Both rooms stank of dog, although the animals themselves were not in evidence.
The empty inventory, on the other hand, was rather a large room, with rather a large fax machine dominating its aft wall. “Some big equipment has to go through here,” Robert explained. “When this thing pulls into port they have to change out all the gases and fluids. The fittings are instantiated as needed. This is also where the crew transfers in and out, nominally, when the gate is working. And it’s the main medical facility as well.”
Bascal eyed the room and the fax and the doorway, nodding in satisfaction. “It’s great, yeah. No material restrictions? Other than legal limits, I mean?”
Robert shrugged. “None that we’ve ever encountered, no.”
“Little gods, I wish we’d’ve had one of these on Camp Friendly. Life would have been so much easier. How’s your buffer mass? Will you object if we cart away a few tons? Mostly silicon?”
A white grin brightened Robert’s blue face. “We’ve got eight hundred tons of buffer mass, Your Highness. With all that neutronium to push around, the engines aren’t going to notice an amount like that. Each neuble masses ten times the dry weight of the ship.”
Bascal looked both impressed and appalled. “Jesus. You must burn a lot of fuel pushing it around.”
“That’s so,” Robert agreed. “Loaded, we have to abandon the fusion drives for anything other than attitude control. Course changes are made by the antimatter drive, usually during squeezing operations.”
“Wow. Fuck. These barges should be ertially shielded.”
“Can’t,” Robert said. “First off, that’d be a lot more expensive than antimatter, especially since we need the antimatter anyway to compress the neubles. We get twice the work out of it. Efficient. Whereas ertial shielding for something this big would take, what, a million gigatons of collapsium? It’d take hundreds of years for this thing just to gather its own shield mass.”
“Or hundreds of barges,” the prince suggested, “to equip one superbarge, which you could push around with flashlights and fart gas. No inertia, no fuss.”
But Robert was shaking his head. “Still can’t, no. The bow of the ship has to be open, right? It’s a scoop. Put a collapsium cap over it and suddenly you can’t gather snow anymore.”
“So put it on the stern.”
“Then you can’t run the engines.”
“So use gravity hooks. Little gods, we’ve had inertialess grappleships for centuries.”
“Wouldn’t work,” Robert said. “For a lot of reasons. Maybe if there was infinite money you could set up a better system. But this one is practical, and self-sustaining. Been working since even before your father’s time, or he’d have never invented collapsium in the first place. Right? No Nescog. No Queendom.”
“Hmm.”
“How,” Conrad interrupted, “do you get the neutronium out?”
“At port? They use magnets; big ones. Like you smacked us with.”
“Oh.” Conrad took the hint. “Our braking system caused you some trouble, did it?”
“Banged the cargo out of alignment,” Money Izolo confirmed. “Gravity fluctuations and a hell of a loud noise. That Plasma discharge was something to see! There may be some structural damage as well, though we can’t get into the chamber to confirm it. We’d have to drain the working fluid, which would be challenging out here in Kuiper wilderness. If something is broken, we’ll know soon enough.”
“You sound just like a mass wrangler,” Conrad said.
Izolo shrugged. “We live here. The ship’s systems are our whole world.”
“I wasn’t making fun. You’ve probably spent more time at it than the real wranglers. Are you going to get jobs when all this is over?”
Izolo laughed. “I doubt it. Jail time, most likely.” “Does the barge have a name?”
“It has a registration number,” Robert said. “But we call it Refuge.”
“Refuge. Hmm. Catchy.”
Bascal was still studying the room, but now his eyes were looking back in the direction of the bridge, and flicking occasionally forward, toward the holds. “What happens in an emergency?” he asked. “Say you’ve got to change course in a hurry.”
Robert turned toward the prince, looking skeptical and suspicious. “We don’t have emergencies. Everything happens very deliberately here.”
“We didn’t,” the prince pointed out. “We came fast, out of the black.”
Robert clicked his tongue.
“Look,” Bascal said, in the utterly reasonable tone that told Conrad he was scheming madly inside. “I’m just asking. You can’t dump the cargo, right? Because it would just keep going, along the same vector that was carrying you toward trouble.”
“Dumping neubles into unassigned orbits is a serious offense,” Robert said. “Much worse than crashing a loaded barge. Neubles have to be accounted for, hunted down and retrieved. That costs money, and in the meantime the traffic hazard is enormous. If anything hits one ... There’ve only been two neutronium spills in the history of the Queendom—as of the time we left, anyway. But both of them involved massive damage and loss of life. Imagine a billion tons of matter going from this big”—he held his fingers a couple of centimeters apart— “to this big”—he swept his arms to indicate the neutronium barge as a whole—“in a couple of milliseconds. With all kinds of radiation spewing out.”
“Bad,” the prince said, nodding. “There’s no network gate to escape through. No abandoning ship. So what do you do?”
“We stay out of trouble,” Robert answered. He paused for an uncomfortable moment and then said, “Well, that’s pretty much the tour. Unless you want to see four more corridors exactly like the one you entered through?”
“Nah,” Bascal said. “We’ll figure the rest out as we go. Should we, uh, start moving ourselves into the inventory?”
“I suppose you should, yah. Here on Refuge, though, we’re overdue for breakfast. I thought perhaps you would like to join us.”
A: Whether Bascal is a “great” or even a “good” poet is hardly a fair question.
Q: But you’re a literature critic!
A: Nevertheless.
Q: Oh, don’t be tedious. We’re paying for this.
A: He’s certainly a precocious poet—I don’t think anyone would dispute that. And if he were to publish pseudonymously, it might be possible after the fact to decouple his position from his creations. Failing that, I make no claims to impartiality, and am skeptical of those who do.
Q: Do you like the poems?
A: Oh, absolutely! We all do. But that’s the point, right? We can’t help it.
—Critic Laureate Julia Aimes,
in a Q281 interview with FUSILIERS magazine
Chapter eighteen.
An outside chance
Whatever Utopia they were building here, it certainly wasn’t a naturalist one. Some of the foods were hand-picked from the garden: rich avocados and sweet melon tarts, onion grass and bamboo shoots. They even had a peach pie tree. This seemed to be more a matter of convenience and aesthetics than anything else, though— they liked having food plants around, and if the fruits weren’t harvested as they ripened, they would simply rot, or else sprout into additional, unwanted greenery. Eating them was easier.
But the sound baffle’s huge circular chamber had a fifty-meter-thick conduit running floor-to-ceiling through its center, and a maintenance panel on its capward side included a small fax machine, which in fact produced the bulk of this Refuge breakfast. There were cereals with milk, sausages with cheese, and other foods with no natural equivalent at alclass="underline" sweetpapers and mulm, as well as the rich yellow paste they called “fressen.”