“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.
chapter twenty
the arena sentence
Finally, an official summons arrived, and when Officer Boyle came down to let Conrad out, he was accompanied by a pair of gleaming Palace Guards. The fax was up a flight of stairs and through a couple of doorways, and once he got there, stepping through it felt no more or less fateful than any other such journey. Conrad was killed and reborn, his memories and identity copied into a different bit of matter.
Where he ended up was a surprise, though—not the palace at all, but some sort of outdoor amphitheater, ringed by palm trees all around, beneath a bright blue sky full of puffy, flat-bottomed clouds. The smell of flowers leaped into his nose, and he was greeted at once by a familiar-looking woman, one of the Tongan courtiers from the queen’s staff, in a tapa-patterned dress of red and brown and glowing white. She glanced at Conrad, then at the sketchplate in her hand, then back at Conrad again.
“Mursk?” she asked.
“That’s right.”
“This way, please. My name is Tusité, and if that doesn’t strike a fear in you, then get tricky with me, and you’ll find out why it ought to.”
She led him down one of two staircases. The seats here, enough for a few thousand people, were mostly empty—except for one knot of a dozen or so kids sitting in the center of the first three rows. One of them was Bascal, dressed in a loose-fitting shirt and pants of a purple that was not quite the forbidden royal shade. He wore the wellstone scarf Robert M’chunu had cut for him from
Viridity
’s sail, and around his head rested a thin crown of wrinkly aluminum foil—clearly his idea of a joke. He was laughing loudly at something.
And then, without warning, the whole gang down there burst into Conrad’s favorite stanza of the Space Pirate Song:
Well they can’t tell us to shape up and they can’t tell us
to ship out,
And they can’t come do our laundry though we
sometimes wish they would,
And they’re never gonna catch us ’cause we won’t do
nothing stupid
So we’re sailing toward salvation in an angel made of
wood!
This didn’t seem like the best foot to be putting forward at a sentencing hearing, but the boys pressed on heedlessly into the chorus:
We’re the pirates of the Queendom; we’re the pirates of
the spaceways.
We’d be pirates of the Nescog if they ever let us on.
So we’re flying through the Kuiper Belt and steering
just with starlight,
And we’ve nothing else to do all day but sing this pirate
song!
With a shock, Conrad saw the boy Bascal had his arm around: Peter Kolb, last seen on the surface of Camp Friendly, running away with his eyes full of tears. But today he was looking not only joyous, but downright smug. His eyes found Conrad and brightened further as the song broke up, with each of the boys trying to throw in a different verse. Bascal melted back into the mob, suddenly talking to someone else.
“Hi!” Peter called out.
“Um, hi,” Conrad answered uncertainly, as he and Tusité drew near. “You seem ... cheerful.”
Peter shrugged. “It’s our day.”
Conrad frowned. “Our judgment day, you mean.”
“This is your place,” Tusité told him. “Stand here and be good.”
Her hand left his arm, and she was on her way back up the stairs, with another Tusité trailing behind.
“So what happened to you, anyway?” Conrad asked Peter. “Did you get killed?”
“Me? No.” Peter sounded surprised. “Though I was marooned for six weeks. Pickings got pretty lean; that rainstorm washed out a lot of the plants and stuff. By the time the navy showed up, I’d gotten very skinny. I was tired all the time, not really doing anything. It sucked.”
“I’ll bet!”
“Well, it’s done. The navy people were astonished when they found me there. We were already famous for having departed.”
“We?” It was Conrad’s turn to sound surprised.
“Hey,” Peter said defensively, “I helped a lot with the planning. It was my mission, too.”
“And mine,” said Martin Liss beside him.
“Little gods,” Conrad exclaimed softly. “I tried to save you, Martin. I really did. Twice!”
“Hey, don’t fret. We all knew the hazards; we all took the chance. I’m just happy to have been a part.”
“Me too,” said Jamil Gazzaniga and Raoul Sanchez together.
Bloody hell, what was going on here? Why was everyone so happy? Especially the dead, the betrayed?
“Hey, bloodfuck,” said Ho Ng, clapping Conrad on the shoulder in a distinctly comradely fashion. Steve Grush clapped his other shoulder, and then James and Bertram and Khen and Preston and Emilio and Karl were all crowding around him, smiling, patting, shaking his hand.
