Garbage Day by Wil McCarthyGarbage Day
by Wil McCarthy
Be careful what you wish for. You may not anticipate the side effects ... 



1. Camp Friendly



Conrad had never seen an angry mob before, much less been a part of one. Like an 
ocean wave it seemed to offer two alternatives: ride along or be smashed under. 
And the ride, truth be told, was fun; since the raid on the boathouse, and with 
it the capture of canoe paddles, the counselors were actually afraid of them.
Of a bunch of fourteen-year-olds! Even "Rock" Dengle was on the retreat, falling 
back along the side of the Arts and Crap cabin (and casting a worryingly broad 
shadow on its clay-and-log wall in the slanting light of a fake and miniature 
sun).
"What the hell you boys doing?" he demanded.
"Busting out," Bascal answered lightly. Cheers rewarded him at once, from Conrad 
himself as much as anyone. "Prince Bascal! All hail Prince Bascal, the 
Liberator!"
"This a summer camp," Rock pointed out. "Recreational. You here for fun, right?"
"Had enough," Bascal replied. Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui, Crown Prince of the 
Queendom of Sol.
The badder boys — Steve Grush, and that Ho kid whose last name was spelled "Ng" 
but sounded more like "Eh" — were flanking Rock on the left, flicking cigarette 
butts and hooting, and you'd better believe that got his attention.
"I gotta hurt someone?" he wanted to know. He looked capable of it — strong and 
pissed off, but in control. Taking care of "troubled" boys was his job.
"We got to hurt you?" Ho Ng shot back, and gave him a whack on the skull with 
the paddle. Tried to, anyway; Rock deflected it with a sweep of his arm. But 
since that left Steve an opening to jab him in the nuts, it didn't do much good. 
Rock doubled over with a froggy kind of sound, but stayed on his feet. Taking on 
fourteen troubled boys was a bit beyond his faculties.
There was a definite satisfaction in seeing a big guy pacified like that, but 
then it looked like Ho or Steve might hit him again, maybe harder this time, and 
truthfully that made Conrad afraid, finally, of the consequences. And ashamed to 
be a member of this particular mob, yes, because Rock Dengle was definitely not 
a bad guy as jailers went. Kept the rules without treating you like a little 
kid, which was more than he 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 — especially not after he'd been whacked in 
the balls with an oar — 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 ten 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 live out scenes from an earlier, 
less civilized time. So it made perfect sense for them to respond in an 
uncivilized way.
"You kids are 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 — 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 groups on the 
other side of the world. The other two were D'rector Jed, both copies 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 they'd 
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 
which 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 really; 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 would 
someday stand higher, enormously higher, than the educator himself? A tricky 
business indeed, and one which 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."
"Cancel the alarm," Rock advised, throwing his voice behind Bascal's. "Let 'em 
in the office. We don't outnumber them much, and 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, either. 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 damn kerosene lamp. 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 no door. The camp had 
several other fax gates whose activation they could maybe have demanded, but 
this was the only one known to be on all the time, with a hardlink gated 
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, in some way, 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 somehow? Were they also 
parental spies, sent here to keep Bascal in line? Jed had certainly seemed to 
think so.
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, seemed somehow to be expecting 
to follow him through. But instead it fell twitching to the floor, when 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 this issue some thought; Conrad certainly had. And 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 
fourteen-year-old didn't?
"Jesus Christ, Bascal," he said with conviction, "I'd follow you anywhere."



2. Domes of the Popcorn Moon



They bounced through a repeater just inside the orbit of Pluto, and were 
funneled into a ring collapsiter segment 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 
painted bright blue. 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 trip the filters and provoke inquiry.
On the curtain's other side was Athens, where it was noon, and brutally hot. 
Another single step whisked them around to Calcutta, which was also hot, 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 just 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.
A billboard of animated wellstone proudly announced the station as one of only 
five public fax depots in the downtown area. A little map showed their 
locations, scattered across 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 ("hansome") 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 of course 
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."
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, 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 a 
Federal Historic District and member of the Living Museum Network.
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 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 
fourteen unescorted, dirty-faced adolescents as a sign of trouble. A mother 
snatched up the hand of a 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. 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, like, 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 
laughed. "I think we're here, 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 upward 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 fist raised defiantly but low, 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 really, 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: 16th and Market in the Mile High City, an almost mythical 
address. 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. 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 were anything but miniature, blocking the view. It 
was only when Bascal led them around a corner onto 16th 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 lower 
than Conrad would've expected, or perhaps 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.
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 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.
The moment wellstone — programmable matter — had found its way into the old 
republics, the Light Wars had started. What anarchy: buildings greedily sucking 
in ambient energy, dumping waste heat, offending the eye with patterns of 
superreflector and superabsorber, with flashing lights, 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 every photon that 
touched you. You could stay cool in the summertime, if your building was a 
perfect mirror focusing the heat back on unfortunate neighbors. In fact, if you 
were clever and obnoxious 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 there was a power 
failure? — 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. 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 dialog, 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."
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, like, 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, and 
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 around it, mostly blank but with occasional attempts at ornamentation, 
inlaid tiles and bas relief 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, 
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 you inevitably 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, and stinking like rotten cheese.
Ho, racing out in front of Bascal once more, leaned over the benches and treated 
both men to a blood-curdling 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" which 
Conrad had never realized he could recognize. 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 something ... else. Self-designed, with all the foolishness that that 
implies. Evolution is at least impartial. But Conrad was young, and thoughts 
like that one were fleeting, like snow which melted rather than sticking.
Bascal clapped him on the shoulder, dragging him forward in the process. 
"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. This is exactly why there are cities like 
Denver, where they at least make an effort. Parents ought to be forced to live 
here. It ought to be mandatory."
A thought occurred: "Maybe you should be in charge of the Children's Cities, 
guy."
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? 
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 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."



3. The Wellwood Deception



Revolution. Wow. Fuck. Was that a metaphor? Because tempting as the idea might 
seem, fourteen fourteen-year-old 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 nobody had ever even 
tried it.
"I thought we were just looking for girls," Conrad 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 cafe 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 cafe 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 Artifice. 
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. You could of 
course stay in the Children's Cities as long as you liked — some people stayed 
on as teachers or administrators or whatever, and a few remained as passive 
consumers, unable or unwilling to grow up, or else making up for an actual 
childhood spent someplace less raw. Calcutta, for example, was famous for its 
"Peter Pan Ghettos." But there were better places for people like that, where 
stronger intoxicants were available and everyone was above the age of consent. 
This place was what they called a "kiddie cafe" — no identification required for 
admittance. Whatever bona fide grownups you found here were probably up to no 
good. Which Conrad supposed was the whole point.
