THE WELLSTONE

“An ideal blend of wit and superscience, set in a brilliant future age when wealth and immortality just aren’t enough. McCarthy gives an adventurous new spin to the ongoing rebellion of the young.”

—David Brin

“Wil McCarthy asks a question for the first immortals: if their children do not know or fear death, might death become an exciting adventure?”

—Sean McMullen

“THE WELLSTONE has a madcap, inventive energy that proves irresistible. Wil McCarthy’s previous book, THE COLLAPSIUM, was dazzling in its ingenuity, and THE WELLSTONE—a deranged take on a boys’ adventure tale, with its log cabin flying through the Kuyper Belt on its programmable matter sails—is a sequel worthy of its predecessor.”

—Walter Jon Williams

THE COLLAPSIUM

“[Protagonist] Bruno de Towaji... is surely speaking for his creator when he assures another character, ‘Imagination really is the only limit.’ ”

—The New York Times

“The future as McCarthy sees it is a wondrous place. While there are amusing attributes and quirks to McCarthy’s characters, the greater pleasures of this novel lie in its hard science extrapolations. McCarthy plays up his technical strengths by providing a useful appendix and glossary for the mathematically inclined reader.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A standout novel. McCarthy has added a lyricism reminiscent of Roger Zelazny to cutting-edge hard science in the manner of Robert L. Forward.”

—The Denver Post

“Ingenious and witty... as if Terry Pratchett at his zaniest and Larry Niven at his best had collaborated.”

—Booklist

“The author of Bloom once again demonstrates his talent for mind-expanding sf. Vibrant with humor, drama, and quirky ideas. Highly recommended.”

—Library Journal

“A fairy tale [with]... the most delicious superscience since Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Stylistic diversity and hard scientific rigor blended with panache and striking imagination. McCarthy works hard to draw out pathos and character development. Genuinely exciting—a wonderful hoot.”

—The New York Review of Science Fiction

“Fresh and imaginative. From a plausible yet startling invention, McCarthy follows the logical lines of sight, building in parallel the technological and societal innovations. ‘Our Pick.’ I wanted to visit this Queendom and meet these people”

—Science Fiction Weekly

“[A] comedy of manners about High Physics, immortality, mad scientists, and murder. Great fun [with a] Wodehousemeets-Doc-Smith aesthetic. As ingenious as the physics and special effects are, it is their juxtaposition to the wit and comedy that gives the novel its particular flavor. [A] playful, thoughtful book.”

—Locus

“Top-notch. Terribly good fun. This very funny book has something for everyone.”

—Entertainment Tomorrow

“McCarthy knows his physics, and makes it extremely easy to suspend disbelief. He creates a world that is both foreign and amazing... but in McCarthy’s hands it appears all but inevitable.”

—Mindjack Magazine

“Wil McCarthy is a certified science fiction treasure, a real-life rocket scientist with a gorgeous writing style and rapier wit to boot. [While his] high-concept physics ideas... are deft and fascinating, it’s his characters and story that make The Collapsium a book to savor, a complex and layered story in the grand tradition of science fiction’s masters.”

—Therese Littleton, Amazon.com

“Quite entertaining. The science is larger-than-life, and so are the characters.”

—SF Site

“I don’t recall the last time a book made me laugh out loud. I did so here on page 146, and at the book’s end I did so again... though my eyes were moist as well. McCarthy has created a story here that is distinctly Asimovian in flavor, though his voice is very much his own.”

—SF Revu

“Prepare to use your grey matter. [McCarthy] fills his pages with lovingly rendered descriptions... but it is the strength of his scientific imagination that really shines through.”

—SFX Magazine (UK)

“A most dazzling future. What follows is a mind-spinning struggle that recalls a Henry Fielding novel of manners, Michael Moorcock’s epic sagas and the cosmic free-for-alls of Doc Smith. There’s fascinating science aplenty, mad scientists, robots running amok... What more could you want?”

—The Weekly Australian

“A decidedly odd but enjoyable mix of mannered, decadent comedy and far-out physics. I liked and was even prepared to believe in [it].”

—Ansible (UK)

BLOOM

“Bloom is tense, dynamic, intelligent, offering a terrifyingly vivid view of how technology can rocket out of our control.”

—David Brin

“What clever and compelling science fiction! The Bloom future is all too believable.”

—James Gleick,

Dragging this fanciful future into print has been a long and sometimes arduous journey. I’d like to extend my earnest thanks to Shawna McCarthy for twisting my arm; to Scott Edelman, Chris Schluep, and Stanley Schmidt for editing earlier phases of the project; and to Anne Lesley Groell for believing so wholeheartedly in this one. To the extent that the ideas in this book are mature, it’s thanks to years of kicking around by friends and relations, most especially Gary E. Snyder, Richard Powers, Mike McCarthy, and Geoffrey A. Landis. I’m also grateful for the wisdom, advice, and enthusiasm of David Brin and Hal Clement, and for the more specific patience of Kathee Jones, Laurel Bollinger, and Don Kinney in critiquing early manuscripts.

I am, of course, deeply beholden to the swarms of physicists, chemists, astronomers, and other scientists on whose work these stories are based. Many of these men and women have been generous with their time, and thoughtful with their imaginations. I owe Bernhard Haisch and Marc Kastner a particular debt. And, as always, the greatest thanks go to my own family for their love and support, which make all the rest of this possible.

Any errors you find in this book are the fault of Secret Villains, whose mad schemes will soon be revealed.

They bounced through a repeater just inside the orbit of Pluto and were funneled into a ring collapsiter segment—a conduit made of tiny black holes—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 with skin of bright blue or brighter pink. 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 only trip the filters and provoke inquiry.

On the curtain’s other side was Athens, where it was sunrise and already hot. Another single step whisked them around to Calcutta, which was hotter and brighter, 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 fresh and 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.

“I have no guards,” the prince said wonderingly. He turned and crushed Conrad in a hug, then did the same to a cringing Ho Ng. “I have no guards!”

He whirled, laughing, oblivious to the staring crowd.

A billboard of animated wellstone proudly announced this station as one of only five public fax depots in the downtown area. A little map showed their locations, scattered along 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 (“hansom”) 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 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. You should be happy.”

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, and 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 an Urban Preservation District and member of the Living Museum Network. A place as classic and primal as the Fuck You Song, and twice as pretty.

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 for some reason 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 fifteen unescorted, dirty-faced adolescents as a sign of trouble. A mother snatched up the hand of her 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, and even snapped his teeth at a woman he caught staring at him. Gods, 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 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 grinned. “I think we’ve arrived, 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 up 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 defiant fist, held 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 then, 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: Sixteenth and Market in the Mile High City, an almost mythical address. The center of raw. 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 waged. 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, blocking the view of all behind them, were anything but miniature. It was only when Bascal led the boys around a corner onto Sixteenth 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 shorter than Conrad would’ve expected, or else 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 and surliness on the other subjects. Only History had inspired any enthusiasm at all, and only because this time it had included the Light Wars, which of course were the first intersection of architecture and matter programming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Buck Moon? Says who?” someone asked.

“Says the Naval Almanac,” Bascal answered.

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

Conrad turned. “Eh?”

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

Now everyone was looking at Feck, and even by gaslight you could see him blushing.

Bascal looked surprised. “Feck! You don’t know things, do you? Peter knows things; he’s the son of laureates. Conrad thinks he knows things, although he’s a son of a bitch the last I heard. But you? Ah, wait a minute, I’m perceiving something: you have a connection to this tribe. Wait, don’t tell me! You’re, let’s see ...” He studied Feck’s complexion and features for a moment. “You’re one-eighth by blood.”

“One-quarter,” Feck said. “But it’s not Algonquin, it’s Chippewa. Their neighbors. For us, this is the Raspberry Moon.”

“Ah! You’re practically a native guide! I had no idea.”

“I’ve never been to North America,” Feck said. “Anyway, this area is Kiowa, or maybe Lakota. The Horse Moon.”

“We’ll have to horse around,” Bascal answered merrily. “And give a big, fat raspberry to the good citizens of Denver. Any other moons we should know about tonight?”

Feck scratched his ear, uncomfortable with the attention. The crowds were lighter here; the boys were practically alone in their pool of lamplight. “Uh, the Corn Moon? Or maybe it’s Popcorn Moon. Also Raptor, Thunder, and Blood.”

“Wow. That’s raw. I like it. We’ll screech like eagles, leaving a wake of thunder and blood. And raspberry popcorn! Actually, that’s quite silly. But anyway the town is ours, and I say we take a bite.”

Ah, the Poet Prince. Conrad snorted to himself.

Ho and Steve, unimpressed by this dialogue, exchanged a look, then turned and started off toward the sunset again. And once again, Bascal seemed honor-bound to go after them, to assert himself. He got between them and propped his elbows up on each of their shoulders, looking side to side and grinning.

“You know,” he said, “a preservation district like this one runs on what they call a ‘service economy.’ You walk around looking at objects on display, and if you like one, the shopkeepers will print out a copy for you, or have it faxed to your address. Or you can sit in a restaurant, and order yummy comestibles from a highly restricted menu. Sometimes the whole selection fits on a card, or a sign. There’s a theme to it. See, what you’re paying for is ambience—the way things look and smell and fit together.”

“Uh-huh,” Ho said uncomfortably. He obviously realized that he was expected to reply, to suggest something. But he was just too damned stupid.

Steve Grush ducked away from Bascal’s elbow, and then Ho did as well, and both the badboys were stepping back, sizing up the prince in some kind of unspoken power struggle. They never had a chance; at a loss for words and deeds alike, Ho finally shrugged, and gestured for Bascal to lead the way.

“You probably know where you’re going. Sire.”

Sire! Conrad couldn’t help wondering if this was a learnable trick, something Bascal had had drilled into him by tutors. He hadn’t really done anything—it might be something coded in his genome, some sort of dominant pheromone signature that made others feel more submissive the closer he got. Was such a thing possible? If so, it stood to reason that Their Majesties would give their son every advantage in the world. But perhaps being prince was advantage enough; it wasn’t like Ho could punch him out or anything, like anyone would stand for it if he did. Conrad felt a burst of pride and affection for this, his personal monarch, and it occurred to him that he would never need a trick like that, as long as he was standing right here at Bascal’s elbow. That was all the leadership any of them were going to need. This was the whole point of a Queendom, right? The need to follow someone, to surrender—if only symbolically—that unpleasant sense of personal accountability. Figureheads, right: they pretend to lead us, and we pretend to follow. How very well we pretend.

Bascal dogged their course left a block, to pass through rows of buildings faced with what looked, yeah, like actual brick. (Although this was hard to believe. Couldn’t it fall off and hurt somebody?)

“Where are we going?” Conrad asked, in a tone that was private, but also calculated to be overheard by the other boys. Look, look, I’m speaking privately with your prince!

“Somewhere,” Bascal said. He certainly seemed to know, or maybe he was just going by instinct, but his course seemed unerring and sure, and the boys followed along willingly enough. They passed a building labeled in big metal letters: UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE TERMINAL ANNEX. How medieval. Did they still deliver “letters” and “packages” here, or was it just an old name for an old building?

Westward they went: toward the mountains, away from the buildings, away from the towers and the lights and the crowds. The downhill slope in this direction was unmistakable. You could still see the afterglow of sunset up ahead, but otherwise it looked gloomy. Empty. Forsaken. Maybe they were nearing the edge of the fax perimeter—that would make these places harder to get to, right? Less valuable, less desirable. “Bad neighborhood” was essentially just a theoretical term to Conrad, but like the Light Wars, it suddenly made a new kind of sense to him here. Maybe there was less wellstone in an area like this, less record of what went on. Was that what Bascal wanted?

He felt obscurely glad, all of a sudden, that this raw, real place was one of the Children’s Cities, where parents came when they felt the urge to spawn, to raise their young among others of their increasingly rare kind. Immortality was another wave that had hit society hard, and here was the reef where waves like that were broken. Denver! Denver!

The crowds were almost entirely gone now, the buildings thinning out into empty, meadowy lots hemmed in by gray metal fences. This afforded a very clear view of the mountains, and Conrad saw that one of the buildings he’d thought was downtown was in fact much farther away, in the foothills. The Green Mountain Spire, of course, a tapering, five-kilometer spike he should have recognized immediately, if for no other reason than because the top half of it was still in sunlight, and glowing as if hot.

Vehicular traffic tapered away and died. They passed along a pedestrian sidewalk and under a couple of bridges, until the area began to feel almost like a wilderness. There might actually be wild animals here. Heck, there probably were: rabbits and squirrels, and maybe even their predators. Would those be foxes? Mountain lions? As the walkway dipped beneath the bridges, cement walls rose up and around it, mostly blank but with occasional attempts at ornamentation: inlaid tiles and basrelief sculptures of deer and mountain goats and bears, of trout in a little river, and a scene of the mountains themselves, which were visible again as the walkway emerged. Moonlight was now the primary source of illumination. Thank God for the superreflector glare of the Dome Towns up there, on the round-faced Popcorn Moon, or Conrad wasn’t sure he could see at all.

The boys passed some benches where a pair of ragged men slept, and here was a genuine shock—there were hermits in the Queendom. He’d always known it, that there were crazies and addicts and social malcontents. These ailments could of course be stripped away by the morbidity filters in any fax machine, but only with the patient’s consent. Mind control was severely frowned on, so inevitably you got some sludge at the bottom of the societal keg. But this was a hypothetical issue, not something that should be sprawling on a bench right in front of Conrad Mursk, stinking like rotten cheese.

Ho, racing out in front of Bascal once more, leaned over the benches and treated both men to a bloodcurdling shriek. They startled awake immediately, their eyes wide. They didn’t make a single noise of their own, and the look on their faces was one of frank fear, even when they realized the scream was just some kid having fun. They expected, what, to be beaten? Murdered? Dragged forcibly through a fax gate until their drunken heads were clear? Now there was a bit of teenage thuggery you could probably get away with. But Ho just laughed, and then Bascal was laughing too, and the boys were on their way again.

And then, without any warning at all, they crested a low hill or ridge and found themselves at the edge of the fax perimeter. You didn’t need a map to see it; there was just this big park: grassy meadows and big stone staircases, and again with the little trees. Wellstone paths snaked through it, glowing faintly and tastefully in the moonlight, and just beyond these stood a row of brightly lit buildings, lining a depression that must be the Platte River.

Indeed, as they drew closer there was an unmistakable smell of “waterway” that Conrad had never realized he could sense. Interesting. That smell had once meant the difference between life and death for his primitive ancestors, so maybe it was coded in his genes. Probably was, yeah. Too much tinkering, he thought, and we could lose these little details. Stop being animals and start being some other kind of thing. Self-designed, with all the foolishness that that implies. Evolution is at least impartial. But Conrad was young, and thoughts like that were a fleeting snow that melted rather than sticking.

Bascal clapped him on the shoulder, dragging him forward. “Conrad my man, you stop to brood every time we round a corner. You’re thinking too much, and it’s getting to be a problem.”

“I’ve got impulsiveness issues,” Conrad answered with a laugh. “You should be glad I’m thinking at all.”

That seemed to make Bascal angry. “Your parents are what, a hundred years old? Two hundred? Fucking experts on the subject of impulsiveness.”

“Actually, it was my school—”

“Well, to hell with your school. I doubt you committed a single age-inappropriate act. This is exactly why there are cities like Denver, where they at least make concessions to our youthful vigor, where they at least acknowledge that we have our own needs. Parents ought to be forced to live here. It ought to be fucking mandatory.”

A thought occurred: “Maybe you should be in charge of the Children’s Cities, O Prince of Sol.”

But Bascal just grunted derisively. “Bring that bill before the Senate, hmm? I’ll be fifty before they’re finished debating. And still a child in their eyes.”

“But your parents—”

This time, it was Bascal’s fist on his shoulder, slugging. “Will you shut up? Please? You are wrecking my mood. It’s tiresome.”

Ho Ng sidled up, showing fists of his own. “No pissing off the prince, bloodfuck. I’m going to pound somebody, and it might be you.”

“Steady,” Bascal said, holding up a hand. “We have a common purpose here.”

“What purpose?” Feck wanted to know. “We appear to be at the limits of the known universe.”

“Why, revolution,” Bascal answered casually, pointing at one of the buildings. “Starting right there.”

Revolution. Wow. Fuck. Was that a metaphor? Because tempting as the idea might seem, a gaggle of teenage refugees from summer camp couldn’t do much against a whole Queendom, with its police and truant officers, its infinite supply of infinitely patient robots, and of course its billions of satisfied citizens in their tens of billions of instantiations. Even if the boys commandeered a fax machine and printed up an army of themselves, the Constabulary would simply shut down the entire area, round the boys up, and reconverge their many copies back into single individuals. The odds were so hopeless—and the threat of punishment so dire—that as far as Conrad knew nobody had ever even tried it.

“I thought we were just looking for girls,” he said, to no one in particular. And that was who replied: no one.

As the buildings approached, it became clear that the river had a good bank and bad bank: one side facing the city and backing to the suburbs, while the other had a nice mountain view, but butted up against the bad neighborhood and so became bad by association. The most questionable of the buildings was an ancient two-story café whose shabby appearance was not an act, but the result of a natural wood facade that had stopped looking luxurious a few decades before Conrad was born. This, not surprisingly, was exactly where Bascal led them.

The café had a scattering of plastic tables and benches and chairs in front and behind, occupied by perhaps a dozen people of varying ages. None of them looked especially old, but then again who did? Conrad guessed a minimum age of around twelve—just old enough to be let out of the house—and a median in the low twenties, with the oldest men and women just edging into their Age of Deceit. Thirty or forty years old, when the fax filters stopped merely harassing the aging process, and began simply to arrest it. Lock it up, lose the key.

There wouldn’t be many folks older than that, except maybe as part of the restaurant staff. This wasn’t the kind of place you came to with your parents; it was the kind of place you came with your friends, to drink watered-down beer and coffee and feel independent. Not much draw for the older crowd.

You could of course stay in the Children’s Cities as long as you liked—some people stayed on as teaching assistants or administrative assistants or whatever, and a few remained as passive consumers, either to make up for a childhood spent someplace less raw, or because they’d frozen somehow in the latter stages of larval development, unable to pupate, to grow wings and fly away. 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 café”—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 dirt-faced 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 egalitarian 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, 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.

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. 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 nineteen, and Bascal, still stationed by the exit, grabbed her elbow as she passed. She was 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 processed,” she replied calmly, jerking her arm away. Then she paused, taking a good look at his face, and made a visible effort to hide her surprise. “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. We don’t get many nights out together.”

“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 of Sol? 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, I hope you’ll 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 fifteen glasses of beer,” Bascal said, jumping in. “And fifteen 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, or looked it, but her expression 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 (except of course for freedom itself), 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. But Conrad 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. Thinking ahead.”

“Such is my function.”

The very 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 terrarium extravagance of the Children’s City, and there began the staid 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 café 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. It was maybe twenty meters across, and 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.

“From an aesthetic standpoint,” Peter Kolb said self-importantly, “this place is fucking rich. The juxtaposition of elements is not as random as it looks.”

Peter was big on aesthetics, which as far as Conrad could tell was a mathematical pursuit, having almost zero overlap with anything real, like architecture or matter programming, or even feng shui. The worst of it was, he couldn’t tell if Peter was being agreeable or sarcastic, so he refrained from commenting. Everyone else was ignoring Peter anyway, so that was all right.

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. Bloodfuck,” 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 take some weird pleasure in mixing his cusswords up that way, or maybe it was a 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 sixteen, 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 get 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 truly, that was one of the camp’s worst indignities: natural cloth. The shirts and culottes not only looked silly, they would not change their color or cut or permeability. They didn’t regulate temperature or dissipate sweat. They didn’t obey commands, or even hear them. They didn’t do anything.

“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 wellgold 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 fucking point to make.

This girl Xmary, hearing the tone of Bascal’s voice, huffed once and then said, “I know some people. I can ask for you. It sounds pretty serious, though.”

“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, choosing to go 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, because wellstone was fundamentally a form of silicon. Woven nanofiber, right? Quantum dots to confine electrons in atomlike 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 fucking Paris. Then there were the transuranic pseudoatoms, and the asymmetric ones, and the ones that incorporated exotic particles. You could alter wellstone’s apparent composition in so many ways that even after three hundred years, a Queendom full of pseudo-chemists 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 the thing that 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. I’ve 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 tesselationtiler. 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’ve got power for the separated objects, right? They’re photovoltaic enough to maintain their own memory and 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 blurted out the thing that needed blurting. Getting any farther 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 shut up and 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 printed daily by the fax machines of the world. Seeing it here, however, was admittedly somewhat surprising. What was child-oriented about a coffee mug? He fantasized briefly that this whole café—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 Irish 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 café 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 once more. “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 also didn’t tell them who you were. When they see your face, they’ll want to help. They’ve snuck out of the house, right? Hoping something interesting will happen. And what’s more interesting than you, on a mysterious errand? 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.”

“You need more people?” she asked. “I can find more people. Easily.”

“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, Conrad. 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, Conrad 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 was 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 kind of fence-climbing accident that had smashed his head 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 tail-bone. 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.”

The spatial quantum foam today

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 byproduct; 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 also 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 here to help him. He was not restrained in any way, and the interrogation room’s door, not closed all the way, betrayed a sliver of light at the edge. 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 any.

“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 at 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 to work it out, 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.”

“We’ve got to get off this egg,” Bascal said, for at least the hundredth time that day.

“Learn to fly,” Conrad replied, dropping another peach pie into his bucket. The fax gates wouldn’t open until the end of the term, and that was that. It turned out they also wouldn’t produce any food except chocolate s’mores, roasted marshmallows, and the godawful “beans and franks” slop that tasted like the bottom of somebody’s shoe. Whose brilliant idea that was was a subject of constant speculation, but Bascal’s money was on the queen, and Conrad figured he was probably right.

In any case, the prince had had to institute emergency mandatory agricultural duties—four hours a day for all campers, himself included. It was a daily calamity for the geese on Adventure Lake, who bore the brunt of the prior eight weeks’ archery practice. Also for the potatoes and carrots and cabbages in the hobby farm, which were being eaten much faster than they could grow back. Well, fuck it. The boys weren’t here forever, and they had never agreed to be responsible stewards.

But veggies and slop, raw goose and candy did not a dinner make. So here the two of them were, picking fresh pies for dessert up in the high branches of a peach pie tree, and also gathering deadwood for the fire. A ways down the row of trees, Ho and Steve were doing the same, and off in the northern part of the orchard another four or six other boys could be heard singing the Fuck You Song while they gathered apples and pecans. It was hard work, reaching the good pies, so Conrad really wished they hadn’t spent the early summer having nightly pie fights. Putting the orchards next to the Young Men’s Cabins was a highly stupid idea in that regard.

“I mean it,” Bascal said. “The toil of a troublous voyage, the bitter wind at our backs.” He reached his hand up toward the sky, grasping at its indigo blankness— much darker than Earth’s—as if he could pick that too, and carry it home in his bucket. “We’re so close. Even a tall ladder would get us out of this atmosphere.”

