I try to wrap my head around a bot that can turn itself into anything you ask of it, that can be a cage or a star with just a bit of programming.
“This is what the technophiles want?” I ask.
Gil purses his lips, disdain masking terror. “Of course,” he says.
Enki doesn’t look at either of us. “Or what someone wants for the technophiles.”
The crowd has gotten smaller, or perhaps just denser, a screaming mass of people corralled by the encircling security bots and what looks to be the entirety of our army — four hundred women, standing at attention with stun rifles. The defensive cloud has retreated with the mob, but a few silvery oblong protrusions are aimed with frightening deliberation at the soldiers. The non-protesters who had crowded the transport platform have scattered. Not many people are keen on witnessing history when they might get shot in the process.
Within the military barricade, the technophile protesters chant with red-faced ferocity. Things like “Tech will save us” and “Adapt or go extinct.” At least Ueda looks unhurt in the silvery cage that sways slightly in the center of the crowd.
Enki strides forward, an unerring progression toward the line of human guards. As I hurry to catch him, I remember what he said about the tech: Someone had to have helped smuggle it in. Someone with clout and reach. Someone like an Auntie.
The security guards won’t let us cross the line.
“I humbly apologize, Summer King,” says an officer in the stifling black suit of a high-ranked guard. “We’re under orders not to let anyone through.”
Enki cocks his head, like a bird. “Could I order you to let me through?”
She dares a look at him, then averts her gaze. “No.”
A moment later, the bars of the cage start to ripple and pulse. Even the chanting falters as the closest protesters fall back in surprise. With the abruptness of a flock of birds lofting into air, the substance of the bars of the cage breaks apart and coalesces into a different form entirely.
Into a picture.
I don’t recognize it at first, even though I’ve seen that iconic stencil of Enki and me all week. It’s Gil who understands exactly what this means.
“They want to speak to Enki,” he says. “Not Oreste.”
It seems so inevitable, once I see that unnaturally flowering invitation. He’s the summer king, and because of his extreme self-modding, he has become the symbol for a legion of frustrated technophiles in Palmares Três.
Above us, the shadows move. Behind us, a few more people have dared to creep closer to the soldiers’ line, despite shouts to clear the area.
There is a moment; it is sweet and slow and quiet as a summer afternoon. I look up. The misshapen star above us has realigned its firm, metallic points so they all face in our direction. Its skin wavers like a heat sheen.
Enki turns and shouts something to the people behind us. I can’t hear him; there’s too much thunder in the plaza and I wonder why, because I hadn’t seen a storm coming. Something hits me. From the ground, I see Enki’s silhouette on the side of an impossible prison, and a huddled shape just beyond it.
Gil lies on top of me. We are covered in blood. Enki has fallen a few feet away from us. The blood on his hands stains the yellow shirt of the girl gasping in his lap.
“Oh, God,” I say. I can barely hear my own voice past the hollow drone in my skull. Guards swarm around us. Gil closes his eyes, averts his face from something I understand a moment too late. A boy, a waka, lying right beside me on the flagstones with a hole in his head.
I have his blood in my hair. I crawl over to Enki, shake off restraining hands as if they are gnats. Sound returns gradually: screams, mostly, peppered with shouts and sobs. The girl in his lap has stopped moving.
“She’s dead,” I say.
He looks up at me and keeps her in his lap.
From beyond the barricade, people start to chant his name. Enki. Enki. Enki. I wish the thunder would rain on them. I wish I couldn’t smell another waka’s blood.
“Are you what they think you are?” I ask.
Enki gives me a look that isn’t long, but drags at me. A What am I to you? and an Are you ready? and love and love and love. He puts the girl down. His eyes roll white; Gil catches him before he falls. A second later, through the holo and the emergency speakers, I hear the city.
“Hello, technophile protesters,” she says, smooth and pleasant as always. “The summer king requests that you release your hostage, the foreign dignitary Ueda Toshio, immediately. The king will be happy to hear your grievances at such time.”