The name of the establishment appeared to be "1551," although maybe that was its 
street address, or possibly even the year it was built. Here, a flock of teenage 
boys was apparently considered less alarming than it was downtown. Only a few 
people looked up at their arrival, and any surprise they showed probably had 
more to do with dorky camp uniforms than anything else.
Bascal seemed to take this nonreaction personally; his easy stride broke into a 
trot, and he uttered a quiet, ululating sort of war cry and made an overhand 
"follow me" gesture to the boys behind him. They were officially taking this 
place by storm, and yeah, that did get a bit more of a reaction. A young man 
who'd been leaning against the doorway now shrank away from it, not caring to 
test his luck.
The place was a lot warmer inside than the cool breeze flowing down along the 
river. Poorly ventilated, Conrad thought, and with a wood face instead of a 
wellstone one, it couldn't pump the heat out electrically, either. Very rustic. 
Hell, it was almost like being back at the camp. The walls were an even mix of 
wood and plaster and brick, with wellstone surfaces only at the serving 
counters, of which there were several. A few animated posters hung on the walls, 
but there was also a lot of static graffiti done up in plain ink, and the reason 
for this was quickly apparent: each table had a big feather pen stuck 
prominently into a built-in inkwell. You could even see a few kids in the act of 
scribbling out their pent-up wisdom.
"They must wash these walls every week," he said to Feck.
Feck just nodded vaguely, his eyes on everything but Conrad.
A sign said "Please Seat Yourself," but there was also a staircase leading 
upward, and although the place was crowded with plastic tables and chairs and 
the people sitting at them, Bascal still had his momentum. A few zigs and zags 
through the crowd, a couple of bumped chairs, and he was on his way up, with 
Steve and Ho and Conrad right behind him, and all the other boys streaming after 
in a long line. People looked up at this, yeah. Looked annoyed, looked maybe a 
little worried.
The second floor was smaller, hotter, less crowded and less decorated. There was 
enough room for the boys to settle in at a corner clustered with round tables, 
but the doorway out to a balcony seemed much more inviting, and that was where 
they went. And if Bascal was looking for trouble, here was the perfect 
opportunity, because the balcony had seating for twenty or maybe twenty-five 
people, but was two-thirds full already, and the empty seats weren't in a block, 
but scattered all over the place.
Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui was full of surprises, though; as the boys piled 
up behind him in the doorway, he could actually have cut a fairly menacing 
figure there. But instead he just stood up straight, clapped his hands twice for 
attention, and called out: "Excuse me! I'm afraid you're all going to have to 
move inside. The balcony is reserved for a private party."
The quality of his voice was something Conrad really was going to have to study: 
self-assured, vaguely apologetic, and entirely official. There was no question 
that you were going to comply, and if for some reason you didn't, well, there'd 
be all sorts of hassle for everyone involved, and in the end you'd still be 
vacating your chair, thank you very much. It took barely thirty seconds to clear 
the crowd, and settle in at all the good seats along the rail.
The last to leave was a girl of about sixteen, and Bascal, still stationed by 
the exit, grabbed her elbow as she passed. Wrapped in a loose-fitting dress of 
glossy black fabric. Her hair and eyelids and irises had been done up in a 
matching shade, while her lips and fingernails matched her shoes with a seething 
red-black glow, like bits of iron sitting at the bottom of a campfire.
"You lovely thing," Bascal said, "can you answer me a question?"
"Get lost," she replied calmly, jerking her arm away. Then she paused, taking a 
good look at his face. "Oh, whatever. What do you need?"
"Are you in a hurry?"
She chewed her glowing lip for a moment, then stopped. "I'm here with friends. 
We had a good table, which you just took, so yeah, I need to get inside and find 
something. Before they come back."
"Ah," Bascal said. "I won't keep you, then."
She half-turned to go inside, then checked it and faced him. "Are you ... "
It hung unspoken: are you the prince? Bascal didn't answer. "Go on inside and 
get a seat for your friends. I'm sure that whatever ... transaction is keeping 
them from you must be very important. But when you're settled, come and see me. 
Us. I have a question."
A brown-smocked waitress materialized, looking annoyed. "Did you just kick 
everyone off this balcony?" For some reason, she directed the question at Steve 
Grush.
"No," he replied, with his usual sullen brilliance.
"We'll have fourteen glasses of beer," Bascal said, jumping in. "And fourteen 
cups of coffee, plus some pitchers of ice water. To eat, we'll take some sort of 
chips and dip thing, and a big plate of cheese and veggies. Does it come with 
olives? I love olives."
The waitress had a wellstone sketchplate in her hand, but didn't write anything 
on it or speak to it. She was under thirty, but her look suggested she'd seen 
quite enough punk kids come swarming in here like they owned the place.
"Who's paying?" she wanted to know.
Bascal held up a thumb. "That would be me."
"Uh-huh." She presented him with the sketchplate, skeptically.
"Authorized up to twenty thousand," Bascal said to it, rolling his thumb across 
its surface in the accepted manner, rather than simply jamming it the way punk 
kids were supposed to. "Plus a hundred-percent tip."
The slate chimed softly, acknowledging the transaction, and the young woman's 
features softened a little. Bascal's face and voice and thumbprint and DNA 
pattern all had to match against an account balance — he was good for the money. 
Still a punk kid, but apparently not a thief or mooch. That tip wasn't going to 
change her life or anything; all the necessities of life and most of its 
luxuries were free for the faxing, or at least had downloadable free knockoffs. 
And everything else had a free waiting list, so no matter how poor you were, you 
knew your turn would eventually come. Penthouse apartment, whatever, just live 
to be a million. But a tip was a nice gesture — traditional, polite — and a big 
tip was nicer still. He didn't have to do that.
"I'll see what we can do."
"Thanks so much," Bascal agreed.
The black-haired girl had slipped away during the exchange. Shrugging, Bascal 
sat down next to Conrad, who was worried and asked, "Can't they track you now? 
The police, your parents? Spending money is always the giveaway."
"Oh, probably. But the account has ... certain security features that will slow 
down a search."
"Oh. That's good, I guess."
The last rays of sunset were visible over the mountains, between gaps in the 
apartment buildings on the river's far bank. From what Conrad could see, the 
buildings themselves were in tasteful colors, not selling anything or trying to 
be anything in particular. These were the homes of ordinary Queendom citizens, 
with fax gates inside, possibly right there in the apartments themselves. Here 
ended the Children's City, and there began the suburbs of the Queendom proper.
The Green Mountain Spire was dark most of the way up now, the sunlight glinting 
redly off the top hundred meters or so, and inching upward with near-visible 
speed. The cafe balcony itself hung over a precipitous three-meter drop, with a 
small grassy bank beneath, and then the stony shallows of the Platte River, 
which wasn't nearly as majestic as Conrad would have imagined: maybe twenty 
meters across, and quite shallow enough to wade in. To the north and south there 
were little sets of rapids, where men and women in glowing green kayaks paddled 
down and, incredibly, back up again.
