The Wellstone

by Wil McCarthy

  Conrad himself gave little thought to geography; he was used to moving between his school on the European continent, his home here in Cork, and the various educational and entertainment facilities they trekked him to in Asia and North America. Except for concerns of daylight and weather, the physical locations of these places hardly seemed to matter. It was only when you got out to the moon and planets that true barriers—like the speed of light—created any genuine sense of distance. But Donald and Maybel Mursk didn’t see it that way. At heart they were yokels, provincials, born into the actual country of Ireland, during a time when travel was arduous and borders were tangible. There was no Queendom, anywhere.

  And yet, when Donald spoke of the Queendom, his tone was full of apology and acceptance and even complicity. If he saw himself as something slightly apart from the monarchy, it was not for lack of approval. Whereas Conrad, who was truly and fully a creature of Tamra’s worlds, nevertheless chafed at their confines.

  “Mom, Dad, were you rebellious in your youth?” he asked suddenly.

  Maybel clucked, amused and embarrassed by the question. “I’m tempted to wash your mouth, lad. We snuck around our share, yes, although it was different in those days. The things we wanted were ... simpler.”

  “Sex?” he pressed, not caring if the question was appropriate. “Drugs?”

  “Oh, all of those things,” she agreed shyly. “All the things that people want. There has to be some age when you’re too young for it, and that puts you in immediate conflict.”

  “You do have to understand,” his father cut in, “we thought our lives would be short. You were born in those days with death staring you in the face. You had to make your time count. Your mother and I were no more than twenty years from the grave when these fax filters came along. And our parents, why, they were gone already.”

  He ran his hand through his hair again. “It’s why we’re such fools, lad. We didn’t want any school, or any hard work. There’s been a lot of catching up for us, a lot of adjustment. We don’t want to be poor and ignorant, not forever. I think we’ve done all right, but for you we wanted a better start.”

  “Huh.” Wow.” It was a perspective Conrad had never considered. It was interesting. Would it have changed anything, if he’d heard this six months ago? Should it have changed anything?

  “Apparently we’ve failed utterly as parents,” Maybel said sadly. “Whatever it is you need, we haven’t provided. Lord, we sent you to that camp you keep you out of trouble.”

  “Don’t cry for me, Mother,” Conrad told her, surprised at the guilt in her face. “I can make decisions, right? I have free will. The problem is nothing to do with our family. It’s a ... I dunno, a structural problem with the Queendom itself.”

  “Perhaps that’s so,” Donald said. “But it’s you and yours who’ll bear the brunt of it.”

  “Well,” Conrad agreed. “We always knew it was a gesture we’d have to pay for. Nothing’s free, is it?”

  Donald’s smile was pained. “No indeed, Son. In all the world—in all the universe—there’s not a thing worth having that comes any way but dear. You choose what you want, and spend the rest of your life paying. And now that life’s eternal, why, that’s a high cost indeed.”

  Half a world away, with the painful light of dawn shining through a different set of bars, a similar conversation was progressing even more smoothly.

  “Xiomara, dear, is there nothing we can do? Will you magically appear in the midst of every trespass and misdeed in the Queendom?”

  “Sorry times call for sorry deeds, Mum.”

  “Do they? Really. Playing space harlot is a political strategem, I suppose.”

  “Harlot? To hell with you, Mummy. That’s the meanest thing you’ve ever said.”

  Like she didn’t have enough troubles. She was a rioter, yes, and now apparently also a space pirate. And these two halves of herself were having a hard time integrating. How could her life be so wrapped up in the affairs of people she hadn’t known she knew? How could Yinebeb Fecre—“Feck the Fairy”—be such a dashing figure around Denver, and yet such a clownish and contemptible one in the eyes of his peers? Had they ever really met him? Had she?

  And then there was the Prince of Sol, who wanted her heart, who accused her of toying with him. There was a problem she’d never expected to have. And this damned Conrad Mursk, who’d had the temerity—the gall!—to save her life. A piece of her life she wasn’t sure she wanted. Oh, it was intense. It was a break from her humdrum existence, not least because he was part of it. But did Xmary want to be that person? Bitter, used? Seasoned? Too late now, of course. She already was.