“Yeah?” Conrad growled. “A two-hundred-meter ladder. Then what?” His voice was satisfyingly deep—one of the few clear benefits of life on Camp Friendly. The air was full of xenon, some really heavy gas to hold the atmosphere down or something, and it was almost the exact opposite of breathing helium. Everyone here sounded grown-up and serious, with the bigger kids actually sounding like crooners and senators, or barrel-chested lumberjacks from that old American TV drama.

“Then a spaceship,” Bascal said with a shrug. “You think we couldn’t build one? All it has to do is hold air long enough to get us someplace with a working fax.”

“Which is probably a long, long way. What about propulsion?”

Bascal shook the branch beneath them. “Are you doubting me, punk?” He grinned. “We build a sail. Just a big, rigid sheet of wellstone film, superreflective on one side and superabsorptive on the other. Haven’t you ever been solar sailing?”

Conrad snorted. “Or owned my own island? No, Bas, we’re not all children of unimaginable privilege.”

The branch shook again, harder, and Bascal’s expression was less amused. “I’ll break this if you’re not careful.” He was on the trunk side, with Conrad out flapping in the breeze.

“All right, all right,” Conrad said, climbing down to a lower branch, worried about losing his balance and falling on something vital. The peach pie tree was only four meters high, but it was twisty, offering lots of opportunities to bang or snag yourself on the way down. And he couldn’t fight back, with a Palace Guard right down there at the tree’s base, watching for even the slightest threat against the pilinisi. “Solar sail, fine.”

“Fetu’ula, actually. Stellar sail.”

“Whatever. Does it steer anything like a bulldozer?”

“I don’t know,” Bascal said. “Who drives a bulldozer? You?”

“Well, yeah. Many times.”

“Sitting in Daddy’s lap?” The prince sneered goodnaturedly.

Conrad shrugged. As County Paver, Donald Mursk supervised the maintenance of quaint country roads, and had free use of all sorts of infernal machines. It was a shame to give Bascal the satisfaction of being exactly right, but Conrad was surprised and pleased just the same, to find something he himself had done which the Pilinisi Sola had not. “Haven’t you?” he sneered back, eager to rub in his petty victory. But Bascal just started shaking the tree again.

“Okay! Cut it out! What about life support?”

“Steal the fax machine out of the Piss Hall,” Bascal said. “If we’re short on oxygen, it should crank some out automatically. Along with fresh water and slop.”

Mess Hall, he meant. After the indignity of being returned here, the first thing they’d done was repaint all the signs, giving each building and landmark a proper name for the occasion. “It’s an arts-and-crafts project,” Bascal had told the Palace Guards, when they’d studied the action and looked like they might intervene. And that explanation had seemed to satisfy them. Even more so than most robots, Palace Guards were enormously intelligent and perceptive. But they weren’t human, and didn’t care about things unless specifically instructed to.

Initially, the robots had tried to impose all sorts of structured activities on the boys. Canoeing, basket weaving, group sing-along ... They were like caricatures of the real counselors, interchangeable and blank-faced, devoid of vocal inflection and bristling with the potential for violence. But it turned out they had no programming to enforce these edicts; if you told them to fuck themselves, they’d just stand there unconcerned while you went about your business.

“Okay,” Conrad allowed, finally getting into the spirit of it. “There isn’t a single spot on this planette I haven’t seen at least twice. I’m all in favor of fresh scenery. So we throw some wet dirt in a hold somewhere, as a mass buffer for the fax. That works. What about energy?”

“Capacitors,” Bascal answered. “That’s what a real sailboat uses anyway. Wellstone panels to absorb energy— mainly from the sun—and capacitors to store it.”

“You know how to make a capacitor?”

Bascal laughed. “Ask a block of wellstone, boyo. You do think too much.”

“All right, whatever,” Conrad conceded. “Are we done here?” He was still climbing down, swinging and twisting a little on every branch just for fun, though being careful not to spill his bucket. The boys would not look kindly on squooshed pies, and they had their ways of letting you know.

“Done enough,” Bascal said with a shrug. He started down himself.

“So you’re actually serious about this.”

“You bet. Dead serious. Our elders need to understand they have zero ability to push us around.”

Conrad reached the ground, glanced briefly at the mirrored skin of the Palace Guard, and then set about rearranging the contents of his bucket, making sure the kindling wasn’t crushing the pies, that the pies weren’t splitting their bready coats and dripping on the kindling. Later on, he’d light the fire with his bow drill and some dried grass, just like Rock Dengle had taught him. He loved lighting the fire, and tending it, feeding in larger and larger sticks until finally it was hot enough to stew a goose. Actually tending the cooking pot was a duty Xmary had taken for herself, for what she called “Neolithic reasons.” I.e., she didn’t trust the boys to do a good job of it, and probably also wanted to make sure nobody spat in it or anything.

“What about navigation?”

Bascal hopped down beside him. “You’re speaking to a Tongan, boyo. Greatest navigators who ever lived.”

“Your father’s European.”

“Catalan Spaniard,” Bascal said. “Another great mariner race. My father invented the ertially shielded grappleship, and sailed the first one alone for over thirty AU. I think there were two of him on board, actually, but still.”

“You know what I mean, Bas. Where do we go, and how?”

Smiling, the prince made a gesture of mock humility. “I’ve sailed alone, with no electronics, from Tongatapu to Eua on a moonless night. For that matter, I’ve sailed from LEO to Luna on a Tongaless night. Steering is easy—you just adjust the transparency of the sail. A mirror here means a push there, and vice versa. Easy as cream custard. As far as where to steer, these days there’s a lot of shipping in Kuiper space. We should be able to track the emissions of a neutronium barge or something. Unmanned, or manned only part-time.”

“Track it how?”

“With sensors. A radiometer or something. Ask a block of wellstone, boyo; we live in a programmable universe.”

“Uh-huh,” Conrad said skeptically. “And where do we get all this wellstone? Weave it out of beans and franks?”

Bascal punched him, not that lightly. “You’re the fucking building inspector. What’s underneath us, right now?”

“Grass,” Conrad said. “Dirt. Liquid neutronium in diamond shells, with probably a layer of rock in between.”

“And a point-one-mil sheet of wellstone,” Bascal added, stamping on the ground for emphasis. “Shovel-proof, about two meters down. Bet you a dollar it covers the whole planette, pole to pole. That’s, like, over a square kilometer of material. Just about perfect for a sail.”

They started back toward the cabins.

“You really are serious,” Conrad said again.

“Very. Are you in?”

He shrugged. “I guess so, yeah. What about space suits?”

“An arts-and-crafts project. Snip a corner off the sail, cut out some life-sized paper dolls, and seal them at the edges.”

“How long is all this going to take?”

“I dunno. Not long. I’m not sure about the actual ship, how we’re going to build it. What materials to use.”

Conrad laughed. “How about D’rector Jed’s cabin? It’s big enough, and God knows it’s the best furnished.”

“Hey,” Bascal agreed, laughing along with him, “that’s a great idea. We can just shrink-wrap the whole thing.”

Nothing on Camp Friendly was far away from anything else; from the orchards was only a minute or two to the Boys’ Cabins and the central offices. Almost as soon as they’d started, the two of them were there at the Piss Hall. Bascal threw the door open.

“Honey! I’m home!” The irony in his voice couldn’t conceal an undercurrent of genuine affection.

“Hi,” Xmary said, looking up from her carrot chopping. “What have you brought me? Peach pies? Over there.” She pointed with the knife.

“Yes’m,” Bascal said, his voice bubbling at the edge of giggles. The Palace Guard, with liquid-quick movements, flowed in behind him, briefly crowding Conrad out of the doorway. He tried not to take it personally; the machine simply would not let Bascal out of its sight, even for a moment. You didn’t get in the way of that, not if you were paying attention.

“Firewood here,” she added, pointing to a different surface, adjacent to the table she was working on. “You didn’t get pie filling on it, did you? That would be bad for the revolution.”

The revolution, ah. She said it in a joking way, but behind the light tone Conrad suspected a lurking seriousness. Shaking things up wasn’t a game to her, but some sort of weird social duty. Very solemn.

“Why are you here, again?” he prodded, hoping to get a rise out of her.

But her answer was straight enough. “Back home, I’ve got six more years of school before I can put my name in to be the assistant to somebody’s assistant. I used to make furniture as a hobby, and later on it was holiday decorations. But who needs handmade things? Who can even tell if they’re real or copied? There’s nothing to do back home, and there never will be. I feel so sorry for my other self back there.”

“Hey,” he told her, putting his hands up, “I’m just giving you a hard time. Trying to. I get enough politics in my diet.”

“Well, the hell with you, then,” she said, butting him hard with her hip. She resumed her chopping.

Early on in the week, Conrad had been certain that Xmary was going to get caught, that she was going to get all of them in even worse trouble. Smuggling a girl into an all-boys camp! But since she’d sneaked a copy of herself out of the house to visit Café 1551 in the first place, her parents didn’t know she was gone. In fact, she wasn’t gone; she was presumably still back there under their watchful eyes, attending summer school and sighing a lot.

And Feck somehow hadn’t tipped their hand, hadn’t gone to the Constabulary or home to his own parents and explained why he wasn’t at camp. And if the camp itself was under observation—which seemed likely—then it obviously wasn’t under the sort of really close observation that would reveal the presence of a female camper who was not Yinebeb Fecre. Bascal’s own Palace Guard clearly saw her standing there, but didn’t care. Hadn’t been asked to. This was not only hilarious, but also lent some credence to Bascal’s insistence that it really was possible, now and then, to put one over on the Queendom authorities.

Either that, or Xmary and the boys were being run like rats through a maze—a notion Bascal had mentioned but didn’t seem to believe. There would be too many variables to control, too many spontaneities to account for. If the authorities were that clever then there was no hope at all. So her presence here was an accident, abetted by her own weird sense of initiative.

There was, of course, the jealousy thing; Xmary was an arts-and-crafts project in her own right, pretty and sassy and with all sorts of surprising talents. Cooking, of all things, in this age of flash-and-bang! And you had to wonder what other talents came out, when she and Bascal shut themselves up in “their” cabin. It was a subject of riotous speculation when Bascal wasn’t around. Hell, Steve Grush had teased Xmary about it right to her blushing face.

“When’s dinner?” the prince asked.

“When I ring the bell, moron,” she fired back. “Just like yesterday and the day before. What are you, slow?”

“Well, I hope not. Conrad and I have a plan to get us off this egg.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Solar sail?”

“Yep. I’ll make the announcement tonight.” He sauntered up to the fax machine—a vertical, doorway-sized plate of gray-black material. The visible portion was the phantom-action lux generator, or something like that, tapping out waves that dreamed they were matter. It was the only intelligent device in the room, unless you counted the robot. “Fax, give me a bowl of taro curry, please. With coconut.”

“Disallowed,” the fax replied, in the loud, sexless tones of somebody trying to piss people off.

“Yeah? Fuck you. Give me a textbook on sailing.”

“Please specify the type of sailing,” the fax said.

Bascal shot a nodding smile back at Conrad—getting somewhere!—then said to the fax, “Solar sailing, you fucked-up piece of shit. I need it for arts and crafts.”

“My internal library contains four titles on solar sailing. Access to external libraries through the Nescog is disallowed.”

“Fine. I’ll take all four. And a map showing all known fax gates within ten AU of this planette.”

“Disallowed,” the fax replied, spitting four paper books into Bascal’s waiting arms.

“Ah. Then allow me to invoke royal override.”

“Disallowed. That function is reserved for the King and Queen of Sol.”

“Which I will never be. Fine, you anus, give me a map of known shipping and habitation.”

A rolled-up sheet of wellstone film tumbled out, missing Bascal’s arms and spilling to the floor.

“Thank you,” Bascal said.

“It pleases me to serve,” the device replied, without feeling.

“I know it, fax. I know it. And believe me, someday I’ll reward you for it.”

The sheet weighed three tons, and took twelve people two whole days to fold up. When they were done, it was forty layers thick, bulging chest-high with air pockets, and still bigger than the furrowed field of the Hobby Farm, some eighty-five meters across. With its waterproof liner gone, the lake drained alarmingly during this time, finally bottoming out at about half its original depth, and there were reports—unconfirmed by anyone reliable—that the hills and plateau on the planette’s eastern hemisphere had begun to slump as well. Meanwhile, Xmary and her crew were canning food and fermenting jugs of cider and cutting/pasting/sealing the fifteen space suits, which everyone agreed were a good idea in case the ship sprang a leak or something. Bascal had to help with that part, though, because it turned out he and Conrad were the only ones who knew the first thing about matter programming.

It began to dawn on Conrad that they were going to get caught. There was no way to hide this much activity, even from an apathetic Queendom that considered them helpless. At some point, the Palace Guards were going to report all this. Hell, even a telescope would reveal the changes in the planette’s appearance. At any moment, the fax gates would pour out a sea of Constabulary officers, or broadcast new instructions to the robots that were already here, and it would all be over. Again.

“We need to sabotage the gates,” Bascal said to him, as if reading his thoughts. The two of them were up on the easternmost rock formation, overlooking the nowlandlocked boathouse and—just barely peeking over the horizon—the docks, which stood now in only a meter of dirty-looking water. In theory the two of them were surveying the launch site; to the south, D’rector Jed’s cabin was also just barely visible, and the guy ropes would sprawl from there to the docks, with the balloon itself curling off to the northeast, almost reaching the paved path they facetiously referred to as the Holy Fuckway,⁴ which circled wide around the lake.

“Where will we get our supplies?” Conrad asked. His voice sounded higher and squeakier than usual; they were almost six meters up, and the air was thinner.

Bascal waved a hand impatiently. “Not the fax machines, the gates. The telecom hardware that links them to the Nescog. There are only two of them on the planette.”

“Oh. So how do we sabotage them?”

“With a crowbar, idiot. Or a sledgehammer. Anything, really. They’re wellstone, but they’re not programmed to withstand an attack. Circuitry is delicate.”

“You’ve smashed one before,” Conrad speculated.

Bascal nodded. He was looking up now, at the sky, at the “sun,” and at the dull, starlike speck of Sol that, from up here, could readily be discerned in broad daylight. “Yeah. Twice.”

Then he looked back at the ground, picked out Ho Ng in the not-so-distance, cupped his hands, and began calling out directions. “Ng! Ng! Get a crowbar or something and meet me by the boathouse!”

“Are you sure you want to do that?” Conrad asked. The knot of unease in his stomach had not loosened. If anything, it was getting tighter. “If we smash the gates, we’re really committing.”

“Committing a crime?” Bascal said. He could turn a sneer into something friendly, an assurance that you were smart enough and raw enough to see the error in your statement. For some reason, Conrad suddenly found this power vaguely frightening.

“Well, y... it is a crime, yes. But we’re in plenty of trouble already. What I meant was, it commits us. There’ll be no other way off the planette, and if we’ve made any sort of mistake...” His voice withered under Bascal’s glare; it took real effort to finish. “This could be very dangerous. We could be killed.”

“That’s what backups are for. The Friendly Products Corporation took an image of you on your way up here, right?”

“I don’t want to be restored from backups.”

Bascal studied him quietly, for several seconds. “Are you losing your nerve?”

Conrad couldn’t keep himself from shrugging. “Not losing it, I just ... What is it again, that we’re trying to accomplish? Suddenly I’m not sure. Revolution?”

“Revolution,” Bascal agreed.

“But that’s crazy, isn’t it? I mean, we can’t win. We can cost them time and money and stuff; we can make a statement. But we can’t overthrow them or anything. Not by building a sailboat.”

“You don’t understand,” Bascal said, and he sounded a little sad.

“So explain it.”

“Explain it? It ought to explain itself. Our revolt isn’t something they’ll lose; it’s something they’ll regret. They have such an easy time forgetting about us, putting us off. Which is ironic, considering the cultural patterns they’re working from. If you asked the Old Moderns about paradise, some would have said it was a tropical stone age full of gatherers and hunters and fishermen. Some would say a network of small farming towns, or a medieval pocket monarchy straight out of fairy tales. Others, maybe a Modern, democratic nation-state held together by information technology. But Tonga was unique in the Modern world: it was all these things at the same time, in the same place. It was everyone’s paradise.

“By the end of the Modern period, the entire human race had its eyes on the Kingdom as, I dunno, a model for a new kind of civilization. Really it was all the old kinds, living right on top of each other. And to be fair, those Utopian ambitions genuinely have succeeded. They’ve smothered the original and lost its spirit—they’ve practically enslaved my parents—but along the way they’ve created something ... else. Something better, at least for them. They just forgot about their unborn, is all. You have to remember, the Old Moderns are still alive, and always will be, walking around in a state of constant amazement. But their paradise was built at our expense—happy children as part of the scenery, the hoped-for future, not part of the machine itself. Not part of the present.

“So, we’ve got to remind them every day, that we’re current human beings, not future ones, not potential ones, not pretend ones. What do people fear when they can’t die or be maimed? Slavery. Oppression. Meaninglessness. Even in the old days, most people would rather die than live by the will of someone else. Even for a decade or two. They fought wars to prevent it. They murdered their own children in their beds. With eternity ahead of us, do we dare to be timid? We need a place in society, a set of roles to grow into that aren’t bogged down by the weight of bureaucracy and prior humanity. We deserve a chance to live and breathe, as our parents have done, and if we die a few times—nobly and defiantly—it only strengthens the point.”

Conrad sat down. He had to think about that, to think it over in those terms.

“Do you hear what I’m saying?” Bascal pressed.

“I do. Yes. You’ve thought a lot about this.”

“Every day of my life.” The prince nodded, considering and then agreeing with his own words. “Last summer I got sent to Niuafo’ou, the remotest and old-fashionedest of the Niua Islands, at the northern extreme of the old Kingdom. The name means ‘Exotic Coconuts,’ and believe me, it’s not referring to a fruit. Those people are serious: no gates, no wellstone, no TV or fax machines. You eat what you catch, and wear what you grow. And what you grow is one hundred percent Earth Original, no recombos or faxable mods. I used to love that island—I learned to sail in its central crater when I was five—but last year all I could think of was how small it was. How narrow-minded and closed. I had a boat; I could’ve sailed it to Vava’u in a couple of days. But there was never a right time to start, and soon the season was over and I was back at school. Opportunity lost.”

Conrad kicked some dirt off the gray cragginess of the rock. He wasn’t a coward; he knew that much. And what Bascal said was ... well, it put words to the feeling that had driven him into so much trouble already. Conrad had never tried to put it in words, didn’t even realize it could be done. But: if the words were accurate, did that necessarily make them true?

“How long,” he finally asked, “will this journey take? Seriously.”

“Two months,” Bascal answered.

“Two months? With fifteen of us in a log cabin? That’s crazy. That’s a long time.”

“If it were easy, there wouldn’t be much point. Think of the statement that makes. Not boohoo, I hate summer camp, but fuck you if you think this is over. It isn’t over. The system needs shocking, and we simply will not be controlled.”

Conrad let out a breath. “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay. Let’s do it. Fucking space pirates.”

“All right! That’s the spirit! That’s the Conrad Mursk I know,” Bascal said, throwing an arm over Conrad’s shoulder and breaking out in probably the widest grin Conrad had ever seen on anyone.

The wrapping of wellstone film had turned a bit clearer, and “above” them, visible through the nearly transparent skylight, the translucent sail was unfurling, both under the pressure of fusion light and by the command of Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. Even without a mirrored surface, the impact of photons had already transferred enough momentum to swing their makeshift boat around. They flew “backward” or “downward” cabinfirst, with the sila’a—the pocket star—shining out of sight beneath the floorboards.

The control panel was just a programmed sheet of wellstone, pasted onto a wooden plank nailed low to the wall. The instruments and controls on it were two-dimensional cartoons, clear and contemporary in design, glowing softly in the primary colors and yet vaguely Polynesian somehow. Here was a gauge like a compass rosette from an old map; over there sat a diagram of the eight guylines connecting the cabin roof to the sail. The stylized images suggested some winching mechanism, as if the cables could be tightened or loosened on command, which they surely could not. But Bascal had mentioned a few times that that was the way to visualize the steering of a fetu’ula , a fetula, a stellar sail craft.

“It’s an issue of control authority,” he’d blathered absently, “very comparable to the rigging on a regular sailboat.”

The navigator’s seat was a legless chair, crisscrossed with canvas straps, and Bascal seemed at home there now, sitting with one foot under him and the other stretched out under the console. Despite the lack of gravity and the fact that he was tied down, his posture suggested an attention to balance. He was fussing happily with the controls, glancing up through the skylight every few seconds to watch the sail opening up.

“Keep us safe, Majesty,” Ho Ng said. “I don’t think the boys cared much for that bump.”

His tone was ingratiating and solicitous and shit-nosed, and of course the honorific was both idiotic and illegal, since even a crown prince was not the King of Sol. But Bascal didn’t seem to notice or mind. “You know I will, Ng. A healthy young body, maintained and optimized by fax filters, can handle an awful lot of abuse. I can virtually guarantee that you’ll be fine.”

He turned to Conrad. “We’ve got about ten more minutes of freefall before I opaque the sail. The planette is forty-seven kilometers from the sila’a. Ordinarily I’d just hail the star from here and call up its laser sail protocol, but without a network gate, or even a radio, that would be tricky. You know what we do about that?”

He waited for a long moment, but Conrad, tied down crookedly on his mattress, could only look back at him and shrug.

“Oh. Right,” Bascal said. Then, to the guard—whose feet were somehow still anchored to the floorboards— “Remove the cone of silence, please.” And then to Conrad again: “Sorry about all that. Really.”

The lifting of the silence was a physical sensation, like a breath of wind. “You’re a shit,” Conrad rasped.

Bascal turned back to his controls. “All that is necessary will be done, my friend. I’d rather you were on the right side of that principle.”

“Dead, shitty bodies,” Ho agreed.

Conrad saw no reason to reply. Above, the sail was almost fully open now, and billowing with underwater slowness. Worse: with honeyed, glacial slowness.

From the other room came sounds of commotion, followed by nervous laughter and hoots of dismay. “Hey, do not fuck around back there,” Bascal called out. “Ten gees can kill you falling ten centimeters. You motherless bastards tie down and shut up.”

“Ten gees?” Conrad repeated, his hoarse voice ringing with the worry of all these unpleasant surprises. He’d somehow envisioned the actual sailing as a graceful, languid affair.

“Quit whining, you baby. We’re young and strong, and fit as the morbidity filters can make us. We’ve been faxed; we’re immortal. Well, immorbid, anyway. And anyway, it’s more like eight and a half gees. I am rigidizing the sail ... Now.”

Like mandolin strings, the guylines jinged and sproinged, sending quasi-musical vibrations down through the cabin roof. The lazy batwing of the sail, arched away from the cabin and the guy ropes like a dome-tent roof, began to pull downward and spread out, becoming a flat translucent ceiling a hundred meters above them, its wings stretching out of sight beyond the edges of the skylight, extending more than seven hundred meters on either side, and half that much from top to bottom. The process took about twenty seconds, and chewed up only a tiny fraction of the solar energy raining up to them from the pocket star.

“Now I’m commencing rotation,” the prince announced.

“Why?”

“Because we’re flying backward, idiot. We have to point where we’re fucking going, and the sail needs to be in front of us when we mirrorize it, or the light pressure will push it against the cabin and we’ll get all fouled up in the ropes. You want that? No?”

“Why not just rigidize the lines?”