Where the grass ended, the river's banks were lined with a random jumble of 
stones, and sticking up here and there were the concrete stubs of what probably 
used to be bridges. Conrad couldn't imagine why they'd never been removed, 
although they did lend an honest, unfinished sense to the area. Neither 
pristinely wild nor immaculately groomed, just here.
It only took a minute for the waitress to return, first with their drinks, and 
then again with platters of nacho chips, smothered in melted cheese and 
surrounded by battlements of carrot and celery, zucchini, and olive.
"Here you go, hon," she said, dropping off the final tray in front of Bascal and 
Steve and Ho and Conrad. "If you need anything, my name is Bernice. Just rap on 
the wall, or the railing."
"My grandmother's name was Bernice," Bascal mused, when she was gone.
"Nice lady?" Ho Ng asked.
Bascal shrugged. "Never met her. She died, like, two hundred years ago, in 
Catalonia. Mayor of a city. Fucking historical figure."
"Jesus H. Garbage," Ho cursed, in a show of solidarity. He was always saying 
things like that: "donkey fuckbrain vomit" and "diarrhea blood angel," and 
Conrad's personal favorite, "mother-Christing piece of dammit." Ho seemed to 
find some weird pleasure in mixing his cusswords up that way, or maybe it was 
some subtle organic defect in his neural wiring, that the fax filters dismissed 
as a mere character flaw.
In the Queendom of Sol, character flaws were considered your own damned 
responsibility — you had to identify them yourself and then formally authorize a 
medical doctor to repair them for you. Or better yet, you could treat it 
yourself through personal experience and growth. And either way, if there were 
side effects in your overall personality, well, those were your own problem as 
well.
But Ho was only fourteen, so really it was his parents who should be worrying 
about these things. And Conrad supposed they had, in their own special way: by 
sending the boy off to summer camp. Very therapeutic, oh yes. Nothing cut down 
on cusswords like having to shit in a goddamned outhouse.
A sour mood threatened briefly to come on, but the watery beer was really good 
somehow, and the nachos were even better, and anyway Bascal seemed determined 
that all his men should be cheerful tonight. Who could argue with that?
And then, before they'd even finished off their first glass, Bascal's 
black-haired girlfriend showed up again, pulling up a plastic chair and 
inserting herself between the prince and Conrad.
"Hi," she said, matter-of-factly. How much was unspoken in that one syllable! 
Hi, Prince. I know who you are, Prince, but I don't care — I'm here to check you 
out as one human being to another. Prince.
Which was fine, sure, except that it was Bascal she'd sat down with, not some 
ordinary puke two years younger than her. And she hadn't brought her friends, 
either. Probably hadn't even told them, for fear of having to share.
"Hi," Bascal said back, in imitation of her tone.
"Hello," Conrad added, with no particular inflection, figuring he might as well 
at least try.
The girl nodded, sparing him half a glance before focusing her attention on 
Bascal once again. She asked, with mock-indifference, "You wanted something?"
Bascal leaned back and smiled. "Seeing you, my dear, I can think of a lot of 
things to want. But I doubt we have much time, so I'll come right to the point: 
I need access to a taboo fax machine. I'm carrying contraband. What's your name, 
by the way?"
Her eyes widened. "I'm Xmary. You need acc — "
"Eksmerry? Is that a nickname? Short for what, Christina Marie?"
"Xiomara Li Weng," she answered distractedly. "You want what, now?"
"A fax machine. A simple, ordinary fax machine that will copy ta'e fakalao. 
Forbidden objects and substances. My men are here are on a mission, for which 
they have certain material requirements. Clothes, for one thing," he said, 
pinching his Camp Friendly shirt for emphasis.
"And what else?" the girl demanded, clearly concerned that this was a setup, 
that she was the focus of some sort of royal joke or sting operation.
"Jewelry," Bascal said, with an inscrutable little smile.
"That's all?" Her eyes flicked downward, then settled on the only jewelry Bascal 
was wearing: the well-gold signet ring on the middle finger of his left hand.
"Pretty, eh?"
"It's not an ordinary ring."
Now there was an edge to Bascal's voice. "Of course it's not an ordinary ring. 
I'm the prince of the fucking Solar System. What do I wear, gold? Tin? It's 
information, darling — quadrillions of terabytes in quantum storage. It wants 
out."
With a shiver of excitement and dread, Conrad realized that they weren't just 
playing at being bad here. They were being bad, they were going to be bad. 
Bascal was really pissed off about something. Hell, they all were. As fugitives 
from adult supervision, they had a goddamn point to make.
This girl Xmary, hearing the tone of Bascal's voice, sighed once and then said, 
"I know some people. I can ask for you. It sounds pretty serious, though."
"That it is."
Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Finally, the girl got up again. Before 
turning to go she asked, "Am I going to get in trouble?"
"Yes," Bascal replied. "We all are. The question is whether anything useful is 
accomplished beforehand."
"Great."
She disappeared. Doing as she was told, going along with Bascal and against her 
own better judgment.
"So what's in the ring?" Steve Grush asked.
"Garbage," Bascal said.
"Garbage?"
"Garbage. Reorganization of matter at the atomic level. Into garbage."
"You mean programmable matter, right?" Conrad asked, because otherwise that made 
no sense at all.
"Duh. Any wellstone surface. But that's everything, right?"
Well, sort of. There were still an awful lot of natural materials around, 
especially in Denver. But Conrad remained confused — wellstone was fundamentally 
a form of silicon. Woven nanofiber, right? Quantum dots to confine electrons in 
atom like structures. In raw form the stuff looked and felt like some heavy, 
impermeable, beetle-shiny plastic, but by sending the right signals through it 
you could fill it with artificial pseudoatoms of any type. Silicon and gold, 
silicon and sulfur, silicon and plaster of goddamn Paris. Then there were the 
transuranic pseudoatoms, and the asymmetric ones, and the ones which 
incorporated exotic particles. You could alter wellstone's apparent composition 
in so many ways that even after three hundred years, a Queendom full of 
pseudochemists and hypercomputer search algorithms had barely cataloged even the 
fundamentals.
But pseudoatoms weren't real, and silicon was.
Bascal was looking smug. "It's Garbage Day in Denver, me boyos. If we each have 
one of these, and we spread out, we can make a lot of frigging garbage. We can 
even threaten infrastructure, which after all is what separates us from the 
animals. If our demands aren't met, they will at least be remembered."
"Raw!" Steve said approvingly, and a number of the boys echoed him.
"Where did this software come from?" Conrad couldn't help asking.
"Wrote it myself, boyo. Been saving it for a special occasion."
