The Wellstone Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  Acknowledgments

  chapter one - the spheres of heav’n

  chapter two - camp friendly

  chapter three - domes of the popcorn moon

  chapter four - the wellwood deception

  chapter five - the battle in the throne room

  chapter six - camp discontent

  chapter seven - freedom blast

  chapter eight - sun ride, sunset

  chapter nine - stowage

  chapter ten - winds of permutation

  chapter eleven - the long carry

  chapter twelve - the battle of conrad

  chapter thirteen - the cold rebellion

  chapter fourteen - restoration day

  chapter fifteen - pride and the prince

  chapter sixteen - crash day

  chapter seventeen - the secret garden

  chapter eighteen - an outside chance

  chapter nineteen - single-celled life

  chapter twenty - the arena sentence

  chapter twenty-one - walking home

  appendix A - glossary

  appendix B - technical notes

  appendix C - the fax wars

  Lost in Transmission

  About the Author

  By Wil McCarthy

  Copyright Page

  For Rich, who will never grow up

  Praise for the works of WIL McCARTHY

  THE WELLSTONE

  “An ideal blend of wit and superscience, set in a brilliant future age when wealth and immortality just aren’t enough. McCarthy gives an adventurous new spin to the ongoing rebellion of the young.”

  —David Brin

  “Wil McCarthy asks a question for the first immortals: if their children do not know or fear death, might death become an exciting adventure?”

  —Sean McMullen

  “THE WELLSTONE has a madcap, inventive energy that proves irresistible. Wil McCarthy’s previous book, THE COLLAPSIUM, was dazzling in its ingenuity, and THE WELLSTONE—a deranged take on a boys’ adventure tale, with its log cabin flying through the Kuyper Belt on its programmable matter sails—is a sequel worthy of its predecessor.”

  —Walter Jon Williams

  THE COLLAPSIUM

  “[Protagonist] Bruno de Towaji... is surely speaking for his creator when he assures another character, ‘Imagination really is the only limit.’ ”

  —The New York Times

  “The future as McCarthy sees it is a wondrous place. While there are amusing attributes and quirks to McCarthy’s characters, the greater pleasures of this novel lie in its hard science extrapolations. McCarthy plays up his technical strengths by providing a useful appendix and glossary for the mathematically inclined reader.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A standout novel. McCarthy has added a lyricism reminiscent of Roger Zelazny to cutting-edge hard science in the manner of Robert L. Forward.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Ingenious and witty... as if Terry Pratchett at his zaniest and Larry Niven at his best had collaborated.”

  —Booklist

  “The author of Bloom once again demonstrates his talent for mind-expanding sf. Vibrant with humor, drama, and quirky ideas. Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “A fairy tale [with]... the most delicious superscience since Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Stylistic diversity and hard scientific rigor blended with panache and striking imagination. McCarthy works hard to draw out pathos and character development. Genuinely exciting—a wonderful hoot.”

  —The New York Review of Science Fiction

  “Fresh and imaginative. From a plausible yet startling invention, McCarthy follows the logical lines of sight, building in parallel the technological and societal innovations. ‘Our Pick.’ I wanted to visit this Queendom and meet these people”

  —Science Fiction Weekly

  “[A] comedy of manners about High Physics, immortality, mad scientists, and murder. Great fun [with a] Wodehousemeets-Doc-Smith aesthetic. As ingenious as the physics and special effects are, it is their juxtaposition to the wit and comedy that gives the novel its particular flavor. [A] playful, thoughtful book.”

  —Locus

  “Top-notch. Terribly good fun. This very funny book has something for everyone.”

  —Entertainment Tomorrow

  “McCarthy knows his physics, and makes it extremely easy to suspend disbelief. He creates a world that is both foreign and amazing... but in McCarthy’s hands it appears all but inevitable.”

