A Princess of the Aerie

by John Barnes

  “It was almost twenty minutes long, Sesh—”

  “I am Princess Shyf. You will address me as ‘Princess Shyf,’ or as ‘Your Utmost Grace,’ idiot boy.”

  Jak fought down his own rising temper and said, “I have a copy of the message. On my purse. Security stamped and everything. Let me send it over and you look at it. This is the last message I ever got from you, till now.”

  “Send it,” the Princess snapped.

  “Do it,” Jak murmured to his purse, which said, “Sending last message from Princess Shyf over current com link, fully secured version.”

  Then the screen froze again, this time with an image of Her Utmost Fury glaring out from it. The door remained locked. Dujuv’s left hand had stopped signaling weird-bad and was now just signaling, Weird … weird …weird … , more tic than communication. An hour went by. Jak wished that he had stopped off at a restroom earlier.

  Jordesta Mattanga returned to the screen and said, “I am commanded to communicate apologies from Princess Shyf for the tone of her remarks. The message copy is clearly authentic in that its internal evidence shows it was received by you when and where you say it was. It is, however, an extremely good fake. This obviously raises grave questions about the Princess’s personal security. We would therefore like to invite you to come and stay at the Royal Palace for at least a brief period, to talk to our security people. We’re negotiating with Hive Intelligence, since you were nominally working for them, to see if they will cover the cost, one way or another, of getting you back home in a timely way.” Then she allowed herself something that seemed almost like a smile. “On the purely personal level, thank you for your patience in dealing with this mess. It was not of either of our making, to be sure, but apparently it will take both your efforts and ours to clean it up.”

  There was a clank and thud as the booth door unlocked.

  “Now, if you will just stay somewhere in Station Eight, Kawib Presgano, of the Royal Palace Guards, will be coming up to the gripliner station to escort you here.”

  “Thank you very much,” Myx said. “Please extend our thanks to the Princess for her courtesy.”

  After a necessary rush to the restrooms, they regrouped on the main floor of the gripliner station. The view was inverted from what they were used to. On the Hive, with a black hole at its center, gravity is inward, constant, and increases as you approach the center; on the Aerie, whose “gravity” is the centripetal force of its complicated, constantly-adjusted precession, gravity is outward, varying, and decreases as you approach the center. Thus on the Hive a gripliner out to the Ring comes and goes through the great domes in the ceiling, and the destination is “up.” Here, gripliners rose through the floor, and in the low grav, the three toves hopped and bounced across transparent sections. Below them, the nearest habitat spread a vast green, blue, and white blur of clouds, lakes, parks, and shining cities across the starry sky beneath their feet.

  Myx checked her purse. “That’s Hiawatha, eighteen million people, lots of lakes and canals, main businesses aqua-culture and truck farming.”

  As they watched, Hiawatha dimmed to darkness, and Jak pulled the earpiece connection from his purse and asked it to give him a quick review of the numbers about the Aerie. On the average (no two rotations were quite alike—only constant precessing under power kept gravity close to constant), the Aerie turned over in about three and a half hours, too short a natural day for comfort, especially with about a quarter-hour eclipse every noon. Hence the transparent top of each habitat could be opaqued at will, the undersurface of each habitat was one vast light collector/projector, and fibers carried incoming sunlight from the backs of habitats, where it fell uselessly, to shine from the backs of other habitats, from which it shone onto land otherwise dark; operating the Aerie required four thousand quarkjet engines (Up Yours had four) scattered around the habitat edges, thirteen trillion light apertures any one of which could send or receive light from any other, and controlled opacity on a total area of smart glass as big as North America. It also needed half of humanity’s total computing capacity to make millisecond decisions in controlling all the engines, networking all the apertures, and changing opacity on every square centimeter of smart glass.

  Jak specked that he had never really known what the word “awesome” meant, before.

  “Anybody hungry? I could really use something to eat,” Dujuv said.

  After they had found a booth in the snack bar’s centrifuge, Myxenna and Jak talked it all over while Dujuv shoveled noodles and beefrat chunks into his mouth and listened. Mostly they tried to convince themselves that Sesh hadn’t meant to be so unpleasant.