Conrad proceeded warily, not wanting to sound negative. "How does it work?"
"I archived a year's worth of patterns from the palace waste chutes, and fit 
them together with a tesselation-tiler. Any surface is mapped with the best 
possible fit in stored garbage, and the boundaries between garbage objects are 
heated and acoustically shocked to cut them away from the parent body. Slap it 
on a wall, and you get a pile of steaming garbage."
"Except that it wouldn't steam," Conrad said. "It wouldn't stink. It might look 
like shit, or half-eaten food, or whatever. Probably even feel like it. But 
pseudoatoms don't have a smell. They can't leak out into the air, like real 
atoms and molecules do."
"Oh," Bascal said, suddenly uncertain. It wasn't a look that fit his face.
"Still, that's pretty amazing that you thought of that. You have got power for 
the separated objects, right? They're photovoltaic enough to maintain their own 
programming? And composition?"
"Um. I don't know."
"Oh," Conrad said. "Probably not, then. You'll just wind up with garbage-shaped 
chunks of nanofiber silicon. It's probably dangerous, too. I mean, there's more 
wellstone in a building than just the facade, right? You'd better be real 
careful what you touch with that thing, or you're going to hurt somebody."
"Who made you the voice of reason?" Ho Ng asked, acidly.
"Um, nobody."
"Why don't you shut up, then? Pussy."
Conrad had no response to that. He'd already said what needed saying. Getting 
any further on Ho's bad side was not a smart idea, and he could see that Bascal 
was brooding, too, looking around with dark, embarrassed anger. That anger 
could, Conrad knew, be directed at him at any moment. He considered apologizing, 
but didn't see how that would help. Better just to pretend he wasn't here.
"Are we still doing this?" Steve Grush wanted to know.
"Yeah," Bascal said, waving a hand distractedly. "Let me think about it for a 
minute." Then he pinched his chin in a gesture so reminiscent of his father that 
for a moment Bascal might have been a younger image of the king himself. A 
little swarthier, perhaps. A bit more angular. Conrad felt a fresh burst of 
affection for this boy, this young man, this Poet Prince of all humanity.
"I have to visit the 'soir," Feck announced loudly, from the other end of the 
balcony. That was short for pissoir, and told everyone exactly, biologically, 
what he'd be doing when he got there. If he'd said 'toir, or shittoir, that 
would convey a different intention. You always knew more about Feck than you 
wanted to. Still, it was funny — Feck was pretty funny sometimes — and suddenly 
there was a lot of laughter, and the conversation turned to other subjects.
"Sorry," Conrad said quietly, seeing his Bascal opening as Feck shuffled past. 
"It's still a pretty raw idea."
"Shut up," Bascal said vaguely, not looking at him.
Taking the hint, Conrad finished his beer, then just as quietly finished his 
coffee. Both were making him thirstier, but he resisted the urge to chase them 
with a glass of water. In a few minutes he was going to have to visit the 'soir 
himself. He supposed they all were. He toyed with his coffee mug instead, 
clinking it a few times on the glass tabletop. Turning it over a few times in 
his hands. Good, old-fashioned stoneware, courtesy of the Friendly Products 
corporation, whose swirling green logo was glazed into the underside.
This didn't take any great scrutiny to discern; the same instantly recognizable 
design appeared on their Camp Friendly tee-shirts, and on thousands of 
child-oriented products produced daily by the fax machines of the world. Seeing 
it here was admittedly somewhat surprising. What was child-oriented about a 
coffee mug? He fantasized briefly, that this whole cafe — perhaps this whole 
ghetto — was just one more Friendly Park, in a carefully supervised Friendly 
Park world.
Oh, God, he was getting "maudlin," as his mother would say. It was exactly why 
she didn't allow him any alcohol, even weak and watered as this. If he drank any 
more, he'd become "rash," and then where would Queendom civilization be?
"Does anyone else want more beer?" he asked, looking around. But they were still 
ignoring him, which was probably good. He'd just order for himself, then, maybe 
even pay. Per the waitress' instructions, he leaned over and rapped on the 
deck's ratty old railing. It rang solidly under his knuckles, though, more like 
plastic or soft stone than wood. Because yeah, of course, it wasn't wood at all, 
just a clever wellstone facsimile. Why would knocking on a wooden rail summon a 
waitress?
Suddenly, his paranoid fantasy seemed less paranoid, less fantastic. If that 
rail wasn't full of microphones already, it easily could be on a moment's 
notice. If the constabulary had tracked the boys here, for example, or if the 
cafe staff had decided something suspicious was going on. Hell, the building 
could even make that judgment itself; most of the symptoms of human intelligence 
could be duplicated with a wellstone hypercomputer the size of a fingernail. 
Conrad's own house was always scolding him, checking up on him, ratting him out 
to his parents ... 
The black-haired, fiery-lipped Xmary reappeared, inserting herself deftly 
between Conrad and Bascal. "I found someone who can help you, Bas. Several 
someones."
Bascal looked up at her, and the confidence was back in his eyes. "Excellent. 
Thank you. And will these someones require payment?"
"I didn't ask, but I don't think so. They seemed pretty eager. I'm sure you 
realize, you're kind of a symbol around here."
"The Prince who Won't Be King? Lord of the oppressed? Spokeschild for the 
permanent children? I can't imagine." Bascal flourished comically with his arms, 
but couldn't quite keep the bitterness out of his voice. "Take me to your 
underground, then. We'll see what mischief this town can endure."
"Bascal," Conrad warned, raising his voice above the general hubbub, "We should 
get out of here. This place isn't as run-down as it looks. This isn't wood, it's 
wellstone. It could be a — "
The prince arched an eyebrow, and not in amusement. "There's business at hand, 
boyo. Connections to be made, a whole underground to be mobilized. One way or 
another, Garbage Day is a party I intend to throw."
Conrad became aware of some noise in the street, rising up like the soft 
clickety-click of a few dozen tap shoes. Like marching boots, approaching at a 
trot? Like the platinum feet of robots, dancing fluidly along the street?
"Bloodfuck!" Ho Ng called out, from his seat along the railing. "Constabulary 
coming. Lots of them."
"Ah," Bascal said, and his tone was of regret, not surprise. "All right, lads, 
hit the ground running. Scatter for me, and do as much damage as possible. Brew 
me up a genuine riot."
Conrad was surprised, and afraid, and maybe not entirely sorry they'd been 
caught. He looked Bascal in the eye, almost challengingly. "What are you going 
to do?"
"What do you think?" the prince snapped, then walked to the railing and punched 
it with his signet ring, producing a kind of porcelain clink. At the point of 
impact, there was a momentary sparkle of blue-white light, fading quickly to 
darkness. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. Conrad didn't so much as breathe. Half a 
second after impact, the change began: a sprouting and sprawling of shapes and 
colors. It shot along the balcony rail, down through its supports and onto the 
floor, onto the wall, up along the roof. The sound of it was like tearing paper, 
like crinkling foil. The building turned to garbage around them, and the narrow 
spaces between the garbage glowed, and sang, and cracked away.
