They couldn’t change their bodies, but clearly they could use their brains. And whatever they were passing, whatever they were saying to each other, the Red Sun workers seemed oblivious to it until it was too late, and their fate was sealed. When the mob had self-assembled into five clean ranks, they rushed their attackers. Silently at first, as rows one and two launched into motion, but then rows three and four let out an ululating yell, while row five raised its fists in defiance.
Nor were these kids afraid to absorb some hurt; the first two rows were sacrificial, simply throwing themselves against the Red Sun line—in some cases right up against the tazzers. This put the Red Sun workers off balance—literally—so that the third and fourth lines could sweep them off their feet, wrenching the tazzers from their hands. This was also sacrificial, as most of the kids involved went down twitching and grunting. But the fifth line swept over them without opposition, taking up the tazzers and hurling them away, without even bothering to use them against their owners.
Instead, the Red Sun people were hauled up by their armpits and threaded into cunning arm- and neck- and headlocks that made optimum use of the strengths and weaknesses of human anatomy. The guards, like everyone else, must be terribly hard to injure, but against overpowering leverage they had little recourse.
“Here now!” one of them said.
“This activity’s unlawful,” tried another.
But more kids were streaming into the area, and the ones already here were finding their voices. “We’re not hurting anything! Why are you on us like this? Leave us the hell alone!” And then, in a rising chorus: “Into the drink with you! Swim for it! Swim for it! Swim for it!!”
“Excuse me,” said the camera of Bernhart Bechs, buzzing down for a closer view.
Conrad didn’t know what to feel. Barely fifteen seconds after the first commotion, the kids were dragging their captives toward the platform’s edge, at the juncture between two of its flower petals, and they really were going to throw them in the water.
“Stop!” he shouted after them. “There are… there… shit. There are smarter ways!”
But nobody was paying attention to an old man’s babbling, and if he jumped down there to intervene, in all likelihood he’d just be going for a swim himself. Damn! Whatever faults these kids might have, helplessness was clearly not among them. And Conrad had seen this all before, had lived it all more than once—the anger, the spontaneous order and chaos, the pent-up need for action. Alas, Utopia, Rodenbeck had written in the wake of the Children’s Revolt, thou retreatest from immorbid grasp as a cricket from fractious children.
And yea, verily, Conrad could feel it in his bones: the dream of a better life never ended, even when all sense said it should. And so the Queendom of Sol—forged with the loftiest of intentions by the best minds in history—was poised, once again, at the brink of revolution.
“Eternal life,” Conrad observed though no one was there to hear him, “is a tuberail car that won’t stop crashing.”
Chapter Eight
In which old haunts are revisited
Perhaps Conrad should have stayed. Perhaps he should have brought his negotiating skills to bear, and brokered some sort of agreement between the squatters, the platform’s rightful owners, and the Constabulary who’d come pouring out of the fax gates a few minutes after the fighting had ended. Perhaps he should have let himself care. But in fact he did none of these things. Feck and Xmary knew the squatters better than Conrad did, and had also enjoyed more extensive contact with the Queendom bureaucracy. In some sense, they’d begun the negotiation process well before the actual skirmish—before Conrad’s revival had even begun—and he didn’t feel like playing catch-up.
Hadn’t he done enough already? Didn’t he have his own needs and wants? Indeed, far from helping Xmary help the kids, he tried to seduce her away.
“This so-called Basic Assistance is pretty hefty,” he said. “We can go places, do things. You’ve spent your life on spaceships, dear, and on worlds that might as well be spaceships. But here’s a place that offers wonders beyond the dreams of Barnard.”
They were sitting side-by-side on the steps outside the park dome, enjoying the night breeze off the ocean while the crowds chattered and shouted behind them.
“Sorry,” she said with a sheepish look he could just barely read in Sealillia’s night-light glow, “but the rest of us are already broke. We retraced our old footsteps in Denver and Tongatapu. Went to the moon, took a submarine ride. We’ve been here two weeks; we blew through our monthly allotment in one.”
“So get some money from your parents.”
She put her head on his shoulder and sighed. “They won’t see me, Conrad. They’re still livid about the Revolt.”
“Really? A thousand-year grudge?”
“You don’t know my parents.”
“Hmm.”
“Anyway, I think we can make a difference here. We should get back inside.”
“I’m sick of making a difference,” Conrad said, scanning the night sky for some sign of the moon, which he still hadn’t seen. “When I built the Orbital Tower, I felt like I was making a real contribution to Sorrow’s future. Not like a stadium or an apartment building; this was something that really helped. But it wasn’t enough; it didn’t save the colony. And everything else I try just ends up… I don’t know. It wasn’t so bad on the ship, but we’re among human beings again. And the thing about human beings… I just… It seems like wherever I go, people are fighting. And I can’t help them, and I can’t make them stop. Can’t I be tired of that? Is that okay?”
“Sure,” she said, hugging his arm. “For a while. But every now and then you poke your head up at just the right time, and it does help. Sometimes fighting is the right thing to do. We can get by without you here, so yes, go on ahead. Spend your allowance; have some fun. Just don’t turn your back when you are needed. There’s no point living forever if you don’t use yourself as a positive force.”
He made a smile she couldn’t see. “Aye, Captain.”
“I mean it, Conrad.”
“So do I.” But then he scratched an eyebrow, cleared his throat and said, “If we all did that, all across the Queendom and throughout the colonies, a hundred and sixty billion people using their lives as a positive force… That seems so overwhelming. How can everybody help everybody, when we’re crammed together like this, or dying out among the stars? I don’t know how to use my life.”
“Well, not by throwing people in the ocean.”
And that, at least, they could both agree on.
He had been to every corner of Barnard system, had crossed every millimeter of the space between Barnard and Sol. Twice! He knew the land and seas of Sorrow from pole to pole, and he had radioed personality snapshots to a dozen other worlds, and gathered back scores of self-aware replies which he’d folded back into himself. He was quite possibly the best-traveled person in history. But Saturn’s rings were a sight unequaled in the colonies, and Conrad had never seen them with his own eyes. So that was where he went first.
And God damn if it wasn’t the most stunning sight his eyes had beheld since the first time he’d seen Xmary naked. From a hundred thousand kilometers above the seething cloudtops, at a latitude of twenty degrees south, he found himself looking “up” at a ring structure that filled the center of his view, leaving only the edges black.