Free Nowhere by Thomas Berger Page B

me—which is why I must take such precautions to ensure my safety: I am the last of the line. If I make no heir, this splendid little land will fall to the rabble.”
    Now, I am democratic to the marrow, and if I rail against the vile herd, or in any event that version of it all too oppressively evident in New York City, my objections have naught to do with matters of social class, my own being none too exalted. Yet, I confess that sitting at the prince’s table, and more important, drinking his champagne, I was inclined to take his problem as having much the same value as he himself put upon it.
    “Good heavens. Then you must by all means and with all haste find a bride, sir, for I have had my own personal experience with your enemies.” I began to tell him about the Liberation Front bombing, but royalty has (or anyway this example of it had) small patience with the narratives of commoners, and Sebastian spoke as if I had been sitting in silence.
    “Luckily,” I was saying, “I took seriously the voice on the phone, and ran from my building, for—”
    “The difficulty,” said Sebastian, “is that I cannot endure the prolonged company of women. Unfortunately, tradition demands that the prince go through an elaborate series of wedding ceremonies, and then make at least some pretense of sharing his life with the princess, insofar as official functions are concerned.”
    “Aha,” said I, in lieu of a better response. Obviously the prince was immune to charges of so-called sexism, which in New York were so easily brought by the kind of viragoes I dated, when my crime was so minor as to express a preference for a plain bagel as opposed to one of which honey, dates & nuts were constituents.
    “I’m afraid that artificial insemination is not possible, owing to the many restrictions precedent places on the royal semen,” said the prince. “The sovereign’s spunk is considered virtually sacred. The sheets are burned if I have a nocturnal emission in bed, for example.”
    I drank a half-fluteful of champagne.
    Sebastian was frowning into the middle distance. “I expect there’s nothing for it but to get cracking, repugnant as my life will be thereafter, until there are sufficient children to make extinction of the dynasty unlikely, and then the princess might be dispensed with.”
    I choked on a draught of champagne. “She will be put to death?”
    After a jolly laugh, Sebastian said, “No, that sort of thing has not been done in ever so long a time. It would now even be out of date to send her to a convent. No, she’ll have a pretty villa in the country and an adequate staff: perhaps not sumptuous accommodations, but neither will they be mean. My own mother enjoyed such lodgings for many years.”
    I was so relieved to hear that he would not, when done with her, execute the poor woman who married him that I could respond almost blithely to the plight of his maternal parent.
    “How nice.”
    “Rare indeed,” said the prince, “is the great man who has not found a boy’s flesh much sweeter than that of any female. Socrates, Caesar, Frederick the Great: there are few exceptions, and those who pretended otherwise were surely hypocrites.”
    To make some expression of what in the Aesopian jargon of those groups who seek to promote the acceptance of their own special tastes was called “freedom of choice” would be truistic to the point of lèse majesté under the current conditions: the prince hardly required my permission to pollute the choirboys of the country he ruled absolutely, not to mention that he was not misguided in finding many celebrated sodomites on the rosters of prominent men. But it was ludicrous to suppose that the likes of Napoleon, Mark Twain, and General MacArthur, to take a disparate lot, had been fraudulently heterosexual. But remember that my purpose was not an inquiry into eroticism.
    I drew on my store of trivia: “And England’s Edward the Second and Ludwig the Mad of Bavaria.” The