Finally—finally!—the pressure began to ease. The sail above them was pure mirror from end to end, reflecting a field of fixed stars and a dwindling violet minisun no brighter than a searchlight. But the pressure eased too slowly, and the pain in every part of his body continued to build. He could tell time by it—a pain clock. He had the luxury now of feeling impatient, and feel it he did, marking the passage of every moment.
As soon as it felt possible and safe, he rolled over onto his side. This brought him face-to-face with Bascal, whose customary grin was long gone. He looked drawn and pained, his brown face shining, his hair matted down with sweat. And yet, his right arm was raised and extended, doing something or other on the control panel.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” Conrad asked.
“Yes,” Bascal replied tightly.
Indeed, the arm looked both bleached and blackened by its ordeal.
“Shouldn’t you stop?”
Bascal grimaced. “Kind of, yeah. I’m ... going to change seats.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Naw. We’re a minute into the run, and we’ll be holding steady at two gees for a couple minutes here. I’ve had worse.”
“A
minute
?” Conrad found that figure very hard to believe—surely it should be an hour!—but there it was on the panel’s chronometer: 01:08, 01:09, 01:10 ...
The acceleration was steady now, and yes, truthfully, not so terrible. Even so, Bascal groaned in obvious pain as he undid his tie-downs and slithered out of the nav chair. The pale right arm, drained of blood, didn’t seem to be working well; it flopped around numbly while Bascal worked with his left. When he was free of the straps, he scooted his rump along the floor for half a meter, until he was seated beside his empty mattress. He didn’t try to lift or roll himself into it.
“You make me proud,” Ho said to Bascal, in a tired and grating voice. He was struggling to sit up.
Conrad decided to join him in this, but thought better of it when his back screamed in protest. And then thought better of
that
when he lay back down and felt the sweaty mattress pressing smotheringly against the side of his face. So he did sit up, and really, it didn’t feel too bad. He was alive, and not seriously hurt, although yeah, he was going to be very, very sore.
People were coughing and groaning and crying in the other room. There was the unmistakable
clump! clump!
of heavy footsteps on the wooden floor, and then Xmary was standing there, framed in the doorway in a pair of camp culottes and a tee shirt cut off to display her navel, and with the reflected purple of the
sila’a
laser shining down through the skylights, Conrad could distinctly see her nipples and the outline of her hips and thighs. Her hair was pulled back in the kind of topknot the centenarians were wearing lately, and like many young women, she’d subtly nudged her physical development in a compact but adult direction, and did not look at all like a child in this light.
“Bascal,” she said, quickly and seriously, “something’s wrong with Raoul. He’s coughing, and there’s blood coming out.”
“I’m sailing, dear,” Bascal answered tightly. And yeah, he could reach the controls even from his mattress.
“What should we do?”
“Well, if I don’t keep an eye on these heading corrections, there’s going to be something wrong with all of us, hmm? Just hold his hand or something. Ask the guards.”
“Is it a lot of blood?” Conrad asked.
She shook her head. “No, just, like, spots of it. Can you come look? Please?”
“Yeah,” he said, and made a show of rising without any grimaces or groans. This wasn’t actually so difficult—he felt like he was carrying someone on his back, but no longer as if the life were being crushed out of him. It did hurt a lot to walk, though.
The cabin’s main room was like something from an old movie: wounded men sprawling on narrow, filthy beds. There was blood on several of them, and more streaming out from the finger-pinched noses of a couple of scared-looking boys. But it was Raoul who really looked bad— gray and bruised, with dark baggy circles under his eyes and blood-flecked spittle on his chin and tee shirt. His chest rose and fell in rapid, shallow rhythm.
“You okay?” Conrad asked him, stupidly.
Raoul looked up with frightened eyes, and shook his head. Nope.
“He was coughing,” Xmary said.
Awkwardly, Conrad crouched down beside the bloody mattress. “You’re breathing kind of fast. Can you slow it down?”
Again, Raoul shook his head. No. Definitely not.
“Can you talk?”
No.
“It could be his lungs,” Conrad said, although he had no idea. Why was she asking him for help? What could he do? “This goes way beyond first-aid training.”