“What’s going on?” he demanded. “Half you guys were murdered! By me, by Bascal! Why are you so cheery about it?”
Standing, smiling, the prince slid forward along the edge of a stone bench, parting the boys around him like a drop of soap in oily water. “Conrad, my man! Haven’t you turned on a TV?”
“Um, no. Why?”
“You’re fucking famous!” somebody shouted.
“Conscience of the revolution!” said someone else.
“What?”
Bascal nodded. “It’s true. We space pirates are the particular heroes of the Children’s Revolt. We’re its heart and soul, its inspiration.”
“What revolt? Us? Camp Friendly?”
The prince rolled his eyes. “Did you ask anyone? Did you read a headline? Did you
hear anything
? There were riots in three cities, boyo. Takeovers and ransoming on a bunch of neutronium barges, plus three other acts of space piracy, including the theft of my mother’s own grappleship. It was a general, systemwide uprising. What were you, in a
cave
?”
“Um. Well, almost.” They would have brought him a TV or newsplate if he’d asked for one. The king’s letter could probably have told him these things as well. Should it have occurred to him to ask?
“It was all because of us, Conrad. All inspired by us. And with the Palace Guard’s memory dump, you’re the most famous of all! Well, after me. And Xmary too, but she’s a special case, being in two of the crucial places at the same time.” At Conrad’s blank stare he explained, “Because she helped orchestrate the first August riot? With Feck? Oh, never mind, you dolt. Just stand there, all right? Look heroic.”
Conrad blinked. “This is a joke, right?”
But even as he was saying it, he could see Feck and Xmary walking down the steps together, shaking their fists in the air in gleeful defiance. And behind them were other people, other
young
people who looked vaguely Denverish somehow. The stands were filling up in clumps and clusters, but Feck and Xmary, with Tusité leading them, came right down to the row behind the last of the space pirates.
“Conrad!” Feck said happily.
“Hi, Feck. So you started a riot, did you?” The only answer was a grin so wide it must have been painful.
And then Xmary was there, waving her fists. But her grin was not so wide or self-assured, and it collapsed entirely when she looked into Conrad’s face. She stopped in front of him. “Hello, you.”
“Hi. Do you, um, remember ... I mean, which Xmary are you? Both?”
“Both,” she confirmed, then patted him on the cheek. “Yes, I remember you, you darling fool. How could I forget?”
Bascal stepped forward, taking one of Xmary’s hands and kissing it. At her arrival, his own smiles had collapsed as well. “Xiomara,” he said. “Hello. So very good to see you.”
And then, with a kind of sour look on his face, he took her hand and transferred it solemnly into Conrad’s grasp.
“Huh? What?” Conrad said, brilliantly.
The prince huffed. “I have eyes, don’t I? And ears, and the sense to know when it’s time.” To Xmary he said, “You’re right; we’re not a romantic match. And since I’m the Prince of Fucking Sol, you’ll be easy enough to replace.”
“What a rotten thing to say,” Conrad noted with sudden, rising irritation.
“Shut up,” Bascal snapped. “I’m doing you a favor. Treat her right and maybe we’ll still be friends.” And then he melted back into the stands, taking refuge behind Ho and Steve and the others.
Conrad looked at the hand he’d been given, and then at the young woman attached to it. Behind her, Feck was looking on with a sour, wounded expression of his own. Xmary the heartbreaker? Leaving a trail of bodies and shattered dreams in her wake? He could see it in his mind’s eye: a Xiomara Li Weng who’d stayed home with her parents on that fateful night, waiting for a secret copy of herself that never came home. Did she suspect she’d met the prince? Been arrested? Smuggled herself to an all-boys summer camp, and then escaped? Who could possibly suspect a thing like that?
But then she’d somehow encountered this Yinebeb Fecre, this runaway who knew people in high places. Who knew
missing
people—revolutionaries on a mysterious voyage. How exciting! How intriguing and suggestive! He tried to imagine what that Xmary would be like, how she might react. That experience was so wildly different than the events aboard
Viridity
—less dirty and smelly and crowded, less frightening. A truly romantic adventure, to balance out the deprivations and indignities of space.