  —Mindjack Magazine

  “Wil McCarthy is a certified science fiction treasure, a real-life rocket scientist with a gorgeous writing style and rapier wit to boot. [While his] high-concept physics ideas... are deft and fascinating, it’s his characters and story that make The Collapsium a book to savor, a complex and layered story in the grand tradition of science fiction’s masters.”

  —Therese Littleton, Amazon.com

  “Quite entertaining. The science is larger-than-life, and so are the characters.”

  —SF Site

  “I don’t recall the last time a book made me laugh out loud. I did so here on page 146, and at the book’s end I did so again... though my eyes were moist as well. McCarthy has created a story here that is distinctly Asimovian in flavor, though his voice is very much his own.”

  —SF Revu

  “Prepare to use your grey matter. [McCarthy] fills his pages with lovingly rendered descriptions... but it is the strength of his scientific imagination that really shines through.”

  —SFX Magazine (UK)

  “A most dazzling future. What follows is a mind-spinning struggle that recalls a Henry Fielding novel of manners, Michael Moorcock’s epic sagas and the cosmic free-for-alls of Doc Smith. There’s fascinating science aplenty, mad scientists, robots running amok... What more could you want?”

  —The Weekly Australian

  “A decidedly odd but enjoyable mix of mannered, decadent comedy and far-out physics. I liked and was even prepared to believe in [it].”

  —Ansible (UK)

  BLOOM

  “Bloom is tense, dynamic, intelligent, offering a terrifyingly vivid view of how technology can rocket out of our control.”

  —David Brin

  “What clever and compelling science fiction! The Bloom future is all too believable.”

  —James Gleick,

  author of Chaos: Making a New Science

  “Wil McCarthy makes ideas jump. Bloom grabs you from very first scene and doesn’t let go till the last page. It’s irresistible.”

  —Walter Jon Williams

  “Ultimately [humanity] must learn to ask new questions. The book’s message is [that] in a universe stranger than we know, ignorance may be inevitable, but it’s definitely not bliss.”

  —The New York Times

  “Swiftly paced, consistently inventive and tightly written. This is a novel that knows its business.”

  —The Washington Post

  “McCarthy has worked out a bleakly dramatic future. This is the kind of broad view of mankind’s future and the universe reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke.”

  —The Denver Post

  “The science is consistent and integral to the story, and the characters are much more plausibly drawn than are so many folks in [other speculative] fiction. In nearly every passage, we get another slice of the science of McCarthy’s construction, and a deeper sense of danger and foreboding.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “The writing is vivid. Readers who can plug into the prose and navigate its dense circuitry will find themselves rewarded with a wallop of a finale that satisfies hi
gh expectations for high-concept SF.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An ingenious yarn with challenging ideas, well-handled technical details and plenty of twists and turns.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “McCarthy is an entertaining, intelligent, amusing writer, with Clarke’s thoughtfulness [and] Heinlein’s knack for breakneck plotting.”

  —Booklist

  “Succeeds on many different levels, combining a unique literary style with complex scientific speculation and political intrigue. Wil McCarthy’s most entertaining and thought-provoking novel yet.”

  —Locus

  “An intense narrative of survival. Bloom works on several levels even while beckoning the reader into deeper mysteries. McCarthy proves once again that he has the wit and narrative power to take us to the outer reaches of space and down into the vast unknown of human, and inhuman, consciousness.”

  —Barnes and Noble Explorations

  “Complex and inventive. Hundreds of pages of smart, suspenseful science fiction. ‘Our Pick.’ ”

  —Science Fiction Weekly

  “An astonishingly original concept, one of the most chilling versions of nanotechnology yet envisioned. McCarthy is able to make the idea... seem quite believable. The pacing of the book is also excellent. McCarthy has a real talent for hard-SF concepts and thriller plotting.”

  —SF Age

  “A feast of exposition [that is] tasty as well as nutritious. His sworn agenda to balance hard science, adventure, and characterization is vindicated by the completed product. Bloom is a fine synthesis between Hard and Literary SF, a trick many have tried, but few have managed.”