Conrad watched Ho Ng drop right through the floor, just moments before the whole 
structure gave way, and suddenly they were all falling, in a storm of hand-sized 
wellstone fragments, like shiny black bugs. The sound of the building's collapse 
was remarkably low, more felt than heard. Weightless for so short a time that it 
barely registered, he thudded onto the steep riverbank, his fall partly broken 
by the plasticky fragments raining around him. His momentum carried him 
downward, skidding, briefly glimpsing the lights of an upside-down suburb 
reflected in the blurry water. And then a load of crap fell on top of him, 
stunning, immobilizing, whooshing the air out of his lungs.
He lay there for a few seconds, taking stock, trying to breathe, wondering if he 
were hurt or killed, if his parents would have to print a fresh copy of him from 
stored patterns. He'd died once before, in some sort of fence climbing accident 
when there were no other copies of him at large. Lost damn near the entire 
month, and never did find out what happened.
Finally, he had enough breath for a grunt of pain, and then a groan. Other 
groans rose up around him. And screams. And then suddenly the Constabulary was 
there, all around, men and women in bright blue, and faceless robots in naked, 
mirror-bright impervium. Hands were grabbing him, lifting, digging him out.
"Can you hear me?" a voice asked. "Are you hurt?"
Coughing, he struggled to stand. "I — ow! My tailbone. My back."
"Medic!" another voice called out. "Possible spinal! Recommend immediate 
faxation!" The hands on his body were gentle but very firm.
He looked around, trying to get his bearings. Trying, he realized, to recognize 
Bascal in the confusion of litter and bodies and flashing lights.
Then the first voice, someone behind Conrad, was speaking again. "Son, until we 
figure out exactly what happened here, I'm afraid you're under arrest."
"Yeah," Conrad said, slumping against the hands that gripped him. "I know it."



4. The Battle in the Throne Room



Some sort of portable fax machine was set up right there at the crime scene, and 
the boys were processed through it. Conrad's injuries were healed almost as a 
by-product; the fax filters compared his body against his genome and the 
standard human template, concluded that the damage wasn't ornamental, and sent 
on a corrected pattern to the other end. That these operations were performed on 
a snarl of quantum entanglements, rather than on a person or even the image of a 
person, did not impress Conrad in the slightest. Indeed, he'd experienced the 
process many times before, and barely noticed it at all.
He ended up in a windowless interrogation room — or rather, an atomically 
perfect duplicate of him ended up there, while he himself had vanished. Died, if 
you like, although people rarely talked about it that way. He'd been through 
this experience almost daily throughout his life, and thought no more about it 
than about the dead skin cells he was supposedly shedding every moment of every 
day.
At any rate, here he was, in this windowless room with a human being and a 
robot. The robot didn't speak — they rarely did, except in emergencies — but it 
also didn't move, which gave it a vague air of menace. Especially since it was 
positioned between Conrad and the exit.
The human being, seated across from him on the other side of a table, was named 
Leslie Jones. She told him gently and repeatedly that she was there to help him. 
He was not restrained in any way, and the interrogation room's door betrayed a 
sliver of light at the edge. It wasn't even closed all the way. But he'd seen 
enough to know that Leslie Jones wasn't a lawyer or a social worker, and seemed 
in fact to be some species of cop, so he played as dumb as he figured he could 
get away with. Lying to the authorities would be worse than useless — they'd 
spot it before the words were even out of his mouth — but they were also 
unlikely to respect his intelligence, nor to be surprised if he didn't display 
much.
"Why did you leave the camp?" Leslie asked him, for the second time.
He shrugged. "We weren't prisoners."
"You could have requested a pass. And an escort. And permission from your 
parents. Instead, we have a counselor assaulted and a Palace Guard vandalized."
"I didn't do any of that."
"But you were there when it happened."
Conrad didn't answer. They knew he was there. Between sensor records and skin 
cells and ghostly electromagnetic imprints, the Constabulary could probably 
trace just about every move he'd ever made.
Smiling, Leslie tried a different approach. "Conrad, you're not in trouble. Not 
very much trouble. No one was seriously hurt, and there's no evidence you did 
anything other than follow your friends, and then witness a crime. We just want 
to find out what happened."
He shrugged again. "You already know."
"Well, yes. But I'd like to hear it from you." She was wearing a green sweater 
with buttons made from what looked like live dandelion heads. Her hair was 
coppery red, and very short. He supposed she was beautiful — he'd never met 
anyone who wasn't — but she spoke and moved like the women of his mother's 
generation. Two hundred years out of date; born into a mortal world, and then 
"saved" from it by the rise of the Queendom. He wondered if faxes of this same 
woman were interrogating all the other boys as well.
"You don't know anything," he told her, not in a nasty way but just factually. 
"I'm sorry, but I really can't explain it to you. There's not even anything to 
explain." Then he disappointed himself by adding, "I want my mother."
Leslie just nodded, with a sympathy that seemed annoyingly genuine. "Both your 
parents have been briefed on the situation, and have asked to send copies of 
themselves here. The request is under review. However, as I'm sure you can 
understand, the involvement of Prince Bascal is a complicating factor."
Again, Conrad had nothing to say that would actually help the situation, so he 
said nothing, and Leslie simply started her questioning again, from the top. 
They went around and around like that for nearly an hour. Finally, when Conrad 
was halfway nuts with the repetition, a disc of yellow light appeared on the 
tabletop, and a little speaker formed beside it and emitted a soft chime.
"Well," Leslie said, eyeing it, "we tried, anyway. You seem like a nice young 
man; you should try opening up a little."
"Oh yeah? Why?" Conrad couldn't help asking.
To her credit, she thought about that for a couple of seconds before replying, 
"Because childhood doesn't excuse rudeness, not in a child your age. Whatever 
problems you believe you're facing, communication is really the only way to 
tackle them. You'll understand this someday, when you and your friends are the 
ones in charge."
Conrad didn't even try to suppress his sneer. "What day is that, Leslie?"
She really looked at him then, rolling her tongue around behind a set of pursed 
lips. Finally, she said, "Look, we've all made adjustments. Nobody said life was 
perfect. But we do have forever, yes?" She rose to her feet then, and motioned 
for him to do the same. "Come on. As I feared, the case has been placed under 
palace jurisdiction. Back to the fax with you, I'm afraid."
For some reason, Conrad felt a shiver of fear. "Why? Where am I going?"
"To the palace. Didn't I just say that? Best behavior, Conrad; you're going to 
meet the king and queen."



