Bascal remained polite this time. “You’ve heard the explanation, Father. I’ve been shouting it from the rooftops for years. It’s the seriousness of it that always escapes you.”
Bruno’s frown deepened. “Seriousness? My boy, I’ve lived a long life, and these are the least serious times I’ve seen. War is a memory, crime is in sharp decline, and there’ve been remarkably few disasters—natural or otherwise—to threaten lives and infrastructure. You’ve never seen a time of strife, lad. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“No, you just refuse to see it. The strife is all around us.”
“Pish,” Bruno said, waving a hand. “You kids. You think teenage angst is a new invention? What you need is a squozen moon.” Then he paused, and added, “It’s awfully small in here. Perhaps the dining room would be better. Have you boys eaten?”
“We have,” Bascal agreed, although it was just nachos and beer. Truthfully, Conrad didn’t think another bite or two would be unwelcome.
“Maybe a snack,” he said stupidly, just as he might to any other friend’s father. Then more contritely added, “Sire.”
“Snack,” Bruno said, pinching his chin and musing, as if this were some bold new theorem he was hearing for the first time. “Hmm.”
Five minutes later, the boys were arranged around a wellwood dining table, with Bruno at one end and Queen Tamra at the other, and Bascal squarely between them on the long side. The table would have been huge with just the three of them, but with fourteen boys and a girl it seemed cozy enough. Everyone was solemnly drinking lemonade from delicate-looking crystal goblets, and nibbling on tiny peanut-butter-and-vanilla sandwiches, and gazing out the picture window at the white sand and coconut palms, the ocean surf throwing itself against the beach, which sprawled for a hundred meters along a gentle, gently groomed slope.
It looked sultry-hot out there, but this dining room was cool in both the literal and metaphoric senses. Her Majesty was less icy than before, but still reserved, impatient and unhappy with her wayward son. She did spare some attention for the other boys, and actually spoke with the ones closest to her—Steve Grush and Jamil Gazzaniga.
“Such a pleasant day. Have you been to the islands before, boys?”
“The Tongan islands? No, ma’am,” Steve said, as politely as you please. It seemed strange to Conrad, that a bully as transparent and tedious and predictable as Steve should be sitting right next to the queen, essentially ignored by her bodyguards. Even stranger that he should look good doing it. It seemed like at any moment he might leap from his chair, grab her by the head, and start delivering noogies. But here was how the worlds really worked: act like a complete asshole and you could lunch with the queen. Jamil, for his part, looked pale and sweaty and terrified, and could only manage to grunt a reply.
“Well, do enjoy them while you can,” Queen Tamra said, glancing briefly at the ocean, and her voice was finally tinged with some amusement. The boys were her captives in every sense of the word.
Xmary also looked terrified, probably because she was seated only two places away from Bruno, and could be caught out at any moment. But the king wore a distracted, lost-in-thought kind of look, and like the queen he was mostly interested in Bascal anyway.
“So,” he said to the prince, tearing himself out of some internal reverie. “You were explaining these trying times to me. Perhaps the vanilla has sharpened your righteous fury. Would you care to continue?”
And yes, Bascal did look angry when he answered, “This is precisely my point.” He gestured around the room, at the table, at the tiny sandwich in his hand. “You connive a scene here to make me look like a little kid. In front of my peers, no less.”
Bruno reflected on that, then nodded across the table to his wife. “Dear, is it childish to eat a sandwich?”
“I eat them every day,” she answered.
“Really, every day. I didn’t know that.” He popped one of them into his own mouth and chewed it thoughtfully.
“Your father,” the queen added, glaring mildly at Bascal, “does not connive. The very idea makes me laugh. Have you two met? Shall I introduce you? Bascal, Bruno. Bruno, Bascal. This is good lemonade, by the way.”
“The cooks have been playing with the pattern,” Bruno said. “I’ll let them know you like it.”
“Do, please.”
But Bascal wasn’t finished. He glared back at his mother and said, “You know perfectly well what I mean.” Then, to the king: “You were already at university by my age, learning physics. Emancipated. Adult.”
And Conrad could see how it was in this house: emotional appeals in one direction and logical ones in the other, with human servants as well as robots and household intelligences to serve as neutrals. But really they were all together, a unified front against which Bascal was busily throwing himself.
“Orphaned, lad,” the king said sadly. “Living on earthquake charity. People died back then, and not on any convenient schedule. I wasn’t an adult; I’d much rather have been learning archery and canoeing.”
“Mother was queen at fifteen.”
“Also orphaned. And thrust into power without warning, by people who did not have her best interest in mind. It’s nothing to envy, Bascal. Here you’ve returned from your adventures to the arms of a loving family. Tamra and I never had that option.”
“A side issue at best, Father. Don’t try to sidetrack me and then walk away feeling you’ve won the argument.”
The queen sighed. “Can we stop this posturing, please? If you want to make a statement, Bascal, try speaking it. The power to change society sits right here in front of you.”
He nodded. “Yes, but not the will. You both understand my point well enough, and even acknowledge its truth. But you see it from a past perspective, and so regard it as a minor issue. Which it isn’t.”
Bruno, gesturing with a crust of bread, opined, “By its nature—its naïveté—youth challenges old assumptions. As you say, we agree on the parameters of the issue but not on their relative weighting. You’re a bright lad, and you have a point. However, there are other savants who draw different conclusions from the data, hmm? Can’t experience provide some context for these judgments? Can’t societies evolve at their own pace? The very fact that you sit here, disagreeing with us, shows off one of the engines of change.”
“Debate,” Bascal groaned. “Certainly, you’d like to keep it neatly Socratic, for centuries if possible. To quench the fires through simple exhaustion. But change is generational, Father; it occurs in painful spasms. A mutant is born into environmental chaos, and thrives amid the broken bodies of its ancestors. That’s your story, right? That’s mother’s. But the cycles of renewal which birthed your Queendom are suffocating beneath it. There’s no changing of the guard, no retirement of old ideas. Every error gets entrenched, until a shock to the system is necessary to effect any change at all.”
“An interesting accusation,” Bruno mused, thinking it over.
But the queen merely chuckled. “Ah, the praise of death. It began the moment our terrors were shelved. But it’s always the death of others, never ourselves, that we look to for renewal. The early martyrs drew a lot of admiration—deservedly so—but where are their arguments now? Their clever rebuttals? Their example for others to emulate? Swallowed up by the silent earth. You know how many suicides last year cited ‘future generations’ as a reason for leaving? Zero.”
Zero? Ouch. Shit. This confirmed Conrad’s worst suspicion: that his age bracket wasn’t so much oppressed as invisible. To neglect a thing in the criminal sense, you had to know it was there!
“It’s not that we don’t sympathize,” Bruno told his son gently. “Your body and mind are screaming for the respect they’re due, by the old organic schedule. You should be a hunter, a warrior, a man. But this problem isn’t new, either. Imagine the plight of the Old Moderns, leaving graduate school in their thirties with dim prospects for advancement, and the first signs of death already creeping into their bodies.”