  So she didn’t know what to think. She wasn’t entirely sure she knew how to think. The reintegration was eleven hours old, and still not taking! She was still of two minds! The old days must have been easier: everyone singled for life, without any of this crazy ambivalence weighing the spirit down. Decisions must have been effortless.

  “Your mother is upset, Mara,” Da told her gently.

  But Mummy pressed on. “No, dear. Upset doesn’t begin to describe what I feel. Betrayed, undermined, humiliated. Did our reputations matter to you at all, young lady? If you’re so intent on this wickedness, then perhaps it’s time we give you the liberty you crave. Darken our windows no more with your brooding silhouette. We’ll turn the lockouts around. When they let you out of here, you’ll be free to go anywhere you please. Anywhere but home.”

  Conrad stayed in the cell another thirty-six hours, and slept almost twenty of it. A pair of local cops—both male and not very talkative—took turns bringing him meals when he rang, and even brought an exercise machine when he complained of boredom. They weren’t here to punish him, or pass judgment in any way. They’d simply been asked to hold him and care for him while preparations were made at the palace.

  Preparations for what?

  He was in the exerciser, thrusting his arms against the resistance of a spring, when Officer Donahue brought a letter for him.

  “Lad,” it said, in the voice of the King of Sol, “a trial at this point would be wasteful. We know most of what you’ve done. Will you grant us the courtesy of pleading guilty?”

  “On what charges?” Conrad probed.

  The letter chuckled. “Fair enough. The willful destruction of a Friendly Parks planette; the theft of resources from same; the operation of an unregistered spaceship; the operation of a spaceship without identity beacon, running lights or other visibility provisions; the negligent homicide of nine human instantiations; the breaking and entering of a Mass Industries neutronium barge, and misappropriation of resources from same. The king owns those, by the way.”

  Considering for a moment, Conrad said, “Most of those deaths had nothing to do with me. I was personally negligent in maybe three of them. And we didn’t break into the barge; your Palace Guard let us in. And we certainly didn’t ‘destroy’ the planette.”

  “I’m afraid you did,” the letter said. “A quantity of water seeped into the core, shorting out circuitry and altering key mechanical properties. A complete dismantlement will be necessary.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Noted. So you’re guilty, then?”

  “Well, yes. The rest of it is true.”

  “Er, you have to say it.”

  “What? Guilty?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Guilty.”

  The letter paused, then said, “Thank you. Our Majesties will be in touch with you shortly.”

  “Great.”

  He would have left it at that, but the cop who’d delivered the letter was already gone, and the letter itself was just sitting there, full of unknown information. When a minute had gone by he asked it, “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “You’re to be sentenced,” it answered, not entirely without sympathy.

  “How?”

  “Our Majesties will determine the punishment.”

  “I mean, what? What punishment?”
r />   “Hmm,” it said. “Unknown.”

  “What’s typical in a case like this?”

  The note laughed again. “Lad, there has never been a case like this. Grand theft of a spaceship is normally punishable by twenty years’ incarceration. Does that help?”

  “Um, no. Not really.” Jesus Christ among the gods. Twenty years? By the time he got out, he’d’ve lived most of his life in prison. He would be, by any sensible definition, a career felon. And a virginal one at that, unless prison held additional surprises he didn’t want to think about.

  And with that thought, the courage that had served him through all of this suddenly collapsed. Yes, he was a sailor and a revolutionary and a sometime confidant of the Prince of Sol, but suddenly he felt—very keenly and distinctly—like a child who was in over his head. Tears are almost exclusively a symptom of frustration, Mrs. Regland had taught him in health class. This is why they’ve become so rare. With eternity before us, there is very little we cannot change. Except the past.

  And damned if it wasn’t true. As the tears began their sad, stupid journey down his face, he crumpled the letter in an angry fist. Damn the thing. Damn it for seeing through his stupid, childish pretensions. Of course, despite the way it felt, the note wasn’t made of paper. It straightened itself out the moment he relaxed his grip.

  “Shit,” he said, choking back an undignified sob. “Damn you, letter. Would you fucking self-destruct or something?”