The throne room of Their Majesties, Bruno de Towwaji and Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, 
looked exactly like it did on TV. Same reed mats over wellstone floors, same 
Spanish tapestries over wellstone walls, same guilded wellstone scrollwork along 
the ceiling and floorboards and high, vaulted doorways. It was daytime here; the 
ceiling was clear at the moment, and light streamed down through it from a 
blue-white sky, much paler than the sky of Camp Friendly.
A pair of vaguely familiar women were here, with the black hair and walnut skin 
of South Pacific ancestry, and the elaborate wraps and hair fans of Her 
Majesty's court. With prim nods and subtle gestures, the two of them gathered 
the boys out of a pair of fax machines, and lined them up two rows deep in front 
of the empty thrones.
Lucky for Conrad, he got to stand two spaces from Bascal, near the middle of the 
front row, not four meters from the raised dais on which the thrones themselves 
rested. Lucky, lucky. His heart was hammering wetly in his throat; he'd never 
been so nervous in his life, even the first time he'd spoken face-to-face with 
the Poet Prince. He still wanted very badly to see his parents; he had no idea 
what was going to happen to him, and the prospect of an angry king and queen was 
far more frightening than the bland, dutiful sympathy of the Constabulary.
The Queendom's royalty were technically figureheads, without any official 
political or legal powers. But they were also beloved, and brilliant, and so 
absurdly wealthy that they could buy the planets outright, if they chose to. So 
in the end it hardly mattered: in the spiritual hunger of the Restoration and 
the perils and tragedies of the Fall, these two had been chosen as humanity's 
penultimate leaders. Whether or not Conrad liked or understood it, they could 
dictate his fate and no one — not even his own mother and father — would 
challenge it.
Still, this mortal fear didn't keep him from noticing that the "boy" to his left 
in the row behind him was actually Xiomara Li-Weng, from the cafe, and that the 
fourteen assembled children did not include Feck. In a way, this made sense: 
Feck had been in the 'soir when the building came down, and if he'd had the 
sense to get rid of his Camp Friendly shirt then at first glance there'd be no 
reason for the Constabulary to connect him with the events on the balcony, or to 
distinguish him from the cafe's regular customers. Whereas a quantum 
reconstruction of the collapse would show Xmary standing right next to Bascal, 
on the balcony with the other Friendly campers.
But despite her short, dark hair and rail-thin figure, Xmary did not resemble 
Feck in the slightest. Conrad didn't even see how she could be mistaken for a 
boy, although she'd rubbed the lipstick off and lost the low-toe shoes, and even 
somehow taken off the nail polish. She wasn't wearing a Camp Friendly shirt, but 
then again neither was Ho Ng, who'd somehow traded his for a shiny gray pullover 
and quilted vest, although he still had the pants: beige culottes that 
completely destroyed his efforts to look raw.
Even so, the error was alarmingly stupid. Had no one checked the biometrics or 
the DNA, or even peeked under the jacket? Had the ire of king and queen so 
disrupted police routines that even the Constabulary could somehow arrest the 
wrong person? Hand her over in a moment of confusion? It was a chilling thought, 
and a reminder of why the Old Moderns had murdered off their royal families in 
the first place, leaving only the Princess of Tonga and the swashbuckling 
Declarant-Philander of Spanish Girona to lead them into the future.
One of the Tongan ladies, gliding back and forth along the front row like a 
dolled-up drill sergeant, paused suddenly in front of Bascal. Placed a finger 
under his chin and lifted slightly, commanding his attention. Conrad couldn't 
make out what she murmured to him, but he did hear the prince's incongruous 
reply: "Lemonade. Please."
Then a chill settled over the room. To the right of the dais, a figure had 
appeared in the doorway. She had the same walnut skin and raven hair as her 
courtiers, but her wrap and drapes and hair fans were of purple, streaked and 
patterned with Polynesian tapa-styled highlights of glowing white. She was 
flanked on either side by ornate Palace Guards of gold and platinum, and news 
cameras buzzed and flickered in the air behind her, like fireflies. She wore a 
diamond crown, and was using the Scepter of Earth as a walking stick, and 
somehow she brought the whole thing off as casually as any jogging suit or camp 
uniform. No friend or relative ever had a face so familiar, so instantly 
readable. The queen was furious.
She was also controlling it tightly, which made it even scarier somehow, and it 
was all Conrad could do to keep from flinching or even cowering as her gaze 
swept across him. In theory, she could order his head chopped off and his 
backups erased, and it would probably happen.
But Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, the Queen of Sol, had eyes only for Bascal as she 
ascended the dais and settled comfortably into her gilded wicker throne. Her 
robot guards, armed with tall, flimsy-looking axes, assumed positions on either 
side of the dais. The news cameras drifted out into the room, documenting the 
scene from all the most dramatic angles. Conrad wondered if he was on 
television, or would be later on in some carefully edited scene. Maybe these 
were simply the palace's own archival cameras, storing holie video into a 
library somewhere.
"All right," the queen said. "Let's hear it." There was no question whom she was 
addressing.
"Malo e lelei, Mother," Bascal replied amiably. "I've missed you."
"Tali fiefia. And I you," she said, with apparent sincerity. "But you're back a 
little early. And in trouble again. And this time, you've brought friends."
"Yes, mother."
She raised her eyebrows, tapped a foot. Finally, she spoke in tight, parental 
tones: "Bascal, don't try my patience, not today. You know I love you, but what 
you don't seem to understand is that I will make an example of you."
"On the contrary," the prince said. "I'm counting on it." His voice was still 
friendly, but his at-attention pose struck Conrad as both a rebuke and a mockery 
of his mother's authority.
Tamra shook her head a little, and sighed. "You think you're so clever, Bas. 
This isn't a chess game, where it helps to look three or four moves ahead. It's 
more like the tide, which comes in when the Moon drags it in, regardless of what 
anyone thinks or says."
"Then I'll plant a neuble on the beach," Bascal answered smoothly.
This was metaphor, Conrad realized. A neuble was a billion tons of liquid 
neutronium in a two-centimeter diamond shell, and would drop through beach sand 
or even solid rock like a cannonball through wet tissue paper. But it would 
affect the tide, you bet.
"Enough," Tamra said coldly. "This isn't a debate. You've injured nearly a 
hundred people, and destroyed a building. Someone could easily have been killed, 
in which case you'd be going to prison."
"I have been in prison," Bascal answered, finally betraying his anger.
"No," she said, "You haven't. You've been at summer camp."
"It's winter here, Mother."
"And summer in Catalonia, yes. When I was a girl, most of the world lived in 
conditions much worse than your Camp Friendly, and never thought twice. If you 
can't see the difference, then perhaps you should spend some community service 
time in the actual punitary system."
