The Wellstone

Chapter nineteen. Single-celled life

Conrad half expected to wind up in the same interrogation room as before, with Officer Leslie of the Dandelion Sweater. It seemed like a very Queendom-of-Sol way to handle the situation: assign a caseworker to each unruly child, build a rapport, write a series of lengthy analyses.... But instead he was led to a windowless holding cell: larger and darker, with an actual cage door that slammed shut with the clang of metal and the mirrored gleam of impervium bars.

He was in a basement somewhere; he didn’t know what city, or even what planet. Could be Venus for all he knew; there were towns there now, on the highlands, and the gravity was indistinguishable. Why they would ship him there he had no idea, but he also had no idea why they’d separated everyone, and locked him up alone. This wasn’t the Denver police station, he knew that much, but the cool, processed air provided no other clues.

How long they left him there alone was something he never learned, because in point of fact he was exhausted. It had been a long day, commencing with the fax deaths and ensuing argument aboard Viridity. More than a week had passed since then, and though he’d been stored as data for most of that time, he’d still lived through twenty or thirty hours of it, all in one big subjective push. He was running, he realized now, on a pure adrenaline high.

But with the action suddenly over, the fear and uncertainty ended, and the heavy Refuge breakfast still weighing him down, he simply stretched out on one of the cell’s bunks and went straight to sleep. Ah, night, Bascal had said to him once in the early days of Camp Friendly. That puts to rest the work of men.

His waking came harshly and too soon: a brightening of lights, a clanging open of the cage door.

“Hello,” said a man’s voice.

Conrad rolled over onto his side, facing the wall. “I’m sleeping.”

“Lad, we need to talk.”

Oh, shit, he knew that voice. His father’s. And presently his mom’s chimed in. “We came as soon as possible. Dear, you have no idea how worried—”

“Please, I’m so tired,” Conrad complained, but his voice sounded too whiny in his ears, too childish. After everything they’d been through—the daring, the recklessness, the sacrifice and deprivation—he had earned the right not to sound like that in front of his parents. He wasn’t a hundred years old, all right, but he didn’t feel seventeen either. And with a shock, he realized he wasn’t: it must be August by now. Since Denver, he hadn’t paid any attention to the calendar, and his late-July birthday had come and gone unnoticed. He was eighteen now, and since Bascal was a few weeks older, so should he be as well.

He didn’t feel eighteen any more than he felt seventeen, but that number at least seemed less jarring, less alien to his recent experience. Did eighteen-year-olds make credible space pirates?

“All right,” he said in a deliberately deeper voice, and hauled himself up to a sitting position. He rubbed his eyes blearily. “Hi.”

Maybel Mursk smiled, and rushed forward to crush him in a hug. “Oh, my brave, clever boy. Welcome home, lad.”

“Where am I?” Conrad asked.

“City and County of Cork,” she said, still squeezing him. Her auburn hair was a frizzy mess that tickled his face. Her company blazer was rough against his bare arms. “Very near to the house, about ten kilometers. We could almost have walked from there, on your father’s own roads.”

When she finally disengaged herself, Conrad found himself staring at his father’s hand, held out for him to shake. He did so.

“We’ve worried,” Donald Mursk said. “We’ve worried a great deal.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Conrad told him sincerely. “I had no way to contact you.”

“We’re very proud,” his father added, a bit tentatively. And that made no sense: proud of him for running away? For breaking the law? For being implicated in nine deaths?

“Of what?”

“Well...” Donald ran a hand through his hair. Like everyone else in the Queendom, he looked like a strong and confident young man, but here was a gesture that suggested otherwise. It belonged with a balding scalp, a bulging gut, a hat clutched between nervous fingers.

“Naturally we’re angry with you,” his mother said.

“Right,” Donald agreed. “Angry. But it’s a strange thing you’ve done, isn’t it? A strangely compelling thing. All sorts of people have been coming up to us and, well, complimenting. I mean, it’s illegal—”

“But not antisocial,” Maybel finished for him. “You’ve done a thing a bit like the Republican hunger strikes: powerfully expressing a viewpoint people can relate to. Mere words don’t compare.”

Conrad sighed. He was tired, and while he’d missed his parents terribly, this was not at all the homecoming he’d envisioned. “We destroyed property. We got people killed.”

“Oh, that may be,” Donald agreed seriously. “But you should hear from the dead boys themselves, before you pass judgment. In the old days we knew, there’d always be some bitter affliction keeping pace with our joys. But we knew there’d be joys. You should give your friends a bit of credit, lad.”

Conrad processed that, not knowing what to think.

“We know you and Bascal disagreed,” Maybel told him. “His letter was very clear on that point, and the visual records from the Palace Guard support it. We know you did your best.”

But Conrad was shaking his head. “No, don’t say that. I helped him. I waffled occasionally, but he always had his way in the end, every step. I deserve my equal share of blame.”

