The Wellstone Read online

  “Who made you the voice of reason?” Ho Ng asked acidly.

  “Um, nobody.”

  “Why don’t you shut up, then? Pussy.”

  Conrad had no response to that. He’d already blurted out the thing that needed blurting. Getting any farther on Ho’s bad side was not a smart idea, and he could see that Bascal was brooding, too, looking around with dark, embarrassed anger. That anger could, Conrad knew, be directed at him at any moment. He considered apologizing, but didn’t see how that would help. Better just to shut up and pretend he wasn’t here.

  “Are we still doing this?” Steve Grush wanted to know.

  “Yeah,” Bascal said, waving a hand distractedly. “Let me think about it for a minute.” Then he pinched his chin in a gesture so reminiscent of his father that for a moment Bascal might have been a younger image of the king himself. A little swarthier, perhaps. A bit more angular. Conrad felt a fresh burst of affection for this boy, this young man, this Poet Prince of all humanity.

  “I have to visit the ’soir,” Feck announced loudly, from the other end of the balcony. That was short for “pissoir,” and told everyone exactly, biologically, what he’d be doing when he got there. If he’d said “ ’toir,” or “shittoir,” that would convey a different intention. You always knew more about Feck than you wanted to. Still, it was funny— Feck was pretty funny sometimes—and suddenly there was a lot of laughter, and the conversation turned to other subjects.

  “Sorry,” Conrad said quietly, seeing his Bascal opening as Feck shuffled past. “It’s still a pretty raw idea.”

  “Shut up,” Bascal said vaguely, not looking at him.

  Taking the hint, Conrad finished his beer, then just as quietly finished his coffee. Both were making him thirstier, but he resisted the urge to chase them with a glass of water. In a few minutes he was going to have to visit the ’soir himself. He supposed they all were. He toyed with his coffee mug instead, clinking it a few times on the glass tabletop. Turning it over a few times in his hands. Good, old-fashioned stoneware, courtesy of the Friendly Products Corporation, whose swirling green logo was glazed into the underside.

  This didn’t take any great scrutiny to discern; the same instantly recognizable design appeared on their Camp Friendly tee shirts, and on thousands of child-oriented products printed daily by the fax machines of the world. Seeing it here, however, was admittedly somewhat surprising. What was child-oriented about a coffee mug? He fantasized briefly that this whole café—perhaps this whole ghetto—was just one more Friendly Park, in a carefully supervised Friendly Park World.

  Oh, God, he was getting “maudlin,” as his Irish mother would say. It was exactly why she didn’t allow him any alcohol, even weak and watered as this. If he drank any more, he’d become “rash,” and then where would Queendom civilization be?

  “Does anyone else want more beer?” he asked, looking around. But they were still ignoring him, which was probably good. He’d just order for himself, then, maybe even pay. Per the waitress’ instructions, he leaned over and rapped on the deck’s ratty old railing. It rang solidly under his knuckles, though, more like plastic or soft stone than wood. Because yeah, of course, it wasn’t wood at all, just a clever wellstone facsimile. Why would knocking on a wooden rail summon a waitress?

  Suddenly, his paranoid fantasy seemed less paranoid, less fantastic. If that rail wasn’t full of microphones already, it easily could be on a moment’s notice. If the Constabulary had tracked the boys here, for example, or if the café staff had decided something suspicious was going on. Hell, the building could even make that judgment itself; most of the symptoms of human intelligence could be duplicated with a wellstone hypercomputer the size of a fingernail. Conrad’s own house was always scolding him, checking up on him, ratting him out to his parents....

  The black-haired, fiery-lipped Xmary reappeared, inserting herself deftly between Conrad and Bascal once more. “I found someone who can help you, Bas. Several someones.”

  Bascal looked up at her, and the confidence was back in his eyes. “Excellent. Thank you. And will these someones require payment?”

  “I didn’t ask, but I also didn’t tell them who you were. When they see your face, they’ll want to help. They’ve snuck out of the house, right? Hoping something interesting will happen. And what’s more interesting than you, on a mysterious errand? I’m sure you realize, you’re kind of a symbol around here.”