"Fine," Bascal snapped. "None of my tutors have been criminals yet. It's a real 
gap in my education."
The queen slammed the metal butt of her scepter down on the tiles of the dais, 
with a sound like a heavy door slamming shut. "Darn you, young man. Must you 
battle us on every front? At every step? Do you despise us because we're your 
parents? Because we're the First Family? Because we're older? You've made your 
little statement, all right, but you know very well it turns people away from 
your cause, not toward it. I miss your poetry, I really do. But I suspect that's 
the very reason you stopped writing it."
Bascal's stance never changed. "The summers here used to inspire me. I truly 
loved them. But then you sent me alone to Girona. Tending sheep. And then it was 
coconuts on Niuafo'o, and finally peaches and onions in the outer solar system. 
And you wonder why I'm angry?"
"You were angry before you left," the Queen said. "So eager for independence, 
and yet so unwilling to accept it."
"Independence?" Bascal said darkly. "At Camp Friendly? Surely you're joking. 
Rebellion turns adults away from my cause, Mother. The children understand."
With a rustle of fabrics, the queen stood up, raising a hand that might have 
pointed, or gestured angrily, or balled into a fist. But instead, she dropped it 
and turned away. "I see the day is gone when you and I can speak. Have it your 
way, then."
She stepped off the dais, on the opposite side from where she'd gotten on, and 
strode briskly to the other arched doorway, disappearing around a corner of 
wellstone-emulated plaster. Conrad heard a knock, and the mock creak of a mock 
door opening. Then hushed voices that reminded him of his own parents, when they 
closed themselves in their bedroom for an argument. It was oddly reassuring, to 
see the Queen of All Things acting just exactly like somebody's mom.
Conrad spared a glance at Bascal, who was looking evilly smug, having gotten the 
better of the worlds' most important person. He also peeked back at Xmary, who 
was standing there with her arms behind her back, trying to be as invisible as 
her clothes and her girl-ness would allow.
The guard robots had disappeared with the queen, and one of the Tongan courtiers 
had vanished at some point as well, leaving only the other one to watch over the 
boys. She was looking after the queen, and presently stepped into the hallway 
behind her, stopping at the corner.
Conrad, deciding to risk it, turned and spoke to Xmary in quick whispers. "What 
are you doing here?"
"Be quiet," she whispered back, not looking at him.
"But why — "
"Be quiet," she said, then met his eyes for a moment and added, even more 
softly, "Young people are supposed to shake things up. I'm here because someone 
else isn't. Now be quiet about it."
Was that what she thought? Did she have visions of Feck the Fairy, brave 
confidant of the prince, scrabbling around the underside of Denver, quietly 
fomenting revolution? Conrad nearly laughed out loud at the idea, and even more 
nearly giggled. He settled for a smirk she would probably misinterpret. He tried 
to get it off his face, but the effort only made their situation seem that much 
funnier. Most likely, even if Feck didn't get caught he would turn himself in to 
his parents before the Sun had even risen.



Conrad was going to say something about it to Peter Kolb, standing between 
himself and the prince. Crack a joke, something, but the Tongan lady had turned 
back toward them again, and was making little "come here" motions with her 
hands. "Boys, come. The king will see you in his study."
The two neat lines broke up into a kind of V formation as Bascal strode toward 
her, with Conrad and the rest of the boys trailing uncertainly behind. Meeting 
the king was less scary somehow, and the prospect of actually standing in his 
study was strange indeed, because Bruno de Towaji — once a Declarant-Philander, 
a genius and consort and knight of the realm — was the inventor of everything 
from collapsium to the blitterstaff, from the fax transport grid to the pub game 
of Shuffle Acrostics. He'd also saved the Sun from collapse or something during 
the Fall, hundreds of years before Conrad was born.
Bascal led them into the hallway, pausing for half a step to thank the courtier, 
whom he called "Tusite." The office door was just a slab of wellstone, folded 
out from the faux-solid material of the wall, but it was made to look like an 
ancient thing of wood and iron, more romantic than spooky.
The room itself was unadorned, and cluttered with mysterious objects and 
diagrams. The king was an inventor still, deeply and constantly concerned with 
the Queendom's technological underpinnings. Unfortunately, his study was rather 
small inside, and as the boys (and girl) shuffled in behind him, Conrad found 
himself squeezed up against Bascal, and against the room's only chair, which 
held a hairy, rotund, vaguely unkempt figure which took a second or two to 
register as His Majesty, unprepared for audience.
The king held a stylus in each hand, and seemed absorbed in the moving images 
his desk was projecting. With visible effort, he looked up into Conrad's face.
"Er, hello," he said, scratching at his beard with one of the styluses, then 
dropping it on the desktop and holding out a hand. "I'm Bruno."
Feeling distinctly weird about it, Conrad took the hand and shook it. "Conrad 
Mursk, sir."
The king nodded and withdrew his hand. "Ah. Well. It's 'sire,' actually. One 
must observe the proper forms. It's the only real purpose the office of 'king' 
serves, and it is a real purpose. Kindly keep it in mind."
"Um, sorry. Sire." Conrad blanched inwardly, and probably outwardly. He wished 
there were some way for him to step back, without toppling his fellow campers 
like shuffleboard pins. He also wished he could shut up, but that impulse 
control thing was going strong, and words were rising out of him like gas 
bubbles. "What is that you're working on? A planette?"
The diagrams before the king showed various cross-sections of some layered, 
spherical object, many hundreds of kilometers across.
Bruno's gaze flicked from Conrad to the desktop and back again. He seemed to 
study Conrad's expression. "It's the Moon, lad. Luna. The Earth's moon."
"Oh. I thought the Moon was bigger than that."
Again, that studying look. The king's head was nodding slowly. "So it is, lad."
Fortunately, Bascal came to the rescue, cutting in with a: "Hello, Father. I've 
missed you at camp."
King Bruno seemed to ponder this for a couple of seconds. "Hmm. Yes, well we've 
missed you as well. But that's hardly the point here, is it? You've misbehaved, 
and will be punished for it."
"Yes, Father," Bascal agreed, his voice maybe a bit too chummy.
Bruno frowned at that, and tried for a moment to rise from his chair, before 
looking around and realizing that the room was packed, that Conrad and Bascal 
weren't smooshed up against him out of pure admiration. He scanned the assembled 
faces, looking almost puzzled. Finally, he directed his attention at Bascal and 
spoke again. "Your mother and I would like to know why. You understand this? 
We've invested a great deal of time and love and energy in a creature which has 
become highly resentful. An explanation would help."
Bascal remained polite this time. "You've heard the explanation, Father. I've 
been shouting it from the rooftops for four years now. It's the seriousness of 
it that always escapes you."
