Before the man could respond to my gesture, Oar took her own stab at communicating: a gush of words in her own native language, a flood of syllables that went on for more than half a minute before she paused for breath.
The man blinked once, then turned back to me. His attitude said he didn't understand Oar, and had no interest in trying. He ventured another smattering of syllables, this one a type of singing that reminded me of Gregorian chant. The words, however, weren't Latin — I don't speak the language, but a zoologist knows enough scientific names for animals to recognize Latin when she hears it.
"Listen," I said, keeping my voice soft and friendly, "we aren't going to understand each other this way. Maybe if we…"
I didn't finish my sentence. At that moment, the man flickered in and out of existence like heat lightning.
Flicker
The effect only lasted a second: his image breaking into a moire pattern of optical interference, then righting itself again into a seemingly solid man. It didn't matter how brief the disruption was — it told me two things.
First, the man was a hologram: a good hologram, since it's extremely difficult for projections to fool the eye at a range of three paces. Nevertheless, I knew he was just a constructed image… something I half-expected already, since corporeal men don't appear out of nowhere. (Some members of the League are rumored to have perfected teleportation, but no one with that technology has ever contacted humans.)
The second thing I knew was that Melaquin had started to live on borrowed time. The flicker in this image could only mean some machine somewhere had acquired a fault. It might only be a small malfunction in a nonessential system — the hardware for projecting pictures of naked men was unlikely to be crucial for survival — but even a tiny glitch meant things had begun to break down. No one, not even the League of Peoples, could build equipment that lasts forever; all the automated repair systems in the universe can't hold back the patient creep of entropy. If four thousand years was the lifetime for the systems here on Melaquin…
…the lifetime of the people wouldn't last significantly longer.
Fluent Osco-Umbrian
The man in front of me behaved as if nothing unusual had happened. He launched into another speech in another language — no language I knew, no language I cared about. I bided my time till he finished, then held up my hand to stop him from trying again.
"Don't bother," I said. "Whatever message you want to convey, it's four thousand years too late. You're a simulation, right? Probably the interface projection for an artificial intelligence that oversees this town. Computer-controlled and designed to relate to the first people who came here. To them, you must have looked like a wise old man… someone they'd naturally respect. But to me, you're evidence of the AI's imminent breakdown. Trying to reach me with languages four millennia old; you can't understand Oar, so you haven't kept up as the people here changed. Anyway, I've never liked talking to AIs — they're always smarmy and unctuous."
The man said nothing. He stared intently, as if sheer force of will could make my words intelligible.
"Oar," I said, "you'd better fetch Tobit. He might know how to deal with our friend. If Tobit has lived long enough in this town, maybe he's learned Osco-Umbrian."
"Tobit…" the naked man whispered.
"Ah," I said, "a name he recognizes."
"Tobit," the man repeated.
"You're friends with Tobit, right?" I said. "Maybe you two get lit up together."
"Tobit," the man answered. "Tobit. Toe… bit… toe… bee… or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—"
"Shit," I said. "Or rather, Zounds."
Speaking Trippingly From the Tongue
"Hail and well-met!" the man said with a flourish of his hand. "I have in timely manner found your tongue within my mind."
An ugly anatomical image, I thought. Aloud, I replied, "You've finally identified my language in your data banks."
The man nodded. "This blessed talk, these words, this speech, this English."
"What is wrong with him?" Oar asked in a whisper. "Is he simply foolish, or is there something chemically wrong with his brain?"
I shook my head. "The League of Peoples obviously drops in now and then to update the local language databases. The good news is that the records are recent enough to include English; the bad news is—"
"It is a foolish kind of English," Oar finished.
"Let me not to the intercourse of true minds admit impediments," the man replied. "My tongue may be rough and my condition not smooth—"
"Enough," I interrupted. It annoyed me he understood my contemporary English but continued speaking his Elizabethan version. That's an AI for you: probably trying to "uplift" me by setting an example of "correct" speech. "Let's keep this to yes-or-no questions," I said. "Are you a machine-created projection?"
"Yea, verily."
"So I'm essentially talking to an artificial intelligence?"
"Aye, milady." The little man displayed a smile of delight — the indulgent smile a pet-owner wears when the family dog rolls over. As I said, AIs are all smarmy.
"And there's some good reason you've approached me?" I asked.
"E'en so."
"What reason?"
"To lay this thy kingdom at thy feet. To bid you take up the scepter. To hail you as lord, and queen hereafter."
And he knelt before me, lowering his head to the pavement in respectful submission.
The First of My Kind
I had never been offered the title of queen. I did not want it now.
"Do you say this to everyone who comes by?" I asked.
"Only you," the man replied. "You are the first of your kind to walk here since the dawn of this era."
"He means you have occluded skin," Oar said helpfully.
"A diplomatic turn of phrase," I told her. Turning back to the man, I said, "I'm not the first of my kind to come. What about Tobit? Or the other Explorers who've visited this town?"
"Pretenders have been legion," the man admitted. "Many a child," he gestured toward Oar, "has tried to usurp the throne, clad in borrowed rags." I realized he meant glass people wearing artificial skin. "Another who dwells in this place appears to have the proper bloodline, yet has knitted himself to unliving metal and is therefore discounted." That had to be Tobit, "knitted" to his prosthetic arm; the League disapproved of cyborging, and had obviously programmed the AI to disqualify anyone equipped with any augmentation.
"Some too," the man continued, "have arrived with unverifiable claims, hidden as they were behind impenetrable armors."
"Ahh!" The other Explorers to pass this way had all been wearing tightsuits. The suits must be sufficiently shielded that the AI couldn't tell whether the wearers were fully human. I, on the other hand, in my knee-high skirt…
"Why are you laughing, Festina?" Oar asked.
I answered, "How many women ever became queen because of their legs?"
Probably a lot, I reflected. Especially if kings had anything to do with it.
The Powers of the Queen
"What does being queen entail?" I asked the little man.
"All this realm's resources lie at your command," he replied.
"Which realm? This dome? Or the entire planet?"
"All that lies beneath this most excellent canopy, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof—"
"The dome," Oar explained.