“But the children,” Conrad mourned. “All the beautiful children in this world, so eager and hopeful. Don't they deserve long lives, and children of their own? Don't they deserve the smell of a new fax machine on a warm afternoon?”
A bit of sourness came back into Brenda's voice. “Are you blaming me, Conrad? What the children deserve has nothing to do with anything.”
She seemed ready to launch into a soliloquy of some sort, a long poetic lecture about the facts of life and death, but instead she caught sight of something behind Conrad, and her face pinched into a scowl.
“What are you doing? Hey! What are you doing?”
Conrad turned and saw a trio of oversized robots marching toward them: two in front, and one behind them pulling a wheeled dolly of some sort. And on the dolly was the fax machine—number 449—in which Conrad had just refreshed himself. This by itself was not surprising; there were all kinds of robots around here, pushing and pulling and carrying things. But these particular robots were Palace Guards—dainty ones with frilled tutus around their waists and necks, like something from the earliest days of the Queendom.
When they spoke, Conrad couldn't tell if it was one voice or three. In any case, they said, “Brenda Bohobe, President of the Bohobe Plate Manufactory, we bring you the greetings of King Bascal. You are cordially invited to join him at a palace dinner party tonight.”
“What are you doing?” Brenda repeated, pointing at the fax machine just in case they somehow failed to take her meaning. “That belongs to the Bupsville hospital.”
“This device,” the robots said, “has been impounded on the authority of King Bascal. No further information is available at this time.”
“That's absurd,” she said tightly. “It's not his. It's not even finished! It has force/speed tests still to go, and—”
“Our records show that this device was employed on a volunteer who is not a Manufactory employee. Therefore, it is working. Therefore, it is impounded. Brenda Bohobe, you are to come with us.”
“Am I under arrest?” she demanded.
“You are invited,” they told her, in an inflectionless tone which nevertheless managed to imply that the two words were, if not identical in meaning, then at least close enough for government purposes.
“Here now,” Conrad told them, though he knew it was pointless, “you can't just barge in here and take things. Do you realize how valuable that machine is?”
One of the robots swiveled its head to face him and said, “Conrad Mursk, First Architect of Barnard. You have a standing invitation at the palace, and will please accompany us.”
“I don't think so,” he said, even though confronting Bascal was exactly what he should probably do right now. He just wanted to see what the robots would say, what they would do. He wouldn't take orders from them, not in this lifetime, not even if they were ordering him to do something rational.
Fortunately, they spared him any further concerns on the matter by pointing a tazzer beam at him and flashing him senseless.
Chapter twenty.
The feast of permanence
The palace dining room was not large, as such things go. It held a single long table with seating for twenty, plus some additional wellstone chairs along the walls so that, Conrad supposed, people could come to watch their betters eat.
Well, maybe that was unfair. If he were going to sell that feature as part of a building design, he would call it “buffet seating,” good for informal parties and such. Which he supposed this gathering probably was. And this room was, he reminded himself, part of a building he had personally designed!
There were no decorations or lighting fixtures per se, because the walls and floor and ceiling were all made of wellstone. Light and windows could appear anywhere. But this by itself had become a rare thing on P2, and its novelty was not lost on Conrad now, especially since the programming was all new. The surfaces emitted a soft glow, with cleverly subtle spotlights shining down onto the table itself. Looking up at the ceiling he found it difficult to see precisely where they were coming from.
The shadows were carefully controlled as well, while stained-glass windows along the north wall admitted just enough natural light, in just the right mix of colors, to lend a picnic air to the proceedings. The windows were nonrepresentational, and shifted slowly from one pattern to another. This, too, was a quaintly decadent touch, and showed good taste. Princess Wendy's, apparently.
Brenda's stolen fax machine—a great, gray slab surrounded by exposed piping and circuitry—dominated one end of the room, with Bascal sitting before it at the head of the table. To his great surprise Conrad found himself seated at the foot of the table, a position of honor to be sure, and in spite of the manner of his arrival he could not help feeling flattered. At the king's left was Princess Wendy, and beside her, to Conrad's additional surprise, was Mack.
Conrad would never forget the initial meeting between those two: throbbing with subdued passion that seemed destined to burn itself out within a few weeks. He hadn't stuck around to see the end of that kiddie relationship, but he had never doubted that it would end. Until now. Funny; he'd traded a dozen messages with Mack over the years, checking up on his old business, his old protégé, but Mack had never once mentioned the princess. And yet the way he sat, the way she sat, the way they looked at each other . . .
“Hi, Boss,” Mack said to him, and though he smiled there might have been a bit of rebuke in his tone. For he still ran Murskitectura, the company Conrad had started in the early years of the colony. And he ran it alone.
“Hi, Mack. How's business?”
The smile became a smirk. “How do you think? The population's not expanding, there's no free capital for discretionary building, and your damned masterworks will last five thousand years if they last a day. We're getting margin work: adding a new housing wing here and there, in your name and style. You cast a long shadow, Boss.”
“Sorry,” Conrad offered sincerely.
But Mack just laughed. “Hey, I'm only a troll. What do I know, or need to?” He raised Wendy's hand in his own. “It's enough that I keep my lady in diamonds.”
This was a joke; diamonds were commonplace in the crust of P2, worth little more than quartz. But Wendy laughed, and seemed to find it witty.
“Welcome, First Architect,” she said, waving Conrad toward his assigned position.
Brenda was seated at Bascal's right, and seemed far more annoyed than flattered by the attention, while Martin Liss, the doctor from Domesville hospital, was seated to her right. Farther down the table sat a number of people Conrad didn't recognize, but then, in the middle, were Robert and Agnes M'chunu, whom Conrad hadn't seen in ages but who, by all reports, had made quite a good show of things after deciding to get married. They were light farmers or something, tending solar collectors and capacitor banks and selling power on the open market, but they also grew and sold vegetables. Conrad had a hard time picturing them grubbing in the dirt, although he supposed someone had to, or half the colony would be living on glucose and protein paste from crappy waste-disposal faxes.
They didn't need chairs; Robert and Agnes had joined the centaurs long ago. Galloping across the open countryside was perhaps not as glamorous as flight, but even so the centaurs were, in some sense, the realization of the angels' dream: speed and strength, with an empty world in which to test them. “We're the freest people who ever lived,” Robert had told him once. Now the two of them sat at the table on four folded legs, with dainty little prayer rugs under them to prevent their chafing against the wellwood floor. But they were still colored that same shade of bright, unnatural blue, from head to hoof to swishing tail. Even among centaurs, they were iconoclasts.