“They are rigidized.” Bascal huffed impatiently. “There’s a control issue, all right? It isn’t stable, pushing backwards like that. It’s ... look, just shut up and let me sail.”

Above, the left half of the wellstone took on a brighter shade of the same gray color, slightly less transparent than the right half. The guylines spanged and sproinged again, and Conrad felt himself pressed lightly against his tie-downs on the left side. The ship was heeling around, turning to face its rear—and its sail—at the sila’a. Presently, it bloomed at the edge of the skylight, a miniature sun no more than a few meters across. Just a pinpoint, really, yellow-orange and painfully bright, even through the veil of the wellstone.

Then the sail’s colors shifted again, swapping sides, and Conrad felt himself pressed the other way. The sila’a, though, continued its way across the skylight, finally pausing just past its left edge, eclipsed by the cabin’s wall and roof. Then the wellstone sail fabric was edge-on to the light, no longer illuminated like a lamp shade, and through its sudden translucence Conrad could make out the stars gliding gently to a halt.

Deep space, here we come, he breathed silently.

“Now this,” Bascal said, to no one in particular, “is the hard part. You ever try to back up a sailboat against the wind? The trick is to angle in, null your orbital velocity, and then use the sail itself as a brake, kind of like a parachute.”

Conrad couldn’t make sense of that remark. “A parachute? What are we, diving into the sun?”

“Onto the sila’a, yes. The fusing hydrogen sits on top of a neuble core, and there’s a solid wellstone surface on top of that, to hold it all in. We need to make contact with that outer shell in order to communicate with the machinery. But there’s an advantage in doing that: it gets us close enough to reflect the laser beam right back at the sila’a. Set up our own little resonating chamber, for extra pressure, extra thrust. It’ll be like shooting a rocket out of a bottle.”

“I ... have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve done this before?”

“Hmm? Oh, gods no. Nobody has.”

Conrad wanted to object: the very idea of backing into a star—even a miniature one—seemed like craziness of the highest order. And bouncing laser beams back into it, for extra thrust? Something had gone awry in their plans, some deeply fucked failure of communication, because he sure hadn’t agreed to any of this. But here and now, did they have a choice? Could they get back to the planette even if they wanted to? Even if Bascal would let them try?

“Okay,” Bascal said, “I’m going to turn us again.”

It was a stately process, and while it transpired Conrad couldn’t help noticing how bright it was getting outside, as the light of the sila’a drew ever nearer, illuminating the guylines and the translucent shrink-wrapping around the cabin. The sail itself was mostly invisible now, a batwing of utterly transparent material, with little squares of silver flitting across it, and clustering in particular on its right-hand side, like a swarm of sun-seeking insects.

“Asymmetric pressure,” Bascal explained, catching Conrad’s look. “The light pushes on the starboard half of the sail but not the port. That’s what turns us, pulls us around.”

“Why does it flicker like that?”

“Stability. The control system is keeping the sail from fluttering or sliding out sideways against the guylines. It’s like the tensioning springs on a spinnaker tack.... Well, you’ve never been sailing, so never mind. But yeah, it’s supposed to do that.”

Gradually, the flickering squares of silver diminished in number, and spread themselves more evenly across the sail, and began to gleam in a really painful way as the sila’a brightened and neared behind them.

“Boy, that’s bright,” Bascal observed. He did something to the controls on his panel, and the squares of silver became squares of bronze, and the shrink-wrapping above the skylight turned a translucent shade of black that was very close to the natural color of wellstone. It blotted out the remaining stars, and made a shimmery halo of the sail and guylines.

Conrad began to notice a sensation of weight, pulling and pressing him into the mattress again.

“Gravity,” Ho Ng said. “Is that the star I’m feeling underneath me, Sire?”

“Yeah,” Bascal told him absently. He was still fiddling with the controls, looking annoyed about something. “Well, it’s also our deceleration. We’re sort of hovering right now. Or we will be in another minute. I’m trying not to bump us too hard.”

Against the surface of a star. Good God. Against the solid surface of a manmade star that was so unimaginably hot that it could warm a planette, could cook a dinner or burn a young man’s face, from forty-seven kilometers away. And yes, it was definitely getting warmer in here!

“Are we going to be cooked, Bas?” he couldn’t help asking.

“No,” the prince said, sounding even more annoyed. But he fiddled some more, and the view outside the windows went totally black for a moment, and then mirror-bright, reflecting the cabin’s interior lighting back in lumpy, funhouse-mirror ways.

Then he looked alarmed, and had time to say “Whoops” in the moment before something very solid and very heavy slammed up into the center of the cabin’s floor.

BAM!

Even as he was slammed into his mattress and jerked against its straps, Conrad was aware of the sounds of cracking and splintering. He even had time to note that these sounds, however brief and mild, were just about the most alarming thing you could possibly hear on board a wooden spaceship. And even when the cracking stopped, the floor itself groaned. Something was bending it in a way it had never been bent before, and the force of gravity— the invisible hand pressing Conrad into his padding— seemed much too strong. Much stronger than at the surface of Camp Friendly.

“Get us off this thing!” he shouted at Bascal. “It’s breaking, it’s going to break! How do you talk to the star?”

“Verbally, I assume,” Bascal said, sounding a bit shaken himself. “Otherwise we’re in real trouble.” Then he turned his head toward the floor and shouted, “Hello? Sila’a? Can you give us laser sail protocol, please?”

Nothing happened.

Nothing except that Conrad felt his rage boil over. This was their plan? Ramming a star and then shouting at it? Asking nicely? This was their fucking plan?

“Laser sail protocol!” Bascal shouted, more loudly. Then screamed, probably as loudly as he was able, “Laser fucking sail! Now!”

Conrad snarled. “You’re a goddamned idiot, Bascal. Thanks for this.”

“Oh,” Bascal said. “Shit. I forgot to mirrorize the sail.”

He touched the control panel, and then—

They went. Something caught them. Conrad could feel the sail bulging outward against its own incredible stiffness, the tight guylines suddenly straining, the crushing/ pressing ball of the sila’a, maybe four burning meters across, falling out beneath them and dropping away, away.

There was nothing stately about it: the other thing Conrad felt was the air crushing out of him, like an iron-weighted pillow settling down on his chest. Taking the next breath was like lifting barbells with his lungs. His vision had gone grainy and narrow, and he felt, in a distinctly physical way, that he was looking out through a tunnel from the back of his brain. His soul had fled from its usual spot just behind the eyes, had been squeezed back against the barrier of his skull. If it squeezed any farther, it would leave his body altogether.

The windows had gone transparent again, or anyway they were admitting light—a biting monochromatic violet, mirrored brightly in the checkered silver of the sail and shimmering with the telltale interference gleams and darknesses of reflected laser. The cabin groaned and shrieked, and from somewhere came—again!—the long and loud and ominous crack of splintering wood. But Conrad barely noticed, barely considered it. He dragged a breath in and then let it whoosh back out. Dragged it in, let it out.

New squares of silver appeared here and there, the checkerboard sail filling as the sila’a drew smaller and dimmer and more distant beneath them. Conrad understood, in a vague way, that Bascal was throttling their acceleration, upping the reflectivity of the sail to draw out more velocity, more speed, keeping them right at the limits of human endurance. He wished he’d asked more questions during the planning phase—especially given the whole Garbage Day fiasco—but this was a vague thought as well, pieced together in the brief interval between Herculean breaths. He dragged one in and let it out. Dragged it in, let it out.

It went on like that until his sense of time began to flicker out. A minute? Two? And still it continued on, the pain and struggle, the slow grinding of wood against wood. He could feel his flesh bruising, his blood pooling, his bones and muscles and cartilage stretching and twisting in unnatural ways. The pain grew, and the light dimmed, and his breath came harder and harder, and he knew that if they somehow survived he would be sore for weeks.

Finally—finally!—the pressure began to ease. The sail above them was pure mirror from end to end, reflecting a field of fixed stars and a dwindling violet minisun no brighter than a searchlight. But the pressure eased too slowly, and the pain in every part of his body continued to build. He could tell time by it—a pain clock. He had the luxury now of feeling impatient, and feel it he did, marking the passage of every moment.

As soon as it felt possible and safe, he rolled over onto his side. This brought him face-to-face with Bascal, whose customary grin was long gone. He looked drawn and pained, his brown face shining, his hair matted down with sweat. And yet, his right arm was raised and extended, doing something or other on the control panel.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Conrad asked.

“Yes,” Bascal replied tightly.

Indeed, the arm looked both bleached and blackened by its ordeal.

“Shouldn’t you stop?”

Bascal grimaced. “Kind of, yeah. I’m ... going to change seats.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Naw. We’re a minute into the run, and we’ll be holding steady at two gees for a couple minutes here. I’ve had worse.”

“A minute?” Conrad found that figure very hard to believe—surely it should be an hour!—but there it was on the panel’s chronometer: 01:08, 01:09, 01:10 ...

The acceleration was steady now, and yes, truthfully, not so terrible. Even so, Bascal groaned in obvious pain as he undid his tie-downs and slithered out of the nav chair. The pale right arm, drained of blood, didn’t seem to be working well; it flopped around numbly while Bascal worked with his left. When he was free of the straps, he scooted his rump along the floor for half a meter, until he was seated beside his empty mattress. He didn’t try to lift or roll himself into it.

“You make me proud,” Ho said to Bascal, in a tired and grating voice. He was struggling to sit up.

Conrad decided to join him in this, but thought better of it when his back screamed in protest. And then thought better of that when he lay back down and felt the sweaty mattress pressing smotheringly against the side of his face. So he did sit up, and really, it didn’t feel too bad. He was alive, and not seriously hurt, although yeah, he was going to be very, very sore.

People were coughing and groaning and crying in the other room. There was the unmistakable clump! clump! of heavy footsteps on the wooden floor, and then Xmary was standing there, framed in the doorway in a pair of camp culottes and a tee shirt cut off to display her navel, and with the reflected purple of the sila’a laser shining down through the skylights, Conrad could distinctly see her nipples and the outline of her hips and thighs. Her hair was pulled back in the kind of topknot the centenarians were wearing lately, and like many young women, she’d subtly nudged her physical development in a compact but adult direction, and did not look at all like a child in this light.

“Bascal,” she said, quickly and seriously, “something’s wrong with Raoul. He’s coughing, and there’s blood coming out.”

“I’m sailing, dear,” Bascal answered tightly. And yeah, he could reach the controls even from his mattress.

“What should we do?”

“Well, if I don’t keep an eye on these heading corrections, there’s going to be something wrong with all of us, hmm? Just hold his hand or something. Ask the guards.”

“Is it a lot of blood?” Conrad asked.

She shook her head. “No, just, like, spots of it. Can you come look? Please?”

“Yeah,” he said, and made a show of rising without any grimaces or groans. This wasn’t actually so difficult—he felt like he was carrying someone on his back, but no longer as if the life were being crushed out of him. It did hurt a lot to walk, though.

The cabin’s main room was like something from an old movie: wounded men sprawling on narrow, filthy beds. There was blood on several of them, and more streaming out from the finger-pinched noses of a couple of scared-looking boys. But it was Raoul who really looked bad— gray and bruised, with dark baggy circles under his eyes and blood-flecked spittle on his chin and tee shirt. His chest rose and fell in rapid, shallow rhythm.

“You okay?” Conrad asked him, stupidly.

Raoul looked up with frightened eyes, and shook his head. Nope.

“He was coughing,” Xmary said.

Awkwardly, Conrad crouched down beside the bloody mattress. “You’re breathing kind of fast. Can you slow it down?”

Again, Raoul shook his head. No. Definitely not.

“Can you talk?”

No.

“It could be his lungs,” Conrad said, although he had no idea. Why was she asking him for help? What could he do? “This goes way beyond first-aid training.”

“How do we help him?” Xmary demanded.

“I don’t know,” Conrad said honestly. The usual treatment for severe injuries was to throw the victim into the nearest fax machine, and print out an undamaged copy. Was that possible in this case, with the network gates disabled and the machinery bound by weird instructions from the king? He glanced up at the fax machine, bolted against the room’s innermost wall. The divider wall separating it from the main room had been removed two days ago. They had clear access if they needed it.

“Fax, will you take him? Repair him?”

“Insufficient buffer mass,” the fax answered. “I can accept a body and correct its pattern, but reinstantiation will not be possible.”

“Why?” Conrad asked. “Can’t you just use his own mass? Disassemble him and then rebuild him?”

The fax spoke slowly, as if inventing the art of conversation as it went along. “My mass buffers have been depleted by recent operations. Sir. The operation you suggest would bring several of them, temporarily, into a negative mass regime, which is not possible.”

Shit. Conrad had shoveled some dirt in there a few days ago, on Bascal’s advice, but he hadn’t checked the levels since then. Hadn’t really thought about it at all. Did dirt even have the right elements in it?

“Can we throw some of the food in?” someone suggested.

“Or take a huge crap in the toilet?” That was Steve Grush, trying to be funny. Or maybe not; the sink and shower and toilet plumbing ran into and out of the fax in a maze of shiny wellstone pipes. A piece of crap would, in fact, be whisked apart into component atoms and stored in the appropriate mass buffers.

“Hurry up,” Xmary said, in a deadly serious tone. And with good reason: Raoul’s eyes had rolled upward, so that only the whites were showing, and those whites—mostly red—were jiggling and jittering in a spasmodic way. His breathing had grown even faster and shallower. He was dying, plain and simple.

“Fax,” Conrad said, “can we just stuff him in there, and print him out later?”

“Certainly.”

Conrad and Xmary shared a quick glance, nodded at each other, and grabbed Raoul by the arms while Steve Grush undid his straps. The only hard part was the confusing mess of bodies and mattresses between them and the fax, but people were scrambling out of the way, or moving to help. Raoul’s legs were grabbed as well, and his bottom, and as a group they gave him the old heave-ho. It seemed very strange, to stuff a limp, twitching body through the solid-looking print plate of the fax. But it wasn’t really solid. Even a cursory inspection showed it was insubstantial, actually a fog of tiny machines sprouting tinier machines sprouting quantum doodads far too small to be visible. And Raoul’s body went right through it, like a diver through the surface of Adventure Lake.

He was saved. Literally. In memory.

“Anyone else?” Conrad asked anxiously, turning to survey the room. But all the other boys were shaking their heads, hiding their hands. No sir, not me.

“Sure?” he pressed, an edge of humor finally creeping into his voice. But there were no takers, and Conrad had begun to feel distinctly light on his feet. He turned toward the navigation room. The bridge, he supposed they should call it. “Hey Bascal, how low is this gravity going to get?”

“Zero!” Bascal called back, sounding annoyed. “Enjoy it while it lasts!”

Oh. Right. As they drew away from the sila’a, as its laser brightness faded and dimmed, there was nothing to push them, no source of acceleration. Conrad had known this, and yet somehow he’d been visualizing them all walking around in here for two months. Not drifting, not floating. Because it was a log cabin, he supposed. Because it had such a definite floor and ceiling, and belonged on the ground.

In that moment, it dawned on him that he really did have an impulse problem. He had a brain but wasn’t using it, and as a result everything—even the obvious things—kept coming to him as nasty surprises. Hell, they didn’t have any facilities in here for zero gravity. How were they going to sleep? To store things? To use the toilet? Now there was an unpleasant thought! And what had all these other kids been thinking? Disbelieving in the entire scheme, never thinking it would really happen? That, or relying on Bascal to work it all out. Or rather, Bascal and his team, meaning basically just Conrad, since Bascal didn’t care and nobody else seemed to worry much how anything worked. Except Peter, whom they’d left behind on the planette.

“Oh boy,” he said to Xmary. “This is going to be a hell of a trip.”

“Keep your hands off me,” Bertram said, gliding back along the wall.

“Fuck you,” James added. “Both of you shits.”

Ho Ng advanced. “Don’t you talk to the prince that way, bloodfuck. Get in the fax.”

“Nobody’s hurting anybody,” Bascal said, in a tone that fell rather short of reassuring.

“Stay away,” Bert said. He was still calm, but barely.

Ho leaped forward in a long, slow arc, his outstretched hands reaching for James’ shoulders. James tried to duck aside, and made the mistake of throwing a punch in the general direction of Ho’s face. It missed, and the two tumbled upward in a flailing mass, arms and legs against the logs and cement of the cabin wall. And then the Palace Guard was there, having dashed across the floor with characteristic grace, its feet held down by some invisible, gravitylike force. Conrad hadn’t quite seen it happen, but two of the mattresses in the robot’s path were now spilling out dust and flakes of foam rubber, their covers torn in patterns shaped like robot feet.

Conrad had expected the robot to separate the combatants, but in fact it simply restrained James, got his feet back on the floor, and let Ho continue to hang onto his other arm.

“Guard,” Bascal said lazily, “assist the process, please. Thank you.”

“Let go! Let go!” James yelled. His struggles intensified, but against the robot he had little hope of success. He attempted to drag his feet, but this simply resulted in their flailing in the air behind him, with the tie-down laces of his camp sneakers fluttering loose. He began to scream like a condemned man, which might very well be the case, because once he was in the fax there was no specific guarantee that he would be reinstantiated. Some archived copy of him would, sometime, but maybe not this one, with these memories. This particular James Shadat might well be on his way to the gods and the afterlife, or the blank nothingness, or whatever.

He shrieked when they hurled him at the plate, and the sound was cut off as his head passed through, and then there was only the pop and hiss of his body going in, every atom measured and logged and teleported away to a nearby buffer. Or something like that; Conrad didn’t really know how fax machines worked.

“Bascal,” he said, “you’ve got to stop this.” He felt sick. Responsible. The prince had gotten this idea from him!

“Nonsense,” Bascal said, with a wave of the hand. “They’re better off in there, out of trouble and out of harm’s way. Everyone will be happier. Plus, it’s too crowded in here anyway. Ho? If you’ll continue, please?”

“Pleasure,” Ho agreed, turning and leaping at Bertram Wang. The Palace Guard followed at a more stately pace, marching magically along the floor, but it got there only a few moments after Ho did.

Bert opted to retain his dignity, saying only, “Is this how you’ll lead the Queendom, ‘Sire’?”

“We may never know,” Bascal answered. And then Bert was gone.

Khen turned out to be another screamer, and afterward Emilio Roberts, one of the bloody-nose kids, lost his composure and started crying and kicking. “This can’t be happening! You can’t be doing this.” So they chucked him in the fax as well.

When it was done, the room was very quiet, and all eyes were on Bascal. He seemed to sense that he was in trouble, that he’d overstepped and lost the confidence of his followers. Nobody wanted to be next. But when he spoke, it was with a flourish and an easy smile.

“We knew the journey would be difficult, and we probably should have known there’d be friction and hasty compromises. I didn’t foresee this, and I apologize to all of you for the ugly spectacle. I promise, it won’t be repeated. But you know as well as I do: if we let those men wander free, the trouble will be much worse. Would you rather tie them up? Kill them? This seems to me like a prudent compromise. Agreed?”

“What do we do now?” someone asked.

“We sail,” Bascal answered simply. He looked at Xmary. “You, darling, will be administering resources. Can you establish meal schedules and such?”

“Yeah,” she replied, without great enthusiasm.

“Terrific.” He turned and launched himself back toward the bridge in a bounding leap.

Conrad followed him. “What’re you doing, Bas? What’s the grand idea here?”

“Well, first we turn the fetula so the sail is edgewise to Sol. That’ll reduce our risk of detection when we have to opaque it. We don’t want to glint, or blot out any stars. Too much risk of being seen.” Bascal was settling back into the navigator’s chair.

“That’s not what I mean,” Conrad said.

“Nevertheless, that’s what we have to do.”

“He bothering you, Majesty?” Ho said from the doorway.

“Nah. He needs to be in here, to pick up the art of steering. We’ll take it in shifts from here on.”

“No concern,” Ho said self-importantly. “You need me, I’ll be right out here.”

“Good. I’ll call when I do.”

The other Palace Guard was still in here, standing motionless in the corner. Between it and Ho, there was considerable reason to avoid antagonizing the prince.

Nevertheless, Conrad crossed his arms. “So I’m steering now, am I? You’ve been making a lot of decisions for a lot of people, Bas. You haven’t done much asking. Why don’t you let your buddy Ho pilot the ship?”

Without looking up from the controls, Bascal said, “Come off it, boyo. Anyone can steer—well, almost anyone—but you’re the only one here with a basic understanding of wellstone. How the system works together, collectively. And you’ve driven vehicles before. You and I are the only qualified pilots.”

“Get fucked.”

“I’m sure I will,” the prince said, then turned to face Conrad. “Look, I can do this without you. It’s inconvenient, but it’s not impossible. If you want to be useless and annoying, that’s your decision.”

“Yeah? You too, Mr. Cone-of-Silence. Are you helping the people on this ... this so-called spaceship? Supporting their interests, fighting for their rights? I used to think so.”

“Watch yourself,” Bascal said, then sighed. “I would like your help, all right? I’d like your support. I’m asking nicely.”

With his arms still folded, Conrad shook his head. “You can’t behave this way, Bas.”

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do.” Bascal’s voice was mild. “I understand your problem: you keep thinking this is a lark. Some kind of joyride. But it really isn’t. We’re not doing this for our amusement; we’re doing it for the next million years of our eternal lives. We’ve got to start those lives off strong and hard, or we’ll never be taken seriously. I wish you could just get that fact into your head and keep it there.”

“Fine, it’s not a game. It’s serious, million-year business. That doesn’t mean you’re free to abuse people. It’s”—Conrad groped for the right word—“counterproductive. It hurts our cause. What will people say if your own followers wind up denouncing you?”

“It depends how the PR ladies spin it,” Bascal answered. But he at least appeared to be thinking it over.

Conrad pressed the point: “You either have support or you don’t, Bas. I’m not sure you understand. I can be on your side and still not agree with ... all this. There’s a right way and a wrong way.”

That made the prince angry. “Oh, so now I’m stupid? I understand exactly what you’re saying, Conrad, but it’s possible I know more about this than you do. If I remember correctly, you’re not the Queendom’s finest student.”

“And you are,” Conrad sneered. It was a stupid thing to say, because yeah, everyone knew what a prodigy Prince Bascal was, and always had been. It was kind of amazing, actually, that a Poet Prince could be friends with a Cork County disappointment like Conrad Mursk. Which helped his argument not at all.

Bascal spread his hands apologetically. “Look, I’m not convinced I can trust you. First you’re in favor, then you’re against; then you’ve got backbone, and now you don’t. . . . I don’t know, Conrad. How smart is that? Unless you’re a genius of epic proportion, what I really need is somebody who listens to my informed opinion.”

“Like Ho Ng.”

“Well, yeah. Actually.”

“You don’t want to listen to him, Bas. You really don’t. Nothing he says or does is for the good of other people.”

Bascal sighed and relaxed his hands, setting them adrift in a low-gravity gesture oddly reminiscent of Feck. “Just let it go. Your opinion is noted, but we’ve got to turn the fetula now, before the sail gives us away. At the moment it’s aimed almost directly downsystem—that’s toward the sun—and any decent astronomer or traffic controller is going to pick it up sooner or later. We’ve got to disappear before they realize we’re gone. Will you take a few minutes to learn something? Please?”

It was Conrad’s turn to sigh. Was there a choice? Would his refusal help anything at all? Regardless of politics, there should be more than one person on board the ship who knew how to operate it. That was just basic safety.

