There was nothing homey about the foyer, or the closed, soundproofed offices adjoining it. Last time Conrad had been here, the palace had had a full-time staff of eight, only two of whom could be considered household servants in any meaningful sense. The others were office workers: bureaucrats and functionaries, keeping Bascal interfaced with the other machineries of government, with public opinion, with light-lagged news from Sol and the other colonies. But farther back, the actual living quarters were fairly comfortable, with natural and artificial light, with lots of soft places to park your ass and flat, hard surfaces to park a drink or a plate of food.
And dutifully, the palace asked him, “May I bring you something, sir? A glass of wine? A platter of fruit, perhaps?”
“That sounds good,” Conrad admitted. He still didn't like buildings nattering at him, but there was something about this one that he'd grown a little fond of. It wasn't human—it wasn't a friend or anything like that. But he liked it in the same way he might like a dog, or a character on a TV show, or an interactive recording of someone he vaguely knew.
A household robot, like a manikin of brightly polished gold, appeared from somewhere, carrying a platter with Conrad's food and drink. Its movements were inhumanly quick, inhumanly graceful. The swivel and bend of every joint was computed to the eighth decimal place, with a result so poetically beautiful that it nearly always brought a smile to Conrad's lips. The platter tilted crazily in the thing's hands, but of course the gee forces were calculated just as precisely, and when the platter was whisked down onto the table beside the armchair Conrad had selected, the only sound it made was the soft whisper of displaced air. The surface of his wineglass betrayed not so much as a ripple. And then, just as quickly, the robot danced back into the shadows and was gone.
Conrad sighed, both amused and saddened at the sight. Like almost every home or office or rustic cabin in the old Queendom, this place was built around a central fax machine, providing everything from fresh air and fruit to fresh copies of the host himself. But those large, medical-grade print plates were hard to come by, and a typical P2 home had one or two much smaller fax machines instead, of decidedly submedical grade. But it was nice to see, if only for a while, the way things ought to be.
Conrad tasted the fruit, and sipped the wine, and these brought another sigh. There really was a difference! A real fax machine produced atomically precise copies of the things in its library. Not convenient approximations or shortcuts, not flavored synthetics, but something actually identical to the original. You could fool yourself into thinking the other stuff was just as good, or nearly as good, but a taste of the real thing quickly dispelled that notion.
Presently, Bascal appeared in the living room's arched doorway, dressed in a pair of loose white trousers and a flowered, tapa-patterned shirt of royal purple.
“Hey there,” he said, smiling warmly. He hurried over, far less gracefully than the robot had done, then grabbed and shook Conrad's hand in both of his before settling into the adjacent armchair. “You're looking exceptionally haggard this afternoon. A bit blurry around the edges, are we?”
“I've just come from the doctor,” Conrad said. “I've got a fax appointment two days from now. I'll be freshly scrubbed and full of beans then, probably fuffing everything in sight. Martin swears I'll survive in the meantime, and I see no reason to disbelieve that. He's not so much of a goofball anymore, our Martin. Or anyway he hides it better than he used to.”
Bascal, for his part, did not look exceptionally haggard, or worn down in any way. He had that freshly faxed look, which only came from doing it every morning, no doubt at the insistence of a nagging house and staff. Although, Conrad reminded himself, this copy had just stepped out of the machine, and would look fresh in any case.
“Well, do please be my guest.” Bascal gestured toward the room's far end, where Conrad could see the cylindrical print plate projecting out from the walls like a quarter-pillar running up along the corner. “Step through. Be a new man.”
Conrad thought about that. It was certainly a tempting offer, shrugging off the wear and tear of the past several years, but he'd already made his appointment at the hospital, and really Genie was right: he should be a good citizen and wait his turn like everyone else.
“I'll pass,” he told Bascal, “but thanks. And how are you?”
As if he didn't know. As if everyone on the planet didn't know what their king had for breakfast every morning. For better or worse, this was how the human mind worked: a figure or two at the top, not necessarily loved or even admired, but elevated and studied with fascination. Monarchic capitalism was the ultimate form of human government, because it was the only one that really accepted human nature and used it to maximum advantage. And as long as you had a Senate actually running things, or pretending to, then the worst aspects of the monarch's own humanity could be curbed as well, or guided into useful channels. That was the theory, anyway.
“I'm well,” Bascal said. “Very well, my boy. And it's very nice to see you. You should come by here more often, really. Well, I suppose we would've seen each other at the Gravittoir dedication ceremony, anyway, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't visit.”
Shrugging, Conrad answered, “I'm running single these days. Maybe I'll make an extra copy at the hospital next month, but then, for crying out loud, I'd have to wait through triage again just to reconverge the memories. It seems like a lot of bother.”
“You're a busy man. I understand. The people of Sol may languish in their ennui and malaise, their joblessness and underemployment, but here beneath the mustard sky we need every hand, most especially yours. You always were my top guy, Conrad.”
Conrad laughed. “That's blatant flattery and you know it. I may have been your favorite guy, at least occasionally, but I was never your best. Never close.”
Bascal's face darkened. “That's not for you to decide, boyo. I hear my parents came to see you. A great big whopping message, tying up the works for thirty-nine hours. Almost two pids of nothing but them! Do you want to tell me about that? Are they snooping again?”
“They mean well, but yes. They're worried about you. About us. And the more I think about it, the more I think there may be something to it. Things here in Barnard aren't going quite according to plan, are they? Shouldn't we be farther along by now? Not grubbing in the dirt for buffer mass, or slapping together these half-assed miniature print plates. Shouldn't we be running this place by now? Faxing across the system in our shiny new collapsiter grid?”
“The issues are complex,” Bascal said, spreading his hands.
“I don't doubt it,” Conrad allowed, “but every problem has a foundation. If we do have one, then what is it, and where did it come from?”
The spread of Bascal's hands widened. “It's economics, boyo. To prosper we've got to grow the economy, and to do that we've got to increase the population. But there's a fax shortage, so we have to build more machines, and to do that we've got to bring in rare earth elements from the asteroids, so we need your Gravittoir to make it easier to get things on and off the planet. But that takes manpower as well, which creates even more population pressure.
“In a way, this is a kind of golden age; we're not only achieving phenomenal rates of growth, we're innovating as well. Our fax filters are in high Instelnet demand in the other colonies, which have a lot of the same problems we do. But we also need our antimatter factories and deutrelium refineries, and we need to build and maintain our ships. Forget neutronium barges; it's a headache and a half just moving cargo around.”