Now everyone was looking at Feck, and even by gaslight you could see him blushing.
Bascal looked surprised. “Feck! You don’t know things, do you?
Peter
knows things; he’s the son of laureates. Conrad
thinks
he knows things, although he’s a son of a bitch the last I heard. But you? Ah, wait a minute, I’m perceiving something: you have a connection to this tribe. Wait, don’t tell me! You’re, let’s see ...” He studied Feck’s complexion and features for a moment. “You’re one-eighth by blood.”
“One-quarter,” Feck said. “But it’s not Algonquin, it’s Chippewa. Their neighbors. For us, this is the Raspberry Moon.”
“Ah! You’re practically a native guide! I had no idea.”
“I’ve never been to North America,” Feck said. “Anyway, this area is Kiowa, or maybe Lakota. The Horse Moon.”
“We’ll have to horse around,” Bascal answered merrily. “And give a big, fat raspberry to the good citizens of Denver. Any other moons we should know about tonight?”
Feck scratched his ear, uncomfortable with the attention. The crowds were lighter here; the boys were practically alone in their pool of lamplight. “Uh, the Corn Moon? Or maybe it’s Popcorn Moon. Also Raptor, Thunder, and Blood.”
“Wow. That’s raw. I like it. We’ll screech like eagles, leaving a wake of thunder and blood. And raspberry popcorn! Actually, that’s quite silly. But anyway the town is ours, and I say we take a bite.”
Ah, the Poet Prince. Conrad snorted to himself.
Ho and Steve, unimpressed by this dialogue, exchanged a look, then turned and started off toward the sunset again. And once again, Bascal seemed honor-bound to go after them, to assert himself. He got between them and propped his elbows up on each of their shoulders, looking side to side and grinning.
“You know,” he said, “a preservation district like this one runs on what they call a ‘service economy.’ You walk around looking at objects on display, and if you like one, the shopkeepers will print out a copy for you, or have it faxed to your address. Or you can sit in a restaurant, and order yummy comestibles from a highly restricted menu. Sometimes the whole selection fits on a card, or a sign. There’s a theme to it. See, what you’re paying for is ambience—the way things look and smell and fit together.”
“Uh-huh,” Ho said uncomfortably. He obviously realized that he was expected to reply, to suggest something. But he was just too damned stupid.
Steve Grush ducked away from Bascal’s elbow, and then Ho did as well, and both the badboys were stepping back, sizing up the prince in some kind of unspoken power struggle. They never had a chance; at a loss for words and deeds alike, Ho finally shrugged, and gestured for Bascal to lead the way.
“You probably know where you’re going. Sire.”
Sire! Conrad couldn’t help wondering if this was a learnable trick, something Bascal had had drilled into him by tutors. He hadn’t really
done
anything—it might be something coded in his genome, some sort of dominant pheromone signature that made others feel more submissive the closer he got. Was such a thing possible? If so, it stood to reason that Their Majesties would give their son every advantage in the world. But perhaps being prince was advantage enough; it wasn’t like Ho could punch him out or anything, like anyone would stand for it if he did. Conrad felt a burst of pride and affection for this, his personal monarch, and it occurred to him that he would never
need
a trick like that, as long as he was standing right here at Bascal’s elbow. That was all the leadership any of them were going to need. This was the whole point of a Queendom, right? The need to follow someone, to surrender—if only symbolically—that unpleasant sense of personal accountability.
Figureheads,
right: they pretend to lead us, and we pretend to follow.
How very well we pretend.
Bascal dogged their course left a block, to pass through rows of buildings faced with what looked, yeah, like actual brick. (Although this was hard to believe. Couldn’t it fall off and hurt somebody?)
“Where
are
we going?” Conrad asked, in a tone that was private, but also calculated to be overheard by the other boys. Look, look, I’m speaking privately with your prince!
“Somewhere,” Bascal said. He certainly seemed to know, or maybe he was just going by instinct, but his course seemed unerring and sure, and the boys followed along willingly enough. They passed a building labeled in big metal letters: UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE TERMINAL ANNEX. How medieval. Did they still deliver “letters” and “packages” here, or was it just an old name for an old building?