“All right,” he said. “Show me.”

“Good man.”

By way of a primer, Bascal pointed out the ordinal directions: port/starboard, fore/aft, and boots/caps. And the cardinal ones: upsystem/downsystem, north/south, and clock/counter.

“When I say ‘boots aft,’ it means a negative pitch along this axis, see? When I say ‘correct north,’ it means we add velocity that way, out of the ecliptic plane where the planets all orbit. Until further notice and regardless of orientation. You see? It’s actually very simple. There are galactic coordinates as well, but we won’t need those. Now sit, and watch what I do.”

Conrad watched and listened, as patiently as his fear and ambivalence would permit. And he saw that the control of a fetula—and by extension, a sailboat—was nothing at all like the control of a construction tractor. The eight guylines were distant cousins to the track clutches of a bulldozer, or the front-end hydraulics of a steam-roller, but they pointed off in so many different directions! And there was nothing akin to a brake or throttle, unless you counted the sail itself, whose transparency could be varied on demand.

Still, there was one piece of his father’s advice that seemed perfectly apropos: Horse around with this thing, lad, and you’re bound to regret what happens next.

From the desk at her bedroom window, Xmary gazed eastward at the towers of Denver. Moping, because the sun was shining and there was happy trumpet music playing somewhere. Moping, because she wanted to go, to hang out and be raw and silly and fun. The Gravity Towers beckoned to her; the Cola Dome mocked. And the plain, bright colors of her desk—red and green and yellow and blue, tiles of fired ceramic mortared in place by the child she had been a decade ago—were the punchline of the joke. A handmade object, a hundred hours of labor. Indistinguishable from a fax-to-order design.

She wanted to snort love drugs and flirt, or rent a little car and just drive it around. She’d been cooped up all month—all summer, really—humoring her parents with chores and schoolwork, saving her allowance for that bright, fulfilling future they imagined she was building toward. As what? As whom?

She deserved an afternoon on the town. And a night, and maybe a morning. Gods, did she ever! But she was due at history class in fifteen minutes, and her absence would be noted and logged and forwarded to the attention of Mummy and Da.

By itself, this was not a problem. In the best of months, she faxed up an illicit copy of herself every week, and sneaked away to do her own bidding. In mediocre times she’d get by doing it every two or three weeks, but even in the driest, lamest of months—like this one, for example—she always gave herself the last Friday off. And today—today!—was the day.

There was nothing difficult about the procedure; the fax machine was right outside her bedroom door, and when she stepped into it she’d simply specify two simultaneous destinations: Childrens’ City College, and Market Street Station. Or maybe River Station, if she felt like hitting the kiddie cafés again.

But there exactly was the problem: she’d sent a copy of herself off to River Street on the last Friday of June, and said copy had met briefly with Cherry and Tom, in the upstairs balcony at Café 1551. And then the Unexplained Thing had happened—the building simply collapsing in a heap—and dearest Xmary had passed on into some new phase of existence. Not dead or injured as far as she knew, but simply not listed among the casualties. Simply not there. Covert messages on the network had failed to garner any response, and no friend or relation had yet admitted to seeing or hearing from her.

She feared the worst: raped and murdered out of sight of the world’s sensors and censors and sense. Dumped in a shallow grave, covered over with rocks and dirt, her memories rotting into the earth instead of coming home where they belonged. How melodramatic! How fitting an end for such a wayward and disobedient little girl! It was everything Mummy had warned her about: seeking out the vile haunts of sleaze—of privacy—and wiggling her assets for the leering eyes of the wrong sort of people.

But fitting or no, the idea terrified her. Shouldn’t it? Not simply because the same thing might happen again, but because Mummy’s being right would be the end of everything. No more life of her own. No more hopes or dreams or casual flings, no guilty pleasures that weren’t chosen for her from some carefully vetted menu! We know what’s best for you, dear. Having lived in a world much harder than yours, we know exactly what you should do next.

What did she want to be when she grew up? Anything. Anything but that. She put a shaky hand to the window, caressing the view. Her unrequited lover. If rape and murder were the price of freedom, she supposed she would just have to pay up.

Was that a decision? It surely felt like one, so she stood up, grabbed her sketchplate and purse, and threw open the bedroom door to face the world.

But just to be safe, she printed the copy first, and checked her over, and gave her a tight hug and a kiss on the cheek. Xmary was dear to her, obviously, though they didn’t spend much time together. Being identical down to the slightest foible and follicle, she could be difficult and often snotty, and she had a remarkable talent for trouble. Last year she had even managed, during an otherwiseforgettable romp with a boy they barely knew, to play an elaborate and rather disgusting prank on herself. How does it taste, dear? She was still amazed she’d pulled that off, concealing her intentions from herself and knowing all the while that there would not only be payback, but that she’d have to reconverge her copies in the fax at some point, winding up as the victim of both the original crime and its retaliation! In the face of that kind of determined mischief, there was only so much of her own company she could take.

“Be careful,” she told herself.

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

“Along with your carcass.”

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

There was no clearly defined “morning” aboard the good ship Viridity. The cold had faded with Conrad’s insulation trick, but the heat had continued to build until finally he awoke with a yelp, scrabbling at the itchy, crawling sensation of weightless sweat blobs against his skin. He had no idea what time it was, or how long he’d slept, because the ship’s only chronometer was on Bascal’s control panel in the bridge.

But he had to get up and demirrorize the wrapping again, and while he was up he visited the ’soir. This wasn’t strictly necessary, but if he went back to bed it soon would be. Unfortunately, this was a messy process they really hadn’t worked out yet. You had to peel back the gasket sealing the toilet lid, and then carefully do your business without breaking up the pool of water that clung jiggling at the bottom, by the effluent drain. And then you had to reseal the lid and flush, and inevitably there were droplets of stray liquid—not water—that could only be collected by hand. Thank all the little gods he hadn’t needed to crap yet.

So then Conrad had to wash his hands, another elaborate process. Water here was something akin to toothpaste: you squeezed out only as much as you needed, because any more would just get away from you and make a mess. And yeah, there were several globs that he had to chase down and consolidate. They formed a neat little water ball, and it occurred to him that there’d be water-ball fights before long. Was that bad? Should it be prevented somehow? He stuffed the water balls down the drain and plugged it behind them.

By the time he got back to his bed, he was most of the way awake. In zero gee it turned out there was no tossing and turning. Rolling over involved a lot of work with the blankets and straps, and didn’t accomplish much anyway, since the mattress didn’t press hard enough to be uncomfortable or cut off your blood flow. But he wiggled and sighed for a while, trying to put himself back to sleep.

And then he noticed how rapidly the temperature was falling. Not actually cold yet, but the heat that had woken him was gone, and the sweat trapped between his clothes and skin was turning unpleasantly tepid. He’d have to fix that, keep it from getting too cold, or he’d just be getting up again. And again. And he wasn’t sure how long it’d been since he’d last changed clothes, but once he was up he quietly ordered a new set from the fax, changed into them in the cooling darkness, and disposed of his old ones. Then he went to the environment panel and bumped the reflectivity of the cabin’s wrapper from zero percent to fifty percent, hoping that would be close enough to maintain a comfortable temperature. Then he went back to bed, and sighed and wiggled some more.

When he finally gave up on sleeping, some of the other boys had begun to stir. He ruminated on the day ahead: Adventure? Boredom? He should rig up a program to regulate the mirrors automatically, that was one thing. And something needed to be done about that damned bathroom....

When Karl Smoit sat up and rubbed his eyes, Conrad decided that morning had finally arrived, so he got up and retrieved a wellstone sketchplate Bascal had stowed in one of D’rector Jed’s cabinets. The more he thought about it, the more he realized how much work there was to do before Viridity would be anything like a stable environment, much less a comfortable one.

Using his pinkie for a stylus, he scribbled on the sketchplate:

To Do List:

Was that it? Were they done for? Well, maybe. As he stalked off into the other room, Conrad allowed for the possibility that there might be a solution. Might. This did not, of course, excuse Bascal. It didn’t excuse threats of murder backed up by lies, nor the gross endangerment of Viridity’s remaining crew. He felt it now with certainty: there were no excuses for this sort of malice and recklessness. If some species of God was out there somewhere, keeping tally, then Bascal was in big trouble.

But that night at dinner the pilinisi was all smiles, and afterward he told the story of “The Princess and the Satellites,” in which a Tongan king’s daughter, a clever player in pre-Queendom politics, purchased an arc of empty space for almost nothing—for a shipment of glass beads and handwoven mats—and then leased it to the Empire of China for the parking of communication satellites, which were bus-sized things like telecom collapsiters, except they contained no black holes and so could not transmit the quantum interference patterns associated with material objects. The princess made a great deal of money, embarrassed her parents and other enemies, set the kingdom aright, and lived happily ever after.

Hurray.

But then, for the first time since this crazy mission had started, it was Conrad’s turn to tell a story. This was the thirteenth night of their voyage—Bascal had been manipulating the seating patterns and the length of the story hour to shut him out, to keep him from addressing the whole crew. But tonight Conrad had simply gotten up and changed seats while the pilinisi was talking, and sat right down between him and the ever-gorgeous Xmary. Conrad knew better than to blurt out the fact that Viridity was going to crash fatally into its target, or else miss entirely. That sort of outburst would simply get him faxed or killed. And with the reminder of the Palace Guards’ murderous power, open mutiny seemed even farther out of the question. So his story couldn’t simply be “The Bad Prince and the Doomed Fetula.”

But as it happened, he did know a Tongan fairy tale.

“I’m taking you back,” he said. “Back, before the power and whimsy of monarchs had swallowed human society. There were two boys who lived on an island, who were very disobedient. They loved to escape from their house and play in the ocean. They loved to dive deep and swim out far beyond the reef, even when their mother told them not to. Their mother worried endlessly, because the boys were fearless, and never careful.”

“Tik and Lap?” Bascal asked, sounding distinctly unamused.

“Maybe,” Conrad told him. “Tik and Lap. That sounds right.”

“Tik and Lap and the giant fish?”

“Yeah.”

The prince glowered but said nothing.

“Anyway, their mother warned them that the sea was dangerous. They could get swept out by the tide, or get a foot caught in the reef. They could get eaten. But the more she scolded, the farther out they swam. One day they swam all the way out to a neighboring island. The chief of the island was impressed, and sent them home in a boat filled with wonderful foods.

“ ‘Gifts must be repaid in kind,’ the boys’ mother told them. ‘You are good with your spears; you must catch some fish for this chief. But please be careful.’ So the boys went spearfishing, and laughed at their mother’s warning. They knew they could swim like tunas, dive like porpoises, and sail as fast as the wind. ‘We’ll show her,’ they said as they gathered firewood to cook their catch.

“But later, while they were fishing, Lap clowned around and managed to drop his spear. So the two boys swam deep, deep into the ocean to retrieve it, without bothering to check what they were swimming down into. It was a giant cave, and inside the cave lived a giant fish, which swallowed the two boys up.

“ ‘We are eaten!’ cried Tik. ‘We are in this fish’s horrible belly. It stinks like rotting fish guts. What will we do?’

“ ‘I don’t know,’ said Lap. ‘Maybe we should have listened to Mom. Maybe she’s not entirely stupid about these things.’

“ ‘I don’t want to die in this place,’ Tik said. ‘There must be something we can do. Look, I’m still holding the firewood! We’ll light a fire inside this fish.’

“The wood was wet, but the two boys were expert at starting fires, so they rubbed the sticks together until finally they burst into flame.

“ ‘Watch this,’ Lap said, and held a flaming stick against the wall of the fish’s belly. The fish jumped and struggled, flipping over and over in the water trying to rid itself of the horrible burning pain. ‘Get ready for a wild ride!’

“Using the flaming sticks, they drove the fish up out of the cave, out of the deeps, up onto the shore of a nearby island. They laughed. ‘We still have more wood. And our spears, and our grass hats. We’ll roast this fish from the inside!’ And that is what they did. Finally, the fish’s mouth opened, and they were able to climb out. And who did they find there, but the chief and his people who had given them the food!

“ ‘Your Majesty,’ they told him, ‘at the request of our mother, we have brought you a gift: a giant roasted fish.’

“ ‘Oh, my. How did you catch him?’ the chief exclaimed.

“ ‘We used ourselves as bait, and cooked him from inside. Now if you don’t mind, we would like to ask you for a ride home. We promised our wise mother we’d never swim that far again.’

“And the chief smiled. ‘You are clever boys to listen to your elders, instead of running wild. Here’s a dollar.’ ”

The hard part was letting Xmary know. They hadn’t agreed on any sort of signal for the start of hostilities, but if he didn’t get word to her—to someone—then Bascal could simply put the guards on him again, and that would be that. No speaking, no gesturing, no pounding on the walls.... But she needed to know what was happening, and what the teams were, and it wasn’t like he could just tell her right in front of everybody, and it wasn’t like he could whisper in her ear or lead her off for a private conference, or pass her a note. Not Xmary, not without attracting a lot of attention.

That left Martin and Karl, and Conrad wasn’t really sure he trusted Martin. The kid was too quiet; beyond expressing “grave doubts about the present regime,” he hadn’t said much. There was no real clue as to the inner workings of his head, or even if he had much of an inner life. Some people seemed to get by without one. If it came down to a simple brawl, Conrad was pretty sure Martin would at least stick a foot out or something— some small gesture in his own self-interest. But initiating any action seemed unlikely. It was too much to ask.

That left Karl. And because Conrad’s shift at the helm was about to begin, there was no time to lose, and no point in delaying. And no reason to be especially afraid, since the price of failure—death—was identical to the price of doing nothing. But he was afraid. He’d never done anything like this before. He didn’t know how to approach it, where to start, how to keep himself from fucking up along the way. And the threat of immediate bodily harm seemed for some reason more viscerally real than the prospect of crashing and vaporizing in a week and a half.

But the sketchy outlines of a plan were taking shape in his mind, and the time to act was now.

He looked around, studying the room. It was “day,” with the ceiling—now off-limits to Xmary—giving off a diffuse, warm, vaguely sunny glow. Conrad would have preferred to turn the power down on that—they didn’t need that much light—but there was enough stored energy in the capacitors to keep it lit for a year or so, and since that was a lot longer than they had to live, he wasn’t going to make an issue out of it.

And in spite of the “daylight,” Ho was asleep in his closet, or maybe whacking off, and Preston Midrand was cinched down on his mattress and also apparently asleep. Bascal was on the bridge, of course, along with one of the Palace Guards. The other guard was in here, rooted to the spot where it had stood, motionless, for most of the past month. And hovering near it with a sketchplate tucked under her arm was Xmary, half-seriously chewing out Martin for “farting again.”

She must be really bored, really sick of her studies, because their shipboard diet had always centered around beans and franks—one the gassiest and most diarrheic food combos in the known universe. Fortunately, any fart gas that touched the fax machine was absorbed and disassembled and whisked into the mass buffers, so the air never had a chance to grow too foul. But yeah, it was a problem they’d all been living with and grown used to, although it had grown steadily worse as they’d depleted their other meager food supplies.

Which, by the way, Conrad strongly suspected Ho of playing more than his fair part in. He did sleep with the food, after all, and memorize its inventory, and guard it jealously against unauthorized access. The one time Karl had sneaked a handful of pecans out, Ho had looked ready to murder him for it, and probably would have if not for the Guards. But two days later the pecans were gone, and Ho said nothing.

Jamil and Karl and Steve Grush were solemnly playing the handball game Karl had invented as a zero-gee alternative to shirtball soccer. The idea was to bat the shirtball to the next person with an open hand, and keep a three-or four-way volley going for as long as possible. Not terribly exciting, and just like shirtball soccer it lent itself to certain abuses, such as the constant and deliberate targeting of noncombatants. But it passed the time.

Karl’s last duty had been swabbing the main cabin’s ceiling and skylights, so Conrad launched himself to the ceiling, gave it a cursory inspection, and said, “Little gods, it’s filthy up here. Who cleaned this?”

This was delivered in Leadership Tone, a bit of play-acting Conrad had adopted based on studies of Bascal. Far from commanding or stern, it was actually sort of jovial. And yet, when you did it properly there was an edge to it, a not-so-casual hinting at potential consequences that seemed, for whatever reason, to yield maximum response. Steve and Jamil and Karl looked up; their shirtball went skittering off into a corner.

“Karl,” Conrad said, “would you grab a dust mop and meet me up here, please?”

“Do I have to?” Karl answered, glowering vaguely, and Conrad couldn’t have asked for a better response. God bless that boy’s stubborn streak.

“I would like you to,” Conrad told him. This was another trick from the de Towaji School of Management: never give an order if you could give a pointed suggestion instead.

Sighing, Karl went around to the fax and asked it for a mop. His look was sullen when he arrived at Conrad’s side.

“Keep that exact expression on your face,” Conrad murmured, trying not to breathe too hard. He needed a tight rein on his fear if this was going to work. “Look at the ceiling; that’s right. Now wipe it, and listen carefully. Oh, boy. In a few minutes, I’m going to start doing something about our predicament. No, don’t look down there; look at your mop. I’ll be altering the helm settings, and I want you and Xmary to be prepared. It may get... ugly. I may need a distraction, or help with something. We may even have to fight.”

“I don’t want to,” Karl said, and Conrad could practically smell the sudden fear coming off him.

“Neither do I,” Conrad admitted, showing off a shaking hand. “But consider the alternative. Bascal is planning to crash this ship, and kill us all.” He raised his voice a bit. “We’re counting on you to do your part, okay? If you need me, I’ll be on the bridge.”

And that’s where he went.

Bascal, far from suspecting anything, just looked tired.

“Hey,” he said, looking up and immediately moving to untie himself from the chair.

“You look tired,” Conrad said.

“Yeah,” Bascal agreed. “Boredom and terror make a wonderful mix.”

Conrad blinked. What the hell was that supposed to mean? What was Bascal afraid of? Dying? Wasn’t this all his idea in the first place? “You, uh, you should take a nap.” On impulse, he added, “There may be more options than you realize.”

“Yeah,” Bascal agreed vaguely, as he lined himself up and launched toward the open door. “I’ll think real hard about that.”

When he was gone, Conrad closed the door behind him, went to the nav chair, and tied himself loosely into it. He wanted to be able to move if the need arose.

The first part of the plan was something he’d thought of a week ago, based on the wording of Bascal’s threat: kill him if the wellstone broadcasts a signal. He still didn’t know if the guards would follow that command or not; it seemed doubtful, but “doubtful” was a poor thing to stake your life on. Under such bizarre circumstances, there was no telling what the robots would do. On the other hand, the instructions required to generate a signal from the wellstone were fairly straightforward, and there was nothing to prevent him from storing them for later use.

In fact, this took him only about fifteen minutes, and the next part, although fateful and irrevocable and huge, was even simpler: he entered the instructions that would turn the sail, and guide Viridity to a new course which would—just barely—miss the barge. Outside, behind the sail, the stars began, imperceptibly, to drift.

Not too surprisingly, this triggered an immediate alarm: the ceiling flashed red, and dotted itself with speakers emitting a low, staccato buzzing. The mutiny was at hand.

The first to appear in the doorway was Ho. “What did you do, bloodfuck?”

But Bascal was right behind him, and the two entered together. The prince looked more weary than surprised. “All right, boyo. What is it?”

“I’m changing course,” Conrad told him. “We need to miss the barge, or we’ll all be vaporized.”

Bascal pursed his lips. “Isn’t this something you should discuss with me first?”

“Ideally,” Conrad said, and God he was nervous. It was really happening now, and he couldn’t stop it even if he wanted to. “But you’ve been sort of immune to reason lately, so I’ve taken the precaution of what they call a ‘deadman switch.’ If I take my hands off this console, or somebody else takes them off for me, then all the energy in the capacitors gets dumped into a broadband SOS, across most of the ... the spectrum. Light, radio, et cetera.”

“Clever,” the prince said grudgingly, after a moment’s reflection. “And what did you hope to gain by this? My full attention?”

“Your common sense,” Conrad answered.

“Ah.”

“If we hit the barge, we’ll all be vaporized. Even the kids in the fax machine. If we miss it ...” Whoa. A sudden stab of excitement ran through him. “If we miss it, we can brake magnetically. The peak accelerations are too high for human bodies. Two hundred gee! But, but ... the fax machine would probably survive. Along with the patterns inside it.”

“Ah!” Bascal said, perking up.

Conrad faced the bridge’s Palace Guard. “Robot, I’m not sure how much you understand about all this, but these helm settings are vital to the prince’s survival. If any alternate course is selected, there’ll be a collision with absolutely no way for him to survive.”

There was no reaction from the guard—no sound or movement, no indication that it had heard.

“They won’t listen to you,” Bascal told him. “Idiot.”

“Oh, I think they will. They’re not stupid. Who knows? They may even send a distress signal of their own, if they sense the ship is in danger. Which it most certainly is.”

The prince sighed. “What do you want, Conrad?”

“Is it so mysterious?” The quaver was leaving Conrad’s voice now. “I don’t see the point of dying. I don’t see how that helps. We’ve already made a dramatic statement. It’s too bad our Nescog gate is down; I’ll bet we’re all over the news channels: the hunt continues for fifteen missing children! Ingenious ship design escapes detection!”

Bascal waved a hand, dismissing these words as foolish. “Do you want to surrender, or do you want to succeed?”

“I want to survive! There are memories which you have no right to take away from me.” My hands on your girlfriend. My fingers in her hair, unresisted.

The prince waved again. “That’s not what I asked. Let’s say we survive, okay? So there’s no concern there. In a survival situation, given a choice between surrendering and succeeding, which do you choose?”

“It’s a false choice,” Conrad said.

“No, it isn’t. You’ve just said so yourself: we can all climb in the fax machine. The robots can leave us in there until the fun is over, and when the ships are docked and they pull us out, we can put on our space suits and climb to an airlock on the outside of the barge. Simple.”

The prince’s voice was reasonable, and his argument made sense. Sort of. But he’d sounded that way before, too, and Conrad knew better than to believe it. “We don’t know that that will work.”

“So simulate it,” Bascal said, and now he was bright and encouraging, his weariness gone.

“Don’t talk like you’re suddenly my friend,” Conrad warned. “I’ll just pick my hands up and we’ll see what happens.”

The prince put his own hands up in gesture of placation or surrender. “Steady, Conrad. You know I was never going to hurt you. Or anyone else. I knew there had to be a way to work this. And I’m glad, I’m glad we didn’t give up before you found it. Just think, man: imagine stepping through that fax into Denver again. Sure, they’ll arrest us, but think what that says, versus simply surrendering now.”

Worryingly, Conrad felt his resolve begin to crumble. He knew better than to trust this Prince of Sol; that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that Bascal’s ruthlessness did not, by itself, make him wrong. It didn’t guarantee or even imply that his plans and conclusions weren’t sound. Quite the reverse: without sentimentality to weigh him down, he might be better equipped to make decisions. This thought led to a most disturbing conclusion: that even the suicidal approach might genuinely be in the boys’ best interest. They were going to live forever, right? What harm was a youthful indiscretion or two, if it gave their surviving copies a stronger voice?

“You’re clouding my mind,” he said.

Bascal laughed. “I wish I had that power, my friend. Really. Your mind is clouded because you keep thinking this is simple, and you keep thinking it’s about you. About us, these copies here on this ship. But when you actually bother to communicate, when you remember the bigger picture, it’s not quite so obvious.”