  “The prince who won’t be king? Lord of the oppressed? Spokeschild for the permanent children? I can’t imagine.” Bascal flourished comically with his arms, but couldn’t quite keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Take me to your underground, then. We’ll see what mischief this town can endure.”

  “You need more people?” she asked. “I can find more people. Easily.”

  “Bascal,” Conrad warned, raising his voice above the general hubbub, “we should get out of here. This place isn’t as run-down as it looks. This isn’t wood; it’s wellstone. It could be a—”

  The prince arched an eyebrow, and not in amusement. “There’s business at hand, Conrad. Connections to be made, a whole underground to be mobilized. One way or another, Garbage Day is a party I intend to throw.”

  Conrad became aware of some noise in the street, rising up like the soft clickety-click of a few dozen tap shoes. Like marching boots, approaching at a trot? Like the platinum feet of robots, dancing fluidly along the street?

  “Bloodfuck!” Ho Ng called out, from his seat along the railing. “Constabulary coming. Lots of them.”

  “Ah,” Bascal said, and his tone was of regret, not surprise. “All right, lads, hit the ground running. Scatter for me, and do as much damage as possible. Brew me up a genuine riot.”

  Conrad was surprised, and afraid, and maybe not entirely sorry they’d been caught. He looked Bascal in the eye, almost challengingly. “What are you going to do?”

  “What do you think?” the prince snapped, then walked to the railing and punched it with his signet ring, producing a kind of porcelain clink. At the point of impact, there was a momentary sparkle of blue-white light, fading quickly to darkness. Nobody moved; nobody spoke. Conrad didn’t so much as breathe. Half a second after impact, the change began: a sprouting and sprawling of shapes and colors. It shot along the balcony rail, down through its supports and onto the floor, onto the wall, up along the roof. The sound of it was like tearing paper, like crinkling foil. The building turned to garbage around them, and the narrow spaces between the garbage glowed, and sang, and cracked away.

  Conrad watched Ho Ng drop right through the floor, just moments before the whole structure gave way, and suddenly they were all falling, in a storm of hand-sized wellstone fragments, like shiny black bugs. The sound of the building’s collapse was remarkably low, more felt than heard. Weightless for so short a time that it barely registered, Conrad thudded onto the steep riverbank, his fall partly broken by the plasticky fragments raining around him. His momentum carried him downward, skidding, briefly glimpsing the lights of an upside-down suburb reflected in the blurry water. And then a load of crap fell on top of him, stunning, immobilizing, whooshing the air out of his lungs.

  He lay there for a few seconds, taking stock, trying to breathe, wondering if he was hurt or killed, if his parents would have to print a fresh copy of him from stored patterns. He’d died once before, in some kind of fence-climbing accident that had smashed his head when there were no other copies of him at large. Lost damn near the entire month, and never did find out what happened.

  Finally, he had enough breath for a grunt of pain, and then a groan. Other groans rose up around him. And screams. And then suddenly the Constabulary was there, all around, men and women in bright blue, and faceless robots in naked, mirror-bright impervium. Hands were grabbing him, lifting, digging him out.

  “Can you hear me?” a voice asked. “Are you hurt?”

  Coughing, he struggled to stand. “I— Ow! My tail-bone. My back.”

  “Medic!” another
voice called out. “Possible spinal! Recommend immediate faxation!” The hands on his body were gentle but very firm.

  He looked around, trying to get his bearings. Trying, he realized, to recognize Bascal in the confusion of litter and bodies and flashing lights.

  Then the first voice, someone behind Conrad, was speaking again. “Son, until we figure out exactly what happened here, I’m afraid you’re under arrest.”

  “Yeah,” Conrad said, slumping against the hands that gripped him. “I know it.”

  The spatial quantum foam today

  was bubbling over fractally;

  six extra miles to get to school

  with gas on absolutest “E.”