Westward they went: toward the mountains, away from the buildings, away from the towers and the lights and the crowds. The downhill slope in this direction was unmistakable. You could still see the afterglow of sunset up ahead, but otherwise it looked gloomy. Empty. Forsaken. Maybe they were nearing the edge of the fax perimeter—that would make these places harder to get to, right? Less valuable, less desirable. “Bad neighborhood” was essentially just a theoretical term to Conrad, but like the Light Wars, it suddenly made a new kind of sense to him here. Maybe there was less wellstone in an area like this, less record of what went on. Was that what Bascal wanted?
He felt obscurely glad, all of a sudden, that this raw, real place was one of the Children’s Cities, where parents came when they felt the urge to spawn, to raise their young among others of their increasingly rare kind. Immortality was another wave that had hit society hard, and here was the reef where waves like that were broken. Denver! Denver!
The crowds were almost entirely gone now, the buildings thinning out into empty, meadowy lots hemmed in by gray metal fences. This afforded a very clear view of the mountains, and Conrad saw that one of the buildings he’d thought was downtown was in fact much farther away, in the foothills. The Green Mountain Spire, of course, a tapering, five-kilometer spike he should have recognized immediately, if for no other reason than because the top half of it was still in sunlight, and glowing as if hot.
Vehicular traffic tapered away and died. They passed along a pedestrian sidewalk and under a couple of bridges, until the area began to feel almost like a wilderness. There might actually be wild animals here. Heck, there probably were: rabbits and squirrels, and maybe even their predators. Would those be foxes? Mountain lions? As the walkway dipped beneath the bridges, cement walls rose up and around it, mostly blank but with occasional attempts at ornamentation: inlaid tiles and basrelief sculptures of deer and mountain goats and bears, of trout in a little river, and a scene of the mountains themselves, which were visible again as the walkway emerged. Moonlight was now the primary source of illumination. Thank God for the superreflector glare of the Dome Towns up there, on the round-faced Popcorn Moon, or Conrad wasn’t sure he could see at all.
The boys passed some benches where a pair of ragged men slept, and here was a genuine shock—there were hermits in the Queendom. He’d always known it, that there were crazies and addicts and social malcontents. These ailments could of course be stripped away by the morbidity filters in any fax machine, but only with the patient’s consent. Mind control was severely frowned on, so inevitably you got some sludge at the bottom of the societal keg. But this was a hypothetical issue, not something that should be sprawling on a bench right in front of Conrad Mursk, stinking like rotten cheese.
Ho, racing out in front of Bascal once more, leaned over the benches and treated both men to a bloodcurdling shriek. They startled awake immediately, their eyes wide. They didn’t make a single noise of their own, and the look on their faces was one of frank fear, even when they realized the scream was just some kid having fun. They expected, what, to be beaten? Murdered? Dragged forcibly through a fax gate until their drunken heads were clear? Now
there
was a bit of teenage thuggery you could probably get away with. But Ho just laughed, and then Bascal was laughing too, and the boys were on their way again.
And then, without any warning at all, they crested a low hill or ridge and found themselves at the edge of the fax perimeter. You didn’t need a map to see it; there was just this big park: grassy meadows and big stone staircases, and again with the little trees. Wellstone paths snaked through it, glowing faintly and tastefully in the moonlight, and just beyond these stood a row of brightly lit buildings, lining a depression that must be the Platte River.
Indeed, as they drew closer there was an unmistakable smell of “waterway” that Conrad had never realized he could sense. Interesting. That smell had once meant the difference between life and death for his primitive ancestors, so maybe it was coded in his genes. Probably was, yeah.
Too much tinkering,
he thought,
and we could lose
these little details. Stop being animals and start being some
other kind of thing. Self-designed, with all the foolishness
that that implies. Evolution is at least impartial.
But Conrad was young, and thoughts like that were a fleeting snow that melted rather than sticking.
Bascal clapped him on the shoulder, dragging him forward. “Conrad my man, you stop to brood every time we round a corner. You’re thinking too much, and it’s getting to be a problem.”
“I’ve got impulsiveness issues,” Conrad answered with a laugh. “You should be glad I’m thinking at all.”
That seemed to make Bascal angry. “Your parents are what, a hundred years old? Two hundred? Fucking
experts
on the subject of impulsiveness.”
“Actually, it was my school—”
“Well, to hell with your school. I doubt you committed a single age-inappropriate act. This is exactly why there are cities like Denver, where they at least make concessions to our youthful vigor, where they at least acknowledge that we have our own needs. Parents ought to be forced to live here. It ought to be fucking
mandatory
.”