  Dujuv sighed, pausing between gulps. “Still … old toves, masen? I mean I dak, toktru, that she has another life and better things to deal with, but we are her old toktru toves, and we’re the people that busted her out when she was being held in Fermi, masen? Seems like having been toves once ought to count for more than it does.”

  “Sometime,” Myxenna said, sourly, “you toktru ought to discuss the djeste of that with your ex-demmy. That being old toves ought to count for something and that maybe people ought to behave accordingly, if maybe you speck what I mean?”

  To Jak’s surprise, Dujuv said, “You know, you’re right. Let’s talk pretty soon about it.”

  “I’d like that.”

  After the silence had become thoroughly awkward, Jak tried changing the subject. “Far as I know, I’m the only one with an enemy outside the Hive,” Jak said. “So one real possibility is that this was some way for Bex Riveroma to lure me out of the Hive, to get that sliver from me. But the Hive’s pretty wide open. He could have knocked me on the head anytime there. Then taken me in for ten minutes with a surgeon, grab that sliver, and everybody’s happy except me and the heets from Maintefice that find my body.”

  Myxenna held up a finger. “Maybe he wants to talk to you personally for some reason or another?”

  “It’s at least one hypothesis.”

  Myxenna nodded, her dark hair bobbing around her face. “All right, now, next question—is Jak right, Dujuv? Do you and I have no enemies off the Hive?”

  Dujuv shrugged. “There are maniacs who want to kill all the breeds and go back to ‘pure human stock,’ and some of them are violent. But why import a panth to assault? There’re plenty here. How about you?”

  “No political connections, I’m a lukewarm follower of the Wager the way that most of the solar system is, no deep personal hatreds, nobody in my family ever killed anybody except maybe my big brother in the Army. And except for my brother and me, my family is all mids—middle class, middle aged, middle management, and they live midlevel on the Hive. The most ordinary, conventional people you could ever meet. Toktru no.”

  “Maybe something to do with Circle Four,” Jak said. “I’m never sure what might be stirring out in my uncle’s web of connections, but I don’t think he’d have shopped me without telling me. Or if Circle Four did, why would they also shop both of you?”

  “Maybe it’s a reunion,” Myxenna said, smiling slightly. “Now Phrysaba and Piaro are about to come walking in here, along with Shadow on the Frost. …”

  Dujuv chuckled. “Well, if they do, I’m going to jump out of my skin. Glad as I’d be to see any of them again.”

  “Just so Mreek Sinda isn’t following them,” Jak said. “I still can’t believe the bizarre djeste she made out of what really happened.”

  “No one else believed it, either,” Dujuv pointed out, “and it did get you laid regular, by someone great-looking. What have you heard from Fnina, anyway?”

  “In the first few days, she sent me five long messages full of undying passion, at about twelve hour intervals, then dumped me for a heet in a slec group.”

  “Heart broken?”

  “Not even dented.”

  “Thought so.” Smiling, Duj took another big bite of the food, and said, “Weehu.”

  “What?”

  “Normally all I notice about foo
d is whether there’s enough of it. That’s what a base calorie demand of six thousand a day will do for you. But this stuff tastes good.”

  “You’re comparing it with a couple of weeks of ship food,” Jak said. “It’s amazing, a Spatial ship has ten times the kitchen space a merchant sunclipper does, and can get offship ingredients fresh, usually every month or so, but still the food is so much better on a sunclipper, and a lot less monotonous.”

  “Toktru,” Dujuv said, through another mouthful.

  Quietly, Jak put his purse down on the table and said, “Record the next conversation, stop when the subject of conversation changes.”

  “I’ll check before I assume it’s changed,” the purse said.

  “Good.” Jak stroked its reward spot. “Now, old toves, I have to do a report for my Solar System Ethnography course, and the topic I got approved is ‘comparison of merchant and Spatial crewie societies.’ What did you all notice about the Spatial?”

  “No sense of humor!” Dujuv said, through a mouthful of noodles. (Jak assumed that was what “Nofenf avumer” meant.)

  Myxenna added, “They look down on anyone who shows any interest in comfort.”

