“Hi,” she said, matter-of-factly. How much was unspoken in that one syllable! Hi, Prince. I know who you are, Prince, but I don’t care. I’m here to check you out as one human being to another, Prince.
Which was fine, sure, except that it was Bascal she’d sat down with, not some ordinary puke two years younger than her. And she hadn’t brought her friends, either. Probably hadn’t even told them, for fear of having to share.
“Hi,” Bascal said back, in imitation of her tone.
“Hello,” Conrad added, with no particular inflection, figuring he might as well at least try.
The girl nodded, sparing him half a glance before focusing her attention on Bascal once again. She asked, with mock indifference, “You wanted something?”
Bascal leaned back and smiled. “Seeing you, my dear, I can think of a lot of things to want. But I doubt we have much time, so I’ll get right to the point: I need access to a taboo fax machine. I’m carrying contraband. What’s your name, by the way?”
Her eyes widened. “I’m Xmary. You need acc—”
“Eksmerry? Is that a nickname? Short for what, Christina Marie?”
“Xiomara Li Weng,” she answered distractedly. “You want what, now?”
“A fax machine. A simple, ordinary fax machine that will copy ta’e fakalao. Forbidden objects and substances. My men are here are on a mission, for which they have certain material requirements. Clothes, for one thing,” he said, pinching his Camp Friendly shirt for emphasis.
And truly, that was one of the camp’s worst indignities: natural cloth. The shirts and culottes not only looked silly, they would not change their color or cut or permeability. They didn’t regulate temperature or dissipate sweat. They didn’t obey commands, or even hear them. They didn’t do anything.
“And what else?” the girl demanded, clearly concerned that this was a setup, that she was the focus of some sort of royal joke or sting operation.
“Jewelry,” Bascal said, with an inscrutable little smile.
“That’s all?” Her eyes flicked downward, then settled on the only jewelry Bascal was wearing: the wellgold signet ring on the middle finger of his left hand.
“Pretty, eh?”
“It’s not an ordinary ring.”
Now there was an edge to Bascal’s voice. “Of course it’s not an ordinary ring. I’m the prince of the fucking solar system. What do I wear, gold? Tin? It’s information, darling—quadrillions of terabytes in quantum storage. It wants out.”
With a shiver of excitement and dread, Conrad realized that they weren’t just playing at being bad here. They were being bad; they were going to be bad. Bascal was really pissed off about something. Hell, they all were. As fugitives from adult supervision, they had a fucking point to make.
This girl Xmary, hearing the tone of Bascal’s voice, huffed once and then said, “I know some people. I can ask for you. It sounds pretty serious, though.”
“It is.”
Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Finally, the girl got up again. Before turning to go she asked, “Am I going to get in trouble?”
“Yes,” Bascal replied. “We all are. The question is whether anything useful is accomplished beforehand.”
“Great.”
She disappeared. Doing as she was told, choosing to go along with Bascal and against her own better judgment.
“So what’s in the ring?” Steve Grush asked.
“Garbage,” Bascal said.
“Garbage?”
“Garbage. Reorganization of matter at the atomic level. Into garbage.”
“You mean programmable matter, right?” Conrad asked, because otherwise that made no sense at all.
“Duh. Any wellstone surface. But that’s everything, right?”
Well, sort of. There were still an awful lot of natural materials around, especially in Denver. But Conrad remained confused, because wellstone was fundamentally a form of silicon. Woven nanofiber, right? Quantum dots to confine electrons in atomlike structures. In raw form the stuff looked and felt like some heavy, impermeable, beetle-shiny plastic, but by sending the right signals through it you could fill it with artificial pseudoatoms of any type. Silicon and gold, silicon and sulfur, silicon and plaster of fucking Paris. Then there were the transuranic pseudoatoms, and the asymmetric ones, and the ones that incorporated exotic particles. You could alter wellstone’s apparent composition in so many ways that even after three hundred years, a Queendom full of pseudo-chemists and hypercomputer search algorithms had barely cataloged even the fundamentals.
But pseudoatoms weren’t real, and silicon was.
Bascal was looking smug. “It’s Garbage Day in Denver, me boyos. If we each have one of these, and we spread out, we can make a lot of frigging garbage. We can even threaten infrastructure, which after all is the thing that separates us from the animals. If our demands aren’t met, they will at least be remembered.”
“Raw!” Steve said approvingly, and a number of the boys echoed him.
“Where did this software come from?” Conrad couldn’t help asking.
“Wrote it myself. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”
Conrad proceeded warily, not wanting to sound negative. “How does it work?”
“I archived a year’s worth of patterns from the palace waste chutes, and fit them together with a tesselationtiler. Any surface is mapped with the best possible fit in stored garbage, and the boundaries between garbage objects are heated and acoustically shocked to cut them away from the parent body. Slap it on a wall, and you get a pile of steaming garbage.”
“Except that it wouldn’t steam,” Conrad said. “It wouldn’t stink. It might look like shit, or half-eaten food, or whatever. Probably even feel like it. But pseudoatoms don’t have a smell. They can’t leak out into the air, like real atoms and molecules do.”
“Oh,” Bascal said, suddenly uncertain. It wasn’t a look that fit his face.
“Still, that’s pretty amazing that you thought of that. You’ve got power for the separated objects, right? They’re photovoltaic enough to maintain their own memory and programming? And composition?”
“Um. I don’t know.”
“Oh,” Conrad said. “Probably not, then. You’ll just wind up with garbage-shaped chunks of nanofiber silicon. It’s probably dangerous, too. I mean, there’s more wellstone in a building than just the facade, right? You’d better be real careful what you touch with that thing, or you’re going to hurt somebody.”
“Who made you the voice of reason?” Ho Ng asked acidly.
“Um, nobody.”
“Why don’t you shut up, then? Pussy.”
Conrad had no response to that. He’d already blurted out the thing that needed blurting. Getting any farther on Ho’s bad side was not a smart idea, and he could see that Bascal was brooding, too, looking around with dark, embarrassed anger. That anger could, Conrad knew, be directed at him at any moment. He considered apologizing, but didn’t see how that would help. Better just to shut up and pretend he wasn’t here.
“Are we still doing this?” Steve Grush wanted to know.
“Yeah,” Bascal said, waving a hand distractedly. “Let me think about it for a minute.” Then he pinched his chin in a gesture so reminiscent of his father that for a moment Bascal might have been a younger image of the king himself. A little swarthier, perhaps. A bit more angular. Conrad felt a fresh burst of affection for this boy, this young man, this Poet Prince of all humanity.
“I have to visit the ’soir,” Feck announced loudly, from the other end of the balcony. That was short for “pissoir,” and told everyone exactly, biologically, what he’d be doing when he got there. If he’d said “ ’toir,” or “shittoir,” that would convey a different intention. You always knew more about Feck than you wanted to. Still, it was funny— Feck was pretty funny sometimes—and suddenly there was a lot of laughter, and the conversation turned to other subjects.