Conrad had no immediate reply, so Bascal pressed the attack. “You’ve done an amazing job here. I’m very impressed with this ... blackmail exercise. But it’s not necessary. You and I have the same goal, and believe it or not we are still friends.”

“No,” Conrad said, shaking his head. “That’s not correct. If I hadn’t done this, if I hadn’t done it today, we’d have crashed and died. You weren’t on my side. You weren’t asking me for help.”

Bascal shrugged. “Am I perfect? Have I got it all figured out? This is difficult for me, just like it is for you. I apologize for any bad feelings my mistakes have caused.”

Conrad glanced at Ho, who was observing the conversation in sullen silence. Perhaps sensing a threat to his position and power. Oh, yeah, like being beta male on a ship full of troubled children was any great thing anyway. He also glanced at the doorway, mildly puzzled; no one else had come in here, or even poked a head in to look. With the alarms and flashing lights and raised voices, such an absence of curiosity was difficult to believe.

“We don’t trust each other,” he finally told Bascal, without quite looking at him.

“No,” the prince admitted.

“We’re not friends. Not now. Don’t make that appeal to me, because I’m not buying it.”

“All right,” Bascal said soothingly. “All right. We’re not friends. Can we be allies? If we agree on a goal, and the methods for achieving it, is that enough?”

“I ... guess it’ll have to be,” Conrad conceded unhappily.

“Then run your simulations,” the prince said. “And when you’re satisfied, turn off this distress beacon of yours. We’ll shake hands, and work out the details of our final approach and docking. Agreed?”

Well. What exactly had just happened here? Had Conrad’s mutiny succeeded—all his planning and his careful arguments winning the day, forcing Bascal to do the right thing? Had the mutiny failed, with Conrad falling back into error under the spell of the silver-tongued Poet Prince? Had the two of them simply worked things out, or lucked into a solution they could both agree on? It seemed, in a funny way, that all of these things were true at once, and Conrad didn’t know what to make of that, what lesson to draw. Shouldn’t something as basic as right and wrong be easier to figure out?

“We’ll see,” he finally told Bascal.

The prince nodded, accepting that answer although it clearly wasn’t what he’d been hoping for. He gestured to Ho, and the two of them left. But moments later, Bascal burst into laughter, and called out from the other room, “Oh, for crying out loud, let him go!”

“What?” Conrad called back.

“You’ve got to see this,” Bascal said to him, drifting back into the doorway. “Wait, scratch that. Do not take your hands off that panel. But boyo, my hat is off to you once more.”

“Why? What’s happening?”

Bascal laughed again. “Jamil and Preston are gone. In the fax, I guess. And Steve’s ... glued to the ceiling with a shirtball in his mouth. Xmary, for God’s sake, you win. Let him fucking go.”

Oh we’re not too good at rigging, and we’re not too good at scanning,

And we’re lousy at logistics which is why we’re farting beans.

But we know just where we’re headed, and we know just how to get there,

And they’re never gonna ping us till we crash right through their screens!

It was 5 P.M. and hotter than hell when Xmary set off, on foot, for the rendezvous point. Eight kilometers from home—farther than she’d ever walked in her life—but with four days’ warning she’d had time to search the product libraries for a really comfortable pair of mischief shoes, and a walking stick of hollow diamond that weighed nothing, looked like a soap bubble, and collapsed to the size of her pinkie when she slipped it in her pocket.

She could wish for a closer rendezvous, but (a) like everyone else in the worlds, she was in perfect physical condition, and (b) getting word out to Feck had been difficult and risky, and getting word back from him had nearly blown everything. Xmary had had to co-opt a classmate, a girl she barely knew but saw regularly in the one place she was still allowed to go. But the girl, Wandi Strugg, had had no idea there was anything illegal going on—she thought it was a simple case of forbidden love, and had read Feck’s message aloud, right in front of Herr Doktor Professor Vanstaadt.

“ ‘Commons Park, at Fifteenth Street on the east bank of the Platte, seven P.M. sharp. Bring six garlands, a sketchplate, and something discreet to protect your knees and elbows.’ ”

Wandi was smirking when she said it—no mystery what she was thinking—but Herr Doktor Professor sniffed something amiss in the words, and looked up from his desk, straight into Xmary’s face.

“Are you in some trouble, young lady?” His voice was like an old cartoon, from the days when people had real accents, and while his skin was smooth, his hair was an honest shade of gray. Herr Doktor was a kindly old busy-body; everyone knew it. Too kindly, too old. Too difficult to fool.

“No, sir,” she’d answered cooly, fighting down the urge to imitate his voice. But the hot flush of her face had said otherwise.

“It’s her boyfriend,” Wandi crooned, thinking she was simply embarrassing a classmate. But it was that very obliviousness that saved the day; Herr Doktor looked Wandi over, weighing her words and her tone, and found no trace of guilt or deceit.

“You should be more considerate,” he told Wandi. “These matters are always delicate.” To Xmary he said, “They have sensors in those parks, you know. If you want an area for private use, I suggest you make a reservation.”

Xmary had nodded and retreated, too choked with fear and embarrassment to make any reply. She hadn’t opened her mouth in class—any class—in the four days since then. It was too close a call, and she didn’t care to risk it any further. It wasn’t punishment she feared, but compassion, because the wisdom of age would shut her down if it could, show her the foolishness and futility of all her best-laid plans. In their version of tranquility she would do nothing, accomplish nothing, be nothing.

So here she was, hiking through the western suburbs toward the aforementioned park, with an enormous rucksack on her back, bursting with phony decorations. She must have looked ridiculous—who carried things anymore? Who walked? But all kinds of strange things took place on Restoration Day; being the celebration of monarchy itself, the fourteenth of August was easily the wildest of Queendom holidays. Possibly the only day when a gathering of rioters could go unnoticed until the riot had actually begun!

Speaking of which ...

She dug the sketchplate out of her pocket and checked the time. And promptly cursed under her breath, because it was 6:58 already. She’d miscalculated her walking time, seeing straight lines on a map without realizing how meandering and indirect the paths and roads really were. She also checked her news headlines, and was annoyed to see that NAVY SEARCH was still CLOSING IN ON MISSING CAMPERS. That particular headline had been recycled almost daily for the past two weeks, and told her nothing at all. Which was frustrating, because she just wanted one little question answered: was she aboard that ship or wasn’t she?

And if so, she also wouldn’t mind knowing why, and how. So that was three questions—still not much to ask, but she’d begun to fear there would never be any answers for her. Which simply hardened her resolve to do something meaningful in the here and now!

Approaching the Platte, she left the street proper and passed through a garden of low trees and struggling midsummer flowers. The pathway was marked with hanging chains, and led to a sturdy wellstone footbridge, with chest-high walls topped by rails of bright green. Even this late in the day, the river itself was full of vesters, children and grown-ups alike swathed in flotation plastics and engrossed in the annual Res-Day ritual of beating themselves senseless on the rocks and rapids. Hooting and screeching among themselves, they paid not one bit of attention to Xmary and her anomalous rucksack.

Across the bridge was another park where dozens of children, maybe six years old and all dressed in various shades of not-quite-royal purple, played and danced to the drummy, twangy strains of Tongan music. But this was Confluence Park, not Commons Park, so Xmary continued on, following the sidewalk south around a set of enormous power transformers and across a deserted street. Like most of the journey, this was all new to Xmary, a slice through the city of her birth that she’d never seen or even imagined before. It was obvious and yet startling, that Denver existed continuously at ground level, with amazing sprawls of cultured space in between the familiar landmarks.

A set of rock stairs led down an incline, and there, finally, was the rendezvous point: a sweep of hilly meadow dotted with trees, and crisscrossed by wellstone paths. Suddenly, Xmary knew exactly where she was: on the hillside overlooking the ruins of Café 1551, now an empty foundation domed over with the yellow mesh of a police cordon. CRIME SCENE. DO NOT TAMPER.

Feck was up ahead, in a kind of gazebo looming over the park from the crown of its highest hill. There were two other boys with him, and two other girls—one leaning against him in a rather familiar way. Xmary waved, and Feck must have been watching the path, because he saw her and waved back almost immediately. He said something to the girl beside him, and she pulled away and stood up straighter. Xmary’s heart quickened, all the excitement and uncertainty of recent weeks coming finally to a head. What she felt when she saw his face, his figure against the skyline, was hard to describe and equally hard to ignore. Enthrallment? Good fortune? An abeyance of her bitter frustration?

She lost sight of him as the path curved behind the hill, but she followed it around and up, and soon enough she was throwing herself into his arms.

“Hi!” She laughed.

“Hi back,” he said, smiling but disengaging himself. “You’re a bit late.”

“I know. Sorry.”

He nodded, looking agitated. “Yeah, our timing is important. You brought the garlands?”

“Right here.” She parted the rucksack’s buckles with a murmured command, then slid the strap off one shoulder and wriggled free.

“Good. Xmary Li Weng, meet riot cell one: Bob Smith, Cherry Florence, Weng Twang, and Patience Electric.”

“Hi, Cherry,” Xmary said, surprised to see one of her close friends here. Cherry was, in fact, the girl who’d been leaning on Feck sixty seconds ago. The others Xmary didn’t know, although they looked familiar.

“Wasn’t sure you were going to make it,” Cherry said, looking her over with a funny kind of disapproval. “After the café incident, I heard from you, what? One time?”

“I’m really sorry. I was grounded. I would’ve sent a message, but—”

“I hate to cut this short,” Feck said, “but it’s less than two hours till showtime, and we’ve got six major intersections to ... decorate.”

Grinning, Xmary stuck her hand up. “What’s our plan, cutie?”

Feck glared for a moment, then put a hand on her elbow and led her a few meters away from the others. “This is not a picnic. All right? Let’s keep things formal.”

Her voice stiffened. “I’m just asking, Feck. What are we doing?”

He showed her a length of shiny-white wellstone twine, then stepped back and turned so the others could see it as well. “You know what a knot bomb is? These garlands, these decorative spike traps of yours, will be tied to the light poles with these little strings. Securely, right? But at nine P.M., they all come undone and fall in the street, halting the flow of wheeled traffic.”

“And then what?” one of the boys—the one Feck had introduced as Bob—wanted to know.

“Then we go straight to the police station,” Feck said.

Bob was aghast. “We turn ourselves in?”

“We create a distraction. We get inside and block the fax machines, or disable them, or better yet commandeer them to print our own army. Failing that, we obstruct the exits with park benches and trash tubes, or with our bodies. There are only five fax machines inside which are big enough to instantiate a police officer, and only three fixed doorways out of the building.”

Xmary, feeling surly and snubbed, said, “What is it, a medieval castle? They can open a doorway anywhere they want. All it takes is a whisper, and a thousand cops are bursting out into the street.”

“Of course they can,” Feck agreed. “We can’t stop the police or Constabulary. We can’t even really delay them.”

“Then what’s the point?” Bob demanded angrily.

Feck could only shrug. “Who can say? What’s the point of anything? This is a performance, Bob. We’re inspiring emotion. There are twenty other riot cells in place, scattered around the downtown district. We go for the fax depots, the news stations, all the centers of control. We make a show of it. Why? Because that’s what Prince Bascal wants. That’s all you and I need to know.”

“But we get caught right away,” Bob complained. “We don’t stand a chance.”

Feck made a face, and matched it with a sarcastic flutter of his hands. “We all get caught, Bob. I don’t see any way around it. Best case, this’ll be, like, a five-minute riot. I thought that was self-evident. Do you want out?” He scanned the five faces around him. “If anyone wants out, just walk away now. No questions.”

The other boy, Weng Twang, wordlessly turned his back and started down the path. Then he paused, and almost cast a glance over his shoulder. But he aborted it just as quickly, and resumed walking.

Feck sighed. “Damn. All right, anyone else? Bob?”

“Uh, no,” Bob said, his eyes on Twang’s retreating form. “My calendar’s clear, pretty much forever.”

“You didn’t get caught at 1551 last month,” Xmary said to Feck.

“That was a fluke.”

“Was it? I wonder. How many of these riot cells have you for a leader?”

“Just the one,” Feck said impatiently. “I can’t use the fax, see? I’m caught if I do. So I’m effectively singled.”

“Well, how many individuals do we have stationed in more than one cell? All their freedom requires is for one copy to escape, right?”

“A few individuals,” Feck allowed. “Not many. We don’t want people going too far beyond their normal patterns too early, attracting attention and all that. Look, none of this matters right now. We need to get moving.” He glanced at the little washroom enclosure just off the gazebo’s east side. “Does anyone need the ’soir? To, uh, relieve themselves? No? Well let’s proceed, then.”

He led them through the park and across the street where, to everyone’s surprise, Weng Twang was waiting for them.

“My apologies,” he said. “Is a numb-ass waffler still welcome among you?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Feck answered, handing him one of Xmary’s holiday garlands. “I’m happy you changed your mind. Again.”

Then he dug something out of his pocket, a little ball of superabsorber black, and tossed it lightly over the wall, into the hulking power transformers Xmary had passed on the way in.

“What was that?” she asked.

And for the first time that evening, Feck chuckled. “That was nothing, dear. That was nothing at all. Shall we go do this thing?”

“And meet whatever fate awaits us,” Xmary agreed, then kissed him hard on the mouth while Cherry Florence glared on.

As the time for magnetic braking approached, the remaining preparations were remarkably straightforward: a bit of research, a bit of simulation, and a bit of fauxdemocratic discussion with the remaining crew. When everyone understood the magnetic braking plan, and had slept on it and then given their explicit agreement, Bascal announced that the differences of opinion that had separated Viridity’s crew were officially reconciled. He proclaimed a group hug. Conrad wasn’t too crazy about hugging Steve, and especially Ho, but for the good of the revolution, such as it was, he endured it.

And then, really, there was nothing left to do. Having agreed to consign themselves to the fax anyway, there was no reason to suffer the additional boredom of eleven more sailing days. So they dug the space suits out of their trunk and started putting them on: paper-doll jumpsuits of translucent, beetle-black wellstone film.

“Better unfax our sleeping beauties,” Xmary observed, jiggling her way through the dressing process. “They need to suit up as well.”

Nobody really knew what would happen on the approach or final impact—whether the cabin would break apart, whether its wellstone wrapping would spring any leaks, or what. Either way, once they were magnetically docked to the barge’s hull they’d be opening the wrapper anyway, so they could get free and find an airlock that would lead them inside. That was the plan, anyway.

The space suits were really just human-shaped balloons, and while their interior surfaces had been programmed to absorb carbon dioxide, Conrad and Bascal had never figured out how to crack it back into oxygen again. So they would have something like fifteen minutes to get into the barge before they suffocated to death. Like everything on this trip, it was a gamble.

“The sleeping beauties may not agree to this,” Conrad replied. “We should give them the option of remaining in storage. For safekeeping.”

“Well,” Xmary pointed out, “to ask them that, we’re still going to have to wake them up.”

“True.” Conrad approached the fax machine, and queried it: “Do you have sufficient buffer mass to recreate the people in storage?”

“Yes,” the fax replied, in that weird, stupid voice it had.

“Good. Good.” With a glance at Bascal, he continued. “Would you please print a copy of Raoul Sanchez? Minus the lung injuries? We might as well get started.”

“My data buffer does not contain a pattern called Raoul Sanchez,” the fax replied. And that couldn’t be right, because poor Raoul’s name and personal data should be appended to his genome, right there in every cell of his body.

“The first person you ... absorbed. Stored, whatever.”

“First?” the fax said. “I have no record indexed in that manner. I have stored eleven thousand four hundred and twenty-two persons.”

Conrad rolled his eyes. “Not the first one ever. The first one on this voyage.”

“Voyage? I have no records indexed in that manner.”

“It was about five weeks ago.”

“My buffer contains four personnel records from that period. None of them is named Raoul Sanchez.”

Four records? Conrad felt a sudden chill. “What... records are they? What names?”

“James Grover Shadat,” the fax replied. “Bertram Wang. Khen Nolastname. Emilio Braithwaite Roberts.”

“That’s all?”

“I have two other personnel records available.”

“Preston Midrand and Jamil Gazzaniga?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, shit,” Bascal said. “It’s a FIFO buffer.”

Conrad turned. “A what?”

“First In/First Out,” Bascal replied angrily. “Its memory isn’t infinite—it’s just supposed to store the pattern long enough to forward it to the Nescog, along with a destination address. As new data gets added, the oldest patterns are deleted to make space. God damn it, I knew that. I wasn’t ... thinking. Frankly, I’m surprised it can hold even six people. That’s a lot of data.”

“So Raoul is dead?” Karl wanted to know.

“This Raoul is, yeah,” Bascal snapped. “Completely. Irretrievably. Even a dead body can be scanned for memories. Hell, a skeleton can be scanned for residual fields if you’ve got the time and money, and even the place where someone stood can be mined for ghosts. But there’s no stone or metal here to support a haunting. I think Raoul’s pattern is about as gone as a pattern can get.”

At these words Conrad felt a sick, sinking feeling. They had finally managed to get someone killed. The risk had been there all along, but now it was a fact. Bascal’s fact, mostly, but the rest of them—Conrad included— had helped make it happen.

“We killed him,” he said. “Oh, God. It’s over. We’ve got to send a distress signal now.”

“On the contrary,” Bascal replied coolly. “This changes nothing.”

But Conrad was having none of that. “Bas, if we climb in the fax, we’ll be killing the others, all six of them. Hell, shit, there are seven of us here right now.” He pointed, ticking the names off on his fingers. “You, me, Xmary, Karl, Martin, Ho, and Steve. That’s seven. One of us will die, too.”

“The civilized thing,” Bascal said, “would be to draw straws. Six long, one short.”

“No, Bas, the civilized thing would be to pull those boys out of there and call the navy for help.”

Bascal slapped a fist in his hand three times. “No, no, and no. That would be the pointless thing. How many times do we have to go over this? The bodies on this fetula are expendable. It’s our real lives that matter.”

“You can’t just kill them,” Xmary said, drifting nearer to the prince, looming weightlessly over him. “You haven’t even asked. I say we pull them out and vote.”

Karl raised a fist in agreement, and even Martin was nodding. But Bascal was undeterred. “This is a monarchy, people. My job is to attend to your best interests, whether you like it or not. I’ve trained for it, literally, since before I was born. That’s the whole point of monarchy: you people are not qualified to vote.”

“And you are?” Conrad said, crossing his arms.

“Shut up, bloodfuck,” Ho said menacingly.

“It’s all right,” the prince told him. “He needs to hear this. Yes, Conrad, I’m qualified to make your decisions. It’s my solemn duty. It’s what I’m trained for.”

But it was Conrad’s turn to press the point. “You’re a figurehead, Bascal. Less than that: you’re the child of figureheads. Your ‘solemn duty’ is to throw the first pitch at ball games and, you know, cut ribbons and stuff.”

Bascal laughed. “You can’t actually believe that, boyo. When was the last time a Royal Decree was disobeyed? When was the last no-confidence vote in the Senate? The people of Earth were tired of responsibility; they forced it on my parents, and wouldn’t take it back now even if they could.”

“Which they can’t?” Conrad demanded.

“Which they can’t,” Bascal agreed. “Look, if nothing else, I’m the third-richest human who ever lived. I could buy whole cities with my weekly allowance.”

“And that gives you the right to commit murder?”

The prince balled his fist again, then sighed and released it. “Call it what you like. Single murder—even premeditated—is a property crime in a Queendom of immorbids. You have some very puritan ideals, Conrad, but if I paid you enough, you’d gladly die a hundred times. A thousand . For that matter, I could buy your right arm. Chop it off and amend your genome, so the fax filters would know not to grow it back. Enough money and you’d be the one asking me.”

“I’m not for sale,” Conrad said, wondering suddenly if that was true. And fearing that it wasn’t.

“Is that what you’re offering?” Xmary asked, suddenly intrigued as well as angry. “Bribes for our cooperation?”

“No,” Bascal said. “Absolutely, no, you should never mix business and friendship. It’s bad for both. Buying people is one of the easiest ways to destroy them. I used to burn my tutors that way, ruin their lives, until my parents finally put a stop to it. And it wasn’t ... fun. Or good. I think they wanted me to have that lesson: money as a weapon, as a tool of despair. My father’s early work sent shockwaves through the entire economy. You wouldn’t believe how careful he is today.

“I know you think I’m callous, but I haven’t even opened my wallet. And I don’t need to. Never mind the force I can bring to bear; this voyage is a major historical event, like the Boston Tea Party or the Air Tax Rebellion, and when it’s all over, these boys will be proud they played a part.”

“You’re crazy,” Conrad said simply.

“Am I?”

“Either that, or you’re evil. Wake these boys up, if you’re so sure they’ll agree with you.”

“Oh, they probably won’t,” Bascal conceded. “Not now. Not until later. But when we’ve succeeded, and we’re famous and the envy of all, they’re going to want their share of the glory. That’s the whole point.”

Okay, so reasoning with Bascal had failed. Again. And there wouldn’t be time or space or opportunity for another mutiny, and Conrad was probably about three seconds from being silenced again, or murdered outright in the fax. Not knowing what else to do, he put his hands together and pleaded. “Bascal, listen, please. Give the distress call. If one person disagrees with you, our reputations will be permanently ... blackened. Nobody likes a murderer. And killing someone who might press charges—”

Bascal seemed amused. “If you feel that strongly about it, boyo, maybe you should volunteer. Kill yourself to save someone else.”

“All right, I will!” Conrad snapped. The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them.

“Really?” Bascal was intrigued. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Conrad said, after slightly longer reflection. The idea sickened him, terrified him: no more self, no more experience, no more life. Just some look-alike, some think-alike that believed it was Conrad Mursk, but had no idea what had really happened here on Viridity. Bascal might be right: the old Conrad would probably—happily—swallow any story the Poet Prince served up.

But what else could he do? Hadn’t he sold out enough to these mad schemes, these daydreams of revolution? Weren’t there enough sins on his head already? Sin: there was a concept his parents had beaten him with until it lost all meaning. It had rarely troubled him before, but on this mission—and especially now—the prospect loomed large. It wasn’t God that concerned him, so much as his own immortal conscience. To live forever in the Queendom, knowing he’d done such a shitty thing ... Knowing he could have prevented it from happening, made sure there was a little less fear and pain and emptiness in the universe. Could he live like that? Would he die now to prevent it?

More to the point, would he sacrifice his entire experience of Xmary? His recovered self, cleansed of sin, would never even know what it lost, what it lacked. Such a waste. But if he couldn’t live up to his own standards, much less hers, then this foolish unconsummated passion meant nothing. The fires of youth were betrayed either way.

“Yes,” he said again. “I volunteer. My ... conscience requires it. If you’re going to erase someone, erase me. Fucker.”

Bascal was quiet for several seconds. He licked his lips. “Well. Is this the same Mr. Impulsive I went to camp with?”

Conrad didn’t feel like answering that. Didn’t feel much like talking at all anymore.

“I’m impressed,” Bascal said seriously. “It’s quite a gesture.” He looked around the room. “Anyone else?”

Slowly, reluctantly, Xmary put her hand up. “For the revolution,” she said lamely. “Not for you. It’s a stronger statement than drawing straws.” Bascal took that in as well, looking even more surprised, and more so still when Karl raised his hand as well—actually lowered it, since Karl was hanging upside-down at the time, with his feet propped against the wall.

