The Wellstone (30 page)

He took his seat, feeling morose. And since he seemed to be the only one in a crowd of thousands who felt that way, he felt it even more keenly. Did these people imagine some culmination of a prince’s clever plan? How disappointing for them.

And the amphitheater really did fill, getting louder and rowdier as it went, until finally the queen’s courtier, Tusité, mounted the stage and glared out at them all.

“You! Quiet! Quiet, everyone.”

Conrad couldn’t tell if the acoustics were natural or wellstone-enhanced, but in any case her voice punched right through the crowd noise like a comet fragment at twenty kips. The conversation splintered, swirling and withering into silence as her gaze swept from one side of the crowd to the other.

“Be silent, everyone. And stand up. Your king and queen will be here shortly.”

There were a couple of boos and catcalls at this remark, but they were met with waves of shushing and pushing and even—it looked like—some good, hard punches to the stomach. Whatever they might be guilty of, whatever grievances they had, these myriad kids were mostly loyal citizens at heart. This, Conrad supposed, was the very thing that separated revolutionaries from ordinary criminals: a desire to make things better not for themselves, but for everyone else. Even if the personal cost was high.

“That’s right,” Tusité said. “If you want respect, you start by giving it. We will now sing ‘Praise upon Her.’ ”

And they did, with Tusité leading them, and the sound of it was beautiful. By the age of ten, everyone in the Queendom had had at least rudimentary voice training, and the tune and lyrics were of course familiar, although a part of Conrad—at once innocent and weirdly alert— felt as though he were really hearing the song for the first time. It didn’t take long to get through the first verse, and Tusité didn’t lead them through the second. Soon the echoes were dying away, leaving behind only the imprint of memory.

Then the fax machine at the back of the amphitheater crackled, and Conrad turned just in time to see Their Majesties, Tamra-Tamatra Lutui and Bruno de Towaji, step through. They were holding hands at first, but let go almost immediately, commencing a stately walk together down one of the stairways, flanked fore and aft by pairs of Palace Guards. He could distinctly hear their footsteps, the
clump clump
of boot heels on the wellstone marble of the steps.

Her Majesty held the Scepter of Earth in her left hand. His Majesty held a rolled-up document in his right. The two of them looked grim, unhappy, determined. Their eyes did not survey the crowd, did not make contact, and Conrad was struck by the notion that this man and woman weren’t people at all—the parents of his friend, whom he’d spoken with personally—but animate mouthpieces for a civilization of twenty-five billion. And the hairs on his neck stood up, because it was hard enough to explain yourself to two people—to one person. To yourself. Was there any hope of being understood by an entire solar system?

The staircase led all the way down to the base of the stage, whose edge the king and queen followed around until they came to a smaller, narrower staircase leading up onto it. And then, there they were at the focal point, the physical and psychological nexus of the stadium’s attention.

The crowd was utterly silent.

“Good afternoon,” the queen said. She pointed with her scepter, sweeping it in an arc across the crowd. “You children—and the few dozen legal adults among you— have been very naughty. But you know that.”

There was scattered laughter. Ah, Queen Tamra, who always knew what to say.

“Many of your concerns,” she went on gravely, “are entirely understandable. However, as you will realize, our understanding does not and cannot equate to forgiveness. The rule of law cannot protect us from each other, and from ourselves, unless it is applied uniformly in all cases. Selective enforcement is the hallmark of a tyranny.”

That didn’t sound good at all.

She paused to let it sink in, and then continued. “In a very personal sense, we regret that your viewpoints were not presented legally. Our government includes numerous mechanisms for the redress of grievance that have operated effectively for hundreds of years. Granted, these channels are slow, as enlightened social change always should be. But impatience is one of the hallmarks of youth, and in many ways this
is
your argument.

“Childhood is a fleeting condition, and any justice which overruns its boundaries is no justice at all, but a service to the adults you will one day become. And your voices have been very clear on this point: that you will sacrifice the comfort and liberty of those future selves, in order to enjoy a different and more immediate sense of freedom in the here and now. Such a decision should not be—and in our estimation, has not been—made lightly. And again, we understand, even if we do not agree.”