A thought occurred: “Maybe
you
should be in charge of the Children’s Cities, O Prince of Sol.”
But Bascal just grunted derisively. “Bring that bill before the Senate, hmm? I’ll be fifty before they’re finished debating. And still a child in their eyes.”
“But your parents—”
This time, it was Bascal’s fist on his shoulder, slugging. “Will you shut up? Please? You are wrecking my mood. It’s tiresome.”
Ho Ng sidled up, showing fists of his own. “No pissing off the prince, bloodfuck. I’m going to pound somebody, and it might be you.”
“Steady,” Bascal said, holding up a hand. “We have a common purpose here.”
“What purpose?” Feck wanted to know. “We appear to be at the limits of the known universe.”
“Why, revolution,” Bascal answered casually, pointing at one of the buildings. “Starting right there.”
chapter four
the wellwood deception
Revolution. Wow. Fuck. Was that a metaphor? Because tempting as the idea might seem, a gaggle of teenage refugees from summer camp couldn’t do much against a whole Queendom, with its police and truant officers, its infinite supply of infinitely patient robots, and of course its billions of satisfied citizens in their tens of billions of instantiations. Even if the boys commandeered a fax machine and printed up an army of themselves, the Constabulary would simply shut down the entire area, round the boys up, and reconverge their many copies back into single individuals. The odds were so hopeless—and the threat of punishment so dire—that as far as Conrad knew nobody had ever even tried it.
“I thought we were just looking for girls,” he said, to no one in particular. And that was who replied: no one.
As the buildings approached, it became clear that the river had a good bank and bad bank: one side facing the city and backing to the suburbs, while the other had a nice mountain view, but butted up against the bad neighborhood and so became bad by association. The most questionable of the buildings was an ancient two-story café whose shabby appearance was not an act, but the result of a natural wood facade that had stopped looking luxurious a few decades before Conrad was born. This, not surprisingly, was exactly where Bascal led them.
The café had a scattering of plastic tables and benches and chairs in front and behind, occupied by perhaps a dozen people of varying ages. None of them looked especially old, but then again who did? Conrad guessed a minimum age of around twelve—just old enough to be let out of the house—and a median in the low twenties, with the oldest men and women just edging into their Age of Deceit. Thirty or forty years old, when the fax filters stopped merely harassing the aging process, and began simply to arrest it. Lock it up, lose the key.
There wouldn’t be many folks older than that, except maybe as part of the restaurant staff. This wasn’t the kind of place you came to with your parents; it was the kind of place you came with your
friends
, to drink watered-down beer and coffee and feel independent. Not much draw for the older crowd.
You could of course stay in the Children’s Cities as long as you liked—some people stayed on as teaching assistants or administrative assistants or whatever, and a few remained as passive consumers, either to make up for a childhood spent someplace less raw, or because they’d frozen somehow in the latter stages of larval development, unable to pupate, to grow wings and fly away. Calcutta, for example, was famous for its “Peter Pan” ghettos. But there were better places for people like that, where stronger intoxicants were available and everyone was above the age of consent. This place was what they called a “kiddie café”—no identification required for admittance. Whatever bona fide grownups you found here were probably up to no good. Which Conrad supposed was the whole point.
The name of the establishment appeared to be “1551,” although maybe that was its street address, or possibly even the year it was built. Here, a flock of dirt-faced teenage boys was apparently considered less alarming than it was downtown. Only a few people looked up at their arrival, and any surprise they showed probably had more to do with dorky camp uniforms than anything else.
Bascal seemed to take this nonreaction personally; his easy stride broke into a trot, and he uttered a quiet, ululating sort of war cry and made an overhand “follow me” gesture to the boys behind him. They were officially taking this place by storm, and yeah, that did get a bit more of a reaction. A young man who’d been leaning against the doorway now shrank away from it, not caring to test his luck.
The place was a lot warmer inside than the cool breeze flowing down along the river. Poorly ventilated, Conrad thought, and with a wood face instead of a wellstone one, it couldn’t pump the heat out electrically, either. Very rustic. Hell, it was almost like being back at the camp. The walls were an egalitarian mix of wood and plaster and brick, with wellstone surfaces only at the serving counters, of which there were several. A few animated posters hung on the walls, but there was also a lot of static graffiti done up in plain ink, and the reason for this was quickly apparent: each table had a big feather pen stuck prominently into a built-in inkwell. You could even see a few kids in the act of scribbling out their pent-up wisdom.