“How do we help him?” Xmary demanded.
“I don’t know,” Conrad said honestly. The usual treatment for severe injuries was to throw the victim into the nearest fax machine, and print out an undamaged copy. Was that possible in this case, with the network gates disabled and the machinery bound by weird instructions from the king? He glanced up at the fax machine, bolted against the room’s innermost wall. The divider wall separating it from the main room had been removed two days ago. They had clear access if they needed it.
“Fax, will you take him? Repair him?”
“Insufficient buffer mass,” the fax answered. “I can accept a body and correct its pattern, but reinstantiation will not be possible.”
“Why?” Conrad asked. “Can’t you just use his own mass? Disassemble him and then rebuild him?”
The fax spoke slowly, as if inventing the art of conversation as it went along. “My mass buffers have been depleted by recent operations. Sir. The operation you suggest would bring several of them, temporarily, into a negative mass regime, which is not possible.”
Shit. Conrad had shoveled some dirt in there a few days ago, on Bascal’s advice, but he hadn’t checked the levels since then. Hadn’t really thought about it at all. Did dirt even have the right elements in it?
“Can we throw some of the food in?” someone suggested.
“Or take a huge crap in the toilet?” That was Steve Grush, trying to be funny. Or maybe not; the sink and shower and toilet plumbing ran into and out of the fax in a maze of shiny wellstone pipes. A piece of crap would, in fact, be whisked apart into component atoms and stored in the appropriate mass buffers.
“Hurry up,” Xmary said, in a deadly serious tone. And with good reason: Raoul’s eyes had rolled upward, so that only the whites were showing, and those whites—mostly red—were jiggling and jittering in a spasmodic way. His breathing had grown even faster and shallower. He was dying, plain and simple.
“Fax,” Conrad said, “can we just stuff him in there, and print him out later?”
“Certainly.”
Conrad and Xmary shared a quick glance, nodded at each other, and grabbed Raoul by the arms while Steve Grush undid his straps. The only hard part was the confusing mess of bodies and mattresses between them and the fax, but people were scrambling out of the way, or moving to help. Raoul’s legs were grabbed as well, and his bottom, and as a group they gave him the old heave-ho. It seemed very strange, to stuff a limp, twitching body through the solid-looking print plate of the fax. But it wasn’t really solid. Even a cursory inspection showed it was insubstantial, actually a fog of tiny machines sprouting tinier machines sprouting quantum doodads far too small to be visible. And Raoul’s body went right through it, like a diver through the surface of Adventure Lake.
He was saved. Literally. In memory.
“Anyone else?” Conrad asked anxiously, turning to survey the room. But all the other boys were shaking their heads, hiding their hands. No sir, not me.
“Sure?” he pressed, an edge of humor finally creeping into his voice. But there were no takers, and Conrad had begun to feel distinctly light on his feet. He turned toward the navigation room. The
bridge
, he supposed they should call it. “Hey Bascal, how low is this gravity going to get?”
“Zero!” Bascal called back, sounding annoyed. “Enjoy it while it lasts!”
Oh. Right. As they drew away from the
sila’a
, as its laser brightness faded and dimmed, there was nothing to push them, no source of acceleration. Conrad had known this, and yet somehow he’d been visualizing them all walking around in here for two months. Not drifting, not floating. Because it was a log cabin, he supposed. Because it had such a definite floor and ceiling, and belonged on the ground.
In that moment, it dawned on him that he really did have an impulse problem. He had a brain but wasn’t using it, and as a result everything—even the obvious things—kept coming to him as nasty surprises. Hell, they didn’t have any
facilities
in here for zero gravity. How were they going to sleep? To store things? To use the toilet? Now
there
was an unpleasant thought! And what had all these other kids been thinking? Disbelieving in the entire scheme, never thinking it would really happen? That, or relying on Bascal to work it all out. Or rather, Bascal and his team, meaning basically just Conrad, since Bascal didn’t care and nobody else seemed to worry much how anything worked. Except Peter, whom they’d left behind on the planette.
“Oh boy,” he said to Xmary. “This is going to be a hell of a trip.”