And then Steve Grush raised a hand. “Me too, Sire. This may be my only chance to do something useful. Ever.”

“Wow,” Conrad said, genuinely shocked.

Ho and Martin looked uncomfortable, and sat very still to avoid any inadvertent, volunteerlike movements.

“My friends, in your valor my courage is quickened,” the Poet Prince mused, “though I make my way through the icy gulfs of Hades itself.” He pinched his chin, as if feeling there for his father’s beard, his father’s wisdom and distracted brilliance. “You’re brave people. I love that. I love you. I’d volunteer myself, but of course the revolution needs its figurehead.” He licked his lips again, and a look of surprising uncertainly passed across his features. “It’s time for hard choices. Steve, your request is accepted. Guard, please throw him in the fax.”

This was done, with little fanfare, although Steve couldn’t suppress a slight squawk at the end.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and God have mercy on us all,” the prince said, looking at the print plate—the blank space where Steve had been. “Sleep, my friend, and dream of freedom.” His gaze lingered there for a while, while he dug at his chin with an index finger. Then, abruptly, he snapped out of it and was surveying the room with clear eyes. “The rest of you are too valuable. Get suited up for the crash.”

“No,” Conrad said. “I won’t. I refuse.”

What does it mean to be a bird? To fly.

Conrad’s hands were back in his pockets, but he withdrew them now and crossed his arms again. “I won’t cooperate with this. I won’t put on a space suit, and I certainly won’t let my image push someone else out of that buffer.”

“Have you ever been dressed by Palace Guards?” Bascal asked him. “I have, and believe me, they’re not household servants.”

“No concern,” Conrad said.

Bascal sighed. “Fine. Have it your way. This is a pointless gesture, but I understand it well. You know exactly what’s going to happen, but you want it on my conscience.”

“Your what?” Conrad snapped.

“Oh, don’t start. If I didn’t care about you ungrateful shits we’d never have done any of this. I’d leave you under the parental jackboot, for a thousand fucking years. Guards, dress this man in a space suit, please. And put him in the fax.”

“Guards,” Conrad tried, “you’re supposed to keep us from hurting each other!”

But the robots paid no attention to him. Somewhere in the balance sheets of their programming, they’d somehow concluded that this course of action—this culling of Viridity’s crew—was both in the prince’s best interest, and in compliance with the king’s commands. Or at least in the prince’s best interest; having allowed all this irreversibly crazy shit to happen, maybe they’d had to cut their losses and give up on old instructions. He would have loved the chance to cross-examine them about it— to determine once and for all how these monsters conceptualized the world—but it was a vain hope indeed.

They were rough, dressing him. They seemed to know which way his joints could bend, and how much pressure his flesh could take without bruising, but at the same time they showed zero regard for his comfort or dignity, for his half-full stomach and bladder, for his ability to draw a proper breath. They worked quickly, slapping the paper-doll cutouts of wellstone film onto his front and back and sealing them together somehow with their fingertips, which apparently doubled as matter programmers. The boots and gloves were trickier and more painful, and the loose, bucket-shaped helmet was the worst of all, because it was still opaque, and seemed to suffocate him even before they’d sealed it on.

“Clear, clear!” he shouted, then, “Transparent!”

But there wasn’t any voice interface. The wellstone couldn’t hear him. Fortunately the robots switched it on somehow, and the whole suit turned to clear plastic around him, just before the neck seam was fingered shut and sealed beneath his adam’s apple. And then he was cartwheeling through the air, the blank fax plate looming before him, and he had just enough time to curse before ...

Pop!

... he was tumbling out of the fax again, into total chaos. Film and dust. Darkness, bodies. Splintered wood and crumpled wellstone, lit only by the dim yellow corner markers of the fax machine itself, and by starlight streaming in from ...

Spinning through the mess, Conrad struggled to make sense of what he was seeing. They had crashed, obviously, and the stars outside weren’t wheeling visibly, so presumably the fetula had slammed into something solid. Something heavy and immovable. The barge. But they were alive , or Conrad was anyway, so they obviously hadn’t smacked into it head-on. Which meant ... the magnetic braking had worked?

Conrad struck some yielding surface, sank in for a moment and then bounced away. Moving and spinning more slowly now. There was nothing resembling a ceiling or floor here, no walls or windows. The braking program had called for a peak deceleration of 260 gee—six and a half “train wrecks” according to Conrad’s mechanics textbook—and under that shock the wood and wellwood of the cabin had been pulverized. From what he could see— which wasn’t much—there weren’t any pieces left larger than his arm. But after that peak, the fetula should slow down rapidly. And as it stopped and reversed, the field strength was supposed to reduce by a factor of a million, so the final docking—the actual physical impact between fetula and barge—would be slow and gentle.

This vaguely curving flatness to his left—was that the outer hull of the barge? A tiny section of a great, kilometer-long cylinder? Yes, he could see it now: Viridity lay crumpled against the barge like a wadded-up rag. The sail would be flat against the barge’s hull, lightly bonded to it, and the wellstone film enclosing D’rector Jed’s cabin had mostly held together, but had burst at the seams, leaving puffy, labial openings through which the air had fled, and through which splinters of wood and other material were now streaming out into the void of space.

A hand gripped his elbow. He turned—he’d gotten quite good at turning in zero gravity without having to hold onto anything—and saw Xmary there in the dimness: barefoot in camp culottes and cutoff tee shirt, with her hair poofed out by static electricity and the clear, shiny membrane of space suit swollen around her like a girl-shaped balloon.

Behind her, holding her in unseemly ways, were Bascal and Karl. And beside them was a single, battered Palace Guard. Conrad didn’t see the other one anywhere. Had it been pulverized? Ejected into space? Dangling from the remaining guard’s foot was Ho, wearing what looked in the poor light like a very frightened expression. Conrad—who was too stunned to be afraid—felt a moment of smugness about that, but when he followed Ho’s gaze to one of the wellstone’s ripped openings, he saw a human-shaped form outside, shrinking and struggling against a backdrop of stars. The missing guard?

No! Jesus and the little gods, that was Martin, thirty meters away and still going. Conrad could just barely make out his face, twisted into a breathless scream while the arms and legs flailed, pulling and pushing at nothing, swimming helplessly against the vacuum.

“Gods!” Conrad shrieked at the others. “Help him! Throw him something!” But the others couldn’t hear him—there were no radios in these crude, makeshift suits, and the vacuum around him absorbed the sounds of his voice like a smothering pillow. The Palace Guard— if it was even alive—clearly wasn’t going to help, and a cursory look around told Conrad there was nothing in here to throw, nothing but dust and splinters, a few jagged lightning bolts of former pine log.

Could Martin catch some pieces of wood, and turn around and throw them behind him? Use them for propulsion? Shaking off Xmary’s grasp, Conrad snatched up one of the fragments and hurled it in Martin’s direction. The throw went wild, though, striking the filmy edge of the rip and spinning away into the void.

A wet fog began to form on the material in front of Conrad’s face, and he realized he was breathing very heavily, using up his limited oxygen supply. He forced himself to slow down, take this whole thing more carefully and thoughtfully. He wiped uselessly at his face bubble, but of course the fog was on the inside. Slow down. Slow down.

He took up another, bigger hunk of wood. He moved, very deliberately, right into the opening, so that its suggestive lip-edges were pressing lightly against the balloon of his own space suit. He cocked his arm back, making sure he had room for the swing, and then he lined up on Martin and let fly. This time the shot was good: straight on target and with virtually no spin. Martin saw it coming, and grabbed at it, and seized it firmly the way a drowning man might. Climbing it, practically.

But that was it. He didn’t turn around, didn’t try to throw it. All Conrad could see of his face now were the whites of his eyes, which seemed impossibly wide and round. He didn’t understand what Conrad was trying to do, and Conrad couldn’t tell him. Did he expect to be reeled in on a line? Was he thinking at all, or simply flailing in a blind panic? The white, wet fog began to expand once more against clear wellstone, and Conrad had to force himself, again, to slow down his breathing.

There were cables out there somewhere: the seven-hundred-meter wellstone guylines that had connected cabin to sail. He fantasized briefly about tying one of these around his waist, and then leaping heroically into the void to snag Martin in a footballer’s two-armed waist hug. He hunted visually for several seconds, his eyes adjusting to the wrinkled gray-black of wellstone sail against the unlit rails and poles and smooth whiteness of the barge’s hull, and the dappled blackness of the larger universe. He quickly found what he was looking for: a snarl of ribbonlike material protruding from beneath the crumple of Viridity’s mortal remains.

He reached for it, then realized he’d have to step outside to get it. Then realized there were no ends; he’d have to untangle eighty meters of line just to think about jumping. And then he’d have to jump, and then he’d have to climb back down the ribbon, hand-over-hand, probably fighting with a panicky Martin Liss every centimeter of the way. And then he’d be back where he started, right here at the edge of Viridity’s crumple.

And the thing about that was, he didn’t have enough air. The atmosphere in these suits was pure oxygen—or supposed to be, anyway—but the pressure was really low. The total amount of oxygen was meager, and already he could feel the difference. Already the suit was losing its ability to sustain him, and in another few minutes its oxygen would be gone, and if he hadn’t found some way into some habitable space inside the barge, then he would suffocate, and he and Martin would both be dead.

At that moment, Conrad made a management decision of his own: he was not going to save Martin. There were unsavory little corollaries to this thought: Martin had understood and agreed to this particular risk. Martin was not key personnel—he didn’t have any specific skills or knowledge that could help keep everyone else alive. There were plenty more Martins where this one had come from—an inexhaustible supply. And anyway, Conrad didn’t like Martin. Didn’t know Martin, and after weeks of sharing the same cramped space together, that said an awful lot. But though he felt rotten inside, these shameful assertions were fleeting and beside the point; Conrad wasn’t prepared to get himself killed for no reason, for no net gain.

And it struck him then—a kind of premonition—that his life would never be entirely peaceful, that he would never choose a peaceful life. As he turned his back on Martin Liss, he realized that there would be others. In the immorbid infinity of his future, there would be others whom he would knowingly abandon to certain—and horrible—death. He was glad, suddenly, that there were no radios in these suits.

A hand gripped the meat of his elbow. Xmary again, and this time she held him so firmly that her fingers made contact nearly all the way around, causing the wellstone balloon around his arm to bulge into two separate, sausagey tubes.

He looked at her. She was pointing. The others were still connected to her in a human chain, with the Palace Guard at its far end, and Xmary was pointing through a different opening in the crumple of wellstone. Something was blinking out there, some sort of blue warning beacon shining up through the folded, beetle-black wellstone of the sail. And beyond the flashing light he could make out the edges of a circular, sail-covered depression. An airlock? A cargo hatch? Waste disposal chute? It hardly mattered, if it offered a way inside.

The guard wasn’t moving—its feet were still anchored somehow—so that left Conrad to lead the chain. Would the guard follow? It would have to, unless it wanted to scoop Bascal up and carry him personally. Which, come to think of it, was probably exactly what it would do if they took too long about this. Would it scatter the rest of them in the process, spinning them off into the void, or slamming the hatch in their faces?

The fog deepened on Conrad’s soap bubble of a helmet. That hatch was seventy meters away, and while the barge’s hull had rungs and rails and handholds all over it—as any real spaceship did—they were draped over with folded layers of sail. Fortunately, there was no air trapped between the layers, puffing them out, and the light magnetic bonding held the layers together as well as holding them down against the hull. Still, it looked like a hell of a climb, and it had to happen quickly.

All right, then. Trying hard to keep his breathing slow, trying not to think about Martin or Bascal or anything else, he moved toward the opening, groping with his free hand. Even in the dimness he spotted the rail before he felt it; closing his hand around it was like grabbing a window sash with the curtains down. And while the filmy material was light and flexible, it had no stretch to it. Pressing a few centimeters of it in around the rail, he had to push hard enough to straighten out wrinkles for meters in every direction. Fortunately, the stuff wasn’t slippery, and neither was the clear, balloony glove around his hand. Air pressure wanted to keep his fingers straight, but he was stronger than it was. The wellstone bulged over the backs of his fingers as he tightened his grip on the handrail.

“One,” he said to himself.

The next move was trickier, as it involved his right arm. He literally had to drag Xmary and the others along as he reached for the further handhold. But though they had inertia, they didn’t have weight. It took no real strength to move them, just precision and patience. He looked over his shoulder and saw the Palace Guard take a step, to keep the chain from tightening dangerously. He sighed. With that rock-solid footing, it could easily lead the way, dragging the rest of them along behind it. As it was, he supposed it could at least serve as a safety anchor.

His hand closed around the second rail. “Two.”

Rails three and four were much the same, although Xmary was finding her own grip on “one” with her free left hand. But by the time he got to six, the human chain hanging onto him was like a mutant centipede with half its legs torn off, moving in jerks and thrashes. It took more concentration to get his handholds right, especially since these rails were cocked toward him at a funny angle. There was a row of them leading directly to the hatch, though, and when he finally got onto it—and straightened the chain behind him—the going was easier.

Still, the fog thickened around his head, beads of moisture forming here and there on the film. And with every step he could feel his air growing weaker and more foul, and something else, too: a loss of heat. It wasn’t like standing outside on a cold night, where the chill of the air seeped gradually into warm flesh. In fact, he was pretty sure the empty vacuum around him was the best possible insulator. But he was radiating heat from his unprotected skin. It was a very distinct sensation, unlike anything he’d ever felt before. He was a man-shaped infrared lamp, shining his energies into the void. A couple of hours out here would, he realized, freeze him solid: a man-shaped block of ice, with no heat energy left to bleed away. But fortunately, he would suffocate long before that happened.

Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three.

He began to worry about the hatch itself, looming dimly in the distance. They would have to uncover it, pulling away tens or even hundreds of meters of folded sail fabric without losing their grip on the barge’s hull. Such a thing was surely possible, but did they have the time? Was there some other way? Should he continue on to the sail’s edge—some thirty meters farther along—and try to crawl back underneath it, with the hatch’s blue beacon lighting the way?

Fifty-six. Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight.

He decided to head straight for the hatch, and see at least briefly what he could accomplish there. They had taken so many crazy, deadly risks already, it seemed silly to try anything other than the direct approach first.

Seventy-one. Seventy-two ...

And when he finally drew even with the circular depression—which please-gods had to be a hatch of some sort—the Palace Guard surprised him by striding forward several paces, dragging a twisted-up Ho and Karl behind it. The robot bent at the waist, doubling itself over and extending a finger, which touched the wellstone fabric and parted it. In a funny and quite poetic way, the robot extended itself jackknife style, pushing the finger along and straightening its body, until it stood inside the hatchway depression, its entire body now flush with the hull, framed by a vertical rent in the wellstone. What a trick!

And then, with equal poise, it swept both arms in wide circles, slashing open a pair of flaps in the film that exposed exactly the thing they most hoped to see: beneath the flashing beacon—brighter now that the gray-black film was off it—lay a circular hatch with the word ENTER emblazoned on it in softly glowing letters. The Palace Guard tapped this word lightly, and the hatch slid open with jarring, shocking speed. And then the guard stepped sideways, pivoting forty-five degrees in the hatchway’s circle, and then stepped back, swinging up and out until it was standing on the rim again, vertical to the barge’s hull.

Poor Ho looked like a pretzel, still clinging to the robot’s leg, with his own leg firmly grasped by Karl. Nevertheless, Conrad was spellbound for a moment, astonished by the beauty and economy and swiftness of the robot’s movements. These Palace Guards would make amazing dancers.

Then its arm was moving, and Conrad was struck by the fear that it would simply tear Bascal out of the human chain, stuff him in the airlock, and let the rest of them join Martin in the Great Beyond. But instead it pointed, a fluid gesture that conveyed a sense of urgency: get in there, now. And Conrad wasn’t going to argue with it; he felt for a handrail he knew would be there, and dragged himself around and inside, hauling Xmary and Bascal and the others along behind him.

Inside, the hatch was nearly as large—well, half as large—as Viridity’s bridge. A white-walled cylindrical chamber, filled with handrails and winking lights and softly glowing paragraphs of text. “Caution.” “Warning.” “Zero Atmosphere and You: a Primer.” There was room for all five of them in here, but not the guard as well. And that was bad, very bad. But when Ho finally let go of that metal leg and bounced fully into the hatchway, the guard itself did not follow. Instead, it bent again at the waist, and tapped the rim of the hole. The hatch slid shut immediately, and the lights came up: bright white.

The Palace Guard had allowed itself to be separated from Prince Bascal. Good gods, what balance of risks and compulsions had prompted that? What sensor data was it relying on? Had the thing concluded Bascal needed his friends more than he needed armed escort? Had it suffered a moment of deviant compassion?

Almost immediately, Conrad felt the balloon of his space suit shriveling around him as the chamber filled up with air. This worried him vaguely; rapid changes in pressure weren’t supposed to be good for you, although he couldn’t remember why. He did feel his ears popping, but no other ill effects. Maybe the fax machine, realizing it was dumping them into vacuum, had compensated in some way? Made it all right?

This chain of thought was broken when the “floor” under them—really just another hatch, with the same ENTER sign on it—slid open with a whoomp! and a clang!

“Jesus!” Ho shouted down at the thing, and yeah, of course, they could hear each other now. They weren’t in vacuum.

“Guys, I’m running out of air,” Karl panted, grabbing at the plasticky material over his head and trying, with plasticky hands, to pull it off. Conrad didn’t see how that could work—even as a thin film, wellstone was tough stuff—but he understood Karl’s anxiety, and in fact couldn’t resist tugging at his own hood a little.

“Me too. Me too. How do we get these off?” Their voices were muffled by the thin barrier of space suit.

“You have to pull up the programming interface,” Bascal said. “It’ll take a few minutes.”

“I don’t have a few minutes,” Karl said, tugging harder, panting harder.

“You’re fine,” Bascal reassured him, though he sounded far from certain.

Conrad was panting as well, and looking at the world through the ever-thickening haze inside his bubble hood. The blobs of moisture there were crawling, ever so slowly, toward his left. Was there a bit of gravity here? It was a neutronium barge, loaded with supercondensed matter, so probably, yeah. But that didn’t help him breathe.

“You’re the only one,” he told Bascal, “who knows how to work these. There isn’t enough time. For everybody. Is there?”

And here, damn all the little gods, was yet another life-and-death triage operation. Bascal would take his own suit off first, and then Xmary’s, and then Ho or Conrad, and Karl—who clearly needed it the most—would have to come last. Could he live that long? Hell, he was turning blue already.

“The robot,” Conrad said, as the thought struck him. “It can open all of them. Quickly.”

“Robot isn’t here,” said Ho, not even bothering to append any sort of threat or insult. He was at the mercy of external forces—his life had just been saved by Conrad Mursk—and it was having a marked effect on his attitude.

“We’ve got to get out of the airlock chamber,” Bascal said, raising his arm up to shoo them all down, into the darkness of the barge’s interior.

Xmary was the first to go, and as she exited the cylindrical chamber, additional lights came on at the other side, revealing a sort of maintenance corridor or oversized crawl space: all waffled metal and access panels. Ho quickly followed her, and then Conrad, with Bascal trailing along behind, pulling a gasping Karl along with him.

But when they exited the chamber, the inner door didn’t automatically close, and Xmary had to hunt for the controls and then burn precious seconds reading the instructions—whatever they were—before deciding on a particular button and slapping it with her hand. Then the hatch closed, and next came a series of clanking and whooshing noises, followed by silence.

To Conrad’s surprise, Bascal set right to work on Karl, pulling up a programming interface on his back and tapping in a series of commands or menu selections.

“Shit,” he said once. And then, a few seconds later, “Come on, you.” Then he was silent for a while, working.

“Do we know the air is good?” Xmary asked.

“Do we care?” Bascal singsonged back in a snotty way.

And then, suddenly, a light flickered on Karl’s back, and seams appeared all around the garment, and it was falling open into man-shaped cutouts, the hood peeling back, the gloves splitting open. Karl gasped, and gasped again, and if there’d been any kind of real gravity here he’d’ve fallen to his knees. Instead, he relaxed into a fetal curl.

Taking the hint, Conrad tapped his arm, trying to pull up a programming interface of his own. But that sort of bottom-level interface was more Bascal’s specialty than Conrad’s. He’d opened exactly one seam before in his life—in the liner of Camp Friendly—and he realized with sudden panic that he couldn’t remember how to do it.

But then, with a whoosh! and a clang! the airlock’s inner door slammed open again, and there was the Palace Guard framed in the hatchway lights. Back with its prince again, after that shocking dereliction of duty. It seemed for the slightest fraction of a moment to consider the scene in front of it, but then, with a whoosh! of its own, it was in motion.

It threw itself at Bascal with such ferocity that it might have been attacking him, except that it missed, and in passing it dragged a finger vertically along his chest, then slashed it horizontally across his neck. The Guard’s trajectory carried it into the far wall, where it rebounded immediately on a path that carried it past Ho and Xmary. The slashing motions of its hand were almost too quick to see, and then its feet were on the ceiling and it was running or jumping or something, and it swung away on an arc heading straight for Conrad. Slash! Slash! For a moment, its arm and finger loomed large in his sight.

And then, as quickly as the robot had launched itself, it froze in place, assuming its usual statuesque pose with arms hanging down at its sides. And then, maybe a second after the opening of the hatch, all the seams had a chance to separate, and everyone’s space suits were peeling open like clear plastic flowers.

Was the air good? Hell if he cared; Conrad drew the deepest breath of his life, then let it out, then drew it in again. He was fighting his way free of the space suit, stripping it away from his sweat-chilled arms and legs, away from his tee shirt and shorts, away from his shoes. He was yanking it off and kicking it away like it was hot or poisonous, and he was breathing deeply of the barge’s air. And yeah, it was good.

“Fuck,” he said. “Oh, fuck. Oh fuck. We almost didn’t make it.”

“Almost, hell,” Bascal said, throwing himself at the wall and kissing it hard. “It’s a fucking miracle.”

And it was, too. They’d left eleven brothers behind— nine dead and two missing—but they’d pulled off a journey of such daring and gall that even they themselves couldn’t believe it. How amazing, how amazing it was to be standing inside a neutronium barge 140 million kilometers from the ruins of Camp Friendly. No one had caught them, stopped them, probably even seen them, and the fact that anyone had survived at all was ... well, miraculous.

“Today we make fuckin’ history,” Ho Ng said, with a greater depth of conviction than Conrad would have imagined he could muster.

And Karl and Xmary were hugging each other and laughing, and Bascal came forward and slapped Conrad on the cheek twice, just hard enough to convey a sense of manly camaraderie.

“We did it,” he said. “We fucking did it.”

“Well, congratulations,” said a deep, loud, unfamiliar and quite angry voice in the corridor behind them. “Just who the hell are you?”

Conrad turned around, expecting to see navy troopers or Royal Constabulary there. He even raised his arms partway in surrender, before noticing it was a bunch of naked human beings. Blue ones, with the pastel shade of artificial skin pigment rather than paint, and the kinky hair and broad features to suggest their natural coloration would be rather darker. But any reassurance he might have felt at this comical sight quickly evaporated when he noticed the weapons: dart guns and heavy wrenches.