She paused again. She had their absolute silence, their absolute attention.

“The matter of your punishment has been the focus of considerable debate and analysis. The solution we’ve arrived at is not one which comforts us, but justice can be like that sometimes. Please be aware that we love you, and wish no harm upon you. But you have brought this on yourselves.”

She pointed the scepter at the sky, and lowered its butt end onto the stage with a soft thump. As gestures went, this one was clear enough: the prosecution rests.

King Bruno unrolled the document in his hand, glanced at it, and then looked up at the audience. “Er, hmm. There’s a lot of legalese in this: the whereas and the shall and the by-the-power-vested. Let’s skip that part, shall we? And allow me to reiterate: this isn’t a desirable solution. But it appears to be a necessary one.”

He paused, looking around, and now he wasn’t the avatar of a nation, or even the father of a friend, but just some nice man stepping in with bad news. “The gist of it,” he said, “is exile. You’ll be provided with a starship and the means to form a reasonable settlement in the worlds of the Barnard system, some five-point-nine light-years from Sol, which will be ceded to you for this purpose.”

A murmur ran through the crowd.

“And once this ship is commissioned and registered and this land grant is made, you will have forty-eight hours to remove yourselves from the borders of the Queendom, which you may not then reenter for a period of one thousand years.”

The murmur became a gasp.

“One thousand years,” the king repeated, “
on pain of
death and erasure.
I can assure you, this sentence is not imposed lightly, nor in good humor. But your cooperation has been impossible to secure by other means.”

He scratched his chin, and tugged lightly at the end of his beard. “The, ah, the course ahead of you is a difficult one, and one I daresay you’ll regret. But it is precisely the course you have chosen, and precisely the one you deserve, and if there truly is a God who dwells within us, or is generated through us, or otherwise takes an interest in our affairs, then I pray that he will have mercy on your souls. Because Tamra and I, alas, cannot.”

He seemed poised for a moment to ask if there were any questions. But that was the scientist in him, the professor and declarant—an old reflex that sometimes showed through. Today he suppressed it, and remained regal.

“At this point,” the queen said, “you are all remanded to the custody of your parents, or parole officers for the adults and emancipated minors among you. We don’t yet know how long the preparations will take, as no voyage of this type has ever been attempted. But the expected cost is very high, and any further misbehavior in the meantime will be dealt with”—she peered down her nose at the audience—“very harshly.”

She paused for several seconds before adding, “That is all.”

And with that, the king and queen turned together, dismounted the stage, and began the climb back up toward the rear of the amphitheater, where the fax gates were. But they didn’t get even as far as the third row— Conrad’s row—before a purple-clad figure leaped from the stands and threw itself at them with a yell.

The heads of the Palace Guards swiveled, their arms coming partway up, weapon-fingers at the ready. But they made no other move, perhaps sensing that Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui had no harm in him at this moment.
“I love you!”
the prince screamed, throwing both arms around his parents in an embrace that nearly bowled them over. He was laughing and crying all at once, his strong voice quavering with emotion. “Thank you, thank you! The task of this grievous voyage has been lightly fulfilled, and I am ... I am . . . pickled with joy!”

Indeed, it was a perfect solution, and Conrad could see that Bascal had been right all along, about everything—even the pushy, malicious stuff. Tantrums and blackmail weren’t supposed to work; they just hardened parental and governmental resolve, right? But here the children were, openly reaping the benefits of it. A thousand years of freedom! A whole star system to call their own! Conrad was worldly enough—just barely—to appreciate the irony.

Bruno’s answer was soft, personal and private. He knew, probably from long experience, how to shelter his voice from the arena’s fine acoustics. But Conrad was only a couple of meters away, and could hear the king’s surprised muttering well enough. “It isn’t a
reward
, Bascal. It isn’t a good thing at all.”

“Oh, Father,” the prince replied fondly, hugging even harder. And they all lived happily ever after.

Like hell they did.

