“Bruno,” he says instead, from ten meters away. “Bruno de Towaji.” A whole string of titles could be appended to the name, both fore and aft, but applying them to this dismal figure seems inappropriate. Still, there is no question in Radmer’s voice, or in his mind. There is no mistaking that face. True, the ravages of time are apparent; the Olders age in slow but very particular ways. Hair and beard faded yellow-white, yes, and grown out to a length past which it simply frays and abrades. The skin smooth, but deeply freckled and tanned with the weary brown of accumulated melanin, sharply creased in its various corners and crannies. Teeth worn to chalky nubs in that slack, hanging jaw.
Radmer himself looks somewhat like this, but with his shorter hair and longer teeth, and the fact that he’s clothed, it isn’t quite so apparent. And though the armies to which he has formally belonged are all dust and gone, he still carries himself like a soldier, while the man in the dirt—digging up yams with his bare hands, Radmer sees now—has the absent, casual quality of a sleepwalker.
And something more: the eyes flicking slowly from here to there, taking in the house, the forest, the soft ground beneath them, the sea. Lingering overlong on the distant brass sphere, and on Radmer himself—disturbances in this long-familiar environment. But he’s not really seeing them. Not seeing at all. Or rather: seeing but not processing. Not affected by what is seen.
The old man rises, clutching two small yams in each hand, and begins walking—not limping or shuffling— toward the little house. Radmer follows.
“De Towaji, sir. Sire. I need to speak with you.”
The old man pauses, casts a cloudy, troubled glance over his shoulder, then continues on.
This is a condition Radmer has heard of: neurosensory dystrophia—pathways worn smooth in the brain through constant, repetitive stimulation. When the nervous system is old and the daily routine goes on unbroken for years or decades, its victims can be trapped by it. He’s heard of couples and even whole villages succumbing, but typically it’s the people who live alone—especially in isolated areas—who are most at risk.
He imagines Bruno de Towaji performing these same actions day after day, varying little or not at all. Like an animate fossil. Like a ghost, haunting this place, oblivious to the fact of his own demise.
The good news is that the symptoms are temporary, subsiding soon after the routine itself is interrupted. The arrival of a visitor is normally sufficient. But barring strange miracles, de Towaji must have been here on the planette for a long time indeed—much longer than Radmer cares to think about. Whole histories come and gone, an unthinkable span of time.
Radmer follows along into the shade of the overhanging forest, and then the old man enters the cottage through an open doorway that looks like it may never have had a door of any kind, or even a curtain. The windows are the same. Probably there’s no winter here, perhaps no serious weather of any kind. Rigby could confirm that. Still, there’s something unsavorily primeval about a house fully open on the sides.
The inside is a single room, shockingly clean, dominated by a water fountain made, like the house and floor, of white wellstone marble. Here de Towaji kneels again, and patiently washes the four yams he’s retrieved.
Radmer tries again. “I suspect you can hear me, Sire. Perhaps you’ll remember an architect by the name of Mursk? Conrad Mursk? We worked together once, long ago. Before that, I was a companion to your son.”
When the yams are clean, de Towaji sets them down on the floor, rises again, and moves to a corner of the house, where a pile of small stones rest atop a little shelf. Flint? For starting a cooking fire? Surely
raw
yams would have busted the poor man’s guts out long ago. He then turns toward the house’s only exit and commences that slow, deliberate walk again. When Radmer blocks the way, de Towaji literally runs into him.
Then blinks and looks him over.
“Sire,” Radmer says.
Slowly, the old man nods. “Ah. Ah. I ... know you.”
“Yes, Sire.”
“Mursk.”
“Yes, Sire. Very good.”
“The architect. You ... crushed the moon. Squoze it.”
Radmer glances behind him at the half-disc of Lune in the sky. The clouds, the continents, the splatters of ocean.... But this isn’t a map. This is the world itself, seen from a height of fifty thousand kilometers. “We crushed it together, Sire. Long ago.”
Gruffly: “You’re ... in my way.”
Radmer can’t bring himself to bar the doorway any longer. Bowing, he steps back and to the side, allowing de Towaji to pass. At once, the old man’s expression eases.
“Forgive me, Sire. I don’t know if I’m rescuing you, or desecrating ... Excuse me! Sire!”
Impatience is a rare emotion among the Olders, but seeing de Towaji prepare to ignore him again, Radmer feels it now, and dares to grab his long-ago master by the arm.
“Bruno! I have little time for this. Rouse yourself and listen to me: a great evil has been loosed upon that squozen moon of ours. Its future is now very much in peril.”
