was bubbling over fractally;
six extra miles to get to school
with gas on absolutest “E.”
But still, the temp’ral quantum foam
was not too bad; despite the crunch
of virtual traffic popping in
and out, I stopped three times for lunch
and got to school before I left
and called back home to give the warning,
“Hey Bas, fill up the bloody tank;
it’s yet another fractal morning!”2
—“Commutative”
BASCAL EDWARD DE TOWAJI LUTUI, age 9
Chapter five.
The battle in the throne room
Some sort of portable fax machine was set up right there at the crime scene, and the boys were processed through it. Conrad’s injuries were healed almost as a byproduct; the fax filters compared his body against his genome and the standard human template, concluded that the damage wasn’t ornamental, and sent on a corrected pattern to the other end. That these operations were performed on a snarl of quantum entanglements, rather than on a person or even the image of a person, did not impress Conrad in the slightest. Indeed, he’d experienced the process many times before, and barely noticed it at all.
He ended up in a windowless interrogation room—or rather, an atomically perfect duplicate of him ended up there, while he himself had vanished. Died, if you like, although people rarely talked about it that way. He’d also been through this experience almost daily throughout his life, and thought no more about it than about the dead skin cells he was supposedly shedding every moment of every day.
At any rate, here he was, in this windowless room with a human being and a robot. The robot didn’t speak—they rarely did, except in emergencies—but it also didn’t move, which gave it a vague air of menace. Especially since it was positioned between Conrad and the exit.
The human being, seated across from him on the other side of a table, was named Leslie Jones. She told him gently and repeatedly that she was here to help him. He was not restrained in any way, and the interrogation room’s door, not closed all the way, betrayed a sliver of light at the edge. But he’d seen enough to know that Leslie Jones wasn’t a lawyer or a social worker, and seemed in fact to be some species of cop, so he played as dumb as he figured he could get away with. Lying to the authorities would be worse than useless—they’d spot it before the words were even out of his mouth—but they were also unlikely to respect his intelligence, nor to be surprised if he didn’t display any.
“Why did you leave the camp?” Leslie asked him, for the second time.
He shrugged. “We weren’t prisoners.”
“You could have requested a pass. And an escort. And permission from your parents. Instead, we have a counselor assaulted and a Palace Guard vandalized.”
“I didn’t do any of that.”
“But you were there when it happened.”
Conrad didn’t answer. They knew he was there. Between sensor records and skin cells and ghostly electromagnetic imprints, the Constabulary could probably trace just about every move he’d ever made.
Smiling, Leslie tried a different approach. “Conrad, you’re not in trouble. Not very much trouble. No one was seriously hurt, and there’s no evidence you did anything other than follow your friends and then witness a crime. We just want to find out what happened.”
He shrugged again. “You already know.”
“Well, yes. But I’d like to hear it from you.” She was wearing a green sweater with buttons made from what looked like live dandelion heads. Her hair was coppery red, and very short. He supposed she was beautiful—he’d never met anyone who wasn’t—but she spoke and moved like the women of his mother’s generation. Two hundred years out of date; born into a mortal world, and then “saved” from it by the rise of the Queendom. He wondered if faxes of this same woman were interrogating all the other boys as well.
“You don’t know anything,” he told her, not in a nasty way but just factually. “I’m sorry, but I really can’t explain it to you. There’s not even anything to explain.” Then he disappointed himself by adding, “I want my mother.”
Leslie just nodded, with a sympathy that seemed annoyingly genuine. “Both your parents have been briefed on the situation, and have asked to send copies of themselves here. The request is under review. However, as I’m sure you can understand, the involvement of Prince Bascal is a complicating factor.”
Again, Conrad had nothing to say that would actually help the situation, so he said nothing, and Leslie simply started her questioning again, from the top. They went around and around like that for nearly an hour. Finally, when Conrad was halfway nuts with the repetition, a disc of yellow light appeared on the tabletop, and a little speaker formed beside it and emitted a soft chime.
“Well,” Leslie said, eyeing it, “we tried, anyway. You seem like a nice young man; you should try opening up a little.”
“Oh yeah? Why?” Conrad couldn’t help asking.
To her credit, she thought about that for a couple of seconds before replying, “Because childhood doesn’t excuse rudeness, not at your age. Whatever problems you believe you’re facing, communication is really the only way to tackle them. You’ll understand this someday, when you and your friends are the ones in charge.”
Conrad didn’t even try to suppress his sneer. “What day is that, Leslie?”
She really looked at him then, rolling her tongue around behind a set of pursed lips. Finally, she said, “Look, we’ve all made adjustments. Nobody said life was perfect. But we do have forever to work it out, yes?” She rose to her feet then, and motioned for him to do the same. “Come on. As I feared, the case has been placed under palace jurisdiction. Back to the fax with you, I’m afraid.”
For some reason, Conrad felt a shiver of fear. “Why? Where am I going?”
“To the palace. Didn’t I just say that? Best behavior, Conrad; you’re going to meet the king and queen.”
The throne room of Their Majesties, Bruno de Towaji and Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, looked exactly like it did on TV. The same reed mats over wellstone floors, the same Catalan tapestries over wellstone walls, the same gilded wellstone scrollwork along the ceiling and floorboards and high, vaulted doorways. It was daytime here; the ceiling was clear at the moment, and light streamed down through it from a blue-white sky, much paler than the sky of Camp Friendly.
A pair of vaguely familiar women stood at ease, with the black hair and walnut skin of South Pacific ancestry, and the elaborate wraps and hair fans of Her Majesty’s court. With prim nods and subtle gestures, the two of them gathered the boys out of a pair of fax machines, and lined them up two rows deep in front of the empty thrones.
Lucky for Conrad, he got to stand two spaces from Bascal, near the middle of the front row, not four meters from the raised dais on which the thrones themselves rested. Lucky, lucky. His heart was hammering wetly in his throat; his knees were knocking. He’d never been so nervous in his life, even the first time he’d spoken face-to-face with the Poet Prince. Conrad had been arrested once before, for throwing rocks at a cat, and had been called to the principal’s office many times, and of course detained and grounded and singled by his parents on a regular basis. But this was a whole new realm of trouble, the prospect of an angry king and queen far more frightening than the bland, dutiful sympathy of any police or petty officials.