A: With some parallax view on the subject, I feel
confident in citing “The Song of Physics” as His
Majesty’s first true masterwork. Here we see the
culmination not only of literary talent and real-world
insight, not only of that famous wit, but also of
generational outreach. The song is fundamentally a
parting gift from son to father, and should be
appreciated as such.

Q: It’s a much longer poem than anything he’d
previously attempted, true?

A: Not only longer, but more universal in every sense.
Here is a piece written with the future—not the
present—in mind. With an audience which includes
the Queendom, but is not limited to it. Of course, it’s
the audacity of the project that truly inspires: the
universe in twenty stanzas, with simple language and
a compulsively tractable—one might almost say
childish—cadence of melody.

Q: A gift to all of us, then. To posterity.

A: A parting gift, I would say, on the eve of a perilous
exile. The poem is ebullient, but the gesture itself
has an old-fashioned air, of separation and mortality.
Just in case,
we used to say.
If this meeting be our last, have this token for thy memory of me. And so we shall.

—Critic Laureate Julia Aimes,
in a Q299 interview with FUSILIERS magazine

chapter twenty-one

walking home

By the light of a gas lamp, Radmer takes a final flask of dinite from the chemry and closes its little brass door for the last time. It’s a clever device, worthy of its Highrock creators: without electricity, using only catalyst beds and the mechanical energy of a foot pump, it combines the gases in the air with water from the sea, to produce a paste that any spark will explode, even in the vacuum of space. He’s been warned not to get this paste on his skin; even the sweet, waxy smell of it sometimes gives him headaches and heart palpitations.

The stuff has a longer name that he can’t remember, but the word “dinite” is familiar to any soldier who’s ever had shells of it bursting overhead. This formula is a bit tamer than the military equivalent, but only a bit. He sprinkles fine sand into the flask as well—an operation which, in the words of his armorer, Mika, “will reduce the energy and enhance the impulse of each detonation.”

The predawn morning has yet to warm up, and finally finishing this chore is a numbing concept; he’s been pumping sixteen hours a day for over a week, and his legs feel ready to drop off with exhaustion. From an energy standpoint, it’s as if he had to personally hike up out of Varna’s gravity well with the space capsule on his back, and then kill enough orbital velocity—with his feet!—for the capsule’s path to dip down into Lune’s atmosphere for reentry. Actually it’s much worse than that, because the pump and the chemry and the mechanics of combustion offer layers and layers of inefficiency. And he’s also had to make oxygen candles with a different chemry of similar design, which eats salt water and bits of iron, so really he’s had to complete that hike twenty times over. By now he’s so sick of it that he’s almost relieved at the prospect of returning to space, and thence to the war itself. Almost.

Luckily, the atmosphere here on Varna contains a lot more nitrogen than the plant and microbial life strictly require. As an air thickener, nitrogen leaves a lot to be desired—you need a large planette to contain it over geologic time—but such things had always been a matter of fashion, back when planettes were still being built. Which is fortunate, because the refueling of the brass sphere would have taken a
lot
longer on a noble-gas world. One cannot spin explosives from xenon and neon.

“Handmade,” Bruno de Towaji remarks, running his fingers along the lines of the chemry’s brass case. “A single device for a single purpose. I see armies of craftsmen, digging ore from the mountainsides, smelting and refining and beating it into shape for this one use. Extraordinary.”

He’s been around the chemry for days, but now, in the lamplight and the gloom of early morning—their
last
morning—he seems to really notice it for the first time. His tone suggests surprise and admiration, as well as condescension. He might be describing a piece of primitive art. He is wearing the felt johnnysuit Radmer has brought for him, to go beneath the topcoat and leathers that will protect him from the cold of space. It’s hardly a garment to be snobby in.

“I’ve used worse,” Radmer tells him as he fishes the packing trowel from a compartment on the sphere’s exterior.

“Yes, I suppose you have. Life in the colonies was—”

“Fine,” Radmer tells him, a bit testily. “It was fine. No worse than we have on Lune today. A handmade world
requires
humans in a way that the Queendom never did. Over time, one learns to appreciate this.”

Bruno makes a sour face, all shadows and beard. “Requires them as fuel, perhaps. Uses them up. Works them over. Kills them.”

