Worryingly, Conrad felt his resolve begin to crumble. He knew better than to trust this Prince of Sol; that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that Bascal’s ruthlessness did not, by itself, make him wrong. It didn’t guarantee or even imply that his plans and conclusions weren’t sound. Quite the reverse: without sentimentality to weigh him down, he might be better equipped to make decisions. This thought led to a most disturbing conclusion: that even the suicidal approach might genuinely be in the boys’ best interest. They were going to live forever, right? What harm was a youthful indiscretion or two, if it gave their surviving copies a stronger voice?
“You’re clouding my mind,” he said.
Bascal laughed. “I wish I had that power, my friend. Really. Your mind is clouded because you keep thinking this is simple, and you keep thinking it’s about you. About us, these copies here on this ship. But when you actually bother to communicate, when you remember the bigger picture, it’s not quite so obvious.”
Conrad had no immediate reply, so Bascal pressed the attack. “You’ve done an amazing job here. I’m very impressed with this ... blackmail exercise. But it’s not necessary. You and I have the same goal, and believe it or not we are still friends.”
“No,” Conrad said, shaking his head. “That’s not correct. If I hadn’t done this, if I hadn’t done it today, we’d have crashed and died. You weren’t on my side. You weren’t asking me for help.”
Bascal shrugged. “Am I perfect? Have I got it all figured out? This is difficult for me, just like it is for you. I apologize for any bad feelings my mistakes have caused.”
Conrad glanced at Ho, who was observing the conversation in sullen silence. Perhaps sensing a threat to his position and power. Oh, yeah, like being beta male on a ship full of troubled children was any great thing anyway. He also glanced at the doorway, mildly puzzled; no one else had come in here, or even poked a head in to look. With the alarms and flashing lights and raised voices, such an absence of curiosity was difficult to believe.
“We don’t trust each other,” he finally told Bascal, without quite looking at him.
“No,” the prince admitted.
“We’re not friends. Not now. Don’t make that appeal to me, because I’m not buying it.”
“All right,” Bascal said soothingly. “All right. We’re not friends. Can we be allies? If we agree on a goal, and the methods for achieving it, is that enough?”
“I ... guess it’ll have to be,” Conrad conceded unhappily.
“Then run your simulations,” the prince said. “And when you’re satisfied, turn off this distress beacon of yours. We’ll shake hands, and work out the details of our final approach and docking. Agreed?”
Well. What exactly had just happened here? Had Conrad’s mutiny succeeded—all his planning and his careful arguments winning the day, forcing Bascal to do the right thing? Had the mutiny failed, with Conrad falling back into error under the spell of the silver-tongued Poet Prince? Had the two of them simply worked things out, or lucked into a solution they could both agree on? It seemed, in a funny way, that all of these things were true at once, and Conrad didn’t know what to make of that, what lesson to draw. Shouldn’t something as basic as right and wrong be easier to figure out?
“We’ll see,” he finally told Bascal.
The prince nodded, accepting that answer although it clearly wasn’t what he’d been hoping for. He gestured to Ho, and the two of them left. But moments later, Bascal burst into laughter, and called out from the other room, “Oh, for crying out loud, let him go!”
“What?” Conrad called back.
“You’ve got to see this,” Bascal said to him, drifting back into the doorway. “Wait, scratch that. Do not take your hands off that panel. But boyo, my hat is off to you once more.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
Bascal laughed again. “Jamil and Preston are gone. In the fax, I guess. And Steve’s ... glued to the ceiling with a shirtball in his mouth. Xmary, for God’s sake, you win. Let him fucking go.”
Oh we’re not too good at rigging, and we’re not too good at scanning,
And we’re lousy at logistics which is why we’re farting beans.
But we know just where we’re headed, and we know just how to get there,
And they’re never gonna ping us till we crash right through their screens!
Working together again, like old chums, Bascal and Conrad managed to create some telescopic sensors, and to project their images in 2-D on the wellstone ceiling of the bridge. Their target: the fat, squat cylinder of the neutronium barge, twelve hundred meters long and nine hundred forty across. You could practically shrink-wrap the thing in the fetula’s sail.
Of course, neither of them knew anything about filtering or image enhancement, and there were certainly no built-in programs for it in any of the wellstone they had on hand, so what they got was a set of straight telescopic images, captured through the equivalent of a two-hundred-meter-wide lens and then magnified a hundred times with no change in detail or resolution.
The sun was too far away to light the scene effectively, so at this range—still nearly a quarter of an AU—the barge’s image was far from clear. You could see nine blooms of yellow light and three of red, which Bascal said were the barge’s running lights: red for the port face and yellow for the capward one, with the green of starboard and the violet of boot hidden behind the cylindrical shape of the barge itself, hulking dimly against the starry background. There was just enough detail to tell—with some staring and squinting and tilting of head—that they were looking at the barge from an aft quarter, seeing most of one side and the six engine bells sticking out from the stern. Of course, the bow would have white lights on it, so their absence here was another clue as to what they were seeing.
“This is raw,” Bascal said, when they’d finally settled on the least-worst focus for the image. “The light we’re seeing takes a minute and a half to reach us from there.”
Conrad whistled. Light was fast, so that must be a very long distance indeed. He didn’t get much sense of speed here aboard the fetula, but considering they’d covered almost four times that distance already, he couldn’t help but be impressed. They were really doing this! He even jotted some figures into a sketchplate to see what fraction of the speed of light they were going, but the result disappointed him: 0.006%. That made it seem slow again somehow.
Still, having not much else to do, he fiddled with the image parameters, eventually deciding that all the magnification was making the barge harder to see, instead of easier. So he pulled back, shrinking the picture and then refocusing, then shrinking and refocusing again. On the third iteration, though, some sort of smudge appeared near the edge of the ceiling, so he pulled back even farther, and focused again.
And gasped. Bascal, fretting with something on the instrument panel again, turned back to look at him, then up at the images on the ceiling.
The smudge, when properly focused, resolved into two separate objects: jagged lumps of translucent, blue-gray material. Like twin fists of icicle-packed snow—the dreaded “mace heads” of a Kildare snowball fight—with pinpoints of light shining between them. The stars, yes, showing through the fist’s worth of empty space that separated the two. But the points of light were too numerous, too large, too dim and glittery somehow. They couldn’t all be stars. The space between the iceballs was populated with something else, something solid. A dust or spume or debris field.