  —SF Revu

  “The science is plausible, the narrative sinewy and taut. [McCarthy’s] assurance and skill are evident throughout. Starlog Verdict: ***** [5 out of 5 stars].”

  —Starlog UK

  “Bloom might be the wide-screen novel nanotech SF needs to kick-start itself. As soon as I read the cover blurb I couldn’t wait to start reading, and then once I’d started reading I couldn’t stop. Wil McCarthy’s take on nanotech SF may be just about as far as we can go with the idea in fiction.”

  —Infinity Plus (UK)

  “Destined to become the classic nanotechnology novel.”

  —Bookman News

  “Impressive. Believable. The story-telling and plot devices are tight, tight, tight. I regretted ever having to put the book down. I found it to be often insightful, in psychology, relationships, even philosophy. But the bottom line is that Bloom is fun. Complaints? Nope, can’t think of one.”

  —Fantastica Daily

  acknowledgments

  Dragging this fanciful future into print has been a long and sometimes arduous journey. I’d like to extend my earnest thanks to Shawna McCarthy for twisting my arm; to Scott Edelman, Chris Schluep, and Stanley Schmidt for editing earlier phases of the project; and to Anne Lesley Groell for believing so wholeheartedly in this one. To the extent that the ideas in this book are mature, it’s thanks to years of kicking around by friends and relations, most especially Gary E. Snyder, Richard Powers, Mike McCarthy, and Geoffrey A. Landis. I’m also grateful for the wisdom, advice, and enthusiasm of David Brin and Hal Clement, and for the more specific patience of Kathee Jones, Laurel Bollinger, and Don Kinney in critiquing early manuscripts.

  I am, of course, deeply beholden to the swarms of physicists, chemists, astronomers, and other scientists on whose work these stories are based. Many of these men and women have been generous with their time, and thoughtful with their imaginations. I owe Bernhard Haisch and Marc Kastner a particular debt. And, as always, the greatest thanks go to my own family for their love and support, which make all the rest of this possible.

  Any errors you find in this book are the fault of Secret Villains, whose mad schemes will soon be revealed.

  chapter one

  the spheres of heav’n

  One man in a sphere of brass.

  One man alone in the vacuum of space.

  One man hurtling toward solid rock at forty meters per second—fast enough to kill him, to end his mission here and now, to cap a damnfool end on a long and decidedly damnfool life. To leave his children defenseless.

  In the porthole ahead is the planette Varna, his destination, swathed in white clouds and shining seas, in grasslands, in forests whose vertical dimension is already apparent against the dinner-bowl curve of horizon. Not planet: planette. It looks small because it is small, barely twelve hundred meters across. Condensed matter core, fifteen hundred neubles—very nice. The surface workmanship is exquisite; he sees continents, islands, majestic little mountain ranges jutting up above the trees. Telescopes, he realizes, don’t do justice to this remotest of Lune’s satellites.

  The man’s name is Radmer, or Conrad Mursk if you’re old enough. Very few people are old enough. Radmer’s own age would be difficult to guess—his hair is still partly blond, his weathered skin not really all that wrinkled. He still has his teeth, although they’re worn down, and a few of them are cracked or broken. But even in zero gravity, as he kicks and kicks the potter’s wheel that winds the gyroscopes which keep the sphere from tumbling, there’s a kind of weight or weariness to his movements that might make you wonder. Older?

  To be fair, the air inside the three-meter sphere isn’t very good. Cold and damp, it smells of carbon dioxide, wet brass, and the chloride tang of spent oxygen candles. Old breath and new—the only way to refresh the air is to dump it overboard, but after two and a half days he’s out of candles and out of time, and there’s a healthy fear stealing upon him as the moment of truth approaches. Opening the purge valve would be a highly risky stunt right now.