But did he know her well enough to speculate like this? Would his guesses be wildly inaccurate? He was pretty sure the Conrad Mursk on board
Viridity
bore little resemblance to the one that had left Cork County three months before. It was hard to be yourself, in conditions like that. Or perhaps the very notion of “self” was a contextual thing—a collection of learned responses to a particular environment. He found the idea oddly cheering: the human spirit shining through adversity.
“I’ll bet reintegration was a shock,” he said to her.
A flicker of smile came and went. “That’s the most intelligent thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the stands behind them. “So, uh ... you and Feck?”
She sniffed. “In a manner of speaking, yes. But I believe he had his share of ... contacts in the underground.”
Indeed, the boy was mobbed by female admirers up there, and seemed to know them all. Was that really Feck? Had he and Xmary really ...
“Oh.”
She scratched her neck. “Look, Conrad, it was—” “Exciting?” he offered sullenly. “Romantic?”
“I was going to say, none of your business.”
He nodded. “Okay. I deserved that. And do I inherit this legacy? Am I next in line?”
“Now that wasn’t smart,” she said, pulling her hand away. Her cheeks reddened—she still had that marvelous blush, so surprsingly easy to trigger. “You can’t trade hearts around like coupons, Hero Boy. Or didn’t you know? Thanks to you and your friends I’ve lost my parents and my home. Anyway, what makes you think I want to have this conversation here, in front of the world? I suppose my charms have driven you mad, but believe it or not, we are about to be sentenced.”
“Um, right,” he said. Then, mustering a bit of sincerity: “Sorry.”
That seemed to soften her. She touched his cheek again. “Oh, my. Twenty years, Conrad Mursk. Maybe thirty. They say the heart remembers. Maybe someday, when we’re out of prison, a little bird will whisper my name, and you’ll think of me, and maybe even look me up. I believe I’d like that.”
He could feel his own cheeks coloring now, warming. How absurd, this myth of his heroism! He’d been selfish and frightened through every minute of an ordeal he’d personally helped to create. And even now, in the relative safety of the Queendom, the touch of a soft hand was all it took to unravel his courage. “I’m an idiot,” he warned. “I really am.”
“Go. Sit,” she said, waving him away with an expression he couldn’t read. She moved back, taking a seat among the Denverites, and Conrad had the uncomfortable sense that a piece of him went with her. Blindly, eagerly, heedless of consequence. He hoped she would treat it kindly.
The crowd—tended by half a dozen Tusités—was growing thicker and thicker: not only a Denver section almost two hundred children strong, but a Calcutta section as well, and another smaller one for ... Athens? He also recognized the TSA Africans from
Refuge
. They were clothed for the occasion, but even so their blue skin really stood out. And around them stood many dozens of others, in a variety of colors and manners of dress.
Theoretically, the Queendom was one big society, freed by the Nescog from the tyrannies of time and space and geography. That had certainly been Conrad’s unexamined view. But he could see now that there were other yokels in other provinces, preserving their own little bubbles of regional culture. These kids over here had a vaguely Martian look: hair teased high over loose-fitting blouses and pastel slacks. Those over there had the squinty, buttoned-down look of Antarcticans—a look he’d had no idea he could even recognize.
It occurred to him that before the start of whatever happened next, this stadium was actually going to fill up. Two thousand people? More?
“What is this?” he asked out loud, of no one in particular. “Who are all these people? Revolutionaries, all of them?”
It was Peter Kolb who answered. “Revolutionaries, all. Not all space pirates, obviously, but rioters and saboteurs.”
“But ... wow, this must be a tenth of the children in the Queendom.”
Peter shrugged. “More like a thirtieth. But yeah, it’s a lot, and the ranks of sympathizers are even larger. Our exploits really struck a chord.”
Conrad nodded, thinking about that. It seemed important: could any society really lock up a thirtieth of its own children? Especially if their crimes were more celebrated than reviled? Maybe there would
have
to be a just solution, a Restoration-style rearchitecting of the social order. And then, in one of those little moments of grown-up awakening, it occurred to him that he didn’t really have any idea what that would mean. What did a perfect world look like? If anyone asked him, he could only stare back at them, slack-jawed and simple.
Great. Just great. He’d fought and struggled and made a mark on the universe, for no clear purpose. For the hell of it. Amazingly enough, he had no list of demands to nail over anyone’s doorway. Did Bascal? Did any of them? Would Their Majesties even ask, or care?