Radmer glances at the blue-green half-disc of Lune, hanging peacefully in the starry sky, then favors his one-time king with a hard, unfriendly glare. “Would you rather live forever, Sire? Truly?”

Bruno does not reply, so Radmer—who after all has pressing business on that squozen, half-sized moon up there—gets back to work. He mixes up the grit and paste in the flask, digs a wad of it out with the tip of the trowel, and starts slathering and packing it into the last of his course-correction charges. It’s a delicate operation—a slip of his hand could blow a substantial chunk out of the planette—but the danger doesn’t faze him. Radmer and danger have been on close, personal terms for longer than he cares to remember.

“We didn’t realize what sentence we’d imposed,” Bruno muses. His tone is wistful and full of regret.

“No one sees the future, Sire.”

“No, I suppose not. But mistakes are supposed to educate us, yes? Instead we have thirteen colonies, thirteen failures, and none of us any wiser for the experience.”

“Millions of pages were written on the subject,” Radmer points out impatiently.

But Bruno dismisses this with a shake of his head. “Analysis. Rhetoric. Imperfect analogy. None of us understood what was happening. Are there messages which cannot be copied? Organisms which cannot reproduce? Our Queendom, so simple and inevitable in its logic, rested on a foundation of prior society. There were hidden variables that refused to transcribe to the colony environment. There must have been.”

Radmer hasn’t had time to consider this subject in recent years, but now with the clarity of hindsight it seems simple enough. “I think it was just a matter of money. A network of collapsiters, spaced every hundred AU from here to Barnard, would have made the Queendom continuous. Or directly connected, at any rate. If the carrying capacity of Planet Two had been higher there’d’ve been no need for a second colony.”

Bruno grimaces. “That’s four thousand collapsiters, lad. At least ten-to-the-fourteenth tons. We’d’ve had to dismantle a moon just to make the neubles to make the black holes—a whole second Nescog, and never mind the energy cost of shipping them.”

“Impractical,” Radmer agrees. “Perhaps a fleet of cargo ships could have served the same purpose. Sending one vessel—even a fine one—is quite a leap of faith, if you think about it.”

“I have,” Bruno says. “And the shame will never leave me. You’re quite right to despise me for it.”

Radmer looks up in surprise. “Sire, have I blamed you for what happened? I don’t think anyone ever did. No one knows everything, sees everything.”

“A king should,” Bruno complains. “A civilization should. We had the wherewithal to reason it out.”

“Aye,” Radmer says. “That we did.”

The correction charge is now fully packed—and wildly explosive—so Radmer drops the trowel into the dinite flask with a clink of metal on glass, and then sets the flask down in the shadows beside the chemry.

“We’ll leave this equipment behind,” he tells Bruno matter-of-factly. “And more. It’s necessary, to compensate for your weight on board the capsule. If you like, we can store it in your cottage rather than littering the ground.”

Bruno shrugs. “It hardly matters.”

“To the immorbid, Sire, little things always matter. Perhaps you’ll return here someday. Or someone will.”

He finds the charge housing’s end cap nozzle and screws it back on. Several of these have blown out—burst their threads when the dinite charges went off during the outbound leg of the trip. But the charge cases themselves unscrew, so the damaged ones have been removed and the intact ones shuffled around so that the capsule has a reasonable balance of corrections available in each of the six ordinal axes.

“Perhaps I will,” Bruno says unconvincingly.

Now Radmer is impatient again. “I’m not taking you to certain death, you know. I’ve lived down there a long time. The people are as kind and wonderful as people ever are, and they deserve our help.”

“Aye, and that’s the problem,” Bruno agrees, with his own little measure of anger. “They need help and care and kindness, and then they die. And then another generation needs help, and they die as well. On and on it goes. Before the Queendom, keeping dogs was like that: eventually they would exhaust all patience, all love, all grief, until the thought of caring for
one more dog
became an obscenity.”

Radmer slams and latches the storage compartment on the skin of the brass sphere and moves to open another, which spills out yards of silk and twine. He says nothing.

