“I’ve got impulsiveness issues,” Conrad answered with a laugh. “You should be glad I’m thinking at all.”
That seemed to make Bascal angry. “Your parents are what, a hundred years old? Two hundred? Fucking experts on the subject of impulsiveness.”
“Actually, it was my school—”
“Well, to hell with your school. I doubt you committed a single age-inappropriate act. This is exactly why there are cities like Denver, where they at least make concessions to our youthful vigor, where they at least acknowledge that we have our own needs. Parents ought to be forced to live here. It ought to be fucking mandatory.”
A thought occurred: “Maybe you should be in charge of the Children’s Cities, O Prince of Sol.”
But Bascal just grunted derisively. “Bring that bill before the Senate, hmm? I’ll be fifty before they’re finished debating. And still a child in their eyes.”
“But your parents—”
This time, it was Bascal’s fist on his shoulder, slugging. “Will you shut up? Please? You are wrecking my mood. It’s tiresome.”
Ho Ng sidled up, showing fists of his own. “No pissing off the prince, bloodfuck. I’m going to pound somebody, and it might be you.”
“Steady,” Bascal said, holding up a hand. “We have a common purpose here.”
“What purpose?” Feck wanted to know. “We appear to be at the limits of the known universe.”
“Why, revolution,” Bascal answered casually, pointing at one of the buildings. “Starting right there.”
Chapter four.
The wellwood deception
Revolution. Wow. Fuck. Was that a metaphor? Because tempting as the idea might seem, a gaggle of teenage refugees from summer camp couldn’t do much against a whole Queendom, with its police and truant officers, its infinite supply of infinitely patient robots, and of course its billions of satisfied citizens in their tens of billions of instantiations. Even if the boys commandeered a fax machine and printed up an army of themselves, the Constabulary would simply shut down the entire area, round the boys up, and reconverge their many copies back into single individuals. The odds were so hopeless—and the threat of punishment so dire—that as far as Conrad knew nobody had ever even tried it.
“I thought we were just looking for girls,” he said, to no one in particular. And that was who replied: no one.
As the buildings approached, it became clear that the river had a good bank and bad bank: one side facing the city and backing to the suburbs, while the other had a nice mountain view, but butted up against the bad neighborhood and so became bad by association. The most questionable of the buildings was an ancient two-story café whose shabby appearance was not an act, but the result of a natural wood facade that had stopped looking luxurious a few decades before Conrad was born. This, not surprisingly, was exactly where Bascal led them.
The café had a scattering of plastic tables and benches and chairs in front and behind, occupied by perhaps a dozen people of varying ages. None of them looked especially old, but then again who did? Conrad guessed a minimum age of around twelve—just old enough to be let out of the house—and a median in the low twenties, with the oldest men and women just edging into their Age of Deceit. Thirty or forty years old, when the fax filters stopped merely harassing the aging process, and began simply to arrest it. Lock it up, lose the key.
There wouldn’t be many folks older than that, except maybe as part of the restaurant staff. This wasn’t the kind of place you came to with your parents; it was the kind of place you came with your friends, to drink watered-down beer and coffee and feel independent. Not much draw for the older crowd.
You could of course stay in the Children’s Cities as long as you liked—some people stayed on as teaching assistants or administrative assistants or whatever, and a few remained as passive consumers, either to make up for a childhood spent someplace less raw, or because they’d frozen somehow in the latter stages of larval development, unable to pupate, to grow wings and fly away. Calcutta, for example, was famous for its “Peter Pan” ghettos. But there were better places for people like that, where stronger intoxicants were available and everyone was above the age of consent. This place was what they called a “kiddie café”—no identification required for admittance. Whatever bona fide grownups you found here were probably up to no good. Which Conrad supposed was the whole point.
The name of the establishment appeared to be “1551,” although maybe that was its street address, or possibly even the year it was built. Here, a flock of dirt-faced teenage boys was apparently considered less alarming than it was downtown. Only a few people looked up at their arrival, and any surprise they showed probably had more to do with dorky camp uniforms than anything else.
Bascal seemed to take this nonreaction personally; his easy stride broke into a trot, and he uttered a quiet, ululating sort of war cry and made an overhand “follow me” gesture to the boys behind him. They were officially taking this place by storm, and yeah, that did get a bit more of a reaction. A young man who’d been leaning against the doorway now shrank away from it, not caring to test his luck.
The place was a lot warmer inside than the cool breeze flowing down along the river. Poorly ventilated, Conrad thought, and with a wood face instead of a wellstone one, it couldn’t pump the heat out electrically, either. Very rustic. Hell, it was almost like being back at the camp. The walls were an egalitarian mix of wood and plaster and brick, with wellstone surfaces only at the serving counters, of which there were several. A few animated posters hung on the walls, but there was also a lot of static graffiti done up in plain ink, and the reason for this was quickly apparent: each table had a big feather pen stuck prominently into a built-in inkwell. You could even see a few kids in the act of scribbling out their pent-up wisdom.
“They must wash these walls every week,” he said to Feck.
Feck just nodded vaguely, his eyes on everything but Conrad.
A sign said PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF, but there was also a staircase leading upward, and although the place was crowded with plastic tables and chairs and the people sitting at them, Bascal still had his momentum. A few zigs and zags through the crowd, a couple of bumped chairs, and he was on his way up, with Steve and Ho and Conrad right behind him, and all the other boys streaming after in a long line. People looked up at this, yeah. Looked annoyed, maybe a little worried.
The second floor was smaller, hotter, less crowded and less decorated. There was enough room for the boys to settle in at a corner clustered with round tables, but the doorway out to a balcony seemed much more inviting, and that was where they went. And if Bascal was looking for trouble, here was the perfect opportunity, because the balcony had seating for twenty or maybe twenty-five people, but was two-thirds full already, and the empty seats weren’t in a block, but scattered all over.
Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui was full of surprises, though; as the boys piled up behind him in the doorway, he could actually have cut a fairly menacing figure. But instead he just stood up straight, clapped his hands twice for attention, and called out, “Excuse me! I’m afraid you’re all going to have to move inside. The balcony is reserved for a private party.”
The quality of his voice was something Conrad really was going to have to study: self-assured, vaguely apologetic, and entirely official. There was no question that you were going to comply, and if for some reason you didn’t, well, there’d be all sorts of hassle for everyone involved, and in the end you’d still be vacating your chair, thank you very much. It took barely thirty seconds to clear the crowd and settle in at all the good seats along the rail.