“Or credit,” his father said. “And that’s the way the law sees it, too. You’re to be severely punished, never doubt it. Your point is well made, but now there’s little else the Queendom can do except punish. Unless it wants to encourage more of the same, and I don’t think anyone wants that.”

Listening to his parents’ voices, their faint but unmistakable accents, he considered the strange fact that the two of them lived and worked and socialized in the very town of their birth. Donald looked after the roads, yes, which few people and fewer vehicles ever used. Maybel was a housing inspector—one of six for the county. Neither of them traveled much outside of southern Ireland, or needed to.

Conrad himself gave little thought to geography; he was used to moving between his school on the European continent, his home here in Cork, and the various educational and entertainment facilities they trekked him to in Asia and North America. Except for concerns of daylight and weather, the physical locations of these places hardly seemed to matter. It was only when you got out to the moon and planets that true barriers—like the speed of light—created any genuine sense of distance. But Donald and Maybel Mursk didn’t see it that way. At heart they were yokels, provincials, born into the actual country of Ireland, during a time when travel was arduous and borders were tangible. There was no Queendom, anywhere.

And yet, when Donald spoke of the Queendom, his tone was full of apology and acceptance and even complicity. If he saw himself as something slightly apart from the monarchy, it was not for lack of approval. Whereas Conrad, who was truly and fully a creature of Tamra’s worlds, nevertheless chafed at their confines.

“Mom, Dad, were you rebellious in your youth?” he asked suddenly.

Maybel clucked, amused and embarrassed by the question. “I’m tempted to wash your mouth, lad. We snuck around our share, yes, although it was different in those days. The things we wanted were ... simpler.”

“Sex?” he pressed, not caring if the question was appropriate. “Drugs?”

“Oh, all of those things,” she agreed shyly. “All the things that people want. There has to be some age when you’re too young for it, and that puts you in immediate conflict.”

“You do have to understand,” his father cut in, “we thought our lives would be short. You were born in those days with death staring you in the face. You had to make your time count. Your mother and I were no more than twenty years from the grave when these fax filters came along. And our parents, why, they were gone already.”

He ran his hand through his hair again. “It’s why we’re such fools, lad. We didn’t want any school, or any hard work. There’s been a lot of catching up for us, a lot of adjustment. We don’t want to be poor and ignorant, not forever. I think we’ve done all right, but for you we wanted a better start.”

“Huh.” Wow.” It was a perspective Conrad had never considered. It was interesting. Would it have changed anything, if he’d heard this six months ago? Should it have changed anything?

“Apparently we’ve failed utterly as parents,” Maybel said sadly. “Whatever it is you need, we haven’t provided. Lord, we sent you to that camp you keep you out of trouble.”

“Don’t cry for me, Mother,” Conrad told her, surprised at the guilt in her face. “I can make decisions, right? I have free will. The problem is nothing to do with our family. It’s a ... I dunno, a structural problem with the Queendom itself.”

“Perhaps that’s so,” Donald said. “But it’s you and yours who’ll bear the brunt of it.”

“Well,” Conrad agreed. “We always knew it was a gesture we’d have to pay for. Nothing’s free, is it?”

Donald’s smile was pained. “No indeed, Son. In all the world—in all the universe—there’s not a thing worth having that comes any way but dear. You choose what you want, and spend the rest of your life paying. And now that life’s eternal, why, that’s a high cost indeed.”

Half a world away, with the painful light of dawn shining through a different set of bars, a similar conversation was progressing even more smoothly.

“Xiomara, dear, is there nothing we can do? Will you magically appear in the midst of every trespass and misdeed in the Queendom?”

“Sorry times call for sorry deeds, Mum.”

“Do they? Really. Playing space harlot is a political strategem, I suppose.”

“Harlot? To hell with you, Mummy. That’s the meanest thing you’ve ever said.”

Like she didn’t have enough troubles. She was a rioter, yes, and now apparently also a space pirate. And these two halves of herself were having a hard time integrating. How could her life be so wrapped up in the affairs of people she hadn’t known she knew? How could Yinebeb Fecre—“Feck the Fairy”—be such a dashing figure around Denver, and yet such a clownish and contemptible one in the eyes of his peers? Had they ever really met him? Had she?

And then there was the Prince of Sol, who wanted her heart, who accused her of toying with him. There was a problem she’d never expected to have. And this damned Conrad Mursk, who’d had the temerity—the gall!—to save her life. A piece of her life she wasn’t sure she wanted. Oh, it was intense. It was a break from her humdrum existence, not least because he was part of it. But did Xmary want to be that person? Bitter, used? Seasoned? Too late now, of course. She already was.

So she didn’t know what to think. She wasn’t entirely sure she knew how to think. The reintegration was eleven hours old, and still not taking! She was still of two minds! The old days must have been easier: everyone singled for life, without any of this crazy ambivalence weighing the spirit down. Decisions must have been effortless.

“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.