of deceleration out of it. Unfortunately, the force of attraction between the two ships dropped off fast as they drew apart. At a hundred kilometers, the force was huge, but at a hundred thousand it was barely more than the eyelash press of starlight.
And there was the problem: if he throttled the acceleration to a survivable level, then the magnetic “lanyard” would snap and the fetula would keep on sailing away, somewhat more slowly than before. If he adjusted the magnets to ensure capture, the fetula would bounce a thousand kilometers past the barge, and then stop and sproing back. But the acceleration would peak at hundreds of gee, and Viridity’s insides would be so much grape jelly and wood pulp. He tried the simulation a dozen times in a dozen different ways before giving up. Magnets weren’t going to save them.