The Wellstone

by Wil McCarthy

  But Xmary—good old Xmary—just laughed. “Girl, you’re the one facing homework and dinner conversation. My mistakes can be swept under the rug.”

  “Along with your carcass.”

  “Hey, wow, I’m already more cheerful than you. Poor thing. Don’t wait up for me, eh?”

  It wasn’t that her parents never let her out—they did—it was just that they would ask her where she was going, and whom she would be with. And they had their ways of verifying these things, or spot-checking anyway, and if they caught her lying the cost was high. So she went bowling and levitating and even boozing with their grudging consent, and for the most part enjoyed it well enough. But wayward girl that she was, she never felt truly alive or free with them peering over her shoulder that way.

  Her private self might not exactly shock them—surely as mortal children they had raised their own share of hell. But they’d worry about her, and gently offer their advice, which was always right and always dull, and she just didn’t need that in her life right now. At nineteen, the age-of-consent laws were complex, but if she didn’t go looking for brutes or father figures she was basically free—finally!—to sample those worldly delights that interested her. And what the hell else was there?

  So she went to the swimming pool to look at the boys, and to let the boys look at her in a Polynesian-styled two-piece that did, yes, show off her assets rather nicely. In the changing room fax, she even gave herself a set of good, old-fashioned tan lines underneath, just in case. And just so her intentions were not in doubt, she applied a bit of that illuminated red sparkle to her lips and toes and fingernails. Boy bait.

  The pool itself was housed in a structure that could open and close and swivel and opaque in response to the sun and wind and the changing moods of its patrons. Right now, with clouds rolling in off the mountains and a hot, dusty breeze blowing up from the south, the walls were clear and closed, looking out on a dry summer meadow, with cottonwood trees and apartment buildings in the distance.

  Treading barefoot across the wet, sticky tiles of the floor, Xmary staked out a lounge chair next to the windows but facing away from them, looking out over the kiddie pools and hot tubs where everyone she knew actually swam and played. Through an archway she could see the edge of the “adult swim” area, where people went for hard exercise and competition—two activities that struck her as ridiculous in a world where your physical fitness was determined by the fax. She’d played water polo and bottom-hockey a few times there, just for fun, but otherwise had never been in it.

  The kiddie area was something else again: a play-ground of rivers and tunnels, wave machines and water-falls, slippery slides and rickety pontoon bridges. There was so much screechy laughter in the air that you could barely hear anything else. She’d learned a few years back that natural humans, unmodified by the fax, could hold their breaths for only a minute or so, if that. A place like this would probably kill them, which was a sad thought considering how short and miserable their lives were to begin with! But Xmary, with no training and only infrequent practice, could stay underwater for three minutes with heavy exertion, and almost six without. It made life bearable, playing porpoise in the kiddie pool, groping through whirlpools in a darkened cavern.... In the unlikely event she ever managed to grow up, this would be one of the things she’d truly miss.

  But even more important than the swimming itself was the survey of the crowd. There were maybe a hundred people here—not bad for a Friday afternoon on the hot side of the summer solstice—and the majority were under thirty. Since there were only a few thousand children in the whole of Denver, this meant—as always—that there was a pretty good chance of running into someone she knew. And yes, sure enough, she spotted a few almost immediately. None of her inner circle, or even her outer one, but there was Hacienda deFlores over there by the fountains, and Chad Breck a few meters farther on, looking Hacienda over from a covert angle.

  Chad was actually a walking advertisement for the sexual politics of the age: he was cute enough—who wasn’t?—and he had that winning smile. But he didn’t know a damn thing about anything, and he liked it that way, and if you got buzzed enough to fall into bed with him then you had some hard decisions to make.

  If you took him home, your house would log the fact and your parents would know everything. If you went to his place then at least his parents wouldn’t care—score one more for their precious sonny boy—but you had to know there were a hundred and fifty sensors recording you in every imaginable detail, and likely as not he’d be sharing these with his friends the next day. Illegally, yes, but if they were even a little bit careful about it there was no good way to catch them. Of course, those same images could be faked by any decent hypercomputer, but in an age of nearly perfect lie detection they’d be hard to fool your friends with. Which of course made even better trophies of the real thing.

