The Wellstone

by Wil McCarthy

  The boys made a rough passage through the city: hooting, snatching at leaves, kicking and leaping over benches, crowding people out of their way. There was no law against being surly, and oh boy did it feel good. Still, Conrad couldn’t quite keep his eyes off the architecture. It was one of the few things he was good at and cared about: the history of building, and of the buildings themselves. Here, that history was written in the walls, layered like geological strata.

  “Look at the sidewalk,” he said to Bascal. And when that was ignored, he tried, “Look at that wall. Is it brick? It looks like brick.”

  “Whatever,” Bascal replied, not mocking but barely looking, either. The question didn’t interest him.

  Conrad tried it on Yinebeb Fecre. “You study architecture, Feck?”

  Feck raised his limp, sarcastic hands again. “Ooh, architecture!”

  Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a popular subject. Still, it seemed important—especially here. There were exactly two subjects Conrad hadn’t failed in his last school year: Architecture and Matter Programming. These he pursued with an intensity that upset his teachers nearly as much as his apathy and surliness on the other subjects. Only History had inspired any enthusiasm at all, and only because this time it had included the Light Wars, which of course were the first intersection of architecture and matter programming.

  If he hadn’t spat in Mrs. Regland’s chair and then called Mr. O’Mara a pigfucker for catching him, he might have learned even more. But what he did know fascinated him: the moment wellstone—programmable matter—had found its way into the old republics, the Light Wars had started. Without delay, without restraint. What anarchy: buildings greedily sucking in ambient energy, dumping waste heat, offending the eye with patterns of superreflector and superabsorber, with flashing lights and magnetic fields, with blasts of communication laser unfettered by any cable or conduit. It was much cheaper to rustle energy out of the environment than to buy it off the grid, so all concern for aesthetics had flown right out the window, overnight, along with concern for the comfort of passersby and even, to some extent, for their safety. You could have all the electricity you wanted, if you blackly drank in every photon that touched you. You could stay cool in the summertime, if your building was a perfect mirror focusing the heat back on its unfortunate neighbors. In fact, if you were clever and obnoxious enough you could do both at the same time: deepening every shadow, amplifying every pool of brightness for your own convenience.

  This wasn’t as crippling a blow to city life as the Fax Wars twenty years later, but the scars remained even after the Queendom’s founding, when the Architectural Courtesy Edicts were rammed through. Here in Denver you could practically tell, just by looking, which decade each building had been constructed in. Here an ancient steel-framed structure of poured concrete, its wellstone a mere facade. There a building of pure wellstone, held up against gravity by the pressure of electrons in quantum dots. (This had struck Conrad as a dumb idea the first moment he’d heard of it—what if the power failed?—but truthfully he’d never heard of a case where one of these selfish buildings had collapsed or dissolved. There must be all sorts of safeguards.) The majority of the buildings were post-Queendom: diamond frames and floors, with wellstone sheathing and facing. But even these had been dressed down, made to resemble materials of more or less natural origin.

  Denver, like most of the really great cities, had forcibly regressed itself to something resembling the end of the twenty-first century. A preponderance of stone and metal and silica glass. Lighted signs had to look a certain way: like neon or mercury vapor or electroluminescent bulk diode. As the sunset deepened and the streetlights came on one by one, he noted with satisfaction that they were simulated gas flame. Had there been gaslights in the twenty-first century? If not, there ought to have been!

  As the boys made their way westward, a full moon slipped into view from behind one of the towers.

  “Awooooo!” said a kid named Peter Kolb, pointing.

  Bascal turned, looked, spread his arms. “Ah, now that is a moon. July, to be specific. The Buck Moon. And we, my friends, are the young bucks making our way in the world. Let all the people of the domes of the moon gaze down upon us in wonder. This is our night.”

  “Buck Moon? Says who?” someone asked.

  “Says the Naval Almanac,” Bascal answered.

  Feck cleared his throat. “It’s, uh, from the Algonquin.”

  Conrad turned. “Eh?”

  “North American tribal society. Very old, but, you know, still in existence. Almost as big as the islands of Tonga, actually. Almost as many people.”

  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.