The Wellstone

by Wil McCarthy

  There was a definite satisfaction in seeing a big guy humbled like that, but then it looked like Ho or Steve might hit him again, maybe harder this time, and that made Conrad afraid, finally, of the consequences. And ashamed to be a member of this particular mob, yeah, because Rock Dengle was definitely not a bad guy as jailers went. He kept the rules without treating you like a little kid, which was more than Conrad could say for most of the others.

  But fortunately, Prince Bascal stepped forward, into what would have been the line of fire. “Steady, men. Nobody wants to get hurt over this. We just need the fax gate.”

  “Can’t leave without your parent or guardian,” Rock said, attempting to straighten. “Regulations, no exception.”

  “Except today,” Bascal said, and Conrad had to marvel at the casual, agreeable tone of this kid’s voice, trained from birth in the art of persuasion. It wasn’t going to convince Rock or anything—not after he’d been whacked in the balls with a canoe paddle—but it did put a vaguely legitimate face on these proceedings. Made it sound like their side of it had some validity.

  Which it did; this wasn’t a jail, strictly speaking, but neither were the boys free to leave, or to do as they pleased while “guests” of the camp. Which might be great if you were twelve or something, but sucked hugely when you were old enough to want female companionship and other assorted contraband. But there was no one to complain to, no cops or social workers to call. No one here at all who was not in the immediate employ of Camp Friendly, and therefore an extension of the parents who’d banished them here.

  So here in the twenty-ninth decade of the Queendom of Sol, on a miniature planet orbiting in the middle depths of the Kuiper Belt, far from the sun and planets, young men were forced—literally forced—to reenact the squalors and deprivations of a less civilized era. So it made perfect sense for them to respond in an uncivilized way.

  “You kids in a lot of trouble,” Rock cautioned. From his tone he was worried for them as much as because of them. He wasn’t going to offer any further resistance; he couldn’t win if he tried.

  On the horizon, twenty meters away, three more counselors materialized. One Conrad recognized but didn’t know; he worked with the younger kids on the other side of the world. The other two were D’rector Jed: two faxed copies of the same individual, each holding the electric cattle prod he’d often warned about.

  “What’s going on here?” one of him demanded officiously. The other just stood there looking stern. It said a lot about D’rector Jed, Conrad thought, that he liked to go everywhere in twos. Did he enjoy his own company that much, or was he simply concerned that the universe outnumbered him?

  “Cessation of involuntary confinement,” Bascal called back without missing a beat. “This man illegally tried to detain us.”

  The distance was not too great to see a veil of caution drop across D’rector Jed’s features as he recognized Bascal’s voice. He seemed to have trouble actually picking Bascal out of the crowd, though. Before starting this, the boys had smeared their faces with dirt and mussed up their hair, mainly as a way of psyching themselves up but also, Conrad now saw, to blur the lines of identity that made them accountable.

  “Your Highness,” one of the Jeds said, and you could see him still mentally backpedaling, rethinking his approach. “Prince” was a funny word, a funny concept; the child who would someday rule.

  If his parents weren’t immortal.

  How did one treat a child, educate or punish or even reward a child, who might someday stand higher, enormously higher, than the educator himself? A tricky business indeed, and one that Bascal, in Conrad’s limited experience, twisted constantly—perhaps reflexively—to his own advantage.

  “Highness,” the other Jed tried, “you and your friends have been entrusted to my keeping. I will not hesitate—”

  “You will hesitate,” Bascal shouted back, taking a large symbolic step in the Jeds’ direction. “In fact, you’ll stand aside entirely, or my merry men here will beat you both senseless. This is not a joke; they’re escorting me for a call to Child Welfare Services, with whom I have a total legal right to consult.”

  This was news to Conrad; three minutes ago, the plan had been, “Come on! Let’s show these bastards!” But this sounded better, more refined. Legitimate, almost.

  “I’ve sounded the alarm,” Jed told him. “It isn’t just me you’ll have to deal with, it’s multiple copies of every counselor on the planette. Plus the Secret Service and Royal Constabulary.”

  “Yeah,” Bascal agreed, “ten hours from now.” That was the speed-of-light round-trip time from here to the Queendom proper.