The city’s voice falls like a blanket on the protesters. Their angry buzzing turns fractured and bewildered. It’s unfair, maybe, that Enki can use the city herself for his cause, as though he has reached into the memories of every Palmarina and sung to them their mothers’ lullabies. But two people are dead and Ueda might follow them and I love her, my city, for all her flaws. At the moment, I don’t care what Enki has to do to save her.
We three stand and wait. There are two dead wakas behind us, and the star overhead could thunder at any moment, but I try not to think. Not to hate.
The mob — suddenly quiet, as though they were equally shocked by the violence — parts to let people through: Ueda-sama, shackled at the wrists and ankles, with a much younger escort.
“That’s Lucia,” I say. The nanotech finalist for the Queen’s Award. “I guess we know what side she came down on.”
“Murderers?” Gil says.
I wrap my arm around his waist.
Lucia looks scared as she approaches us, like a kid forced to give a speech at a grande’s party. But perhaps we just look bloody and implacable.
Ueda-sama is ten times the age of most of the protesters in Royal Plaza. When he smiles, suddenly he looks it. “Hello, Enki,” he says. “Took you long enough.”
Enki’s eyes are still lidded. “Hello, Ueda,” he says.
“We have demands,” Lucia says in a decent attempt at bravado. She seems shocked, almost confused. Had she planned the attack or just lost control of her tech?
“Hostage takers usually do,” says Gil.
Lucia ignores him. “The ambassador will be released when the Aunties agree to immediate unilateral trade agreements between Palmares Três and Tokyo 10, with further technologically advanced cities to be added pending negotiations with their representatives. They want you to lead these efforts until your tenure …” Lucia breaks off and swallows.
Ueda-sama laughs as if he has a sea urchin in his throat. “Well?” he says. “They have your Queen and most of the Aunties trapped in the tower.”
Enki is silent for a moment. “I’ll help open the city,” he says.
Ueda shakes his head. “They’re barbarians,” he says very undiplomatically. “You know they’ll still let the Aunties kill you, even with new tech.”
“That was always a mutual agreement, Ueda,” Enki says, with more sadness than I’m used to. “We’re all Palmarinas, technophile or not.”
Their names were Wanadi and Regina. Both wakas, just nineteen, and now famous for the worst reason of all: dying young and violently. The funeral for the first Palmarinas ever killed by war nanotech is lavish and somber. Enki walks with Oreste and the parents at the front of the procession. I’m with Gil, toward the back of the first column of Aunties and Uncles and various secretaries. It doesn’t escape my notice that the swarm of camera bots seems thicker toward our end, but I just squeeze Gil’s hand and keep walking.
Everything is changing so fast I can’t make out any pattern. I only see what I most fear: that my city is dying, that it’s somehow my fault, that there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. Parliament starts an emergency session tomorrow morning, and all the news casters think the Aunties will be forced to grant technophile demands. Of course, most casters think that Enki is on the technophile side, and I know it’s more complicated than that. But Enki is strange and unpredictable at the best of times, and no matter what he does, there might be no stop
ping what his first meeting with Ueda-sama set in motion. After the technophiles surrendered and the nanocloud dispersed, Lucia tried to escape with the rest of the mob, but Auntie Maria arrested her a day later. They granted the other protesters amnesty. But I’ve heard that no one can find the nanocloud. No one knows when the technophiles might call it back again, or why they shot indiscriminately into the crowd in the first place.
My eyes have been affixed to the moving holo at the front of the procession — footage of Wanadi and Regina, happy and alive. They look so familiar, so much like me and my friends that it makes me want to cry, though I never knew them. They weren’t technophiles or isolationists, just wakas trying to make sense of their lives. Bad luck brought them to Royal Plaza that afternoon. Stuck in the tide of gawkers and counter-protesters, they’d been pushed to the front of the crowd, and ricocheting bullets had caught him in the head and her in the chest.