Bruno's frown deepened. "Seriousness? My boy, I've lived a long life, and these 
are the least serious times I've seen. War is a memory, crime is in sharp 
decline, and there've been remarkably few disasters — natural or otherwise — to 
threaten lives and infrastructure. You've never seen a time of strife, lad. You 
don't know what it's like."
"No, you just refuse to see it. The strife is all around us."
"Pish," Bruno said, waving a hand. "You kids. You think teenage angst is a new 
invention?" Then he paused, and added, "It's awfully small in here. Perhaps the 
dining room would be better. Have you boys eaten?"
"We have," Bascal agreed, although it was just nachos and beer. Truthfully, 
another bite or two would not be unwelcome.
"Maybe a snack," Conrad said, stupidly, just as he might to any other friend's 
father. Then more contritely added, "Sire."
"Snack," Bruno said, pinching his chin and musing, as if this were some bold new 
theorem he was hearing for the first time. "Hmm."



Five minutes later, the boys were arranged around a wellwood dining room table, 
with Bruno at one end and Queen Tamra at the other, and Bascal squarely between 
them on the long side. The table would have been huge with just the three of 
them, but with thirteen boys and a girl it seemed cozy enough. Everyone was 
solemnly drinking lemonade from delicate-looking crystal goblets, and nibbling 
on tiny peanut-butter-and-vanilla sandwiches, and gazing out the picture window 
at the white sand and coconut palms, the ocean surf throwing itself against the 
beach, which sprawled for a hundred meters along a gentle, gently groomed slope.
It looked sultry-hot out there, but this dining room was cool in both the 
literal and metaphoric senses. Her Majesty was less icy than before, but still 
reserved and impatient with her wayward son. She did spare some attention for 
the other boys, asking the ones closest to her — Steve Grush and Jamil Gazzinga 
— if they had ever been to Tonga before.
"No, Ma'am," Steve said, as politely as you please. It seemed strange to Conrad, 
that a bully as transparent and, well, stupid as Steve should be sitting right 
next to the Queen, essentially ignored by her bodyguards. Even stranger that he 
should look good doing it. It seemed like at any moment he should leap from his 
chair, grab her by the head, and start delivering noogies. But here was how the 
worlds really worked: act like a complete asshole and you could lunch with the 
Queen. Jamil, for his part, looked pale and sweaty and terrified, and could only 
manage to grunt a reply.
Xmary also looked terrified, probably because she was seated only two places 
away from Bruno, and could be caught out at any moment. But the king wore a 
distracted, lost-in-thought kind of look, and like the queen he was mostly 
interested in Bascal anyway.
"So," he said to the prince, tearing himself out of some internal reverie. "You 
were explaining these trying times to me. Perhaps the vanilla has sharpened your 
righteous fury. Would you care to continue?"
And yes, Bascal did look angry when he answered, "This is precisely my point." 
He gestured around the room, at the table, at the tiny sandwich in his hand. 
"You connive a scene here to make me look like a little kid. In front of my 
peers, no less."
Bruno reflected on that, then nodded across the table to his wife. "Dear, is it 
childish to eat a sandwich?"
"I eat them every day," she answered.
"Really, every day. I didn't know that." He popped one of them into his own 
mouth and chewed it thoughtfully.
"Your father," the queen added, glaring mildly at Bascal, "does not connive. The 
very idea makes me laugh. This is good lemonade, by the way."
"The cooks have been playing with the pattern," Bruno said. "I'll let them know 
you like it."
"Do, please."
But Bascal wasn't finished. He glared back at his mother and said, "You know 
perfectly well what I mean." Then, to the king: "You were already at university 
by my age, learning physics. Emancipated. Adult."
And Conrad could see how it was in this house: emotional appeals in one 
direction and logical ones in the other, with human servants as well as robots 
and household intelligences to serve as neutrals. But really they were all 
together, a unified front which Bascal was busily throwing himself against.
"Orphaned, lad." the king said sadly. "Living on earthquake charity. People died 
back then, and not on any convenient schedule. I wasn't an adult; I'd much 
rather have been learning archery and canoeing."
"Mother was already Queen at fifteen."
"Also orphaned. And thrust into power without warning, by people who did not 
have her best interest in mind. It's nothing to envy, Bascal. When your semester 
at camp is over, you can return to a loving family. Tamra and I never had that 
option."
"We're going back, then," Bascal said. "To the dumping ground."
"Don't be melodramatic," the queen chided. "You may learn to appreciate the 
comforts of our age. Of dining with your parents, even. If not, then perhaps 
camp isn't so awful after all." She touched a napkin to her lips and stood up. 
"I have meetings, I'm afraid."
"Send a copy," Bascal snapped.
"I have," the queen replied evenly, "Several. But the day is fluid, and things 
keep coming up. I'll spare you the goodbye kiss." She looked around the table. 
"A pleasure meeting you children. In the future, kindly stay out of trouble. His 
Majesty will escort you to the dumping ground."
With a swishing and rustling of fabrics, she was gone. Conrad felt bemused, and 
somewhat torn. Tamra Lutui was easy to love: beautiful and funny, intelligent 
and capable. It was part of why she'd been elected — or drafted — in the first 
place, and the effect was at least as pronounced in person as on TV. But she was 
belittling her son's grievances, and with them an entire — and much aggrieved — 
generation.
"We won't cooperate," Bascal said to his father. "It wouldn't be right."
"No?" the king replied, thinking about it. "We've pulled all the humans off the 
planette, and replaced them with Palace Guards. From this point on, your 
cooperation and approval are rather moot. You're only fourteen, lad."
"Yes. And someday I'll be 'only a hundred,' and then 'only a thousand.' I'll 
always be younger than you, Father."
Patiently: "That's true, but by the time you're a thousand, the difference in 
our ages will be comparatively small. You're going to live forever, lads, and 
once you've left childhood behind there's no reclaiming it."
He mused for a further moment, and said, "You know, that camp of yours is 
gorgeous, probably the finest planette ever built. I would have loved ... would 
have ... " His voice trailed away wistfully. Then his gaze jumped up suddenly, 
and settled on Xmary. "Egad, child, are you a girl?"
"No," she replied, sounding indignant. Sounding just exactly like an indignant 
sixteen-year-old girl.
"Hmm," the king said, studying her for a moment. "All right. No offense meant. 
Shall we go, then?"
Bascal held his arms out, roadblock style, and looked around warningly. Nobody 
move.
Seeing this, Bruno nodded. "Hmm. Yes. Well, if you won't cooperate, you won't 
cooperate. I was young once, I remember how it was. We'll have the guards drag 
you kicking and screaming through the fax, all right? We'll all preserve our 
honor that way."
Then he looked right at Conrad and winked — a conspiratorial gesture of such 
portentous friendliness and condescension that the lad would, in some small way, 
never be the same again.
This isn't over, he thought. But for now, it is.