Torch of Freedom

Berry shook her head. 'Sorry, I said that stupidly. What I should have asked is what's the probable range of time, given past experience?'

Wix ran fingers through his long and thick blond hair. 'At the short end, a few days. That'd be unlikely, though. At the other extreme . . . Well, the longest recorded voyage—well-documented, anyway—through hyperspace for a wormhole survey ship was a little under four months.'

'One hundred and thirteen days, to be precise,' said Kare. 'That was the Solarian survey ship Tempest back in . . . what? 1843, TJ?'

Wix nodded, and Berry made a face. 'Four months!'

Kare's look of concern was replaced by one of reassurance. A good attempt at it, anyway. 'It's not as bad as it sounds. For one thing, there's not much danger involved. Like Captain Zachary said before they ever headed out, survey ships are designed with the possibility in mind that this might happen. They've got plenty of endurance and life support.'

'Absolutely,' Wix agreed with an emphatic nod. 'The real thing to worry about on a trip that long is boredom, Your Majesty. It's not that big a ship, you know.'

Their attempt at reassurance didn't help. Berry grimaced, as she imagined being trapped in such a vest- pocket world for almost four months.

'But of course survey ships are designed with that in mind also,' Kare added, a bit hurriedly. 'I can assure you, Your Majesty—I speak from personal experience here—that a survey ship has as much in the way of stored entertainment as even a big city. Well . . . not live entertainment, of course. But there's about all you could ask for in the way of reading material, vids, games, music, you name it.'

'Sure is,' said Wix. 'I once took the opportunity on a long survey voyage—almost certainly the once-in-a- lifetime-opportunity—to watch the entirety of The Adventures of Fung Ho.'

Berry's eyes widened. The Adventures of Fung Ho had been the longest-running fictional vid series in human history—aside from soap operas, of course—with forty-seven continuous seasons.

'All of it? That's—' She had a knack for math, and did the calculations quickly. 'That's over a thousand hours of viewing time. A thousand and thirty-four, to be precise, except that I think there were a couple of years when they had shortened seasons.'

Wix nodded. 'Three seasons, actually. 1794, due to an actors' strike, where they lost almost a third of the season. 1802, from a writer's strike—but that only lasted for a few weeks. And the biggest loss, over half the season in 1809, when Lugh came under severe bombardment and just about all activity on the planet had to be suspended for the duration of the emergency.'

Lugh was the third planet of the star Tau Ceti, and was the location where most of the episodes in The Adventures of Fung Ho had been recorded. The planet was popular for a large number of vid series, especially those involving adventure, due to its flamboyant scenery and even more flamboyant biota. Unfortunately, the Tau Ceti system also had over ten times as much dust as did Sol's system and that of most inhabited solar systems. That massive debris disk meant the planet was subject to more in the way of impact events than all but a handful of other planets with permanent human settlements. The danger of bolides shaped everything about Lugh's culture, from the structure of its system defense force down to the fact that those same bolides were a regular feature in the adventure vids produced there.

Berry shook her head slightly, as she continued with her calculations. A thousand hours of viewing time translated into eighty-three consecutive days, assuming you sat and watched for twelve hours a day.

'Gah,' she said. 'All of it?'

'He cheated,' said Kare. 'He skimmed through all the episodes involving E.A. Hattlestad and Sonya Sipes.'

'That has got to be the silliest sub-plot ever invented by the human race,' groused Wix, 'even allowing for the fact that it's supposed to be romance.'

Berry chose not to argue the matter. She'd seen a large number of the episodes of the Fung Ho series herself—although certainly not all of it, nor even close—and had been rather partial to the romance between Hattlestad and Sipes. As much of it as she'd seen, at least. Granted, the premises were pretty extreme, starting with the size disparity between Hattlestad—who was practically a homunculus—and the eight- foot-tall giantess Sipes. But so were the premises of the entire series, when you got right down to it. That wasn't surprising, given that Fung Ho had been inspired by the adventures of Baron Münchhausen. Add asteroids, alien tempters and temptresses (whose temptations usually succeeded, Fung Ho being Fung Ho), and energy weapons.

'Still,' she said, 'I'm impressed. Or appalled, I'm not sure which.'

Kare and Wix both chuckled. 'To be honest,' said Wix, 'after it was all over and I thought about it, I was a lot closer to being appalled than impressed, myself. The series is addictive, but speaking objectively it's about as ludicrous an exercise in fiction as you can find in the record.'

Kare's smile faded. 'But to get back to the point, Your Majesty, I think it's much too early to start really worrying about what happened to the Harvest Joy. Yes, there are some explanations that involve real disasters. But they're not that likely.'

'Well, okay,' said Berry. She cocked her head. 'I'm presuming that until you know more, you have no intentions of sending another survey ship through the wormhole.' That was a statement, not a question. Beneath the pleasant tone, there was the hint that Berry—Queen Berry, when push came to shove—would not permit any such foolishness.

Kare shook his head. 'Oh, no. Even if we had another survey ship with an experienced captain and crew at our disposal—'

'Which we certainly don't,' Wix said forcefully.

'—we wouldn't do it, anyway. There's a standard procedure to be followed in cases like this. Stripping away the jargon, the gist of it is: remeasure, recalculate, and refigure everything, before you so much as breathe heavily on that wormhole.'

Berry nodded. 'Okay. We'll just wait then. For now, at least.'

The very muscular woman named Lara appeared in the entrance to the small salon where Berry had been meeting with the two scientists. Jordin and Wix weren't quite sure what her formal duties were. She seemed to serve the queen as a combination bodyguard, personal handler and court jester.

'The delegation from the pharmaceutical companies has now been waiting for twenty-five minutes,' she said. 'You're late, not them.'

The physicists, accustomed to the court of Manticore, were startled. Even now, after having spent two and half months on Torch, they still weren't really acclimatized to the planet's sometimes odd customs. It was inconceivable that anyone, much less a mere bodyguard, would speak that bluntly—no, rudely—to Queen Elizabeth. And if they did, there'd be hell to pay.

But Queen Berry seemed to think it was simply amusing. 'Lara, weren't you paying attention in your sessions on royal protocol?'

'Slept right through the silly business. Are you coming, or do you want me to dream up some more excuses?'

'No, no, I'll come. We're done here.' She gave Kare and Wix a smile and a semi-apologetic nod of the head. 'Sorry, but I'm afraid I've got to leave now. Please let me know immediately if anything further turns up.'

After she left, Wix let out his breath slowly. 'Well,' he said, 'it is the most likely explanation.'

Kare made a face. He had not, in fact, lied to the queen. As Wix had just stated, the most likely explanation was that the Harvest Joy couldn't return through the wormhole, for whatever reason, and was now slowly making its way back to Torch via hyperspace.

But . . .

It wasn't the only possible explanation. He'd been honest enough when he stressed how uncommon it was—these days, at least—for ships to be lost during wormhole surveys. Statistically, the odds were very much against anything of the sort having happened to Harvest Joy. On the other hand, though, there was a reason he'd deliberately avoided getting into any details concerning the disasters that could happen to survey ships. However unlikely they might be, they could happen, and some of them were . . . gruesome. The fate of the