“Jesus!” Karl squawked.

“Greetings, naked people,” Bascal said, with remarkable aplomb. He pushed off with a foot, then caught himself with a hand, positioning himself in front of the others, in good light where his face could be clearly seen.

“Who are you?” one of the naked men repeated. He looked about twenty or twenty-five years old, which could mean anything. There were two other men beside him, and two women lurking behind them at a bend in the corridor. Both were painfully pretty despite their blueness (or because of it?), and although one had a wrench and the other a dart gun, Conrad couldn’t keep his eyes off their faces and breasts, the darker blue of their lips and nipples and pubic hair.

“I’m the Prince of Sol,” Bascal replied, sounding surprised.

“Sure you are,” the man answered tightly. His voice was very deep, and it seemed to Conrad that that was a natural feature as well. The Queendom was full of poseurs who altered their looks and sound and smell with special fax machines and genome appendices, but unless it was subtle you could always kind of tell. So: natural voice, natural hair, natural facial features, all packaged in a decidedly unnatural skin. The guy sounded angry, too, and kind of scared. The gun he held wasn’t aimed at anything specific, but he was ready with it. And his blue cock and balls, now that Conrad noticed, were shriveled up against him, cowering.

“Wait a minute,” one of the women said. “I think he is.”

“Stay out, Agnes,” the man answered nervously.

“No, really,” the woman said. “That’s Bascal Edward. He’s just older, is all. That robot is his bodyguard!”

Seizing the initiative, Bascal said, “I’d move very slowly if I were you. It’s a state-of-the-art Palace Guard. So when exactly did the neutronium industry go Blue Nudist? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Cute,” the man said, gesturing a little with the gun. It was the wrong thing to do; immediately, the Palace Guard raised a finger and nailed the little weapon with a bolt of energy. The man screamed, flinging the piece away, and Conrad thought for a moment that he saw quicksilver drops of molten metal splashing where it hit the wall.

“Ow! Crap! What are you doing here? Who sent you?”

“Sent?” Bascal’s mask of certainty slipped a bit. “We came here to use the fax. We’re castaways.”

“From what? Prison? Piracy?”

“Summer camp.”

The naked people stared back blankly, unable to process that comment into anything useful.

“Maybe you should explain,” the man said finally. He was holding a rail with his uninjured hand and another with his free, naked foot. The hand that had held the gun now trembled against his chest.

“Who are you people?” Bascal couldn’t seem to help asking.

The man’s gaze narrowed. “What? You first, kid. Prince. What are you doing here? Why did you attack our ship?”

“Your ship?” Bascal repeated.

“Attack?” Conrad said. “We crashed here. Well, sort of crashed.”

There was another brief silence, and then Xmary said, “You seem nervous. Sir. We’re not here on any sort of official business. We were marooned on a planette, and escaped in a homemade fetula.”

One of the women said something in a clicky, guttural language Conrad was certain he’d never heard before. Something angry and menacing, which included the English words “Jolly Roger” and “magnet ray.”

“We came here to use the fax,” Bascal said again. “We’re trying to get to Denver.”

“Why?” the man demanded.

The prince held up a hand, his voice hardening. “All right, look. What’s your name?”

The man’s frown deepened for a moment, and then partially relaxed. “I’m Robert. Robert M’chunu.”

“Our leader,” said the woman named Agnes, in a half-joking tone.

“There are no leaders here,” Robert called back over his shoulder, in a weary way that suggested he said this often, and would be happy if he never had to say it again. Then, turning back, he seemed for the first time to notice the Camp Friendly tee shirts that everyone except smelly Ho had on. He rubbed his lips with his gun hand, thinking about that. “Summer camp. You came to use the fax? There’s no network gate, you know. We sabotaged it a long time ago.”

“No gate?” Bascal said. “No gate? Why the hell not? That’s the whole reason we came here!”

“We didn’t want anyone following us,” Agnes said. “We didn’t want to be found.”

Bascal digested that for a couple of seconds, and then said, “I think it’s time you explain this to me. Why are there naked stowaways on a Mass Industries neutronium barge? Vandalizing a neutronium barge, and threatening visitors?”

That charge took some serious gall, Conrad thought. But it seemed to have the desired effect; Robert and his people shrank back ever so slightly, cowed by the imaginary authority of a figurehead prince. But then again, the threat of the Palace Guard was real enough. Conrad was frankly surprised the thing had reacted as mildly as it did. Emotionally, it must be in some robotic equivalent of righteous fury, prepared at any moment to lash out against these looming figures who dared to threaten. But something stayed its hand, some impulse of curiosity or diplomacy or decorum, some intuitive balance between danger and opportunity. There was no point trying to understand these monsters; Conrad watched them and watched them, and yet their inner machinations remained inscrutable. Not human, no, but not simplistic either.

It was the man to Robert M’chunu’s right who answered, “We’re castaways as well. The South African Territories are no place for a child these days.”

Bascal considered that. “You brought children with you?”

“We are children. We were.”

And then a look of understanding bloomed over Bascal’s features, and he smiled. “Runaways! Ah! You left copies at home, yes? Nobody knows you’re here.”

Warily, resignedly, Robert nodded. “Correct, yah.” He was nursing his hand, which sported angry, growing welts on the palm and fingers.

“Why here?” Xmary asked.

He shrugged. “No place more remote. We jam the gates, why, we’re on our own until the holds are full of neubles and the barge heads back to the Queendom. Twenty years, maybe. A lifetime.”

Still grinning, Bascal shook an accusing finger. “You’ve got your own little Bluetopia here. No leaders, no clothes ... Or did we blunder into the middle of something? An orgy? A ceremony?”

“We’re nudists,” Agnes confirmed.

“It’s restricted in TSA,” Robert explained. “You have to be twenty-five before you can even apply for the permits. I tried a different body plan for a while—two extra legs and a short coat of hair to cover the naughty bits. Never got ticketed—the cops thought it was cute—but I needed this big horse’s behind to fit the legs on, and I just got tired of it. I want to be me, not some creature. They just don’t want a young man’s dongle hanging out.”

“Unconscionable,” Bascal said. “So you escaped! Went as far and as free as the Nescog would carry you, and cut yourselves off. When you finally return, and reintegrate with your original selves, you’ll be gifting them with the precious memory of twenty years of freedom . There might be some fines and penalties involved, but that’s okay— your selves will never be the same. Nobody who even hears about it will ever see their lives in quite the same way. This is brilliant; this is great! How many of you are there?”

Robert examined his injured hand, then glowered at the prince. “Don’t pretend to understand, Your Highness. This is our private business.”

“And ours,” Bascal said, spreading his arms a bit. “We’ve lost our only transportation.”

“Robert,” Agnes said, “I don’t think he’s Tamra’s perfect little Poet Prince anymore. He said it himself: he’s a runaway, too.”

“You have been away a long time,” Xmary observed. “He’s well known as a troublemaker.”

“If nobody knows they’re here,” the other woman said menacingly, “we can safely put them out the airlock.” The Palace Guard, turning its head with a faint click and whirr, rewarded this comment with a hard, faceless robotic stare. Try it, lady.

Bascal, for his part, chose to ignore her. “What time of the day is it here? I suggest introductions, and then a tour. Well, maybe a bathroom break as well.” He looked around at the surviving campers, as if gathering consensus. “We’re very eager to see what you people are up to.”

Whatever Utopia they were building here, it certainly wasn’t a naturalist one. Some of the foods were hand-picked from the garden: rich avocados and sweet melon tarts, onion grass and bamboo shoots. They even had a peach pie tree. This seemed to be more a matter of convenience and aesthetics than anything else, though— they liked having food plants around, and if the fruits weren’t harvested as they ripened, they would simply rot, or else sprout into additional, unwanted greenery. Eating them was easier.

But the sound baffle’s huge circular chamber had a fifty-meter-thick conduit running floor-to-ceiling through its center, and a maintenance panel on its capward side included a small fax machine, which in fact produced the bulk of this Refuge breakfast. There were cereals with milk, sausages with cheese, and other foods with no natural equivalent at all: sweetpapers and mulm, as well as the rich yellow paste they called “fressen.”

It was a bland but hearty breakfast, served in tiny glass dishes with metal forks and spoons, and the blue nudists gathered these small portions around them in great number. Everyone had a little bit of everything, it seemed, which added up to an awful lot of food.

“Tell me you don’t eat this much for lunch,” Bascal joked.

“Certainly no,” Robert answered seriously. “Breakfast is the energy meal.”

“A spread-out meal, too,” the prince observed.

They were all sitting around the gravity depressions, which turned out to be nice places to eat picnic-style, without any of the hassle of zero-gee dining. Wouldn’t have worked, Conrad suspected, if the dirt were thicker or softer or wetter than it was, or if there’d been bugs, or anything like that. But this place was more like a hydroponics lab than any sort of real garden. Even the dirt was, in some indefinable way, clean.

The Camp Friendlies sat together, with Robert and Money and Agnes, and a sour-faced Brenda, who looked ready to slap the food out of their hands and spit on it. Still, even twisted with anger, her azure features were anything but haggish. Conrad’s impulsive side kept yammering at him to touch, touch, touch these naked women. Karl and Ho, hard-up after weeks aboard Viridity, must be feeling the same; Conrad himself had only once found the privacy to jerk off, and it hadn’t been too terribly satisfying. But touching anyone here without the clearest invitation would likely provoke an incident, and touching Brenda in particular could result in the loss of a limb, or worse.

And what would Xmary think? Not that that should matter to him, but little gods, he wasn’t going to kid himself about it. The symptoms of heartsickness were less pressing here in these open spaces, with life and strangers all around, but the illness itself remained, like a shackle around his chest.

More TSA refugees sat together at the next depression, two hundred meters or so around the donut. It seemed very far away indeed, but not everyone fit there, so still another small crowd was clustered at the next one down. They were only barely visible: tiny figures sitting cross-legged in a cone of light, against a backdrop of dark weeds.

The dogs were here as well, gleefully loping through the air, slipping in and out of the gravity zones with tongues and tails wagging. They, at least, were not blue.

“Yah,” Robert agreed, “it does make a pretty diffuse cafeteria. But we don’t always eat in the same circles. We move around; we mix it up. The variety is nice.”

“What do you do with all these calories?” Xmary asked, picking at the greasy remains of her own breakfast. “You must get a lot of exercise.”

Agnes nodded slightly. “Some, yah. Twice-a-week calisthenics.”

“We had that,” Karl said. “We had it every day for an hour.”

“We used to,” Agnes said, wrinkling her nose. “But I like twice a week better. The ship and the garden keep us busy enough.”

Tucking away a final sausage, Bascal burped, excused himself politely, and asked, “The ship really takes care of itself, though, right?”

“Hardly,” Robert answered with a half-snort. “It isn’t meant for live-in crew, remember. Certainly not this many. Cleaning up after ourselves is a major chore. And you’d be surprised how many things corrode or break or come loose during normal operation, and how little of that shows up in the maintenance logs the shipping company would see. Even with regular inspections and crew rotations, it’s got to add up. When these things pull into port, lugging fifty or a hundred neubles in their groaning bellies, they must be a real shambles. I can only imagine the situation a hundred years from now.”

“Why?” Bascal said. “What happens a hundred years from now?”

“The lower Kuiper gets depleted. We’ve already wrangled a third of it. You see, the Nescog uses lots of collapsium, and the mass has to come from somewhere. Finite supply. Next century, the barges will be trolling in the higher bands, where the distances are greater and comet density is lower. Consequently, missions will be longer and more difficult to support.”

“Oh. I see.” Bascal nodded. “You know, if it helps, we saw a couple of big icebergs on our way down. Near-contact binary, maybe a hundred kilometers each. That’s got to be, what, a few thousand neubles’ worth?”

“At least,” Robert said, nodding. “You’re probably talking about the Cyades, which are a landmark in this part of the belt. If so, it’s more like half a million neubles. So thank you for the tip, but of course we can’t swallow mass in such big chunks. Our orbit crosses the Cyades in about five years, and we’ll do the same thing everyone else does when they pass it: fire the laser a few times to knock off a gigaton of snow. One free neuble, maybe two, for our trouble. Eventually Mass Industries will send an engineering team to blow the thing up, and park a fleet of crushers right there on the site.”

Bascal snorted. “Some way to treat a landmark. Not very sentimental, eh?”

“No,” Robert agreed. “They can’t afford to be. The Queendom’s appetite is perhaps not bottomless, but certainly no one has found the bottom of it yet.”

Here was an issue Conrad had never thought about— he’d always heard the Kuiper’s resources described as “limitless.” But of course, in reality nothing ever was. He’d also thought, naïvely, that all this time they were sailing across a vast, empty wilderness. Were they really just sneaking through a construction site? Could all their trials and tribulations really boil down to something as banal as that?

No, he decided, they could not. As an act of will, he stated it to himself axiomatically: the drama of their journey was inherent in the journey itself, and could not be divided or diminished. The alternative—that they were wasting their time—implied that their individual and collective actions had no meaning, and perhaps never would. And if he believed that, then why do anything at all?

“What happens when the higher bands are depleted?” he asked pointedly.

Money Izolo nodded with approval. “Yah, it’s going to be a real concern. At present growth rates we see maybe a thousand years of Kuiper left to harvest. After that, it’s up to the Oort Cloud for another few thousand, but that’s a lot farther away. We may need ertial shielding on the barges just to make the journey economical. Either that, or a lot more barges.”

“Or less demand for neutronium,” Conrad said.

“Or that, yah. And after the Oort is gone, it’s the comets and wanderers and failed stars of near interstellar space, where the economics get even thinner. I think about this a lot. We’re immortal, right?”

“Immorbid,” Bascal corrected apologetically. “We can die.”

“But we can’t be unhealthy,” Izolo said, grasping the meaning of the term. “All right, but we will live to see these things, yah? The empty Kuiper, the vanished Oort. And then what?”

Nobody had an answer for him.

“This is good food,” Xmary thought to say. “If perhaps a bit heavy.”

“Oh, gods yeah,” Karl agreed. “Much better than that crap we had on the ship. Thank you.”

“That reminds me!” Bascal said. “Our fax machine survived the crash. A bit worse for wear, I’m sure, but if it’s still out there in the wreckage, we should probably go retrieve it at some point. Even a battered, restricted fax is better than none.”

“For the journey onwards?” Robert asked. “You’ve decided to leave, then?”

Bascal looked around at his crew. “We haven’t decided anything. We haven’t had a chance to talk, or even shower. I’m just thinking ahead. We certainly don’t want to let good equipment go to waste.”

“No,” Robert agreed. Among the handful of things a fax machine couldn’t produce were neutronium, collapsium, antimatter, or any product or component bigger than itself. The list even included that most commonplace of objects: the print plate of another fax machine. In a Queendom of plenty, these were hard-currency items, not lightly cast away. “But those little plastic space suits you came in are frightful. And you didn’t use lines? Or safety clips? Dangerous.”

“We know,” Bascal said. “We lost a man on the way in.”

“You did? Jesus and the little gods. I’m sorry. Can you send your robot out?”

“This thing? This Palace Guard? It won’t leave my side. Ever, as long as I live.”

Except that it had, just this morning, to save the lives of Bascal’s remaining shipmates. Conrad’s mind kept returning to that small miracle, mulling it over, scanning it for meaning. He was not a big believer in luck, but what did that leave? The god of lightsails?

“What about Martin?” he said. “There should still be a fresh image of him in the machine, minus only the death by suffocation. We should get him out of there while we still can. From what I saw, there’s not much holding it down. If it drifts away, we’re going to lose him again.”

“Oh. Good point.” Xmary groaned. “I hate to say it—I really hate to say it—but we need to go back out there. Now.”

Gaping, Robert shook his head. “You? Jesus, no. You stay here, my fellows. Inside. Money and I—all of us here—we’re experienced in this sort of vacuum work. We’ll equip up at the inventory and mount a proper retrieval. Bring your fax machine back in one piece.”

“Well, thank you,” Bascal said. “That’s very kind.”

“No, not at all.” Robert’s grin was uneasy. “You’re the prince, yah? I ask you, truly, how’s it going to look if we get you killed?”

Conrad half expected to wind up in the same interrogation room as before, with Officer Leslie of the Dandelion Sweater. It seemed like a very Queendom-of-Sol way to handle the situation: assign a caseworker to each unruly child, build a rapport, write a series of lengthy analyses.... But instead he was led to a windowless holding cell: larger and darker, with an actual cage door that slammed shut with the clang of metal and the mirrored gleam of impervium bars.

He was in a basement somewhere; he didn’t know what city, or even what planet. Could be Venus for all he knew; there were towns there now, on the highlands, and the gravity was indistinguishable. Why they would ship him there he had no idea, but he also had no idea why they’d separated everyone, and locked him up alone. This wasn’t the Denver police station, he knew that much, but the cool, processed air provided no other clues.

How long they left him there alone was something he never learned, because in point of fact he was exhausted. It had been a long day, commencing with the fax deaths and ensuing argument aboard Viridity. More than a week had passed since then, and though he’d been stored as data for most of that time, he’d still lived through twenty or thirty hours of it, all in one big subjective push. He was running, he realized now, on a pure adrenaline high.

But with the action suddenly over, the fear and uncertainty ended, and the heavy Refuge breakfast still weighing him down, he simply stretched out on one of the cell’s bunks and went straight to sleep. Ah, night, Bascal had said to him once in the early days of Camp Friendly. That puts to rest the work of men.

His waking came harshly and too soon: a brightening of lights, a clanging open of the cage door.

“Hello,” said a man’s voice.

Conrad rolled over onto his side, facing the wall. “I’m sleeping.”

“Lad, we need to talk.”

Oh, shit, he knew that voice. His father’s. And presently his mom’s chimed in. “We came as soon as possible. Dear, you have no idea how worried—”

“Please, I’m so tired,” Conrad complained, but his voice sounded too whiny in his ears, too childish. After everything they’d been through—the daring, the recklessness, the sacrifice and deprivation—he had earned the right not to sound like that in front of his parents. He wasn’t a hundred years old, all right, but he didn’t feel seventeen either. And with a shock, he realized he wasn’t: it must be August by now. Since Denver, he hadn’t paid any attention to the calendar, and his late-July birthday had come and gone unnoticed. He was eighteen now, and since Bascal was a few weeks older, so should he be as well.

He didn’t feel eighteen any more than he felt seventeen, but that number at least seemed less jarring, less alien to his recent experience. Did eighteen-year-olds make credible space pirates?

“All right,” he said in a deliberately deeper voice, and hauled himself up to a sitting position. He rubbed his eyes blearily. “Hi.”

Maybel Mursk smiled, and rushed forward to crush him in a hug. “Oh, my brave, clever boy. Welcome home, lad.”

“Where am I?” Conrad asked.

“City and County of Cork,” she said, still squeezing him. Her auburn hair was a frizzy mess that tickled his face. Her company blazer was rough against his bare arms. “Very near to the house, about ten kilometers. We could almost have walked from there, on your father’s own roads.”

When she finally disengaged herself, Conrad found himself staring at his father’s hand, held out for him to shake. He did so.

“We’ve worried,” Donald Mursk said. “We’ve worried a great deal.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Conrad told him sincerely. “I had no way to contact you.”

“We’re very proud,” his father added, a bit tentatively. And that made no sense: proud of him for running away? For breaking the law? For being implicated in nine deaths?

“Of what?”

“Well...” Donald ran a hand through his hair. Like everyone else in the Queendom, he looked like a strong and confident young man, but here was a gesture that suggested otherwise. It belonged with a balding scalp, a bulging gut, a hat clutched between nervous fingers.

“Naturally we’re angry with you,” his mother said.

“Right,” Donald agreed. “Angry. But it’s a strange thing you’ve done, isn’t it? A strangely compelling thing. All sorts of people have been coming up to us and, well, complimenting. I mean, it’s illegal—”

“But not antisocial,” Maybel finished for him. “You’ve done a thing a bit like the Republican hunger strikes: powerfully expressing a viewpoint people can relate to. Mere words don’t compare.”

Conrad sighed. He was tired, and while he’d missed his parents terribly, this was not at all the homecoming he’d envisioned. “We destroyed property. We got people killed.”

“Oh, that may be,” Donald agreed seriously. “But you should hear from the dead boys themselves, before you pass judgment. In the old days we knew, there’d always be some bitter affliction keeping pace with our joys. But we knew there’d be joys. You should give your friends a bit of credit, lad.”

Conrad processed that, not knowing what to think.

“We know you and Bascal disagreed,” Maybel told him. “His letter was very clear on that point, and the visual records from the Palace Guard support it. We know you did your best.”

But Conrad was shaking his head. “No, don’t say that. I helped him. I waffled occasionally, but he always had his way in the end, every step. I deserve my equal share of blame.”

“Or credit,” his father said. “And that’s the way the law sees it, too. You’re to be severely punished, never doubt it. Your point is well made, but now there’s little else the Queendom can do except punish. Unless it wants to encourage more of the same, and I don’t think anyone wants that.”

Listening to his parents’ voices, their faint but unmistakable accents, he considered the strange fact that the two of them lived and worked and socialized in the very town of their birth. Donald looked after the roads, yes, which few people and fewer vehicles ever used. Maybel was a housing inspector—one of six for the county. Neither of them traveled much outside of southern Ireland, or needed to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mursk?” she asked.

“That’s right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This book borrows numerous terms from its prequel, The Collapsium. Critical carryovers, plus additional terms first appearing in this volume, are defined below.

Adamantium—(n) The pseudomaterial with the highest known toughness index, and the third-highest hardness. Because it is a poor conductor of electricity, adamantium has a high energy cost to maintain in comparison with other comparable pseudomaterials.

Aft—(adj or adv) One of the ordinal directions on board a ship: along the negative roll axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and boots/caps directions, and parallel and opposite to fore.

Asteroid belt—(n) A ring-shaped region in the ecliptic plane of any star where the tidal influence of major bodies has prevented the accretion of planetessimals into larger planets. Sol’s Asteroid Belt includes the minor planet Ceres, and otherwise consists of irregular rocky bodies (asteroids) smaller than 260 kilometers across. It extends from approximately 2.2 AU at its lower boundary to 3.6 AU at its upper, with a total mass (including Ceres) less than one-tenth that of Luna.

AU—(n) Astronomical unit; the mean distance from the center of Sol to the center of Earth. Equal to 149,604,970 kilometers, or 499.028 light-seconds. The AU is the primary distance unit for interplanetary navigation.

Boots—(adj or adv) One of the six ordinal directions on board a ship: along the positive yaw axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and fore/aft directions, and parallel and opposite to caps.

Caps—(adj or adv) One of the six ordinal directions on board a ship: along the negative yaw axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and fore/aft directions, and parallel and opposite to boots.

Cardinal direction—(n) Any of the six main compass points for solar navigation: upsystem, downsystem, north, south, clock, and counter.

Chemry—(n) Any device that employs mechanical energy to drive the chemical synthesis of a product, most typically a food or fuel. Usually applied to human-portable devices; larger versions are more commonly referred to as “factories.”

Chondrite—(n) Any stony meteoroid characterized by the presence of chondrules, or round particles of primordial silicate formed during the early heating of a stellar nebula. Chondrites are similar in composition to the photospheres of their parent stars, except in iron content.

