Even the container had a colonial flair: a narrow cone of glass with the pointy end flattened to form a stand. Glass because the scarcity of metals here, coupled with energy costs rather higher than they'd enjoyed in the Queendom, made gold or wellstone a bit too pricey for disposable cups. Technically, of course, the cups were recyclable, and would simply be hurled back into the fax when the show was over and the robotic cleanup crew swept the stadium's litter all the way down to the molecular level. But already there were sounds of breakage all around; these glasses were fun to smash.
Such practices would be unthinkable in the Queendom, but that was the point of striking off on your own, right? New ideas, new traditions, new solutions shaped and limited by a fresh environment.
“Better?” the king asked him, supplementing the question with an elbow to Conrad's ribs.
“Much,” Conrad agreed, with answering jabs of his own. “Thank you for the drink, Your Highness.” In Sol, a harmless action like this would have drawn the ire of the unshakable Palace Guard robots, earning Conrad a painful tazzing at the very least. But here they simply earned him the wrath of the king himself, who grabbed Conrad's left arm and made as if to twist it.
“Be a loyal subject,” the king warned, “or you may go home a fractured one.”
“Ow,” Conrad said. “All right, quit it.” And then, when Bascal had released him: “Miserable tyrant. So how's this wildlife program going? I heard you were almost ready to release some animals.”
Here the king grew more serious. “If by ‘animals' you mean ‘millimeter-sized burrowing insects,' then yes. We need them to condition the soil for the next wave of plant life. The modified lichens are taking off nicely, spreading out across the landscape in the spaces between the algoids. Now we're introducing more complicated root systems. But there's a lot of debate on this point, and I'm reluctant to impose a solution by fiat.”
“Debate on what?”
“What to use to fill that niche,” Bascal said. From his tone, the question both amused and annoyed him. “Our libraries are full of Earth organisms, dozens of which could do the job handily once halochondria are introduced into their cell structure, but I've got people arguing that that wouldn't be fair to the lidicara. The native peoples, you see? All squidgy and helpless and stupid. Even if we leave the Sea of Repose completely alone—just isolate it from a terraformed Sea of Destiny and all the waterways we care about—the changes around it will still have an effect. If we introduce a lot of Earth life, and fuff around with the atmosphere in addition, we could extinct the little bastards in their own ecosystem.”
“So, then. What'll you do? Engineer some lidicara ambassadors?”
Conrad hadn't meant the question seriously, but Bascal answered it that way. “Something like that, yes. A modified form, specialized for burrowing and toughened up for a life outside the water. We're still wrangling over the details. Obviously we've got to release some Earth life if we want to support human beings on this ball, but first we may broaden the native ecosystem. Give it some of the resilience it might've developed with another hundred megayears of evolution.”
“Compressed into what, a single year of engineering?”
“Oh, no, Conrad. Much longer than that. We mustn't fall prey to any false sense of urgency; there's plenty of time to do it all slowly and well. Do it right. There's no death, no deadline, no pressure. Anyway my father would tell you that time itself is an illusion. There is no forward or backward, just an infinity of moments, like paintings in a gallery. And most of the paintings are nonsense! Strange as it seems, we simply pick the ones we like, and string them together into a story.”
“You said as much in the ‘Song of Physics,'” Conrad mused.
But the face Bascal made was sour and puckery. “Oh, hell. Let's not bring art into it, all right?”
“You're the one who mentioned painting, Sire. Is that no longer considered a form of art?”
That didn't quiet the king one bit. “It's not that I'm blocked, if that's what you're thinking. Truly, it isn't. My moments are simply filled, or else jealously protected in their empty state. There's no reason to insist on fresh poetry right now. The illusion of relentless movement through time is an aspect of consciousness. It is consciousness. The one to pity is the mortal human off thataway, in our past, ever plummeting toward his extinction and yet expected, somehow, to be cheerful! I, sir, have no such extinction in my plans, and can afford to take a few decades out to—oh, I dunno—build a civilization? Remake this world as God might have done it, and then invade it afresh with our own troops?”
“So we're ethical conquerors, then,” Conrad said. “You tamper with nature in nature's own image, while I build the human world—from native rock as much as wellstone—to look as though it's always been here.”
“You personally?” Bascal asked, now sounding a bit offended for some reason. “Everyone else is just a consumer, eh? A population with no purpose but to be housed by you, brick by brick with your own two hands? Conrad Mursk, First Architect of Barnard. Never mind all these robots, these work-study programs for the newly awakened, these fax copies we all have running around, busy every moment of the day. I would never have given you that title, boyo, if I'd known it would go to your head like this. Second Architect! Third Architect! Paver's Boy, for crying out loud. If I had it to do over again . . . But no, then you'd feel a need to prove yourself, to be worthy of more. Sometimes I think you were born to grind me.”
“Whether it please Your Majesty or not,” Conrad replied, “I was born to build. I've got mortar in my veins.”
“And rocks in your head, yes. Bricks in your feet. Maybe a support beam up your ass.”
Suddenly they were laughing again, and Conrad would have carried the joke farther, reflecting it back on his monarch, if the showtime trumpets had not chosen that moment to begin blaring.
“Who's up first?” he asked instead.
“Steve Grush and Luca Elmer Rodhaim,” the king answered in a stage whisper as the crowds slowly quieted around them. “Odds are seven to five in Steve's favor, with a spread of three and an overage of .6. He's switched from dual tazzers to a net and spear, though, which may bring his favor down a point.”
From the wellwood stadium floor below, the sound of trumpets gave way to flat warning klaxons, and the “go” lights flickered from green to amber. The crowd went silent. Then the lights went red, and the welliron sally gates curled aside, and two nearly nude men sauntered onto the killing floor from opposite sides of the stadium. The crowd broke into a roar; this was going to be good.
On the left, coming in from the east gate, was Steve Grush, bearing the promised net of impervium fibers, and a wellwood spear with a wicked—probably atomically sharp—point. On the west was Luca Rodhaim, with the two-handed Ringing Sword that was fast becoming his trademark. In an ordinary bout that vibrating blade could be counted on to bi- or trisect the nearest opposing Security rep within twenty seconds of gates-up, but Steve was an unforgiving fighter, and a monstrously quick one, second only to Ho Ng in the rankings.
“I'll bet you five million dollars,” Bascal said as the two combatants closed and circled.
“On what?”
“On mayhem.”
Conrad was supposed to bet against mayhem? In the finals? “No deal,” he said. But then Steve threw his net, spiraling out on its weights like a miniature galaxy, and although it was impervium, the Ringing Sword slashed right through it, flinging it to the ground in two uneven pieces.