  Giving the winding mechanism a final kick, he ratchets his chair back a few notches and unfolds the sextant. This takes several seconds—it’s a complicated instrument with a great many appendages. When it’s locked into the appropriate sockets on the arms of his chair, and then properly sighted in, he takes a series of readings spaced five clock-ticks apart, and adjusts a pair of dials until the little brass arrow stops moving. Then, sighing worriedly, he folds the thing up again, stows it carefully in its rack, and clicks the chair forward again to kick the potter’s wheel a few more times. Course correction needs a stable platform, you bet.

  When he’s satisfied the gyros are fully wound, he takes up the course-correction chains, winces in anticipation, and jerks out the sequence the sextant has indicated. Wham! Wham! The sphere is kicked—hard—by explosive charges on its hull. Caps, caps, fore, starboard, starboard... It’s quite a pummeling, like throwing himself under a team of horses, but before his head has even stopped ringing he’s setting the sextant up again and retaking those critical measurements.

  The planette’s atmosphere is as miniature as the rest of it, and there’s the problem: from wispy stratosphere to stony lithosphere is less than half a second’s travel, if he comes straight in. That’s not long enough for the parachute to inflate, even if his timing is perfect. To survive the impact, he has to graze the planette’s edge, to cut through the atmosphere horizontally. Shooting an apple is easy; shooting its skin off cleanly is rather more difficult, especially when you’re the bullet.

  Could he have sent a message in a bottle? A dozen messages in a dozen bottles, to shower every planette from here to murdered Earth? That would be an empty gesture, albeit an easier one. God knows he’s needed elsewhere, has been demanded in a dozen different else-wheres as the world of Lune comes slowly unraveled. But somehow this dubious errand has captured his imagination. No, more than that: his hope. Can a man live without hope? Can a world?

  Alas, the sextant’s news is less than ideal: he’s over-corrected on two of three axes. Sighing again more heavily, he stows the thing and gets set up for the next course correction, gathering the chains up from their moorings. When he jerks on the first one, though, no team of horses runs him over. Nothing happens at all.

  With a stab of alarm, he realizes he’s been squan
dering correction charges, not thinking about it, not thinking to save a few kicks on each axis for terminal approach. Can he recover? By reorienting the ship, which he needs to do for landing anyway? Yes, certainly, unless he’s been really unlucky and run out of charges simultaneously on all six of the sphere’s ordinal faces.

  Outside the forward porthole, there is nothing but Varna: individual trees beneath a swirl of cloud, growing visibly. There is, to put it mildly, little time to waste.

  Attitude control is strictly manual; Radmer throws off his safety harness and hurls himself at a set of handles mounted on the hull’s interior. They’re cold, barely above freezing, and damp enough that his fingers will slip if he doesn’t grip with all his might, which, fortunately, he does.

  There’s a metallic screech and groan, brass against brass, as the outer hull begins to roll against the bearings connecting it to the inner cage, where his feet are braced. The potter’s wheel and gyros hold a fixed orientation in space while the three-meter sphere, complete with chair and storage racks, is rotated around them. Sunlight flashes briefly through one porthole; through the other, the green-white face of Lune, from whence he came.

  Like most men his age, Radmer is a good deal stronger than he looks. Still, the hull’s rotation is as difficult to stop as it is to start. It’s his own strength he’s fighting, the momentum he himself has imparted. Despite the cold, the effort makes him sweat inside his coat and leathers.

  He’d like to move the hull so his chair is facing backward, to serve as a crash couch. Because yes, even the best landing is going to be rough. But with the starboard charges expended, that would still leave him with one uncorrectable axis. Instead, he points the chair in the “caps” direction, ninety degrees from where he wants it, fires two charges in perpendicular directions, then points the chair forward again and quickly straps in, so he can take another sextant reading on the planette.

  Perfect? Close enough? No, he’s off again, drifting somehow from an ideal ballistic trajectory. He starts dialing for another correction, realizes he’s out of time, and hurriedly stows the sextant instead, to keep it from becoming a projectile in its own right.