The old man frowns, and it is no regal frown meant to convey official displeasure, but a private and unconscious one. A gesture of simple unhappiness.
“Future,” the old man muses, or perhaps recites. He continues looking down the path ahead, deeper into the forest. “I remember that word. Where is the future? When will it get here?”
“I fear it will not, Sire.”
De Towaji’s gaze clears a bit, and a look of pained amusement passes briefly over his features. He speaks very slowly. “Lad, I guarantee it will not. All these ... futures we thought we were building. Where are they? In the past.
This
is the past, by the time I finish saying so.” He pauses for a long moment to make the point, then adds, “There is no future, only past.”
Now Radmer is angry. “I’m not here to debate the semantics of it, Sire. People are dying as we speak, and still others are being enslaved. Millions more are at risk, and
there’s
an ill thing to allow into our past, if it’s within our power to prevent it.”
Bruno tries to pull away. “I’m in the past as well, lad. Leave me.” Then, more regally:
“Leave me.”
“I won’t,” Radmer tells him. “Not yet—not until you’ve heard me out.”
Resistance ceases; a kind of bitter calm settles over de Towaji. He is waking up, yes, and he doesn’t like it. The look is clear in his eyes: a fear of being
needed
again, of bearing up under that burden after being free of it for so very long. Radmer understands, suddenly, that the old man’s isolation and senility did not come upon him by accident.
His grip tightens, and his voice is almost cruel as he says, “Even if you were
dead
I would make you listen, Sire. Because I fancy you can help us, and I don’t much care if it pleases you. Where else have we got to turn? Nowhere. And when I speak the name of our peril, I think you might even
want
to help.”
“Unlikely. You have no idea how wearily I washed up on this shore, lad. Not the least beginning of an idea.”
Tightly: “I fancy I do, Sire. I’ve been depended on a time or two myself. And we live on, don’t we? Never too old to be bothered, to be mined for blood and sweat, to be dusted off and put to use again in one way or another. Not even a grave to rest in, not for the likes of us. But the alternative—to live on with no purpose at all—is appalling and obscene.”
Finally, Bruno de Towaji matches Radmer’s anger, and meets his gaze. “You think so, do you? Smug bastard. Speak the name of your peril, then, and begone from my sight.”
Radmer does as he’s told, and has the grim pleasure of watching the old man’s face light up with a terrible mix of wonder and righteous anger and, yes, even fear.
Now de Towaji is fully awake, blinking, looking Radmer up and down. “Lune, you say? The collapsiter grid is gone. Did I dream that? Between the stars we travel no more. How did you get here, lad? And ... how will you return?”
Radmer feels the corners of his mouth begin to stir. Seeing Bruno again has brought back a lot of memories, a lot of old grief. With the clarity of hindsight, he does feel some understanding of his bonds to this man, but they were formed and broken long ago, in events so huge that from the inside they hadn’t looked like anything at all. Joyrides and camp riots, the green virile fires of youth.
But this is too practical a question for a man who wants to be left alone. Radmer senses that a hurdle has been crossed, a new cascade of events set in motion. He will be taking this man, this intellect, this trove of living history back to Lune with him. And in that moment he dares, for the first time in months, to hope.
This is an island, with birds and a tree.
The island is a mountain in the middle of the sea.
One person lives here, but it isn’t me.
I wouldn’t like to live in the middle of the sea.
1
—“The Island”
BASCAL EDWARD DE TOWAJI LUTUI, age 4
chapter two
camp friendly
Conrad had never seen an angry mob before, much less been a part of one. Like an ocean wave it seemed to offer two alternatives: ride along or be smashed under. And the ride, truthfully, was fun. Since the raid on the boathouse, and with it the capture of canoe paddles, the counselors were actually
afraid
of them.
Of a bunch of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds! Barely out of diapers, some might say, but even “Rock” Dengle was on the retreat, falling back along the side of the Arts and Crap Cabin and casting a worryingly broad shadow on its clay-and-log wall in the slanting light of a fake and miniature sun.
“What the hell you boys doing?” he demanded.
“Busting out,” Bascal answered lightly. Cheers rewarded him, from Conrad as much as anyone. “Prince Bascal! All hail Prince Bascal, the Liberator!”
“This a summer camp,” Rock pointed out. “Recreational. You here for fun, right?”
“Had enough,” Bascal replied. Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui, Crown Prince of the Queendom of Sol.