  “The fax gate itself is protected by your own Palace Guards. They won’t let you leave.”

  “I don’t need to,” Bascal said. He glanced sidelong at Rock Dengle, who was still struggling valiantly to stand upright. “There’s already been a regrettable incident here. We’re prepared for there to be more if you interfere with us. My guards are watching us now, I assure you, and your safety will be of little concern to them.”

  “Cancel the alarm,” Rock advised, throwing his voice behind Bascal’s. “Let ’em in the office. We don’t outnumber them much, and if they want to call Welfare, I say fine. Got nothing to hide. Parents need to know about this.”

  D’rector Jed didn’t respond to that, but when the boys started moving, en masse, in the direction of the office, he didn’t try to stop them. So they walked right past both of him and over the horizon, the little sun slipping behind the planette as they went. Small planets were like that; times of day were little places you could walk to. Here, the stars shone down like a vindication from God himself.

  Superficially, the office looked like one more log cabin, especially in the dark. It was larger, though, and the light spilling out through the windows came from a proper wellstone ceiling, not a damned electric lightbulb. And once they got the door open and mobbed their way inside, the illusion was shattered completely. This could be anywhere in the Queendom—the bathroom had a flush toilet, for crying out loud. A further sign of the basic injustices here.

  The fax was in a back room, a kind of entryway with the fax standing in place of an outside door. The camp had several other fax machines whose activation they could maybe have demanded, but this was the only one known to be on all the time, with a hardlink gate leading directly to the New Systemwide Collapsiter Grid, the Nescog, that could get their message—or even their material selves—out of here in substantially less than the blink of an eye.

  Unfortunately, as promised, the gate was guarded by a pair of gleaming Palace Guard robots, their blank metal faces and sexless metal bodies both unreadable and immobile. They were here, no doubt, to keep unauthorized persons from entering Camp Friendly and harming the Queendom’s only prince.

  Although, Conrad mused, the fax software could probably do that all by itself—filter out any images not specifically authorized here. Were these guards redundant, a hedge against someone corrupting the system? Were they also parental spies, sent here to keep Bascal in line? Jed had certainly seemed to think so, though the prince’s words implied otherwise.

  As bodyguards they were certainly intimidating enough; Conrad had little doubt they could burst from this room and be anywhere on the planette within minutes. The boys stood well back, milling around in the outer room, a few of the bravest eyeing these monsters from the “safe” distance of three or four meters.

  Bascal alone seemed unimpressed, striding in toward the fax and gesturing at the two robots. “You, you, come with me. We’re evacuating—the planette is on fire. Come on.”

  He stepped right up to the fax and said, “Nearest emergency center.” The robots hesitated for a barely perceptible moment; then the first of them, with alarming fluidity and grace, turned and leaped through the gate, vanishing in a puff of quantum dislocation.

  The second robot seemed to be waiting for Bascal, expecting to follow him through. But instead it fell twitching to the floor, wh
en Bascal produced a tiny, toyish-looking gun of blue plastic and calmly made the robot’s mirror-bright head disappear. There was no mess, and barely any sound. A teleport gun?

  “Close the gate to incoming calls,” Bascal said to the fax, then turned to his troops with a self-satisfied grin. “These parents of ours, they have nothing to pass on or share. Nothing to teach us except sit down, shut up, and live in their shadows forever. It’s their Queendom, right? Always will be.”

  Grumbles of assent from the boys. They had immortal parents, too. They’d maybe given the issue some thought; there’d be no inheritance for any of them, no family legacy, no empty shoes to fill. Conrad’s own father was the Cork County Paver, always and forever, leaving only the title of “paver’s boy” for Conrad himself to hang an identity on.

  And that sucked.

  Anyway, you just had to admire the prince’s cool. Like it was all a game, like he could walk anywhere, through fire and bullets and untamed black holes, without so much as a flinch. You wanted to stand behind him, you really did.

  “Well,” Bascal continued, “what say we tear the place up a little? A night on Earth, my treat. You break it; I buy it.”

  Conrad had always had a problem with impulse—it was pretty much why he’d been exiled here in the first place. So while he knew there’d be hell to pay eventually, he really did like the idea of busting things up. What seventeen-year-old didn’t?

