So here they were: Sixteenth and Market in the Mile High City, an almost mythical address. The center of raw. To the east a few blocks was Self Similar Street, where they were still recording the puppet show live every week. Somewhere to the south was the Cola Dome where the Broncos and Avalanche and Nuggets still played, where famous concerts were held and paintball battles waged. On the streets, as advertised, was actual vehicular traffic: white buses and yellow/black taxis, delivery trucks and horse-drawn carriages. Rather a lot of bicycles, too, piloted not by children but by serious-looking adults swathed in impact-resistant wellcloth. There were also a few pedicabs drawn by midgets, which struck Conrad as an odd touch indeed: where did you find midgets in an age of perfect health?
The sidewalks were crowded and vibrant, full of obstacles for the pedestrians to flow around in artful patterns. This was a city of posts and pedestals, columns and obelisks. A fountain burbled merrily. There were little trees everywhere—maples and poplars and even acacias, no more than four or five meters tall. But the towers looming all around, blocking the view of all behind them, were anything but miniature. It was only when Bascal led the boys around a corner onto Sixteenth Street that anything resembling mountains became visible, hulking dimly ahead in the sunset, shrouded by clouds, crowded from beneath by low buildings. But the mountains were shorter than Conrad would’ve expected, or else farther away. In the golden-red glow of the clouds it was hard to tell. But that was the direction Bascal led them: away from the towers, toward the sunset.
The boys made a rough passage through the city: hooting, snatching at leaves, kicking and leaping over benches, crowding people out of their way. There was no law against being surly, and oh boy did it feel good. Still, Conrad couldn’t quite keep his eyes off the architecture. It was one of the few things he was good at and cared about: the history of building, and of the buildings themselves. Here, that history was written in the walls, layered like geological strata.
“Look at the sidewalk,” he said to Bascal. And when that was ignored, he tried, “Look at that wall. Is it brick? It looks like brick.”
“Whatever,” Bascal replied, not mocking but barely looking, either. The question didn’t interest him.
Conrad tried it on Yinebeb Fecre. “You study architecture, Feck?”
Feck raised his limp, sarcastic hands again. “Ooh, architecture!”
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a popular subject. Still, it seemed important—especially here. There were exactly two subjects Conrad hadn’t failed in his last school year: Architecture and Matter Programming. These he pursued with an intensity that upset his teachers nearly as much as his apathy and surliness on the other subjects. Only History had inspired any enthusiasm at all, and only because this time it had included the Light Wars, which of course were the first intersection of architecture and matter programming.
If he hadn’t spat in Mrs. Regland’s chair and then called Mr. O’Mara a pigfucker for catching him, he might have learned even more. But what he did know fascinated him: the moment wellstone—programmable matter—had found its way into the old republics, the Light Wars had started. Without delay, without restraint. What anarchy: buildings greedily sucking in ambient energy, dumping waste heat, offending the eye with patterns of superreflector and superabsorber, with flashing lights and magnetic fields, with blasts of communication laser unfettered by any cable or conduit. It was much cheaper to rustle energy out of the environment than to buy it off the grid, so all concern for aesthetics had flown right out the window, overnight, along with concern for the comfort of passersby and even, to some extent, for their safety. You could have all the electricity you wanted, if you blackly drank in every photon that touched you. You could stay cool in the summertime, if your building was a perfect mirror focusing the heat back on its unfortunate neighbors. In fact, if you were clever and obnoxious enough you could do both at the same time: deepening every shadow, amplifying every pool of brightness for your own convenience.
This wasn’t as crippling a blow to city life as the Fax Wars twenty years later, but the scars remained even after the Queendom’s founding, when the Architectural Courtesy Edicts were rammed through. Here in Denver you could practically tell, just by looking, which decade each building had been constructed in. Here an ancient steel-framed structure of poured concrete, its wellstone a mere facade. There a building of pure wellstone, held up against gravity by the pressure of electrons in quantum dots. (This had struck Conrad as a dumb idea the first moment he’d heard of it—what if the power failed?—but truthfully he’d never heard of a case where one of these selfish buildings had collapsed or dissolved. There must be all sorts of safeguards.) The majority of the buildings were post-Queendom: diamond frames and floors, with wellstone sheathing and facing. But even these had been dressed down, made to resemble materials of more or less natural origin.
Denver, like most of the really great cities, had forcibly regressed itself to something resembling the end of the twenty-first century. A preponderance of stone and metal and silica glass. Lighted signs had to look a certain way: like neon or mercury vapor or electroluminescent bulk diode. As the sunset deepened and the streetlights came on one by one, he noted with satisfaction that they were simulated gas flame. Had there been gaslights in the twenty-first century? If not, there ought to have been!
As the boys made their way westward, a full moon slipped into view from behind one of the towers.
“Awooooo!” said a kid named Peter Kolb, pointing.
Bascal turned, looked, spread his arms. “Ah, now that is a moon. July, to be specific. The Buck Moon. And we, my friends, are the young bucks making our way in the world. Let all the people of the domes of the moon gaze down upon us in wonder. This is our night.”
“Buck Moon? Says who?” someone asked.
“Says the Naval Almanac,” Bascal answered.
Feck cleared his throat. “It’s, uh, from the Algonquin.”
Conrad turned. “Eh?”
“North American tribal society. Very old, but, you know, still in existence. Almost as big as the islands of Tonga, actually. Almost as many people.”
Now everyone was looking at Feck, and even by gaslight you could see him blushing.
Bascal looked surprised. “Feck! You don’t know things, do you? Peter knows things; he’s the son of laureates. Conrad thinks he knows things, although he’s a son of a bitch the last I heard. But you? Ah, wait a minute, I’m perceiving something: you have a connection to this tribe. Wait, don’t tell me! You’re, let’s see ...” He studied Feck’s complexion and features for a moment. “You’re one-eighth by blood.”
“One-quarter,” Feck said. “But it’s not Algonquin, it’s Chippewa. Their neighbors. For us, this is the Raspberry Moon.”
“Ah! You’re practically a native guide! I had no idea.”
“I’ve never been to North America,” Feck said. “Anyway, this area is Kiowa, or maybe Lakota. The Horse Moon.”
“We’ll have to horse around,” Bascal answered merrily. “And give a big, fat raspberry to the good citizens of Denver. Any other moons we should know about tonight?”
Feck scratched his ear, uncomfortable with the attention. The crowds were lighter here; the boys were practically alone in their pool of lamplight. “Uh, the Corn Moon? Or maybe it’s Popcorn Moon. Also Raptor, Thunder, and Blood.”
“Wow. That’s raw. I like it. We’ll screech like eagles, leaving a wake of thunder and blood. And raspberry popcorn! Actually, that’s quite silly. But anyway the town is ours, and I say we take a bite.”
Ah, the Poet Prince. Conrad snorted to himself.