But Conrad’s parents were Irish, and in spite of his best efforts they had managed to imprint him with a certain degree of superstition. He had seen a ghost once, no shit, and he looked around now, suddenly realizing all the other tourists had filed away without his noticing. He was here alone with the machines, on a platform designed by the very cleverest of history’s monsters.
“I think I’ll go to Denver,” he said to the fax machine, and hurried to fling himself through the plate.
But Denver, where arguably his own involvement in the Children’s Revolt had begun, was all wrong. Most of it hadn’t changed at all; the old skyline was still there, instantly recognizable. The streets were still bursting with children—for this was a Children’s City—and with buskers and athletes and pedestrians, for this was also an Urban Preservation District where short-range faxing was severely discouraged.
But though the old Denver was still visible beneath, today the city had a lot of extra grown-ups pushing their way through the streets of downtown, and a lot of robots scurrying daintily through morning errands. And the downtown district itself lay in the deep morning shadow of six enormous towers—not orbital towers, but simple pressurized stratscrapers capable of holding a million people each. Taller than the mountains to the west, taller even than the Green Mountain Spire which had once been the city’s signature landmark, they… they ruined it. They made the city look small and artificial and old.
“How long have those been there?” he asked a passerby, pointing up at the monstrosities.
“Huh?” said the man, looking for something out of the ordinary and not finding it. His breath steamed in the October air.
“The towers,” Conrad said, huddling into the warmth of his wellcloth jacket again, for he had not been cold in many decades. “The big ones. How long?”
“Oh, a long time. Hunnerds of years,” the man said. Then, looking Conrad over, he brightened. “Hey! You’re that feller from Barnard, aren’t you? Returned from the stars to back here whence you were born.”
“I am,” Conrad admitted, “though I haven’t been to ‘whence’ yet. I’m from Ireland.”
“Eh? Well, welcome back to society, just the same. Does it feel good? Does it feel right?”
“I don’t know,” Conrad answered. “I only lived here for twenty-five years. I’ve been gone for a thousand.”
And yet, those twenty-five loomed very large in his memory. At the time, they’d been one hundred percent of his life’s experience, whereas Barnard, even at the end, had never been more than ninety percent. And hell, thinking back now it didn’t feel like much more than half. A lot of important things had happened to him out there—shaping his character, informing his judgment—but the trajectory of his life had been determined here. Literally: right here on this very street, on a warm July night, with the Prince of Sol at one elbow and Ho Ng—a man Conrad would one day murder—at the other. Denver was the crucible to a lifetime of rebellion; the cannon from which he’d been fired.
“It looks smaller,” he said. “It feels crowded and weedy and gone-to-seed. But that’s a funny thing, because nothing has really changed. Aye, and maybe that’s the problem.”
“Well, good luck to yer,” the man offered, grabbing and pumping Conrad’s hand, then dropping it and moving on.
Ireland should be the next stop: a ritual visit to his parents, whom he loved and missed. They had raised him well enough; his vagabond life could hardly be blamed on anyone but himself. But this was a funny thing, too, because where Denver still felt recent to him, his life with Donald and Maybel Mursk seemed impossibly remote. And those had been the same time.
So he didn’t feel quite ready. He needed to steep in the thin dry air of Denver awhile, before he could face the damp chill of Cork. Instead he found a seat in a nearly full restaurant, where the wellstone was working overtime to cancel out the crowd noise and leave each table in its own bubble of quiet. Eventually a human waiter appeared, and offered him a choice between ten different meals. Conrad selected the least Barnardean of these—a spicy egg sandwich with blue corn chips on the side—and settled back with a mug of bitter red tea.
The waiter just laughed when he tried to pay. “The walls know, sir. Who you are, what you can afford. Food is free, right? The door wouldn’t open unless you could pay for service.”
Ah. And service didn’t come cheap. Not here, not anywhere. He asked the wall, “Excuse me, um, hello. How much money have I got?”
And the wall answered immediately, in that fast, clipped accent of Sol’s machines: “Twenty-seven trillion dollars, sir.”
Wow. There must have been some mean price inflation here in the Queendom, because the last time he’d been here a trillion dollars was enough to pay ten thousand workers for ten thousand years.
“That’s to three significant digits, sir. Do you require greater precision?”
“Uh, no. Thanks. But how much is my lunch? A few billion?”
“No, sir. Two hundred and six dollars, sir.”
“Two hundred? Dollars? But that would mean…” He was rich? He: an exile, a vagabond who’d rebelled against two governments? He’d had money for a while in Barnard, but he’d squandered it all on secret schemes and silly interstellar messages. And even if there was a bit left over, what value would a few Barnardean dollars have here, when Barnard itself was just a dream? He’d had a Queendom bank account as well, holding trivial sums when he’d departed, but even compound interest couldn’t account for such an explosion. In an immorbid society, interest rates were very low indeed!
“I’m afraid you’ve made some sort of mistake,” he told the wall. “My name is Conrad Ethel Mursk. I’m a refugee.”
“Possibly, sir,” the wall agreed. “But your bank records are quantum entangled with the physical universe, and thus incapable of error.”
He laughed. “Are they, now? I’ve never seen a system incapable of error. Where would I get so much money?”
“It isn’t my place to know, sir, but I can find out for you.”
“Um. Yeah, okay. Do that.”
Why not? He was intrigued. And half a minute later, the wall answered, “Sir, the greater bulk of payments into your account have been from Mass Industries Corporation, with a minority share from World University. I also detect one deposit from the Office of Basic Assistance, in the amount of one thousand dollars.”
Conrad mulled that over. Mass Industries was King Bruno’s neutronium company, whose dredges gathered up the stray dust and gravel of the solar system and squeezed it into billion-ton neubles. Conrad had once helped to hijack one of their ships, but that was the closest he’d ever come to a business relationship with them. And his connections with World University were even more tenuous than that.
“That doesn’t make sense,” he said.
“I wouldn’t know, sir. I’m just a wall. Two messages have just arrived for you, sir. Shall I play them?”
“I don’t know. What are they?”
“The first comes from Ring Observation Platform Two. Seven hundred eighty people have complained, sir, and the number who are afraid to go there is not known. The platform—the only one of its kind—remains in service as a historical landmark. The other message is a request for a job interview on Maplesphere at your earliest convenience.”