Bruno wipes his mouth, and examines the new Timoch boots Radmer has given him. “And yet. And yet, there was always another mutt, wasn’t there. Wagging its tail.”

“The parachute needs sewing and packing,” Radmer says flatly. “After that, we depart. Do you have any personal effects you’d like to bring?”

In spite of everything, Bruno spreads his arms and laughs. “Do I look like a man with personal effects?”

“No. Indeed.”

A pang of hunger sounds in Radmer’s gut. This is not surprising; working the chemries all week has kept him in a state of constant famishment. In response he has denuded the planette so savagely that he genuinely worries the wild potato and yam and carrot species—and possibly some of the fish—may have been driven to extinction. The fruit trees he’s less worried about, since picking them clean doesn’t kill them.

But in point of fact, Radmer can digest leaves and grass—all the Olders can, though they don’t relish it— and if this long chore were to drag on any longer, the astronomer Rigby would soon notice the color green vanishing from Varna’s miniature landscape.

Again, from an energy standpoint, it would have made more sense and been more efficient to feed soil and vegetable matter directly into the chemry, rather than using his own body as the power plant. But that would have required a vastly more complex device, versatile enough to detect and assimilate and reformulate a wide assortment of chemicals. And things simply don’t work that way on Lune anymore.

“Can you lead me to some bananas?” he asks Bruno.

Again, there is laughter. “That will be a long walk, my dear architect laureate. But there may still be a bunch or two on the planette’s other face.”

“Sold,” Radmer says. “I can use the break.” Then, as they set off, he tells the old king in a more thoughtful tone, “You know, the brevity of a natural life does have its upside. Fifteen years of peace and prosperity may not seem like much to you, but on Lune it’s long enough to raise a family. And
fifty
years is a lifetime, literally. I can say, without exaggeration, that my personal actions have brightened the lives of hundreds of millions. This is, of course, dwarfed by your own record, but these are the children of my children, forty generations along.”

“This war of theirs,” Bruno says, waving off the compliment. “It’s a bad one.”

“Very bad,” Radmer agrees, marveling at how poorly those two words convey the true situation on Lune.

“And you believe I can help.”

It’s Conrad’s turn to laugh, albeit humorlessly. “I’ve been a fool before, Sire. Many times. But I fear at this point that
only
you can help. Or rather, that if you cannot, then there is no hope at all.”

The king’s rusty, castaway voice is heavy with irony. “What will you do then? Maroon yourself on a planette? We’ll see about this, you and I. There is always hope. Giving it up is a sign of weakness.”

“Ah,” Radmer says, ignoring all of the easy and obvious retorts.

Ahead, the sun breaks over the round horizon, putting an end to their darkness, and Radmer—who was once Conrad Mursk—chooses to see it as an omen.

When they’ve winched the sphere over into its launch orientation, when they’ve donned their leathers and sealed their hatches, when they’ve bolted the passenger chair into place and peered one final time through the windows at the soil and greenery and cloudy skies of Varna ... only then does it begin to feel real. Only then does Radmer feel the relief, the flush, the
excitement
, of success. Hitting Lune will be easy enough, compared to the journey here.

“Will you do the honors, Sire?” he asks, handing the blast chains to Bruno. “One firm tug, on my mark.”

“I will, yes,” the king says, taking the chains with a weird solemnity.

“It already stinks in here,” Radmer notes. “I warn you, it will get much worse.”

“Yes, yes. Just give the countdown.”

“A countdown!” Radmer exclaims. “How quaint. Yes, that’s just what the occasion demands. Five! Four! Three!”

And then he pauses, feeling a tickle of déjà vu at the edges of his mind, like the melody of an old, forgotten song. Or perhaps its lyrics:
She doesn’t have an engine and
she doesn’t have a fax gate ...

“Two? One?” Bruno inquires.

And Radmer answers him. “Sorry, yes. Fire.”

So the chains are jerked and the charges detonate, and there’s nothing gentle or forgiving about it. Varna departs from the windows, and the sky grows black, and the two men, pressed back savagely into their seats, are hurled toward an uncertain future.

All things considered, it’s a hell of a ride.