“They really think it’s intimidating,” Gil says softly, his lips brushing against my ear.
“What?” I say, shaking my head, turning to him.
He pushes his fingers through mine, in that way that means he’s worried. I would try to reassure him, but he tilts his head. I follow the direction of his gaze.
Up ahead, rivets frame the famous tiered waterfall of Royal Park and the jewel of the bay behind it. Before the waterfall, a large, empty platform will eventually seat the Queen, Enki, and a few dozen high-ranking Aunties. Facing that are a hundred or so seats in a cordoned-off area, where Gil and I will watch. And beyond that, what must be every security bot in the city stands at attention, thousands and thousands of them in careful, silent, endless rows of impassive pewter faces and black armbands. They surround the crowd of at least ten thousand people who have come to witness what I suppose must be history.
And it’s apropos, in a gut-wrenching way, that the method the Aunties have chosen to reassert their authority after the technophile riots suddenly appears so useless and backward and old-fashioned. After all, what can even three thousand security bots do against a metastasizing, ever-adapting nanocloud whose only purpose is escalating death?
“The Aunties have already lost, haven’t they?” I whisper.
Gil’s grip on my hand gets so tight it’s painful. I don’t try to stop him. “I think maybe they know it, June. But maybe even that kind of anachronism is preferable to …”
His shoulders shake very slightly. Gil watched those two wakas die. As much as anyone in the city, he knows that death cloud. He knows what the technophiles and their allies have unleashed. “The past stands in the path of the future, knowing it will be crushed,” I say softly, but not so softly that the closest camera bots can’t hear me. I don’t care anymore.
Gil looks up again as we’re walking past the gauntlet of rigid bots. “That’s your kind of art, June.”
And he’s right; it is.
But Oreste didn’t become Queen by relying on symbolic gestures.
Our Queen leaves the eulogies to parents and friends; she only gets up to speak at the end, and then only for less than a minute.
In her simple white skirt and turban, she looks implacable and powerful and icy in her fury. I’m close enough to not need the holos to see the thick arch of her brows, the lines around her eyes and mouth she has never erased. She regards us, this human sea drowning the park, for nearly a minute. Hardly a cough disturbs the absolute silence; only the rush of the waterfall behind her and the softer, more insistent crash of waves against pylons far, far below.
If I can hardly breathe, I know I’m not alone. Oreste is more ruthless than any Auntie because she is the Auntie.
“That this has happened in my city, during my reign, is my own sin and one that cannot be forgiven. Wanadi and Regina are dead. Nothing will bring them back. But they are dead because some in this city are convinced they will be happier or their lives will be better with the kind of destructive technology that has so ripped apart cities as separate as Tokyo 10 and Salvador. I know they still think so, despite these twin tragedies, and despite the absolute inevitability of many more. Some might say it is futile to fight against the tide of the future. I believe there are many futures. The one that I, and all of us here today, must work toward is one where Palmares Três remains the jewel on the bay. Where we retain our strength and our core and our humanity as we meet our destiny.”
No one claps, but behind me someone trills, like a woman catching the spirit during a service, like a mother at her daughter’s wedding. The sound is high. Oreste pauses, halfway to her seat. Suddenly, another woman trills, and then another, a growing sea of ululation, disconcerting me with its determination and pride. Maybe a few wakas join in, I don’t know. But this is a grande sound for a grande love and I wonder what it says about me that I can feel it vibrating in my throat.
Regina had your lights on her arms; they turned green before she died. I know you think she died while I held her. I know you think there was nothing we could have done, but that isn’t true either. I saw, because the city saw, and now there’s not so much difference between us as there used to be.
Regina’s lights turned green, like your display on O Quilombola, like the jewels of the verde. She died with a half-kilo of nano-produced shrapnel lodged in her spine, but her lights — the lights from the fad that you started — said that she struggled to live. If I had demanded medics instead of waiting on the protesters, could I have saved her life? Could I have kept the promise of that green flash?