“They must wash these walls every week,” he said to Feck.
Feck just nodded vaguely, his eyes on everything but Conrad.
A sign said PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF, but there was also a staircase leading upward, and although the place was crowded with plastic tables and chairs and the people sitting at them, Bascal still had his momentum. A few zigs and zags through the crowd, a couple of bumped chairs, and he was on his way up, with Steve and Ho and Conrad right behind him, and all the other boys streaming after in a long line. People looked up at this, yeah. Looked annoyed, maybe a little worried.
The second floor was smaller, hotter, less crowded and less decorated. There was enough room for the boys to settle in at a corner clustered with round tables, but the doorway out to a balcony seemed much more inviting, and that was where they went. And if Bascal was looking for trouble, here was the perfect opportunity, because the balcony had seating for twenty or maybe twenty-five people, but was two-thirds full already, and the empty seats weren’t in a block, but scattered all over.
Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui was full of surprises, though; as the boys piled up behind him in the doorway, he could actually have cut a fairly menacing figure. But instead he just stood up straight, clapped his hands twice for attention, and called out, “Excuse me! I’m afraid you’re all going to have to move inside. The balcony is reserved for a private party.”
The quality of his voice was something Conrad really was going to have to study: self-assured, vaguely apologetic, and entirely official. There was no question that you were going to comply, and if for some reason you didn’t, well, there’d be all sorts of hassle for everyone involved, and in the end you’d still be vacating your chair, thank you very much. It took barely thirty seconds to clear the crowd and settle in at all the good seats along the rail.
The last to leave was a girl of about nineteen, and Bascal, still stationed by the exit, grabbed her elbow as she passed. She was wrapped in a loose-fitting dress of glossy black fabric. Her hair and eyelids and irises had been done up in a matching shade, while her lips and fingernails matched her shoes with a seething red-black glow, like bits of iron sitting at the bottom of a campfire.
“You lovely thing,” Bascal said, “can you answer me a question?”
“Get processed,” she replied calmly, jerking her arm away. Then she paused, taking a good look at his face, and made a visible effort to hide her surprise. “Oh, whatever. What do you need?”
“Are you in a hurry?”
She chewed her glowing lip for a moment, then stopped. “I’m here with friends. We had a good table, which you just took, so yeah, I need to get inside and find something before they come back. We don’t get many nights out together.”
“Ah,” Bascal said. “I won’t keep you, then.”
She half turned to go inside, then checked it and faced him. “Are you ... ?”
It hung unspoken: are you the Prince of Sol? Bascal didn’t answer. “Go on inside and get a seat for your friends. I’m sure that whatever ... transaction is keeping them from you must be very important. But when you’re settled, I hope you’ll come and see me. Us. I have a question.”
A brown-smocked waitress materialized, looking annoyed. “Did you just kick everyone off this balcony?” For some reason, she directed the question at Steve Grush.
“No,” he replied, with his usual sullen brilliance.
“We’ll have fifteen glasses of beer,” Bascal said, jumping in. “And fifteen cups of coffee, plus some pitchers of ice water. To eat, we’ll take some sort of chips and dip thing, and a big plate of cheese and veggies. Does it come with olives? I love olives.”
The waitress had a wellstone sketchplate in her hand, but didn’t write anything on it or speak to it. She was under thirty, or looked it, but her expression suggested she’d seen quite enough punk kids come swarming in here like they owned the place.
“Who’s paying?” she wanted to know.
Bascal held up a thumb. “That would be me.”
“Uh-huh.” She presented him with the sketchplate, skeptically.
“Authorized up to twenty thousand,” Bascal said to it, rolling his thumb across its surface in the accepted manner, rather than simply jamming it the way punk kids were supposed to. “Plus a hundred percent tip.”
The slate chimed softly, acknowledging the transaction, and the young woman’s features softened a little. Bascal’s face and voice and thumbprint and DNA pattern all had to match against an account balance—he was good for the money. Still a punk kid, but apparently not a thief or mooch. That tip wasn’t going to change her life or anything; all the necessities of life and most of its luxuries were free for the faxing, or at least had downloadable free knockoffs. And everything else had a free waiting list (except of course for freedom itself), so no matter how poor you were, you knew your turn would eventually come. Penthouse apartment, whatever, just live to be a million. But a tip was a nice gesture—traditional, polite—and a big tip was nicer still. He didn’t have to do that.
