Home: Interstellar: Merchant Princess by Ray Strong

what he had said. Of course, she knew that the authorities had moved the Princess . They had just talked about it, and he told her she could not visit legally. Then why would —
    The waiter interrupted Meriel’s thoughts with a polite bow. “Pardon me, miss, but is there something wrong with your lunch? I am sure that Chef Pierre would be happy to prepare something special if this is not to your liking. Perhaps an ile flottante or raspberry crepes with crème fraiche?”
    She had no idea what he was referring to, but said only, “No, thank you. I’m sure that would be delicious, but I’m just not hungry.”
    The waiter frowned slightly and raised an eyebrow, as if forgiving a veiled insult. “As you wish. If I may, we will close for the afternoon in approximately five minutes. If there is anything else I can get for you, please just signal me.”
    “Thank you,” Meriel said, and the waiter took her lunch plate, the only fresh food she had been served in her entire life, away untouched.
    Meriel looked out at the busy square and the beautiful day and sighed. The settlement for the Princess and her current savings would buy her a vacation on Earth, perhaps in the real Paris, but it would only be for her and only for a little while. And when she left, it would all be gone, every physical reminder of the Princess and her childhood and her family. Everything would be gone forever. Still, I would have something more than I have now .
    She pursed her lips. No. This is beautiful, but it’s just an illusion. This is not my life . She would need to prove that the Princess was not a mule and her parents were not drug dealers. But how do you prove a negative? she wondered and rose to leave.
    As Meriel walked out of the café, the hologram faded away, and the space became featureless gray walls and ceiling. When the doors closed behind her, the waiters and customers, all mindless androids, lined themselves up against a wall and turned themselves off.
    ***
    Meriel switched back to the “simple black dress” option and walked to the edge of the torus to avoid the security cameras. She boarded a tram headed for green-zone—where the regular folks went to relax, and the elites went to tarnish their reputations. Her mission there was simple: score some tranq boost to dispel her nightmares without taking the meds.
    Neon holograms flashed outside the transparent ceramic window. Another tram passed in synch with hers every few moments to balance the mass and smooth the microgravity tremors with a compensating angular acceleration. The view was the same from the tram on Runner Station in the Ross 128 system, which was where Elizabeth found her seven years ago, except she remembered the flashing advertisements to be a lifeless gray.
    ***
    There was no color in her life then, and the incessant advertisements and colorful signage of the blue-zone bars and businesses that passed outside the window left no impression on her. She was alone—three years after the Princess attack. Her parents and friends were dead and her sister was light years away.
    She knew what she had seen the day of the attack and could not forget, no matter how much she wanted to. The anonymous faces in white jackets with pleasant smiles had told her all the reasons why the Princess attack could not have happened the way she had said, and they complimented her on her rich fantasy life and creative imagination. But the smiles turned cold when she couldn’t align her memories to the stories they wanted, stories of drugs and intrigue that she could never believe. In their notes, her creative fantasies became delusions that had to be controlled by medication.
    After months of interviews, therapy, and separation, she doubted herself, and unable to invent a story that made sense to her and them both, she stopped fighting and took the medication.
    Now at fifteen, she had no friends and desired none. There was only the job and the biological need to be suitably compliant for