“I tried,” Conrad told him tiredly. “You're not an easy man to advise. You respond much better to actions, as you've amply demonstrated today.”
“So fine, I'm responding. Now talk to me.”
Conrad sighed. “Bas, why do your plans always involve this pressure cooker of pain and death and suffering? Why are the rewards always so far in the future? People don't want that. They never have and never will.”
“But we're immorbid,” Bascal answered. “Some of us. Planning for the future never used to be a personal thing. Our parents were the first crop of humans to map out a future they themselves would inhabit. And they pissed the job, didn't they? We've got to do better. Forget twenty-year plans and even century plans; we have the opportunity, the duty, to plan across the millennia, across the eons. And if we can see paradise, not just in dreams but in the hard, cold numbers of mathematical certainty, does it not behoove us to be brave? To take the first hard steps down that road? The easier roads all lead to ruin, my friend. I've seen it.”
Conrad sighed. “Jesus and the little gods, Bas, quit the act. You can bamboozle children, but you're not fooling me. By the time you solve the economic crisis, the colony's dead will be irradiated into frozen goo. There's no resurrection; the only place you can send them is heaven itself. But there's a lesser paradise much closer at hand.”
The king's eyes filled with cold certainty. “You've taken the Cryoleum. Twenty-five thousand sleeping bodies. Taking them ‘home' to a place they've never seen. I've sent word back to myself on Sorrow, to verify that the Cryoleum is actually missing, but you can save me the trouble.”
“Yes,” Conrad admitted. “We've taken the Cryoleum.”
“Damn you,” the recording said. “Do you realize what you've done? Do you know how destabilizing that'll be? No matter how ruthless I am—and I hate being that, believe me!—this will distort the morale equations, further eroding our productivity, further postponing the dawn of our indigenous Eden.” Then the hologram's eyes widened a bit. “Ah, but it's a secret. Yes? If I kill you, if I kill everyone on the ground who knows about your plans, the whole thing can be covered up. We'll just need to find a way to explain the loss of Newhope. And that shouldn't be difficult. She's an old ship; accidents happen.”
These words made Conrad very happy and proud not to be on Bascal's team, to be instead on his own team and struggling for his own vision of the least-worst future. But at the same time the words triggered a deep mourning, because he and Bascal really had been good friends, best friends, for hundreds and hundreds of years. They still were.
“Even your barely sentient messages dream of homicide,” Conrad said.
The recording shook its head. “Sadly, it makes sense. And fortunately, I have the fortitude to press onward, even with plans that make me personally ill.”
“You can't stop us,” Conrad said.
Here the recording smiled: a cold, holographic smile. “You'd be surprised what I can do. You'd be amazed what I can do, with centuries of thought and planning. I always knew there'd be rebellions to put down. And it occurs to me, seeing you lying there half asleep, that I have still another weapon at my disposal.” He looked down at himself. “This ghost will haunt you, Conrad. It will deprive you of rest until such time as you surrender Newhope and return home in chains.”
Oh, dear God. “Go away, Bas.”
“No, indeed,” the recording said. “I'm tireless, drawing my energy directly from your own reactors. And as you say, I'm barely sentient. Thus, I'm incapable of boredom. The volume of my speech is unfortunately capped by safety interlocks—I can no more shout you to death than I can command the wellstone in your hull to disintegrate. Alas for you, because it would be a kinder death than what Ho has in store.
“However, the duration of my speech has no such constraints. We shall begin, I think, with one million recitations of the “Fuck You Song,” and follow up with a long, detailed list of your personal faults. I will not enjoy this, for I cannot, but perhaps the real Bascal will be satisfied when all is done, that all has been done that can be, to bring down this house of cards you call a conspiracy.”
“Go away,” Conrad repeated as the first stanza of the “Fuck You Song” began. “Little gods, Bascal, you can't be serious.”
Ah, but he could. And was.
Chapter twenty-four.
Flashfight
That Newhope could be unwilling to receive any further malicious uploads was a possibility, given that she was a highly intelligent and protective entity in her own right. However, she should not have been capable of resistance when presented with Royal Overrides. Perhaps, then, there was a communications problem of some sort, although this is also unlikely in a ship constructed of wellstone and hypercollapsites. Or perhaps Bascal—the singled king of a world and a people—was too busy or distracted to halo himself for another recording. But could he not have duplicated the original transmission, and filled the spaces of Newhope with a thousand holie copies of himself?
In point of fact, he did not. For whatever reason, only one ghost haunted the ship, with one crewmate—Conrad—bearing the brunt of its attentions. Perhaps Bascal felt a twinge of love or pity, or simply couldn't bring himself to send himself off, again and again, to certain doom. There was something wrenching about sending a piece of your soul on a one-way trip to data heaven, never to be heard from again. Conrad had abandoned the practice years ago.
But King Bascal was harder-headed about these things, and it's difficult to imagine he'd've foresworn such an action if it offered some strategic or tactical advantage, or hastened the day when his visions of Eden could be instantiated in the physical universe. Some light might be shed on the subject if the site of his palace could be examined by quantum archaeologists, but failing that, we can simply acknowledge the mystery, and agree that Newhope's habitable spaces were neither as loud nor as chaotic as they might have been.
Nevertheless, her crew—even Eustace—were all pulling long shifts, scheming in their heads and trying to communicate ideas to one another while simultaneously keeping them obscure from the prying ears presumed to surround them. The industrial-grade fax machine—the only one onboard—produced stimulants in abundance to keep them all on their toes, and between that and the lack of sleep, the general stress, and the specific nagging and singing and joking of Bascal's one message, they were all pretty fuzzed out by the time they reached the bottom of their orbit.
“Velocity with respect to Barnard is 615 kps,” Feck announced loudly, over the ninety thousandth refrain of the “Fuck You Song.” “If we have forever to get home, the minimum needed for escape boost is 620, but ideally we'll need something closer to ten thousand. I'll kiss the engines for good luck, ma'am. As for the sails, I am unfurling them . . . now.”
There was a lot more to the boost sequence than just that, but while the sails were unfurling, and before Feck had gotten to the next step on the checklist, red lights began flashing and alarms blaring.
“What's happening?” Xmary demanded.
Conrad, sitting now at the Systems Integration station instead of his own chair, reported, “It's a broken thread alarm. From the bow sheeting, just aft of the ertial shield. Something's evaporating the outer layers of the wellstone there.”