The illusion of gravity dropped away over the next several minutes while Conrad pointed and gestured and spoke urgently, throwing together impromptu work details to clean up the things that had already fallen and broken, and to lash everything else down, and to come up with covers and hoods for the bathroom fixtures before things could get any worse in there. By the time they were twenty minutes into the flight, gravity was down to a tenth of a gee, and they were all dancing giddily on air.
It didn’t surprise Conrad when people ignored him. What did surprise him was the ease and complicity with which most of them listened and, albeit in offhand and slipshod ways, obeyed. Was this because he was friends with Bascal? (
Was
he still friends with Bascal, and did he even want to be?) Or was it simply because there were obvious things that needed doing, and he was the only one pointing them out?
The fax proved willing to provide first-aid supplies— crafted from the atoms that had been Raoul Sanchez—so the nosebleeds were soon plugged and coagulated, the sprains iced, the bruises warmed and moistened. Tape bandages were wrapped around questionable limbs and joints, while skin sealants were applied to the many cuts and abrasions the boys had suffered. Anti-inflammatory medications were passed around liberally; the insults of heavy gee had spared no one.
Even Xmary had her share of ouches. Conrad found himself dabbing her middle back with sealant foam while she held the back of her shirt up over one shoulder with a bruisy-looking arm.
“Ow,” she said.
“Sorry. I’m almost done.”
“Does it look bad?”
“It looks painful,” Conrad admitted. The wound was a flap of skin the size of his pinkie nail, not especially bloody for some reason, but partly separated from the flesh beneath. He smoothed it back in place with the sealant, then blew on it to hasten its drying, all the while acutely conscious of the smoothness of her skin. “What did you do?”
“Fell,” she said. “The edge of the mattress caught me.”
“A
mattress
did this? Gods.”
“Yeah.” She lowered her shirt.
“What the fucky hell?” said Ho Ng’s voice. Conrad turned, and saw Ho there glowering in the doorway.
“What?” he asked, mostly innocently.
Ho stepped forward. “Who said you could touch the princess?”
“What princess?”
“He’s sealing a cut,” Xmary snapped, standing up and straightening her clothing. This effort proved both difficult and elaborate; what little “gravity” they had left was gently pulling things to the floor, but any movement would kick it all up again. She bounced several times on her toes before settling to the floor again, and Conrad couldn’t help but notice the loose jiggle of her small breasts, and wonder what they looked like under there. She gestured around her with an arm—another elaborate effort. “Use your eyes, Ho. We’ve got casualties.”
“I’ll use my eyes,” he said, staring her up and down with creepy lust, humorless and undisguised.
She glided toward him like a ballerina, and managed to stop gracefully, right in his face. “Watch yourself.”
If it was a staring contest, she won it right away; Ho turned his glare on Conrad. “Don’t touch her again.”
“Or what?” he couldn’t help asking. Shooting his mouth off again, yes, heedless of consequence. How many losing battles had he fought for the sake of these verbal jabs? Not that Ho could punch him or kick him or grapple him, not in the immediate presence of two Palace Guards. If rumors were any guide, the things could not only move fast enough to generate whipcracks and sonic booms, but could sense the intention of violence before the fact, could read it in the brain and the nerves and the tensing of muscles. Tazzing a punch was one thing, but how would they respond to an impending act of genuine malice?
Conrad was tired of Ho. If he
could
fight, it might be better to just get it over with, and give this fucker something to think about next time. On the other hand, he was under no illusion that he could win the fight, or that standing up for himself would magically end the threats and humiliations. It’d make them worse, probably.
Damn it, he’d waited long enough for his fear to kick in. Real fear. It was balanced by anger, what with Peter abandoned to the elements and Raoul stuffed in a fax machine and used for buffer mass. And balanced also by lust and pride; in front of Xmary, who was probably the only girl for ten AU in every direction, he had no interest in looking timid.
“Or what?” he repeated, but his voice broke, betraying his fright. The room had gone silent, except for the gentle whirring of the Palace Guard as it turned its head to regard them.
Bascal appeared behind Ho, tapping him on the shoulder. “Boys,” he said. “Or rather, men! What’s this posturing all about?”
“He touched your woman,” Ho said, stepping aside without turning, his eyes still locked on Conrad.