  But still, the temp’ral quantum foam

  was not too bad; despite the crunch

  of virtual traffic popping in

  and out, I stopped three times for lunch

  and got to school before I left

  and called back home to give the warning,

  “Hey Bas, fill up the bloody tank;

  it’s yet another fractal morning!”2

  —“Commutative”

  BASCAL EDWARD DE TOWAJI LUTUI, age 9

  chapter five

  the battle in the throne room

  Some sort of portable fax machine was set up right there at the crime scene, and the boys were processed through it. Conrad’s injuries were healed almost as a byproduct; the fax filters compared his body against his genome and the standard human template, concluded that the damage wasn’t ornamental, and sent on a corrected pattern to the other end. That these operations were performed on a snarl of quantum entanglements, rather than on a person or even the image of a person, did not impress Conrad in the slightest. Indeed, he’d experienced the process many times before, and barely noticed it at all.

  He ended up in a windowless interrogation room—or rather, an atomically perfect duplicate of him ended up there, while he himself had vanished. Died, if you like, although people rarely talked about it that way. He’d also been through this experience almost daily throughout his life, and thought no more about it than about the dead skin cells he was supposedly shedding every moment of every day.

  At any rate, here he was, in this windowless room with a human being and a robot. The robot didn’t speak—they rarely did, except in emergencies—but it also didn’t move, which gave it a vague air of menace. Especially since it was positioned between Conrad and the exit.

  The human being, seated across from him on the other side of a table, was named Leslie Jones. She told him gently and repeatedly that she was here to help him. He was not restrained in any way, and the interrogation room’s door, not closed all the way, betrayed a sliver of light at the edge. But he’d seen enough to know that Leslie Jones wasn’t a lawyer or a social worker, and seemed in fact to be some species of cop, so he played as dumb as he figured he could get away with. Lying to the authorities would be worse than useless—they’d spot it before the words were even out of his mouth—but they were also unlikely to respect his intelligence, nor to be surprised if he didn’t display any.

  “Why did you leave the camp?” Leslie asked him, for the second time.

  He shrugged. “We weren’t prisoners.”

  “You could have requested a pass. And an escort. And permission from your parents. Instead, we have a counselor assaulted and a Palace Guard vandalized.”

  “I didn’t do any of that.”

  “But you were there when it happened.”

  Conrad didn’t answer. They knew he was there. Between sensor records and skin cells and ghostly electromagnetic imprints, the Constabulary could probably trace just about every move he’d ever made.

  Smiling, Leslie tried a different approach. “Conrad, you’re not in trouble. Not very much trouble. No one was seriously hurt, and there’s no evidence you did anything other than follow your friends and then witness a crime. We just want to find out what happened.”

  He shrugged again. “You already know.”

  “Well, yes. But I’d like to hear it from you.” She was wearing a green sweater with buttons made from what looked like live dandelion heads. Her hair was coppery red, and very short. He supposed she was beautiful—he’d never met anyone who wasn’t—but she spoke and moved like the women of his mother’s generation. Two hundred years out of date; born into a mortal world, and then “saved” from it by the rise of the Queendom. He wondered if faxes of this same woman were interrogating all the other boys as well.

  “You don’t know anything,” he told her, not in a nasty way but just factually. “I’m sorry, but I really can’t explain it to you. There’s not even anything to explain.” Then he disappointed himself by adding, “I want my mother.”

  Leslie just nodded, with a sympathy that seemed annoyingly genuine. “Both your parents have been briefed on the situation, and have asked to send copies of themselves here. The request is under review. However, as I’m sure you can understand, the involvement of Prince Bascal is a complicating factor.”

  Again, Conrad had nothing to say that would actually help the situation, so he said nothing, and Leslie simply started her questioning again, from the top. They went around and around like that for nearly an hour. Finally, when Conrad was halfway nuts with the repetition, a disc of yellow light appeared on the tabletop, and a little speaker formed beside it and emitted a soft chime.

  “Well,” Leslie said, eyeing it, “we tried, anyway. You seem like a nice young man; you should try opening up a little.”

  “Oh yeah? Why?” Conrad couldn’t help asking.

  To her credit, she thought about that for a couple of seconds before replying, “Because childhood doesn’t excuse rudeness, not at your age. Whatever problems you believe you’re facing, communication is really the only way to tackle them. You’ll understand this someday, when you and your friends are the ones in charge.”