  “Certainly,” the letter answered. “And you have the king’s own apology for any distress my delivery may have caused.” Then it fell at once into a fine silicate dust.

  chapter twenty

  the arena sentence

  Finally, an official summons arrived, and when Officer Boyle came down to let Conrad out, he was accompanied by a pair of gleaming Palace Guards. The fax was up a flight of stairs and through a couple of doorways, and once he got there, stepping through it felt no more or less fateful than any other such journey. Conrad was killed and reborn, his memories and identity copied into a different bit of matter.

  Where he ended up was a surprise, though—not the palace at all, but some sort of outdoor amphitheater, ringed by palm trees all around, beneath a bright blue sky full of puffy, flat-bottomed clouds. The smell of flowers leaped into his nose, and he was greeted at once by a familiar-looking woman, one of the Tongan courtiers from the queen’s staff, in a tapa-patterned dress of red and brown and glowing white. She glanced at Conrad, then at the sketchplate in her hand, then back at Conrad again.

  “Mursk?” she asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “This way, please. My name is Tusité, and if that doesn’t strike a fear in you, then get tricky with me, and you’ll find out why it ought to.”

  She led him down one of two staircases. The seats here, enough for a few thousand people, were mostly empty—except for one knot of a dozen or so kids sitting in the center of the first three rows. One of them was Bascal, dressed in a loose-fitting shirt and pants of a purple that was not quite the forbidden royal shade. He wore the wellstone scarf Robert M’chunu had cut for him from Viridity’s sail, and around his head rested a thin crown of wrinkly aluminum foil—clearly his idea of a joke. He was laughing loudly at something.

  And then, without warning, the whole gang down there burst into Conrad’s favorite stanza of the Space Pirate Song:

  Well they can’t tell us to shape up and they can’t tell us to ship out,

  And they can’t come do our laundry though we sometimes wish they would,

  And they’re never gonna catch us ’cause we won’t do nothing stupid

  So we’re sailing toward salvation in an angel made of wood!

  This didn’t seem like the best foot to be putting forward at a sentencing hearing, but the boys pressed on heedlessly into the chorus:

  We’re the pirates of the Queendom; we’re the pirates of the spaceways.

  We’d be pirates of the Nescog if they ever let us on.

  So we’re flying through the Kuiper Belt and steering just with starlight,

  And we’ve nothing else to do all day but sing this pirate song!

  With a shock, Conrad saw the boy Bascal had his arm around: Peter Kolb, last seen on the surface of Camp Friendly, running away with his eyes full of tears. But today he was looking not only joyous, but downright smug. His eyes found Conrad and brightened further as the song broke up, with each of the boys trying to throw in a different verse. Bascal melted back into the mob, suddenly talking to someone else.

  “Hi!” Peter called out.

  “Um, hi,” Conrad answered uncertainly, as he and Tusité drew near. “You seem ... cheerful.”

  Peter shrugged. “It’s our day.”

  Conrad frowned. “Our judgment day, you mean.”

  “This is your place,” Tusité told him. “Stand here and be good.”

  Her hand left his arm, and she was on her way back up the stairs, with another Tusité trailing behind.

  “So what happened to you, anyway?” Conrad asked Peter. “Did you get killed?”

  “Me? No.” Peter sounded surprised. “Though I was marooned for six weeks. Pickings got pretty lean; that rainstorm washed out a lot of the plants and stuff. By the time the navy showed up, I’d gotten very skinny. I was tired all the time, not really doing anything. It sucked.”

  “I’ll bet!”

  “Well, it’s done. The navy people were astonished when they found me there. We were already famous for having departed.”

  “We?” It was Conrad’s turn to sound surprised.

  “Hey,” Peter said defensively, “I helped a lot with the planning. It was my mission, too.”

  “And mine,” said Martin Liss beside him.

  “Little gods,” Conrad exclaimed softly. “I tried to save you, Martin. I really did. Twice!”

  “Hey, don’t fret. We all knew the hazards; we all took the chance. I’m just happy to have been a part.”

  “Me too,” said Jamil Gazzaniga and Raoul Sanchez together.