Clathrate—(adj) Of or pertaining to a compound formed by the inclusion of molecules of one substance in the crystal lattice of another. In Kuiper and Oort space, methane and noble-gas hydrates (i.e., water ices) are the most typical examples. Literally: “possessing a lattice.”

Clock (also Retrograde)—(adj or adv) One of the six cardinal directions: clockwise when facing down from solar north. In Sol system, a minority of moons and comets orbit clock.

Collapsiter—(n) A high-bandwidth packet-switching transceiver composed exclusively of collapsium. A key component of the Nescog.

Collapsium—(n) A rhombohedral crystalline material composed of neuble-mass black holes. Because the black holes absorb and exclude a broad range of vacuum wavelengths, the interior of the lattice is a supervacuum permitting the supraluminal travel of energy, information, and particulate matter. Collapsium is most commonly employed in telecommunications collapsiters; the materials employed in ertial shielding are sometimes referred to as collapsium, although the term “hypercollapsite” is more correct.

Comet—(n) Any celestial body consisting primarily of ices, clathrates, and chondritic dust. In most star systems, comet diameters are typically 100 kilometers or smaller, and rarely more than 1000 kilometers, although even in Sol system a few are 2000 kilometers or larger.

Converge (also Reconverge)—(v) To combine two separate entities, or two copies of the same entity, using a fax machine. In practice, rarely applied except to humans.

Counter (also Prograde)—(adj or adv) One of the six cardinal directions: counterclockwise when facing down from solar north. In Sol system all planets and asteroids, and the vast majority of moons and comets, orbit counter.

Declarant—(n) The highest title accorded by the Queendom of Sol; descended from the Tongan award of Nopélé, or knighthood. Only twenty-nine declarancies were ever issued.

Dinite—(n) Any detonating or deflagrating explosive consisting primarily of ethylene glycol dinitrate.

Downsystem—(adj or adv) One of the six cardinal directions: toward the sun from any orientation.

Duramer—(n) A translucent, gray-white pseudomaterial characterized by flexibility and high strength.

Ertial—(adj) Antonym of inertial, applied to inertially shielded devices. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

Fall, The—(prop n) Historical period of the early Queendom, marked by the destruction of the first Ring Collapsiter and the capture of Declarant-Philander Marlon Sykes by the forces of Bruno de Towaji. The Fall both preceded and precipitated de Towaji’s involuntary coronation as King of Sol.

Fax—(n) Abbreviated form of “facsimile.” A device for reproducing physical objects from stored or transmitted data patterns. By the time of the Restoration, faxing of human beings had become possible, and with the advent of collapsiter-based telecommunications soon afterward, the reliable transmission of human patterns quickly became routine.

Faxation—(n) The act or process of using a fax machine.

Fax Wars, The—(prop n) Historical period of the Late Modern era, characterized by abrupt changes in philosophy, religion, urban planning, and other disciplines following the introduction of practical human teleportation.

Feng shui—(n) A system of spiritual geomancy, dating to the Medieval or possibly the Classical period of East Asia. Under more technical rubric, many principles of feng shui were carried forward into the architectural and matter programming disciplines of the Queendom of Sol.

Ferromagnetism—(n) An attraction between uncharged materials, occurring when atoms of nonzero magnetic moment—containing spin-unpaired electrons and thus behaving as elementary electromagnets—spontaneously align themselves for mutual reinforcement. In atomic matter, ferromagnetism is associated with iron, cobalt, nickel, gadolinium, and certain rare earth elements.

Fetula—(n) Any vehicle propelled or controlled by the pressure of light, including sunlight, starlight, and the radiation of sila’a and other artificial sources. The term “solar sail” is sometimes applied colloquially, but in fact solar sails are a subset of fetulae. From the Tongan fetu’u (star), and la (sail).

Fore (also Forward)—(adj or adv) One of the six ordinal directions on board a ship: along the positive roll axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and boots/caps directions, and parallel and opposite to aft.

Freefall—(n) The condition of free travel through any flat or curved spacetime in the absence of perturbing forces. Colloquially, any condition in which gravity or acceleration cannot easily be perceived. Freefall is a theoretical construct that does not occur in nature.

Fressen—(n) A nutritious paste, typically yellow in color, consisting primarily of starches and saturated fats.

Friendly Products Corporation, The—(prop n) Queendom-era supplier of patterns and services for children, parents, and adult recreational facilities, including sports teams.

Gate (also Fax gate, Network gate)—(n) The physical hardware mediating the transmission of energy, information, and material objects between individual fax machines and the Nescog.

Gee (also g)—(n) A measure of gravitational or inertial acceleration, equal to the mean surface gravity of Earth at sea level.

Gigaton—(n) One billion metric tons, or 10¹² kilograms. Equal to the mass of a standard industrial neuble or collapson node (black hole).

Grappleship—(n) Any vehicle propelled by means of electromagnetic grapples. Use of grappleships was considered impractical in the Queendom until the advent of ertial shielding, though high-powered inertial devices were capable of attaining enormous accelerations.

Gravitic—(adj) Of or pertaining to gravity, either natural or artificial.

Holie—(n) Abbreviated form of “hologram.” Any three-dimensional image. Colloquially, a projected, dynamic three-dimensional image, or device for producing same.

Hypercomputer—(n) Any computing device capable of altering its internal layout. Colloquially, a computing device made of wellstone.

Immorbid—(adj) Not subject to life-threatening disease or deterioration.

Impervium—(n) Public-domain wellstone substance; the hardest superreflector known.

Instantiate (also Print)—(v) To produce a single instance of a person or object; to fax from a stored or received pattern.

Invisible—(adj) Incapable by nature of being seen or detected in a particular wavelength range. Invisibility is distinguished from transparency in that a transparent object cannot be used to conceal other objects, whereas an invisible one can. Perfect invisibility (i.e., distortion-free) and universal invisibility (i.e., across all wavelengths) have never been demonstrated and may be physically impossible.

Kaume’a—(n) Tongan word for friend, widely used in the Queendom of Sol.

Kip (also Kips or KPS)—(n) Kilometers per second, a measure of velocity useful in interplanetary navigation.

Kuiper Belt—(n) A ring-shaped region in the ecliptic plane of any solar system, in which gravitational perturbations have amplified the concentration of large, icy bodies, or comets. Sol’s Kuiper Belt extends from 40 AU at its lower boundary to 1000 AU at its upper, and has approximately one quarter the overall density of the much smaller Asteroid Belt. The total mass of the Kuiper Belt exceeds that of Earth.

Laureate—(n) An honor bestowed by the Queendom for extraordinary service. Descended from the Nobel citation of Swedish monarchy in the Old Modern era.

Light Wars, The—(prop n) Historical period of the Late Modern era, characterized by abrupt changes in architectural and infrastructural design following the introduction of programmable matter. Practices considered exploitive of the general populace continued until the passage of the Architectural Courtesy Edicts in the third year of the Queendom of Sol.

Luna—(prop n) Original name of Earth’s moon.

Lune (also The Squozen Moon, The Half Moon)—(prop n) Name attaching to Earth’s moon following the terraforming operations that reduced its diameter from 3500 to 1400 kilometers.

Magtal—(n) A class of lustrous pseudomaterials characterized by high electron mobility and superferromagnetism. Unalloyed magtals can exhibit fixed magnetic flux densities of one million Gauss and higher. Malo e lelei—Traditional Tongan greeting widely used within the Queendom. Literally: “thank you for coming.”

Mass Industries Corporation—(prop n) Queendom-era supplier of neutronium and especially finished neubles. Majority-owned by Bruno de Towaji, MIC at its peak operated a fleet of over five hundred neutronium barges. Mass wrangler—(n) Term applied to any worker in the neutronium industry, and especially to the maintenance crews of the barges and dredges themselves.

Matter programming—(n) The discipline of arranging, sequencing, and utilizing pseudomaterials in a wellstone or other programmable-matter matrix, often including the in situ management of energy and computing resources. Microwatt—(n) One-millionth of a watt, a measure of power useful in microelectronics and the application of starlight.

Mulm—(n) An edible polymer of monounsaturated fats, typically served in pellet form.

Nanofiber—(n) Any fiber of nanoscopic dimension. Often refers to the quantum-well-based electron conduits that are woven together to form wellstone and related materials.

Nanoscopic—(adj) Existing or examined on the nanometer (10-9 meter) scale of quantum electronics and molecular machinery.

Nescog, The—(prop n) New Systemwide Collapsiter Grid. Successor to the Inner System Collapsiter Grid or Iscog; a high-bandwidth telecommunications network employing numerous supraluminal signal shunts.

Neuble—(n) A diamond-clad neutronium sphere, explosively formed, usually incorporating one or more layers of wellstone for added strength and versatility. A standard industrial neuble masses one billion metric tons, with a radius of 2.67 centimeters.

Neutronium—(n) Matter that has been supercondensed, crushing nuclear protons and orbital electron shells together into a continuous mass of neutrons. Unstable except at very high pressures. Any quantity of neutronium may be considered a single atomic nucleus; however, under most conditions the substance will behave as a fluid.

Neutronium barge (also Neutronium dredge)—(n) A space vessel, typically one billion cubic meters (1000 × 1000 × 1000 m) or larger, whose primary function is to gather mass, supercompress it into neutronium, and transport it to a depot or work site. Although less numerous, smaller neutronium barges also existed for transport only.

North—(adj or adv) One of the six cardinal directions: parallel to the positive spin axis of the sun.

Older—(prop n) Informal title or ethnic slur applied to immorbid Queendom residents by the morbid, mortal peoples of Lune.

Oort Cloud—(n) A roughly spherical shell surrounding any solar system, in which gravitational perturbations have amplified the concentration of large, icy bodies, or comets. Sol’s Oort Cloud extends from 30,000 AU at its lower boundary to 100,000 AU at its upper, and has approximately 300,000 times the mass and one-billionth the overall density of the much smaller Asteroid Belt. The orbits of Oort bodies can have periods of millions of years, and may be inclined in any direction. The total mass of the Oort Cloud exceeds that of Jupiter.

Ordinal direction—(n) Any of the six orienting points for the interior or exterior of a ship: port, starboard, fore, aft, boots, and caps.

Oxygen candle—(n) A compound of sodium chlorate and iron, typically enclosed in a metal housing, which smolders at 600° C, producing iron oxide, sodium chloride, and approximately 6.5 man-hours of oxygen gas per kilogram of candle. Widely used in spacecraft, submarines, caves, and mines where breathable atmosphere may be intermittently unavailable.

Pandanus—(n) A plant genus characterized by woody trunks supported with numerous aerial prop roots. The pandanus palm or textile screw pine produces large, tough leaves whose fibers were widely employed in Polynesian cultures for thatching, rope, wicker, and basketry. When specially prepared, the fiber of white pandanus, or kie, can form a soft, silklike cloth.

Photovoltaic—(adj) Capable of generating an electrical voltage across the junction between dissimilar materials, with the input of light energy, through the liberation of bound electrons in a preferred direction. Many natural materials (e.g., silicon) produce minor photovoltaic effects across grain boundaries. However, the much greater efficiency of quantum-well devices such as wellstone makes them preferable for most applications. In many isolated devices, wellstone pseudomaterials must be photovoltaic in order to maintain their other properties using ambient radiation.

Pilinisi—(n) Prince. Traditionally, any Prince of Tonga.

Planet—(n) Any natural satellite of a star whose gravity is sufficient to pull it into spherical shape. Sol system includes hundreds of planets, mainly in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud.

Planette—(n) Any artificial celestial body consisting of a stony or earthy lithosphere surrounding a core or shell of supercondensed (neutronic) matter. The vast majority of planettes are designed for human habitation, and include Earthlike surface gravity and breathable atmospheres.

Port—(adj or adv) One of the six ordinal directions: along the negative pitch axis, perpendicular to the fore/aft and boots/caps directions.

Pseudoatom—(n) The organization of electrons into Schröedinger orbitals and pseudo-orbitals, made possible with great precision in a designer quantum dot. The properties of pseudoatoms do not necessarily mimic those of natural atoms.

Pseudochemistry—(n) Electron shell interactions taking place among pseudoatoms, or between pseudoatoms and natural atomic matter. Also, the systematic study or exploration of pseudochemical interactions.

Pseudomaterial—(n) Any material composed partly of pseudoatoms and existing within the matrix of a programmable substance such as wellstone. “Pure” pseudomaterials cannot exist, since the nanoelectronics required to generate and maintain them must be atomic in nature.

Quantum dot—(n) A device for constraining the position of one or more charge carriers (e.g., electrons) in all three spatial dimensions, such that quantum (“wavelike”) effects dominate over classical (“particle-like”) effects. Charge carriers trapped in a quantum dot will arrange themselves into standing waveforms analogous to the electron orbitals of an atom. Thus, the waveforms inside a quantum dot may be referred to collectively as a “pseudoatom.”

Raw—(adj) Unfinished. Uncooked. In a natural, unrefined, or crude state. Youthful. Colloquially, fashionable or exquisite.

Restoration, The—(prop n) Interglobal election that established the Queendom of Sol under Tamra I. The term derives from the presumption that monarchy is the “natural” state of human beings, owing to a genetic predisposition.

Sila’a—(n) A pinpoint fusion generator or “pocket star” consisting of a wellstone-sheathed neutronium core surrounded by gaseous deuterium. From the Tongan si’i (small) and la’aa (sun).

Sketchplate—(n) A thin, rectangular block or sheet of wellstone sized and preprogrammed for the portable display and input of text, drawings, and physical simulations. Sol—(prop n) Formal name for the Earth’s sun, derived from the Latin. The Greek Helios was considered archaic for most Queendom uses.

South—(adj or adv) One of the six cardinal directions: parallel to the negative spin axis of the sun.

Squozen—(adj) Squeezed. Reduced symmetrically in diameter, as with the Squozen Moon. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

Starboard—(adj or adv) One of the six ordinal directions: along the positive pitch axis, perpendicular to the fore/aft and boots/caps directions.

Superabsorber—(n) Any material capable of absorbing 100% of incident light in a given wavelength band. The only known universal superabsorber (i.e., functioning at all wavelengths) is the event horizon of a hypermass. (Approximations of 100% absorption are generally referred to as “black.”)

Supercompress (also Supercondense)—(v) To compress to the point of proton-electron recombination, i.e., until neutronium is formed. Colloquially, to compress beyond any point the speaker finds impressive. Superferromagnetism—(n) Any ferromagnetism exceeding the field densities possible with atomic matter.

Superreflector—(n) Any material capable of reflecting 100% of incident light in a given wavelength band. No universal superreflectors are known. (Approximations of 100% reflectance are generally referred to as “mirrors.”)

Sweetpaper—(n) An edible composite of polymerized and unpolymerized glucose, most typically served as a garnish.

Ta’e fakalao—(adj) Contraband or forbidden by law, as distinct from tapu or taboo (forbidden by custom or religion).

Tali fiefia—Traditional Tongan welcome, widely employed throughout the Queendom. Literally: “joyous reception.”

Tapa—(n) A traditional Polynesian cloth made from the inner bark of the mulberry tree, and decorated in batik floral or faunal patterns using a variety of natural dyes and bleaches. Colloquially, the phrase “tapa pattern” or “tapa style” may refer to any floral print, or to any print in the Tongan or Polynesian style, on any material.

Tazzer—(n) A short-range beam weapon consisting of pulsed, coaxial streams of electrons and metal ions in a guide beam of blue or violet laser light. Tazzers are primarily used to induce temporary incapacity (pain, paralysis, unconsciousness), although lethal versions also exist.

Teleport—(v) To transfer, either instantaneously or at the speed of light, from one location to another. Teleportation can involve either the actual transfer of mass energy, as in a quantum waveform collapse or tunneling event, or alternatively, can involve only the transfer of organizing parameters, which are disrupted at the transmitting location and imposed on an equivalent mass energy at the receiver.

Teleport gun—(n) A short-range beam weapon capable of dispersing the mass in a cone-shaped target region without significant release or expenditure of energy. Teleport guns are notably unreliable, posing a significant risk to users and bystanders alike, and were banned for most uses by Queendom authorities.

Terraform—(v) To make Earthlike. In general, to match the gravity, climate, and atmosphere of a planet or planette to that of Earth, possibly including the imposition of a stable biosphere. Enclosed spaces are “climate-controlled” rather than terraformed.

Timoch—(prop n) Capital city of the Luner nation of Imbria.

Tonga—(n) Former Polynesian kingdom consisting of the Tongatapu, Ha’apai, and Vava’u archipelagoes, and scattered islands occasionally including parts of Samoa and Fiji. Tonga was the only Polynesian nation never to be conquered or colonized by a foreign power, and was the last human monarchy prior to establishment of the Queendom of Sol.

Tongatapu—(n) The largest and most populous island of Tonga; home to its traditional capital at Nuku’alofa.

Train wreck (TW)—(n) A measure of inertial (not gravitational) acceleration, equivalent to 40 gee. In practice, the term is applied only to impulsive accelerations (e.g., collisions, explosions). An unmodified, unprotected human can generally survive a 1 TW impulse lasting several seconds, while 2 TW impulses lasting longer than one second are typically fatal. Survival of millisecond impulses (e.g., vibrational) of up to 4 TW have been recorded. Impact to specific body areas produces highly nonlinear effects, and is rarely recorded or described in this fashion.

Transparent—(adj) Possessing a negligible absorption or reflection spectrum in a particular frequency range (e.g., visible light). Materials with zero absorption and zero index of refraction are referred to as “optical superconductors.” Transparency is distinct from invisibility in that a transparent object cannot be used to conceal another object, whereas an invisible one can. Universal transparency (i.e., across all wavelengths) has never been demonstrated and may be physically impossible.

Transuranic—(adj) Beyond uranium. Used to identify natural atoms or ions containing more than 92 protons, or pseudoatoms containing more than 92 electrons. Because pseudoatoms can contain up to several thousand electrons in a wide variety of symmetries, the vast majority of known pseudoatoms are transuranic.

TV—(n) Abbreviation for “television,” an archaic telecommunications term revived by the second and third generations of the Queendom of Sol. The term generally referred to any broadcast of audiovisual content, although three-dimensional imagery was still frequently referred to as “holie.”

Upsystem—(adj or adv) One of the six cardinal directions: away from the sun in any orientation.

Varna—(prop n) A 640-meter-radius planette constructed in orbit around the Squozen Moon by private investors during the latter years of the Queendom of Sol. Site of the Q1290 Treaty of Varna, granting Right of Return to Barnard refugees.

Wellstone—(n) A substance consisting of fine, semiconductive fibers studded with quantum dots, capable of emulating a broad range of natural, artificial, and hypothetical materials.

Wellwood—(n) An emulation of lignous cellulose (wood), often employed as the default state of wellstone devices.

The very first thing the Fax Wars revealed was the deep-seated desire of every human being to be larger. Not larger in the abstract, with respect to the environment, but larger in relative terms, with respect to his or her peers, on account of the latent genetic programming that equated height, and to a lesser extent muscle mass, with social status.

Simply scaling up the human form was quickly shown to be an unhealthy—and in some cases fatal—oversimplification. You couldn’t get more than about ten percent larger without major problems of bone diameter and systolic versus diastolic pressure coming into play. Not that this stopped everyone—among the eighty % of humanity who could afford fax access, average height increased overnight by about fifteen percent, and body mass by around thirty percent and we can only assume that each individual found a balance point between the pain and fatigue of gigantism, and the psychological distress of watching everyone else get larger.

The next wave began in the following year, with the first of many morphing filters that permitted intelligent, systemic changes to the human form under little more than voice command. The enormous mathematical complexity of these filters—which operated on the quantum waveforms themselves—are a testament to the cruel severity of the Old Moderns’ dysmorphic yearnings. Once again the change occurred abruptly, with some twenty percent of travelers exiting the system in body forms that could barely fit through the print plate, and most others opting for at least another ten to twenty percent height or mass increase.

The third wave followed close behind, with a series of conformal filters that bent the knees and elbows and neck just so, arranging the human body for optimal packing without major redesign of the ligature system. Soon, even larger giants were rolling out of the public faxes in a tight fetal crouch. And then of course came the ligature changes that allowed for tighter packing still.

At this point, regional and national governments (such as they were) applied pressure to the makers and operators of fax hardware, who were themselves greatly troubled by what they had wrought. Hard limits were imposed on the mass of a faxed human being, with no exceptions made even for the natural giants and willful corpulents who still existed here and there in the world. What followed was a brief but intense flurry of exotic body styles designed to circumvent the restrictions: bird-boned women towering over their stocky peers, and men with hollow sacs beneath their falsely bulging muscles.

This was solved with equally inflexible limits on height and volume, and later the ratio between them. As a result, some people refused to travel through the public networks at all, preferring to retain their ill-gotten glamour by traveling the long way around, in vehicles or on foot. However, the rapid disappearance of highways, airports, and other travel infrastructure—no doubt encouraged by the bribes of the early Fax Lords⁶—made such a lifestyle choice increasingly difficult and austere. And because it was also associated with religious extremism—the Murder-Me-Not crowd who believed their souls would be imperiled by the physical destruction of their original bodies—the practice was never particularly fashionable.

So for another couple of years, the complaint was that everyone in the world looked exactly the same: a bland uniformity of height and weight and physical type. And the world was too small for these half-giants anyway; what a bore it was to be constantly bumping your head, knocking your knees, fitting through spaces nobody had had the time to redesign for larger humans.

So the wheel of fashion turned, and soon the true individualists of the world were turning out in short or skinny or even midget forms, and everyone was cutting back at least a little. “Grow your home: shrink yourself!” became the battle cry, and eventually the maximum-height types found themselves the butt of good-natured humor and even, in some cases, less-than-good-natured suspicion. What good was a tall politician? A burly contract negotiator? Just what were they trying to pull?

Around this same time, it began to dawn on the general populace that they could make copies of themselves. This quickly resulted in “xeropollution,” with some individuals creating as many as ten thousand independent instantiations, literally overrunning certain urban areas— most notably Dallas, Texas, the home of the Plural Five. Governmental and corporate powers took a dim view of this practice and reacted with harsh measures, including a three-month, near-total moratorium on faxation, and the sanctioned mass murder of key individuals to reduce their numbers. This led—again, primarily in Dallas—to a number of armed skirmishes that represent the only “hot” conflict of the Wars, with a definite and easily measured death toll of 325 individuals. (The mortality rates for instantiations of these individuals is less well known.)

Fortunately, the rapid development of the Lodney Re-convergence Filter permitted human copies to be merged back into single individuals, with all memories and subjective experience intact. Strict limits were soon enthusiastically and bloodlessly enforced, first on total number of copies, and later, more fairly, on aggregate copy-hours over predefined periods of time.

These transient waves took a long time to settle out, and in some sense continued through the Queendom-era fashions of hair color, skin pigmentation, and self-plural cooperation. But for practical purposes, the Fax Wars were over a decade after they had begun, with the vast majority of human beings choosing modest plurality and the convenience of death and rebirth, over the theological virtues of singletonism and walking. And choosing, yes, to embrace their unique physical attributes as symbols of their heritage and identity.

“Clothe thyself in beauty if thou must,” the playwright Wenders Rodenbeck instructs us in his satirical classic, Uncle Lisa’s Neutron. “ ’Tis charm we find in dreadful short supply.”