The badder boys—Steve Grush and that Ho kid whose last name was spelled “Ng” but sounded more like “Eh”— were flanking Rock on the left, flicking cigarette butts and hooting, and you’d better believe
that
got his attention.
“I gotta hurt someone?” Rock wanted to know. He looked capable of it—strong and pissed off, but in control. Taking care of “troubled” boys was his job.
“We got to hurt
you
?” Ho Ng shot back, and gave him a whack on the skull with the paddle. Tried to, anyway; Rock deflected it with a sweep of his arm. But since that left Steve an opening to jab him in the nuts, it didn’t do much good. Rock doubled over with a froggy kind of sound, but stayed on his feet. Taking on
fifteen
troubled boys was a bit beyond his faculties.
There was a definite satisfaction in seeing a big guy humbled like that, but then it looked like Ho or Steve might hit him again, maybe harder this time, and that made Conrad afraid, finally, of the consequences. And ashamed to be a member of this particular mob, yeah, because Rock Dengle was definitely not a bad guy as jailers went. He kept the rules without treating you like a little kid, which was more than Conrad could say for most of the others.
But fortunately, Prince Bascal stepped forward, into what would have been the line of fire. “Steady, men. Nobody wants to get hurt over this. We just need the fax gate.”
“Can’t leave without your parent or guardian,” Rock said, attempting to straighten. “Regulations, no exception.”
“Except today,” Bascal said, and Conrad had to marvel at the casual, agreeable tone of this kid’s voice, trained from birth in the art of persuasion. It wasn’t going to
convince
Rock or anything—not after he’d been whacked in the balls with a canoe paddle—but it did put a vaguely legitimate face on these proceedings. Made it sound like their side of it had some validity.
Which it did; this wasn’t a jail, strictly speaking, but neither were the boys free to leave, or to do as they pleased while “guests” of the camp. Which might be great if you were twelve or something, but sucked hugely when you were old enough to want female companionship and other assorted contraband. But there was no one to complain to, no cops or social workers to call. No one here at all who was not in the immediate employ of Camp Friendly, and therefore an extension of the parents who’d banished them here.
So here in the twenty-ninth decade of the Queendom of Sol, on a miniature planet orbiting in the middle depths of the Kuiper Belt, far from the sun and planets, young men were forced—literally forced—to reenact the squalors and deprivations of a less civilized era. So it made perfect sense for them to respond in an uncivilized way.
“You kids in a lot of trouble,” Rock cautioned. From his tone he was worried
for
them as much as because of them. He wasn’t going to offer any further resistance; he couldn’t win if he tried.
On the horizon, twenty meters away, three more counselors materialized. One Conrad recognized but didn’t know; he worked with the younger kids on the other side of the world. The other two were D’rector Jed: two faxed copies of the same individual, each holding the electric cattle prod he’d often warned about.
“What’s going on here?” one of him demanded officiously. The other just stood there looking stern. It said a lot about D’rector Jed, Conrad thought, that he liked to go everywhere in twos. Did he enjoy his own company that much, or was he simply concerned that the universe outnumbered him?
“Cessation of involuntary confinement,” Bascal called back without missing a beat. “This man illegally tried to detain us.”
The distance was not too great to see a veil of caution drop across D’rector Jed’s features as he recognized Bascal’s voice. He seemed to have trouble actually picking Bascal out of the crowd, though. Before starting this, the boys had smeared their faces with dirt and mussed up their hair, mainly as a way of psyching themselves up but also, Conrad now saw, to blur the lines of identity that made them accountable.
“Your Highness,” one of the Jeds said, and you could see him still mentally backpedaling, rethinking his approach. “Prince” was a funny word, a funny concept; the child who would someday rule.
If his parents weren’t immortal.
How did one treat a child, educate or punish or even reward a child, who might someday stand higher, enormously higher, than the educator himself? A tricky business indeed, and one that Bascal, in Conrad’s limited experience, twisted constantly—perhaps reflexively—to his own advantage.
“Highness,” the other Jed tried, “you and your friends have been entrusted to my keeping. I will not hesitate—”
“You
will
hesitate,” Bascal shouted back, taking a large symbolic step in the Jeds’ direction. “In fact, you’ll stand aside entirely, or my merry men here will beat you both senseless. This is not a joke; they’re escorting me for a call to Child Welfare Services, with whom I have a total legal right to consult.”
This was news to Conrad; three minutes ago, the plan had been, “Come on! Let’s show these bastards!” But this sounded better, more refined. Legitimate, almost.
