That bothered Conrad. “I don’t like this, Bascal. Eventually, if we stay out here long enough, we’ll get unlucky. One of these particles will fire right through the cabin, won’t it?”
“Maybe,” Bascal said honestly. “I don’t know. If it was small enough, I think passing through the first layer of wrapping would vaporize it. I doubt it could penetrate the wood after that. But then you’d have a pinhole in your airtight wrapping.”
“And that would be that.”
Bascal thought it over and nodded. “It would be bad, anyway. Maybe we should inspect the wrapping.”
They did this, and quickly discovered another hole. A leak. Fortunately it was small—only a tenth of a millimeter—and there didn’t seem to be any significant air loss through it, although over enough time it would surely bleed away their entire atmosphere.
“Before the advent of programmable matter,” Bascal noted, “spaceships were full of leaks. You just couldn’t make them airtight, not if you wanted to get in and out, or get cables in and out. Or have windows.”
“It only has to last fifteen days,” Conrad agreed weakly, trying for the same casual tone.
There was little point in grommeting the hole, since the wrapping was already as rigid and tough as its invisibility permitted. But they went ahead and did it anyway, swapping a bit of tough inviso-cloth for a circle of tougher impervium. The hole itself, per Bascal’s prediction, was simply an absence of matter, not programmable, not patchable from inside the cabin. Unless maybe they wanted to drill through a log and patch the appropriate section of shrink-wrap by hand.
“I’ll bet a sheet of plastic and some library paste would do the trick,” Conrad moped.
“Nah,” Bascal said. “No need. Let’s just ride it out and hope for the best.”
Chapter fourteen.
Restoration day
It was 5 P.M. and hotter than hell when Xmary set off, on foot, for the rendezvous point. Eight kilometers from home—farther than she’d ever walked in her life—but with four days’ warning she’d had time to search the product libraries for a really comfortable pair of mischief shoes, and a walking stick of hollow diamond that weighed nothing, looked like a soap bubble, and collapsed to the size of her pinkie when she slipped it in her pocket.
She could wish for a closer rendezvous, but (a) like everyone else in the worlds, she was in perfect physical condition, and (b) getting word out to Feck had been difficult and risky, and getting word back from him had nearly blown everything. Xmary had had to co-opt a classmate, a girl she barely knew but saw regularly in the one place she was still allowed to go. But the girl, Wandi Strugg, had had no idea there was anything illegal going on—she thought it was a simple case of forbidden love, and had read Feck’s message aloud, right in front of Herr Doktor Professor Vanstaadt.
“ ‘Commons Park, at Fifteenth Street on the east bank of the Platte, seven P.M. sharp. Bring six garlands, a sketchplate, and something discreet to protect your knees and elbows.’ ”
Wandi was smirking when she said it—no mystery what she was thinking—but Herr Doktor Professor sniffed something amiss in the words, and looked up from his desk, straight into Xmary’s face.
“Are you in some trouble, young lady?” His voice was like an old cartoon, from the days when people had real accents, and while his skin was smooth, his hair was an honest shade of gray. Herr Doktor was a kindly old busy-body; everyone knew it. Too kindly, too old. Too difficult to fool.
“No, sir,” she’d answered cooly, fighting down the urge to imitate his voice. But the hot flush of her face had said otherwise.
“It’s her boyfriend,” Wandi crooned, thinking she was simply embarrassing a classmate. But it was that very obliviousness that saved the day; Herr Doktor looked Wandi over, weighing her words and her tone, and found no trace of guilt or deceit.
“You should be more considerate,” he told Wandi. “These matters are always delicate.” To Xmary he said, “They have sensors in those parks, you know. If you want an area for private use, I suggest you make a reservation.”
Xmary had nodded and retreated, too choked with fear and embarrassment to make any reply. She hadn’t opened her mouth in class—any class—in the four days since then. It was too close a call, and she didn’t care to risk it any further. It wasn’t punishment she feared, but compassion, because the wisdom of age would shut her down if it could, show her the foolishness and futility of all her best-laid plans. In their version of tranquility she would do nothing, accomplish nothing, be nothing.
So here she was, hiking through the western suburbs toward the aforementioned park, with an enormous rucksack on her back, bursting with phony decorations. She must have looked ridiculous—who carried things anymore? Who walked? But all kinds of strange things took place on Restoration Day; being the celebration of monarchy itself, the fourteenth of August was easily the wildest of Queendom holidays. Possibly the only day when a gathering of rioters could go unnoticed until the riot had actually begun!
Speaking of which ...
She dug the sketchplate out of her pocket and checked the time. And promptly cursed under her breath, because it was 6:58 already. She’d miscalculated her walking time, seeing straight lines on a map without realizing how meandering and indirect the paths and roads really were. She also checked her news headlines, and was annoyed to see that NAVY SEARCH was still CLOSING IN ON MISSING CAMPERS. That particular headline had been recycled almost daily for the past two weeks, and told her nothing at all. Which was frustrating, because she just wanted one little question answered: was she aboard that ship or wasn’t she?
And if so, she also wouldn’t mind knowing why, and how. So that was three questions—still not much to ask, but she’d begun to fear there would never be any answers for her. Which simply hardened her resolve to do something meaningful in the here and now!
Approaching the Platte, she left the street proper and passed through a garden of low trees and struggling midsummer flowers. The pathway was marked with hanging chains, and led to a sturdy wellstone footbridge, with chest-high walls topped by rails of bright green. Even this late in the day, the river itself was full of vesters, children and grown-ups alike swathed in flotation plastics and engrossed in the annual Res-Day ritual of beating themselves senseless on the rocks and rapids. Hooting and screeching among themselves, they paid not one bit of attention to Xmary and her anomalous rucksack.
Across the bridge was another park where dozens of children, maybe six years old and all dressed in various shades of not-quite-royal purple, played and danced to the drummy, twangy strains of Tongan music. But this was Confluence Park, not Commons Park, so Xmary continued on, following the sidewalk south around a set of enormous power transformers and across a deserted street. Like most of the journey, this was all new to Xmary, a slice through the city of her birth that she’d never seen or even imagined before. It was obvious and yet startling, that Denver existed continuously at ground level, with amazing sprawls of cultured space in between the familiar landmarks.
A set of rock stairs led down an incline, and there, finally, was the rendezvous point: a sweep of hilly meadow dotted with trees, and crisscrossed by wellstone paths. Suddenly, Xmary knew exactly where she was: on the hillside overlooking the ruins of Café 1551, now an empty foundation domed over with the yellow mesh of a police cordon. CRIME SCENE. DO NOT TAMPER.