“I’ll see what we can do.”
“Thanks so much,” Bascal agreed.
The black-haired girl had slipped away during the exchange. Shrugging, Bascal sat down next to Conrad. But Conrad was worried and asked, “Can’t they track you now? The police, your parents? Spending money is always the giveaway.”
“Oh, probably. But the account has ... certain security features that will slow down a search.”
“Oh. That’s good, I guess. Thinking ahead.”
“Such is my function.”
The very last rays of sunset were visible over the mountains, between gaps in the apartment buildings on the river’s far bank. From what Conrad could see, the buildings themselves were in tasteful colors, not selling anything or trying to be anything in particular. These were the homes of ordinary Queendom citizens, with fax gates inside, possibly right there in the apartments themselves. Here ended the terrarium extravagance of the Children’s City, and there began the staid suburbs of the Queendom proper.
The Green Mountain Spire was dark most of the way up now, the sunlight glinting redly off the top hundred meters or so, and inching upward with near-visible speed. The café balcony itself hung over a precipitous three-meter drop, with a small grassy bank beneath, and then the stony shallows of the Platte River, which wasn’t nearly as majestic as Conrad would have imagined. It was maybe twenty meters across, and shallow enough to wade in. To the north and south there were little sets of rapids where men and women in glowing green kayaks paddled down and, incredibly, back up again.
Where the grass ended, the river’s banks were lined with a random jumble of stones, and sticking up here and there were the concrete stubs of what probably used to be bridges. Conrad couldn’t imagine why they’d never been removed, although they did lend an honest, unfinished sense to the area. Neither pristinely wild nor immaculately groomed, just here.
“From an aesthetic standpoint,” Peter Kolb said self-importantly, “this place is fucking rich. The juxtaposition of elements is not as random as it looks.”
Peter was big on aesthetics, which as far as Conrad could tell was a mathematical pursuit, having almost zero overlap with anything real, like architecture or matter programming, or even feng shui. The worst of it was, he couldn’t tell if Peter was being agreeable or sarcastic, so he refrained from commenting. Everyone else was ignoring Peter anyway, so that was all right.
It only took a minute for the waitress to return, first with their drinks, and then again with platters of nacho chips, smothered in melted cheese and surrounded by battlements of carrot and celery, zucchini and olive.
“Here you go, hon,” she said, dropping off the final tray in front of Bascal and Steve and Ho and Conrad. “If you need anything, my name is Bernice. Just rap on the wall, or the railing.”
“My grandmother’s name was Bernice,” Bascal mused, when she was gone.
“Nice lady?” Ho Ng asked.
Bascal shrugged. “Never met her. She died, like, two hundred years ago, in Catalonia. Mayor of a city. Fucking historical figure.”
“Jesus H. Bloodfuck,” Ho cursed, in a show of solidarity. He was always saying things like that: “donkey fuckbrain vomit” and “diarrhea blood angel,” and Conrad’s personal favorite, “mother-Christing piece of dammit.” Ho seemed to take some weird pleasure in mixing his cusswords up that way, or maybe it was a subtle organic defect in his neural wiring, that the fax filters dismissed as a mere character flaw.
In the Queendom of Sol, character flaws were considered your own damned responsibility. You had to identify them yourself and then formally authorize a medical doctor to repair them for you. Or better yet, you could treat it yourself through personal experience and growth. And either way, if there were side effects in your overall personality, well, those were your own problem as well.
But Ho was only sixteen, so really it was his parents who should be worrying about these things. And Conrad supposed they had, in their own special way: by sending the boy off to summer camp. Very therapeutic, oh yes. Nothing cut down on cusswords like having to shit in a goddamned outhouse.
A sour mood threatened briefly to come on, but the watery beer was really good somehow, and the nachos were even better, and anyway Bascal seemed determined that all his men should be cheerful tonight. Who could argue with that?
And then, before they’d even finished off their first glass, Bascal’s black-haired girlfriend showed up again, pulling up a plastic chair and inserting herself between the prince and Conrad.
“Hi,” she said, matter-of-factly. How much was unspoken in that one syllable! Hi, Prince. I know who you are, Prince, but I don’t care. I’m here to check you out as one human being to another, Prince.