“I’ve sounded the alarm,” Jed told him. “It isn’t just me you’ll have to deal with, it’s multiple copies of every counselor on the planette. Plus the Secret Service and Royal Constabulary.”
“Yeah,” Bascal agreed, “ten hours from now.” That was the speed-of-light round-trip time from here to the Queendom proper.
“The fax gate itself is protected by your own Palace Guards. They won’t let you leave.”
“I don’t need to,” Bascal said. He glanced sidelong at Rock Dengle, who was still struggling valiantly to stand upright. “There’s already been a regrettable incident here. We’re prepared for there to be more if you interfere with us. My guards are watching us now, I assure you, and
your
safety will be of little concern to them.”
“Cancel the alarm,” Rock advised, throwing his voice behind Bascal’s. “Let ’em in the office. We don’t outnumber them much, and if they want to call Welfare, I say fine. Got nothing to hide. Parents need to know about this.”
D’rector Jed didn’t respond to that, but when the boys started moving, en masse, in the direction of the office, he didn’t try to stop them. So they walked right past both of him and over the horizon, the little sun slipping behind the planette as they went. Small planets were like that; times of day were little places you could walk to. Here, the stars shone down like a vindication from God himself.
Superficially, the office looked like one more log cabin, especially in the dark. It was larger, though, and the light spilling out through the windows came from a proper wellstone ceiling, not a damned electric lightbulb. And once they got the door open and mobbed their way inside, the illusion was shattered completely. This could be anywhere in the Queendom—the bathroom had a
flush
toilet
, for crying out loud. A further sign of the basic injustices here.
The fax was in a back room, a kind of entryway with the fax standing in place of an outside door. The camp had several other fax machines whose activation they could maybe have demanded, but this was the only one known to be on all the time, with a hardlink gate leading directly to the New Systemwide Collapsiter Grid, the Nescog, that could get their message—or even their material selves—out of here in substantially less than the blink of an eye.
Unfortunately, as promised, the gate was guarded by a pair of gleaming Palace Guard robots, their blank metal faces and sexless metal bodies both unreadable and immobile. They were here, no doubt, to keep unauthorized persons from entering Camp Friendly and harming the Queendom’s only prince.
Although, Conrad mused, the fax software could probably do that all by itself—filter out any images not specifically authorized here. Were these guards redundant, a hedge against someone corrupting the system? Were they also parental spies, sent here to keep Bascal in line? Jed had certainly seemed to think so, though the prince’s words implied otherwise.
As bodyguards they were certainly intimidating enough; Conrad had little doubt they could burst from this room and be anywhere on the planette within minutes. The boys stood well back, milling around in the outer room, a few of the bravest eyeing these monsters from the “safe” distance of three or four meters.
Bascal alone seemed unimpressed, striding in toward the fax and gesturing at the two robots. “You, you, come with me. We’re evacuating—the planette is on fire.
Come on
.”
He stepped right up to the fax and said, “Nearest emergency center.” The robots hesitated for a barely perceptible moment; then the first of them, with alarming fluidity and grace, turned and leaped through the gate, vanishing in a puff of quantum dislocation.
The second robot seemed to be waiting for Bascal, expecting to follow him through. But instead it fell twitching to the floor, when Bascal produced a tiny, toyish-looking gun of blue plastic and calmly made the robot’s mirror-bright head disappear. There was no mess, and barely any sound. A teleport gun?
“Close the gate to incoming calls,” Bascal said to the fax, then turned to his troops with a self-satisfied grin. “These parents of ours, they have nothing to pass on or share. Nothing to teach us except sit down, shut up, and live in their shadows forever. It’s
their
Queendom, right? Always will be.”
Grumbles of assent from the boys. They had immortal parents, too. They’d maybe given the issue some thought; there’d be no inheritance for any of them, no family legacy, no empty shoes to fill. Conrad’s own father was the Cork County Paver, always and forever, leaving only the title of “paver’s boy” for Conrad himself to hang an identity on.
And that sucked.
Anyway, you just had to admire the prince’s
cool
. Like it was all a game, like he could walk anywhere, through fire and bullets and untamed black holes, without so much as a flinch. You wanted to stand behind him, you really did.
“Well,” Bascal continued, “what say we tear the place up a little? A night on Earth, my treat. You break it;
I
buy it.”
Conrad had always had a problem with impulse—it was pretty much why he’d been exiled here in the first place. So while he knew there’d be hell to pay eventually, he really did like the idea of busting things up. What seventeen-year-old didn’t?
“Jesus Christ, Bascal,” he said with conviction, “I’d follow you anywhere.”