  “Jesus Christ, Bascal,” he said with conviction, “I’d follow you anywhere.”

  chapter three

  domes of the popcorn moon

  They bounced through a repeater just inside the orbit of Pluto and were funneled into a ring collapsiter segment—a conduit made of tiny black holes—where their signal could travel, for a while, much faster than the classical speed of light. Planets and planettes and planetoids whizzed by, unseen. There was no sensation associated with this; the boys’ bodies and minds—perhaps their souls—were reduced to quantum wave packets for the journey. This was the Nescog, the New Systemwide Collapsiter Grid, brainchild of Bascal’s father. To an outside observer, the journey from Camp Friendly in the middle Kuiper Belt, to Earth in the Inner System, could appear to take anywhere from eight to ten hours, depending on network congestion and the alignment of the various nodes and conduits. To the boys themselves, the journey felt—and for practical purposes was—instantaneous, no more significant or amazing than stepping through a curtain.

  They could have specified a number of copies, and spilled out the other end en masse, an army of themselves. They could have specified a color, and come out with skin of bright blue or brighter pink. They could have specified an orientation, and come out facing backwards. But they did none of these things, and stepped out as themselves. Nothing else had occurred to them on the spur of the moment, and anyway antics like that would only trip the filters and provoke inquiry.

  On the curtain’s other side was Athens, where it was sunrise and already hot. Another single step whisked them around to Calcutta, which was hotter and brighter, and drenched in monsoon rains. They ended up in Denver, where the sun had recently set on a summer-warm city, and the air was fresh and fine. They spilled out into Market Street Station, jabbering, punching one another, giggling. Freedom was theirs at last, and the news of their escape could not have traveled any faster than the boys themselves. It would be a while before anyone came looking.

  “I have no guards,” the prince said wonderingly. He turned and crushed Conrad in a hug, then did the same to a cringing Ho Ng. “I have no guards!”

  He whirled, laughing, oblivious to the staring crowd.

  A billboard of animated wellstone proudly announced this station as one of only five public fax depots in the downtown area. A little map showed their locations, scattered along a kidney-shaped district a couple of kilometers across, and the flanking text informed the boys that ownership and operation of private fax gates within the exclusion zone was sharply restricted. Depending on the boys’ exact destination, their transportation options from here included bus (free), automotive taxi ($), horse-drawn (“hansom”) cab ($$), and of course walking, which according to the sign was strongly encouraged in a commercial preservation zone of Denver’s caliber.

  “Ooh,” one of the boys said, pretending to be impressed, and emphasizing the remark with the raised, limp hands of some supposed effete aristocracy. It was Yinebeb Fecre who did this, with an additional layer of irony he probably wasn’t aware of: by the standards of Camp Friendly, he was an effete aristocrat, the hyperactive child of two well-known television critics. Feck the Fairy.

  “Shut up,” Bascal told him mildly. “Denver’s raw. It’s good. You should be happy.”

  Conrad hadn’t seen the place except on TV, but overall he was inclined to agree. Back in his parents’ day, fax technology had hit urban areas like a saturation bombing campaign, rewriting their maps and landscapes overnight. Many cities became beehives of addressable spaces whose physical locations were all but irrelevant. Streets vanished; sidewalks vanished; neighborhoods vanished. In some cases the cities themselves vanished, or became hypothetical entities with outposts scattered all over the solar system. But Denver’s urban planners had seen it coming, and had drawn this cordon around the heart of the city to preserve it from the tyrannies of convenience. Not just a Children’s City, this, but an Urban Preservation District and member of the Living Museum Network. A place as classic and primal as the Fuck You Song, and twice as pretty.

  The terminal itself was underground, a dimly lit urban space filled with columns and information kiosks and snack bars, and old-fashioned telephones that were probably just for show. Another billboard—this one illuminated for some reason with tiny red dots—announced periods of planned outage in the fax gates here, and periods of broadband connection to some specific destination for some specific window of time: HONOLULU 21:15–21:17 TODAY. There were ranks of embossed numbers along the ceiling, although what purpose they served was not apparent.