  And hotel rooms were expensive and left a money trail, and rented cars and aircraft were too damned cramped. So inevitably you ended up in a park or basement somewhere—with a blanket if you were lucky—and the magic of it all wore off pretty quickly. The holy grail was for one of your friends to get an apartment of their own that you could use, but of course the moment they did, that care-free spirit would begin to wither under the pressures of worldly responsibility. Theirs was a different Denver altogether: coldly competitive, and filled to bursting with bitches and bastards too selfish and fearful to die or retire or move somewhere else, or even step out to enjoy a day in the sun.

  “Meritocracy can be cruel,” her Da was fond of saying. “It takes a hundred years to build a life, and six months to ruin it if you play your hand badly.”

  You had forever to recover from your mistakes, true enough, but who wanted to risk another hundred years of numbing labor? For that matter, who wanted to start the process in the first place? Moving out to the planets wouldn’t help. Frontier, schmontier—if you didn’t have money it was just like everywhere else. Worse, really, because even the “outside” was artificial and owned. There was no place to escape to.

  She spotted another familiar face, attached to a boy standing knee-deep in the Figure Eights and looking right at her. She couldn’t put a name to him—she wasn’t sure they’d ever spoken—but she had seen him around the campus this month, and in a few other places where people their age were found. Actually, he looked a few years younger than she was—sixteen or maybe seventeen—but to the extent that she cared at all, that was potentially a plus. What she really needed was a project.

  She favored him with a smile and a wave, and he looked nervous for a moment before steeling himself and wading over in her direction.

  “So you survived, eh?” he said to her as he stepped, dripping, out of the water.

  “Survived what?” she asked.

  “The café: 1551. Can I borrow your towel?”

  And this was a pleasantly intimate request, because her towel was dry and he was only really wet from the waist down. He was cute enough—again, who wasn’t?— but he spoke with an accent she couldn’t place, and wore a mustache that wouldn’t really grow in for another few years, and there was something innocently delicate and artistic about him, something that tugged gently at her strings.

  She tossed him the towel. “I’m at a loss, here. Were you there when the 1551 collapsed?”

  “Most definitely,” he said, wiping the beads of moisture off his legs. “And I left the scene in a hurry, so I’m glad to see you’re none the worse.”

  She blinked. “You saw me there? You talked to me?”

  It was his turn to look puzzled, though he nodded. “Yep, I surely did. You had that same hairstyle. That same stuff on your lips. And a black dress. You don’t remember?”

  His manner was increasingly nervous. He handed the towel back and did not quite meet her eye.

  “I disappeared that night,” she said quietly, pinning him with her gaze. There was no reason to be afraid, not with all these people around. But she had probably thought the
same thing on that fateful night, and where—where?—had it gotten her? “If you know anything about that, I advise you to spill it before I scream for the cops.”

  “No, no,” he said nervously. “Don’t scream. I’m an agent for the Prince of Sol, and my cover is thin. May I sit down? May I share this chair with you so we can keep our voices low? I remember your name, it’s Xiomara something.”

  “Xmary,” she corrected. “And stay where you are. So you’re the prince’s agent, are you?”

  “One of them,” he said, making another shushing motion with his hands. “And if you’ll please keep your voice down I’ll tell you everything I know. I didn’t see your name on the injured list. On any list.”

  “Neither did I. I couldn’t have been there when it fell, with cops everywhere. They’d’ve found me.”

  “Oh, but you were. I was this close to you. You were sitting at the prince’s elbow, talking about a signet ring or something.”

  “Again with the prince!” she said, throwing her hands up. “His name wasn’t on the lists either. I think I would have noticed that.”