Power has responsibility, that’s what they tell me. They should say that power has guilt and guilt has grief and no mod but death can take that away.
“I love you, June,” says the city as Enki turns a cartwheel past the mountain of cushions in the corner of his living room.
“Enki,” I say, “why does the city love me?”
He balances on one leg, hand outstretched for another maneuver, but perfectly steady. “Why shouldn’t she?”
He’s speaking without using his mouth again; but it’s the third time this week, and necessity has made me overcome my initial revulsion at the disconnect between his lips and the voice slipping from the speakers.
“She’s not human?”
He starts up again, flipping and springing so fast and so high I’m sure it must be augmented by his mods. “So that’s what matters?” the speakers say.
“She’s a city!”
He runs, jumps high enough to touch the ceiling, and rolls when he hits the floor. He stays down there, sprawled on his back, a sheen of sweat catching on the lights suddenly flickering above us. He isn’t breathing hard, but maybe the sweat reminds both of us what can be so easy to forget these days: He’s human too.
“She’s me,” he says, and it’s his own mouth, his own lungs, his own rough vocal cords. I find myself on my knees beside him. He stares unblinking at an empty ceiling. His fingertips graze my palm, and I am breathless and dumb. “We are bound up,” he says. “I stitched her pieces together with myself as the thread. She doesn’t always like it, you know. Sometimes she blames me.”
“Then why do it?”
“Because she raised me. Because she’s true. Because her sewage maintenance lines don’t know what her fono network is doing.”
I frown, though perhaps it’s useless to try to make sense of him. “Do they need to?”
“The Aunties have forced her to be so unnaturally disconnected just so they can have more control.”
“But I love you, June,” says the city again, and she is subdued and resigned.
Shaking, I fall down beside Enki on the floor. It jars me, but I don’t mind. “Why, City?” I ask.
She pauses. “Because Enki used the love of you to tie my external weather sensors to my municipal energy production unit.”
Enki starts to laugh, both his own voice and over the speakers. The stereo makes me want to cover my ears. “What she means is that she loves you because I do.”
I know he doesn’t feel anything for me like what he does for Gil, but
today I almost believe him. What if his love is something more than just his mods? Nothing would make me happier, and nothing would scare me more.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“You know these things never do.”
He turns over and kisses me. I hold my breath and wait for it to end. I can’t handle Enki like this, so himself and so alien and crystal clear. I want my beautiful boy back, the one who danced barefoot before Oreste, the one whose mind was a cipher and whose words I obsessively dowsed for meaning. Now it’s fall, and it will soon be winter, and he is burning so bright I can hardly look at him. Especially not this close. Especially not with his tongue touching mine.
“I’m sorry,” he says, breaking it off. Above us the lights flicker, one second on, one second off, like a message in ancient code.
When are you ever sorry? I tremble in relief. I wish he would do it again.
“You wanted to tell me something,” I say, because it’s the only thing left.
He waves his hand dismissively. “Oreste wants you to talk to Lucia. The nano girl. Convince her to help keep the war tech out of the city. And give the name of whatever Auntie betrayed us in the first place, of course.”
“Me?”
“She says the girl respects you.”
“Why should I agree?”
He smiles and touches my jaw. “You haven’t said no to Oreste yet.”
The Aunties have kept Lucia in a facility on Tier Two since the demonstration five days ago. Apparently, they’ve attempted to cut a deal with her this entire time, but since she’s still sitting by the window in a small, self-contained, two-room apartment, I assume that she hasn’t agreed.
And so Oreste sent me, inadvertent icon of the technophiles. It makes a certain kind of sense, but I don’t think I’m going to have much luck. Lucia grimaces when I walk into the room. She doesn’t do anything so childish as ignore me, but it couldn’t be much clearer that she wishes I hadn’t come.
The Summer Prince Page 18