“Your mother is upset, Mara,” Da told her gently.
But Mummy pressed on. “No, dear. Upset doesn’t begin to describe what I feel. Betrayed, undermined, humiliated. Did our reputations matter to you at all, young lady? If you’re so intent on this wickedness, then perhaps it’s time we give you the liberty you crave. Darken our windows no more with your brooding silhouette. We’ll turn the lockouts around. When they let you out of here, you’ll be free to go anywhere you please. Anywhere but home.”
Conrad stayed in the cell another thirty-six hours, and slept almost twenty of it. A pair of local cops—both male and not very talkative—took turns bringing him meals when he rang, and even brought an exercise machine when he complained of boredom. They weren’t here to punish him, or pass judgment in any way. They’d simply been asked to hold him and care for him while preparations were made at the palace.
Preparations for what?
He was in the exerciser, thrusting his arms against the resistance of a spring, when Officer Donahue brought a letter for him.
“Lad,” it said, in the voice of the King of Sol, “a trial at this point would be wasteful. We know most of what you’ve done. Will you grant us the courtesy of pleading guilty?”
“On what charges?” Conrad probed.
The letter chuckled. “Fair enough. The willful destruction of a Friendly Parks planette; the theft of resources from same; the operation of an unregistered spaceship; the operation of a spaceship without identity beacon, running lights or other visibility provisions; the negligent homicide of nine human instantiations; the breaking and entering of a Mass Industries neutronium barge, and misappropriation of resources from same. The king owns those, by the way.”
Considering for a moment, Conrad said, “Most of those deaths had nothing to do with me. I was personally negligent in maybe three of them. And we didn’t break into the barge; your Palace Guard let us in. And we certainly didn’t ‘destroy’ the planette.”
“I’m afraid you did,” the letter said. “A quantity of water seeped into the core, shorting out circuitry and altering key mechanical properties. A complete dismantlement will be necessary.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Noted. So you’re guilty, then?”
“Well, yes. The rest of it is true.”
“Er, you have to say it.”
“What? Guilty?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Guilty.”
The letter paused, then said, “Thank you. Our Majesties will be in touch with you shortly.”
“Great.”
He would have left it at that, but the cop who’d delivered the letter was already gone, and the letter itself was just sitting there, full of unknown information. When a minute had gone by he asked it, “What’s going to happen to me?”
“You’re to be sentenced,” it answered, not entirely without sympathy.
“How?”
“Our Majesties will determine the punishment.”
“I mean, what? What punishment?”
“Hmm,” it said. “Unknown.”
“What’s typical in a case like this?”
The note laughed again. “Lad, there has never been a case like this. Grand theft of a spaceship is normally punishable by twenty years’ incarceration. Does that help?”
“Um, no. Not really.” Jesus Christ among the gods. Twenty years? By the time he got out, he’d’ve lived most of his life in prison. He would be, by any sensible definition, a career felon. And a virginal one at that, unless prison held additional surprises he didn’t want to think about.
And with that thought, the courage that had served him through all of this suddenly collapsed. Yes, he was a sailor and a revolutionary and a sometime confidant of the Prince of Sol, but suddenly he felt—very keenly and distinctly—like a child who was in over his head. Tears are almost exclusively a symptom of frustration, Mrs. Regland had taught him in health class. This is why they’ve become so rare. With eternity before us, there is very little we cannot change. Except the past.
And damned if it wasn’t true. As the tears began their sad, stupid journey down his face, he crumpled the letter in an angry fist. Damn the thing. Damn it for seeing through his stupid, childish pretensions. Of course, despite the way it felt, the note wasn’t made of paper. It straightened itself out the moment he relaxed his grip.
“Shit,” he said, choking back an undignified sob. “Damn you, letter. Would you fucking self-destruct or something?”
“Certainly,” the letter answered. “And you have the king’s own apology for any distress my delivery may have caused.” Then it fell at once into a fine silicate dust.
Chapter twenty.
The arena sentence
Finally, an official summons arrived, and when Officer Boyle came down to let Conrad out, he was accompanied by a pair of gleaming Palace Guards. The fax was up a flight of stairs and through a couple of doorways, and once he got there, stepping through it felt no more or less fateful than any other such journey. Conrad was killed and reborn, his memories and identity copied into a different bit of matter.
Where he ended up was a surprise, though—not the palace at all, but some sort of outdoor amphitheater, ringed by palm trees all around, beneath a bright blue sky full of puffy, flat-bottomed clouds. The smell of flowers leaped into his nose, and he was greeted at once by a familiar-looking woman, one of the Tongan courtiers from the queen’s staff, in a tapa-patterned dress of red and brown and glowing white. She glanced at Conrad, then at the sketchplate in her hand, then back at Conrad again.
“Mursk?” she asked.
“That’s right.”
“This way, please. My name is Tusité, and if that doesn’t strike a fear in you, then get tricky with me, and you’ll find out why it ought to.”
She led him down one of two staircases. The seats here, enough for a few thousand people, were mostly empty—except for one knot of a dozen or so kids sitting in the center of the first three rows. One of them was Bascal, dressed in a loose-fitting shirt and pants of a purple that was not quite the forbidden royal shade. He wore the wellstone scarf Robert M’chunu had cut for him from Viridity’s sail, and around his head rested a thin crown of wrinkly aluminum foil—clearly his idea of a joke. He was laughing loudly at something.
And then, without warning, the whole gang down there burst into Conrad’s favorite stanza of the Space Pirate Song:
Well they can’t tell us to shape up and they can’t tell us to ship out,
And they can’t come do our laundry though we sometimes wish they would,
And they’re never gonna catch us ’cause we won’t do nothing stupid
So we’re sailing toward salvation in an angel made of wood!
This didn’t seem like the best foot to be putting forward at a sentencing hearing, but the boys pressed on heedlessly into the chorus:
We’re the pirates of the Queendom; we’re the pirates of the spaceways.
We’d be pirates of the Nescog if they ever let us on.
So we’re flying through the Kuiper Belt and steering just with starlight,
And we’ve nothing else to do all day but sing this pirate song!
With a shock, Conrad saw the boy Bascal had his arm around: Peter Kolb, last seen on the surface of Camp Friendly, running away with his eyes full of tears. But today he was looking not only joyous, but downright smug. His eyes found Conrad and brightened further as the song broke up, with each of the boys trying to throw in a different verse. Bascal melted back into the mob, suddenly talking to someone else.