  “It’s been hushed up. A royal embarrassment. But I saw the cops arresting him. I think you must have gotten out the same way I did: by running your pretty ass off.”

  “Yeah? Then where am I now?”

  He tried a nervous grin. “Right here?”

  She slugged him for that, not gently. But there was something in the way he said it that eased her fears.

  “If you didn’t run,” he said, “then the Constabulary made you disappear, along with the others. There were only two ways out.”

  “What others?” she asked, completely flummoxed by this bizarre story, whose key details had not been spoken yet. Had they?

  “Runaways,” he said. “Royal runaways. We’d escaped from ... well, it doesn’t matter where. Wrongful captivity, let’s say.”

  “Why did the building collapse?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Bascal was cooking up something illicit. Garbage Day, I heard him saying, but I was at the wrong end of the table.”

  It seemed a weirdly candid thing for an agent on a secret mission to say. She looked him over, taking in his fretful stance, his nervous face. His not-quite-tasteful swimsuit that looked like something a public fax would print for free, no questions asked.

  “You aren’t making this up,” she said.

  He let out a breath, relaxing visibly. “No, I’m not. And if you’ve suffered this disappearance as you say, then it’s a mystery to me as well. You have a loose copy, a loose end somewhere. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  Later, with charity-fax hamburgers in their bellies and loose wellcloth pants and shirts over their swimsuits, they sat together on one of the many covered bridges that connected the towers of the downtown district. Anyone could get inside the bridges, but Xmary had shown him how to get up onto the roof; now their legs hung out past the drip rail, dangling in the late-afternoon breeze. Their brains were buzzing lightly, too, from mood capsules they were technically not allowed to purchase until the age of thirty.

  “We don’t have to stay here,” she told him tentatively. “The Queendom is our oyster.”

  But Feck shook his head at that. “We do, actually. The moment I step in a fax, I’ll probably be diverted to Constabulary headquarters. No one knows I’m here—they can’t, or I’d’ve been arrested weeks ago. Somehow, they don’t even know to look for me. It’s part of the mystery.” He paused for a moment, looking up and down Stout Street, whose white gaslights were already coming on, although the sun hadn’t fully set. “Anyway, this is fine. Nice view. No traffic.”

  “It’s a quiet corner,” she agreed. “One of my special places.”

  Little chills of excitement were shooting up and down her spine. She’d never met anyone like Feck before: someone with a mission, a task, an actual job to do. A criminal, yes, but with an excellent pedigree. The prince’s own criminal. The fact that he was nervous and pensive about it only made it more real.

  Feck glanced down at the bridge roof itself, and scratched at it with his fingernail in an experimental sort of way. “There could be listening devices anywhere—hypercomputers, scanning for tripwords. But somebody would have to put the right tripwords out to them, hmm? And would they bother?”

  “You have to be careful what you say?”

  He shrugged, a bit helplessly. “Things need to be said. I have to do it somewhere. There are no people around, so that’s a good start.”

  Foolishly, she asked him, “Do you have a favorite girl?”

  He frowned, still scratching at the roof. “It... I’ve met several here in Denver, and see them regularly. Beyond that, I’m not sure what you mean. I didn’t approach you for ... ,” he trailed away nervously. “Of course I like you; I feel desire. I’d be crazy not to. But that’s not why we’re here.”

  And this just made the situation that much more thrilling. “Why are we here?” she asked. “What is your secret mission?”

  “My mission?” He smiled thinly beneath his boyish mustache. “I’m instructed to start a riot. I’ve been telling people it’s on Restoration Day, beginning exactly at nine P.M.”

  Restoration Day: the fourteenth of August. Sixteen days from now.

  “A riot? You mean, like, smashing streetlights and stuff?”

  “Sure, whatever we can manage.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. Tying up resources? Drawing attention? In the scheme of things, I believe it’s part of a larger disruption.”

