Free The Wellstone by Wil McCarthy Page B

than the sky of Camp Friendly.
    A pair of vaguely familiar women stood at ease, with the black hair and walnut skin of South Pacific ancestry, and the elaborate wraps and hair fans of Her Majesty’s court. With prim nods and subtle gestures, the two of them gathered the boys out of a pair of fax machines, and lined them up two rows deep in front of the empty thrones.
    Lucky for Conrad, he got to stand two spaces from Bascal, near the middle of the front row, not four meters from the raised dais on which the thrones themselves rested. Lucky, lucky. His heart was hammering wetly in his throat; his knees were knocking. He’d never been so nervous in his life, even the first time he’d spoken face-to-face with the Poet Prince. Conrad had been arrested once before, for throwing rocks at a cat, and had been called to the principal’s office many times, and of course detained and grounded and singled by his parents on a regular basis. But this was a whole new realm of trouble, the prospect of an angry king and queen far more frightening than the bland, dutiful sympathy of any police or petty officials.
    The Queendom’s royalty were technically figureheads, without any official political or legal powers. But they were also beloved, and brilliant, and so absurdly wealthy that they could buy the planets outright if they chose to. So in the end it hardly mattered: in the spiritual hunger of the Restoration and the perils and tragedies of the Fall, these two had been chosen as humanity’s penultimate leaders, second only to God. Whether or not Conrad liked or understood it, they could dictate his fate, and no one—not even his own mother and father—would challenge it.
    Still, this mortal fear didn’t keep him from noticing that the “boy” to his left in the row behind him was actually Xiomara Li Weng, from the café, and that the fifteen assembled children did not include Feck. In a way, this made sense: Feck had been in the ’soir when the building came down, and if he’d had the sense to get rid of his Camp Friendly shirt, then at first glance there’d be no reason for the Constabulary to connect him with the events on the balcony, or to distinguish him from the café’s regular customers. Whereas a quantum reconstruction of the collapse would show Xmary standing right next to Bascal, on the balcony with the other Friendly campers.
    But despite her short, dark hair and rail-thin figure, Xmary did not resemble Feck in the slightest. Conrad didn’t even see how she could be mistaken for a boy, although she’d rubbed the makeup off and lost the low-toe shoes, and even somehow taken off the nail polish. And she’d turned her party dress into a pair of beige trousers and a white shirt—though not a Camp Friendly shirt or even a tee shirt. But then again Ho Ng was out of uniform too, having somehow traded his tee for a shiny gray pullover and quilted vest, although he still had the pants: beige culottes that completely destroyed his efforts to look raw.
    Even so, the error was alarmingly stupid. Had no one checked the biometrics or the DNA, or even peeked under her shirt? Had the ire of king and queen so disrupted police routines that even the Constabulary could somehow arrest the wrong person? Hand her over in a moment of confusion? It was a chilling thought, and a reminder of why the Old Moderns had murdered off their royal families in the first place, leaving only the Princess of Tonga and the swashbuckling Declarant-Philander of Spanish Girona to lead them into the future.
    One of the Tongan ladies, gliding back and forth along the front row like a dolled-up drill sergeant, paused suddenly in front of Bascal. Placed a finger under his chin and lifted slightly, commanding his attention. Conrad couldn’t make out what she murmured to him, but he did hear the prince’s incongruous reply: “Lemonade. Please.”
    Then a chill settled over the room. To the right of the dais, a figure had appeared in the doorway. She had