  Some people carried luggage—an eccentricity in a world where fax machines could store any object in callable library routines and print copies on demand. There were other eccentricities apparent in the crowd: people who looked older or younger than the “ageless” standard of Queendom beauty. People who were dressed funny, people who had funny hair. And children of various ages, of course—comprising nearly ten percent of this crowd of dozens. The mix was interesting and cosmopolitan and yeah, highly raw. Fresh, original. Whatever. But everyone in the crowd—even the children—seemed to greet the arrival of fifteen unescorted, dirty-faced adolescents as a sign of trouble. A mother snatched up the hand of her toddler and pulled him close. Others were less overt, but their suspicion was lightly veiled at best.

  Welcome to Denver. Keep your hands where we can see them.

  Conrad gave back some dirty looks, and even snapped his teeth at a woman he caught staring at him. Gods, it wasn’t like people got away with crimes anymore; not when the whole Earth was one giant sensor. Even where events weren’t explicitly recorded in a wellstone matrix, they left quantum traces in the rocks or something. Ghosts. With enough patience and computing power, almost any event could be reconstructed.

  Ignoring the ill will around them, Bascal surveyed the chamber itself, and grinned. “I think we’ve arrived, men.”

  There was an escalator leading up to street level, and Ho Ng and Steve Grush, with hardly a glance at Bascal or any of the others, hopped onto it and went up. The prince, perhaps sensing a threat to his leadership, hopped onto the down escalator and called out, “Onward! Onward!”

  It wasn’t hard to run up against the descending staircase, although what effort it took was strangely infuriating, the laws of gravity doubly stacked against you. And the people riding down were of course not amused as the boys swarmed past; but nobody said anything or tripped anyone, so Bascal made it to the top only a few moments behind Ho and Steve. And right there beside him was Conrad, the right-hand man, feeling important. Oh, he�
��d felt important a time or two already this summer, going to the same camp as the Prince of Sol. But this was different, this was nonaccidental. The two of them were actual friends.

  “This is raw,” he said to Bascal in a low, private tone, and the prince responded with a defiant fist, held where only Conrad could see it.

  “Until somebody recognizes their pilinisi, me boyo. Then it gets complicated.”

  “Mmm.” Conrad could only nod knowingly. “Pilinisi ” was the Tongan word for “prince,” and he knew—or imagined he knew—what that meant for Bascal’s life. No shortage of women, for one thing, but no privacy either. Everyone figured they knew him, when in fact almost nobody really did. But then, this disheveled boy in camp shirt and boating culottes didn’t much resemble the Bascal Edward you saw on TV.

  Up at ground level, circular doorways irised open for them in the terminal building’s glass outer wall. The air outside was perfect: summer-warm and sunset-cool, not a bit muggy. It smelled of food: garlic and fresh-baked bread, maybe kettle corn popping somewhere nearby. The sidewalks were concrete with inlays of what looked like real stone—you could tell by the rough texture of it, not at all like a wellstone emulation.

  So here they were: Sixteenth and Market in the Mile High City, an almost mythical address. The center of raw. To the east a few blocks was Self Similar Street, where they were still recording the puppet show live every week. Somewhere to the south was the Cola Dome where the Broncos and Avalanche and Nuggets still played, where famous concerts were held and paintball battles waged. On the streets, as advertised, was actual vehicular traffic: white buses and yellow/black taxis, delivery trucks and horse-drawn carriages. Rather a lot of bicycles, too, piloted not by children but by serious-looking adults swathed in impact-resistant wellcloth. There were also a few pedicabs drawn by midgets, which struck Conrad as an odd touch indeed: where did you find midgets in an age of perfect health?

  The sidewalks were crowded and vibrant, full of obstacles for the pedestrians to flow around in artful patterns. This was a city of posts and pedestals, columns and obelisks. A fountain burbled merrily. There were little trees everywhere—maples and poplars and even acacias, no more than four or five meters tall. But the towers looming all around, blocking the view of all behind them, were anything but miniature. It was only when Bascal led the boys around a corner onto Sixteenth Street that anything resembling mountains became visible, hulking dimly ahead in the sunset, shrouded by clouds, crowded from beneath by low buildings. But the mountains were shorter than Conrad would’ve expected, or else farther away. In the golden-red glow of the clouds it was hard to tell. But that was the direction Bascal led them: away from the towers, toward the sunset.