  “Revolution,” Xmary said, liking the idea right away. Secret missions for all; a chance to disturb this endless, stifling peace! It was not only the ultimate bid for parental recognition, but a sort of adult enterprise in its own right. Like any revolution: a chance to right wrongs and lay claim to neglected rights. There was no democracy—no republic, even—for the children of her generation. And when could there be, ever?

  “Maybe,” Feck agreed. “It could come to that, although we’re scarily outnumbered and outequipped. I guess the thought is more to shake things up, for attention. So I have to ask: do you have any particular talents I can add to my team?”

  “I’m good with my hands,” she said without hesitation. “I do stupid, useless handicrafts.”

  “Ah, so you can make untraceable things,” Feck suggested.

  She didn’t deny it. In fact, a Christmas garland she’d strung up between a pair of lamp poles one year had fallen into the street and damaged a bus. Chewed the hell out of its tires and finally broken its axle, because her folded impervium stars had one of those shapes that formed a stable tripod on the bottom and left the final point sticking straight up. When she’d checked later, her encyclopedia had called it a “caltrop,” and identified it not as a decoration, but as a defensive armament useful against personnel, ground vehicles, and especially horses. And no, the garland had never been traced to her in any way, even by Mummy and Da, although a detailed analysis would have revealed her DNA and fingerprints and electronic shadows or ghosts. But nobody had bothered, because it was just a damn cheap Christmas garland blown down by the wind.

  “I can make untraceable things,” she confirmed.

  “Beautiful and talented,” Feck said seriously. “That’s raw.”

  Xmary felt a smile coming on. “Shaking things up is the duty of youth, Feck. And we’ve been neglecting it, haven’t we? This is an awakening. You’re my ray of morning sunshine.”

  And then she couldn’t help herself any longer: she kissed him. He seemed almost to expect it. Or anyway, he knew what to do.

  Unfortunately, when Xmary got home, Mimi and David Li Weng were waiting up for her in the living room with their lovely daughter Xiomara. And not one of them looked happy to see her.

  “Good evening, young lady,” Mummy said pointedy.

  “Hi,” she said back, because she figured she knew what was coming, and it wasn’t really Mummy’s fault. Just the way things were.

&n
bsp; “You’ve been out without asking,” Mummy singsonged.

  Xmary shrugged. “Yeah. So?”

  “Have a seat, please, darling. There are some facts of life that apparently need explaining.”

  Sighing, Xmary sat down next to herself, and offered an affectionate pat on the knee. People didn’t have brothers and sisters anymore, but they had their friends, and especially they had themselves. Under other circumstances she might have put an arm over her shoulder— even given herself a little kiss—but here and now she settled for sitting close.

  Da cleared his throat, and looked back and forth at his daughter. “Mara, darling, we’ve identified eleven unauthorized duplicates in your network records for this calendar year alone. And the thing about that is, we can only account for ten of them.”

  “You scanned my fax records?” She gaped. Why this should surprise or offend her she had no idea. But it did. Was nothing sacred? Was there no privacy at all?

  “Where is the other you?” Da pressed.

  “I don’t know,” one of her admitted, while the other examined the ceiling.

  Da blinked. “You don’t know? She ran off? Did something happen to her?”

  More firmly: “I don’t know, Da. I wish I did.”

  “Have you called the police?” Mummy asked. Then, “No, of course you haven’t, dear. The police would have called us, first thing. And your sordid misadventures are nothing you’ll share with the law, are they?”

  “Right, Mum,” Xmary said. “I kill cops. We all do. It’s all anyone talks about at the pool anymore.”

  “Am I supposed to find that funny? Into the fax, both of you. You’re grounded and singled for the month. No copies, no body mods, and your destination lockout will be revived.”

  “Mom!” the other Xmary protested. Last year’s lifting of Nescog parental lockouts was the closest she’d ever come to freedom. But not really, since the tariffs would wipe out her allowance if she left the planet or made more than a handful of nonlocal hops. And if Mummy and Da could take away the privilege whenever they felt like it, or track her movements, or possibly (probably?) check her medical trace for fingerprints and foreign substances ...