  Conrad didn’t even try to suppress his sneer. “What day is that, Leslie?”

  She really looked at him then, rolling her tongue around behind a set of pursed lips. Finally, she said, “Look, we’ve all made adjustments. Nobody said life was perfect. But we do have forever to work it out, yes?” She rose to her feet then, and motioned for him to do the same. “Come on. As I feared, the case has been placed under palace jurisdiction. Back to the fax with you, I’m afraid.”

  For some reason, Conrad felt a shiver of fear. “Why? Where am I going?”

  “To the palace. Didn’t I just say that? Best behavior, Conrad; you’re going to meet the king and queen.”

  The throne room of Their Majesties, Bruno de Towaji and Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, looked exactly like it did on TV. The same reed mats over wellstone floors, the same Catalan tapestries over wellstone walls, the same gilded wellstone scrollwork along the ceiling and floorboards and high, vaulted doorways. It was daytime here; the ceiling was clear at the moment, and light streamed down through it from a blue-white sky, much paler than the sky of Camp Friendly.

  A pair of vaguely familiar women stood at ease, with the black hair and walnut skin of South Pacific ancestry, and the elaborate wraps and hair fans of Her Majesty’s court. With prim nods and subtle gestures, the two of them gathered the boys out of a pair of fax machines, and lined them up two rows deep in front of the empty thrones.

  Lucky for Conrad, he got to stand two spaces from Bascal, near the middle of the front row, not four meters from the raised dais on which the thrones themselves rested. Lucky, lucky. His heart was hammering wetly in his throat; his knees were knocking. He’d never been so nervous in his life, even the first time he’d spoken face-to-face with the Poet Prince. Conrad had been arrested once before, for throwing rocks at a cat, and had been called to the principal’s office many times, and of course detained and grounded and singled by his parents on a regular basis. But this was a whole new realm of trouble, the prospect of an angry king and queen far more frightening than the bland, dutiful sympathy of any police or petty officials.

  The Queendom’s
royalty were technically figureheads, without any official political or legal powers. But they were also beloved, and brilliant, and so absurdly wealthy that they could buy the planets outright if they chose to. So in the end it hardly mattered: in the spiritual hunger of the Restoration and the perils and tragedies of the Fall, these two had been chosen as humanity’s penultimate leaders, second only to God. Whether or not Conrad liked or understood it, they could dictate his fate, and no one—not even his own mother and father—would challenge it.

  Still, this mortal fear didn’t keep him from noticing that the “boy” to his left in the row behind him was actually Xiomara Li Weng, from the café, and that the fifteen assembled children did not include Feck. In a way, this made sense: Feck had been in the ’soir when the building came down, and if he’d had the sense to get rid of his Camp Friendly shirt, then at first glance there’d be no reason for the Constabulary to connect him with the events on the balcony, or to distinguish him from the café’s regular customers. Whereas a quantum reconstruction of the collapse would show Xmary standing right next to Bascal, on the balcony with the other Friendly campers.

  But despite her short, dark hair and rail-thin figure, Xmary did not resemble Feck in the slightest. Conrad didn’t even see how she could be mistaken for a boy, although she’d rubbed the makeup off and lost the low-toe shoes, and even somehow taken off the nail polish. And she’d turned her party dress into a pair of beige trousers and a white shirt—though not a Camp Friendly shirt or even a tee shirt. But then again Ho Ng was out of uniform too, having somehow traded his tee for a shiny gray pullover and quilted vest, although he still had the pants: beige culottes that completely destroyed his efforts to look raw.

  Even so, the error was alarmingly stupid. Had no one checked the biometrics or the DNA, or even peeked under her shirt? Had the ire of king and queen so disrupted police routines that even the Constabulary could somehow arrest the wrong person? Hand her over in a moment of confusion? It was a chilling thought, and a reminder of why the Old Moderns had murdered off their royal families in the first place, leaving only the Princess of Tonga and the swashbuckling Declarant-Philander of Spanish Girona to lead them into the future.