  Bloody hell, what was going on here? Why was everyone so happy? Especially the dead, the betrayed?

  “Hey, bloodfuck,” said Ho Ng, clapping Conrad on the shoulder in a distinctly comradely fashion. Steve Grush clapped his other shoulder, and then James and Bertram and Khen and Preston and Emilio and Karl were all crowding around him, smiling, patting, shaking his hand.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Half you guys were murdered! By me, by Bascal! Why are you so cheery about it?”

  Standing, smiling, the prince slid forward along the edge of a stone bench, parting the boys around him like a drop of soap in oily water. “Conrad, my man! Haven’t you turned on a TV?”

  “Um, no. Why?”

  “You’re fucking famous!” somebody shouted.

  “Conscience of the revolution!” said someone else.

  “What?”

  Bascal nodded. “It’s true. We space pirates are the particular heroes of the Children’s Revolt. We’re its heart and soul, its inspiration.”

  “What revolt? Us? Camp Friendly?”

  The prince rolled his eyes. “Did you ask anyone? Did you read a headline? Did you hear anything? There were riots in three cities, boyo. Takeovers and ransoming on a bunch of neutronium barges, plus three other acts of space piracy, including the theft of my mother’s own grappleship. It was a general, systemwide uprising. What were you, in a cave?”

  “Um. Well, almost.” They would have brought him a TV or newsplate if he’d asked for one. The king’s letter could probably have told him these things as well. Should it have occurred to him to ask?

  “It was all because of us, Conrad. All inspired by us. And with the Palace Guard’s memory dump, you’re the most famous of all! Well, after me. And Xmary too, but she’s a special case, being in two of the crucial places at the same time.” At Conrad’s blank stare he explained, “Because she helped orchestrate the first August riot? With Feck? Oh, never mind, you dolt. Just stand t
here, all right? Look heroic.”

  Conrad blinked. “This is a joke, right?”

  But even as he was saying it, he could see Feck and Xmary walking down the steps together, shaking their fists in the air in gleeful defiance. And behind them were other people, other young people who looked vaguely Denverish somehow. The stands were filling up in clumps and clusters, but Feck and Xmary, with Tusité leading them, came right down to the row behind the last of the space pirates.

  “Conrad!” Feck said happily.

  “Hi, Feck. So you started a riot, did you?” The only answer was a grin so wide it must have been painful.

  And then Xmary was there, waving her fists. But her grin was not so wide or self-assured, and it collapsed entirely when she looked into Conrad’s face. She stopped in front of him. “Hello, you.”

  “Hi. Do you, um, remember ... I mean, which Xmary are you? Both?”

  “Both,” she confirmed, then patted him on the cheek. “Yes, I remember you, you darling fool. How could I forget?”

  Bascal stepped forward, taking one of Xmary’s hands and kissing it. At her arrival, his own smiles had collapsed as well. “Xiomara,” he said. “Hello. So very good to see you.”

  And then, with a kind of sour look on his face, he took her hand and transferred it solemnly into Conrad’s grasp.

  “Huh? What?” Conrad said, brilliantly.

  The prince huffed. “I have eyes, don’t I? And ears, and the sense to know when it’s time.” To Xmary he said, “You’re right; we’re not a romantic match. And since I’m the Prince of Fucking Sol, you’ll be easy enough to replace.”

  “What a rotten thing to say,” Conrad noted with sudden, rising irritation.

  “Shut up,” Bascal snapped. “I’m doing you a favor. Treat her right and maybe we’ll still be friends.” And then he melted back into the stands, taking refuge behind Ho and Steve and the others.

  Conrad looked at the hand he’d been given, and then at the young woman attached to it. Behind her, Feck was looking on with a sour, wounded expression of his own. Xmary the heartbreaker? Leaving a trail of bodies and shattered dreams in her wake? He could see it in his mind’s eye: a Xiomara Li Weng who’d stayed home with her parents on that fateful night, waiting for a secret copy of herself that never came home. Did she suspect she’d met the prince? Been arrested? Smuggled herself to an all-boys summer camp, and then escaped? Who could possibly suspect a thing like that?