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, beðcause 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. Noðbody 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 leðgitimate 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 comðplain 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 uncivilðized 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 outnumðber 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 inðside, 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 leadðing 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.”