Evening of May 14, 2440
By early evening, the Pleasure Park looked less like a private estate amenity than the grounds of a world exposition.
Across the road, nearly 15 acres of the Marmaduke homestead had been turned over to the press junket, where more than a thousand reporters and camera crews circulated among local political and business figures, V’ren officers, food stations and outdoor pavilions. By dawn, organizers expected roughly 150,000 people to have moved through the larger event.
And the V’ren captains were not scheduled to arrive until morning.
Matthew Marmaduke, meanwhile, was doing what he had been doing for hours: walking through his own party and allowing reporters to catch him.
“Lord Marmaduke, Keira Mendez with Variety.”
Marmaduke stopped.
“You’ve become a household name across three languages and two species. Your household is part soap opera, part political dynasty, and your social reach rivals corporate governments.”
Marmaduke smiled at that.
“My question is this: Do you see yourself as a leader, a symbol, or a character? And how much of this, tonight, the Freehold, your presence, is still real, and how much is now performance?”
“Let me answer that in reverse order.”
He gestured across the road.
“This is the third major event I’ve had the Pleasure Park decked out for this year. Usually I don’t have this many until the end of June.”
The previous events, he said, had been considerably smaller, around 25,000 visitors over a day.
Tonight was something else.
“We’re expecting around 150,000 between three this afternoon and dawn tomorrow.”
On an ordinary summer evening, Marmaduke said, the park might draw about 2,000 people during the week and as many as 5,000 on a weekend.
For the moment, those numbers made the place sound almost normal.
The Ferris wheel, pools, midway, playing fields and generations of accumulated recreational infrastructure suggested otherwise.
Mendez returned to the original question.
“So, leader, symbol or character?”
“Yes.”
“All three?”
“Yes.”
Marmaduke looked toward the park again.
“People deserve places where they can have fun. They deserve reasons to get together. They deserve things their kids will remember.”
The Pleasure Park has been accumulating those memories for roughly three centuries.
“It started with one of my ancestors having the deluded idea that what this place really needed was a private golf course.”
Mendez laughed.
“Then came the Collapse, and golf stopped mattering quite so much.”
What followed was less a master plan than a family argument conducted through construction.
“His son put in a putt-putt course and a swimming pool for the locals and his kids. Then somebody added the first go-kart track. His grandson built the first ballfield. His daughter added the volleyball courts.”
Each Freeholder inherited the place, changed something and left the rest behind for the next one.
Marmaduke did the same.
“My first contribution was the ice rink.”
His tone shifted slightly.
“That was for Amy.”
Amy Marmaduke, his late wife, had grown up in California.
“Her first Missouri winter, she fell in love with skating.”
The rink stayed.
So did most of what came before it.
“Last year I upgraded all the baseball diamonds to Little League World Series standards.”
For someone whose political authority is regularly described in imperial terms, Marmaduke talks about civilization surprisingly often in terms of ballfields, swimming pools and places to buy bad carnival food.
“So yes, this is about rebuilding civilization,” he said. “But civilization isn’t just roads and power plants and somebody telling you where the sewage goes.”
He nodded toward the park.
“It’s this too.”
Then came the line that probably explained the rink better than the infrastructure did.
“It’s making sure the next kid gets to skate with the girl he loves too.”
For several seconds, Mendez let that sit.
Then Marmaduke changed subjects.
“Did you see the Shinto shrine?”
“Yes. Beautiful. Seemed authentic.”
“There’s no ‘seemed’ about it.”
Marmaduke pointed farther into the park.
“My great-grandfather Dale built it for his wife, Tatsumi Niikura. She was from Kyoto.”
The shrine was not installed as a decorative approximation of Japanese tradition. It remains an active religious site maintained by the same extended family that established it.
“My great-granduncle Prester John was the first shrine priest, along with his wife’s father.”
That began a priestly line that continued through Prester John’s descendants.
“My cousin Gary keeps it now. Gentaro Boone Marmaduke. Everybody calls him Gary. He’s our chief groundskeeper, runs the Pleasure Park and serves as one of the shrine priests.”
Mendez asked how often the shrine was actually used.
“Regularly.”
Then Marmaduke added another complication to any attempt to distinguish sincere tradition from entertainment business.
“A few times a year, we rent out the whole park to outsiders who want a traditional wedding at the shrine.”
“The whole park?”
“The whole park.”
“There are only three places on this continent where you can really do that anymore,” he said. “This is one of them.”
Which brings the conversation back to Mendez’s original question.
How much of Matthew Marmaduke is real, and how much is performance?
At the Pleasure Park, the distinction may not matter very much.
A golf course became a swimming pool, ballfields, go-karts, an ice rink and a carnival midway because generations of one family kept adding things they wanted other people to enjoy. A shrine built for one Japanese woman became a living religious institution, then also became one of the continent’s rare destination wedding venues.
And the man standing in the middle of humanity’s biggest first-contact media event still talks about the whole thing as though he merely happens to own the place where everybody showed up.
Maybe that is performance.
Maybe that is leadership.
Maybe, as Marmaduke suggested, the answer is simply yes.