  “Lousy place for a panth. They’re all very proud of being the brainy service, so they all pat me on the head. It’s funny because first it got me thinking about how much I didn’t like being treated as stupid, and then about the fact that I get treated as stupid all the time, it was just more consistent on the Spatial ships, and then I got to thinking that, you know, I’m not glib like Jak or brilliant like Myx but I’m not stupid at all. I’m like most panths, normal intelligence, maybe better. That really made me think.”

  Jak nodded. “On the ship, you couldn’t even talk to us about any of that. So you’ve been thinking a lot.”

  “I always think a lot. I just do it kind of slow.”

  Myxenna said, “I knew you thought a lot. You used to be kind of ashamed of it, I thought.”

  “I was, I guess. I was getting plenty of attention for being a good-looking goalie. That also meant people were watching me all the time. Why risk getting attention by opening my mouth and maybe saying something stupid?”

  Jak said, “You don’t let me get away with treating you as if you were dumb. Rightly so, masen?”

  “Hey, I expect my best friend to know that I’m playing dumb.”

  “Your demmy always did know,” Myx said.

  Dujuv looked up, and for one moment the warmth that shone in his eyes made Jak wonder why Myxenna didn’t just melt at the sight of it. “I know,” he said. “Why do you think I bonded so tight that I can’t let go? Because you were kind to me, and panths grow up so hungry for human contact, masen?”

  “I have noticed that,” Jak said. “I thought it was just part of the genetic programming.”

  “Naw, it’s because we’re all lonely kids. We have to be. We’re dangerous to other kids. We get muscle and coordination much earlier than unmodifieds, but intelligence and empathic sense much later. That’s why we have to be in a special crèche instead of dev school—when I was four, by unmodified standards, I was emotionally two but physically ten, with panth reflexes. Don’t either of you ever say this because it’s offensive as hell, but what we say among ourselves is that up till gen school, panths don’t need parents, we need zookeepers.”

  It was so unexpected that Myx blew tea through her nose.

  “Now that’s like old times,” Jak said.

  Myx tried to grab and tickle him, but she was giggling too hard, and then Dujuv bounced across the table and got into it—on both sides, as he always did, in the interest of fairness—and they were all tussling around and laughing like crazed children when the privacy door slid open and there was a young man standing there in uniform. He coughed politely and did a terrible job of hiding a smile. “Er, the directory said you would be in this booth.”

  “Assuming we’re who you’re looking for, it was singing-on,” Myx said. The young heet was tall and broad-shouldered, with light caramel colored skin, tan-patterned in the leopard-print style that was supposed to be the heliopause of clash-splash-and-smash nowadays. His uniform was dark blue and so loaded with piping, epaulets, medallions, badges, superfluous buttons, straps that connected nothing to nothing, and other decorations and baubles, that he looked like an escaped drum major trying to pass as a Christmas tree, or perhaps a magnetized doorman who had run through a costume shop. He had a long hawk-nose, big round dark eyes, and an expression fighting to be serious.

  “Well, I’m Kawib Presgano, of the Royal Palace Guard of Greenworld, and I was sent out to pick up three unexpected visitors who came in on Up Yours. You are Jak Jinnaka, Dujuv Gonzawara, and Myxenna Bonxiao?”

  “We are,” Jak said. “You, um, caught us at an awkward moment.”

  Kawib smiled and raised an eyebrow. “Now why is it that people would rather be caught panhandling, or naked in public, than just having fun?”

  “What if that is your idea of fun?” Myx teased.

  “I wouldn’t know, I’ve never panhandled. If you all have finished eating and wrestling, we should probably go. The Princess is not noted for her patience, and the order originated with her.”

  They walked up the steps and airswam out the exit. The three toves headed for the main gates, but Kawib said, “No, this way. We’re taking one of the palace’s hoppers. Have you ever ridden a hopper before?”

  The craft that Kawib led them to, in the private garage off the station, was about eight meters long by five at the broadest part of the beam. An upper glass ellipsoid formed the canopy over a lower, larger ellipsoid of silver-blue metal studded with dozens of cold jet nozzles and four linducer grapples. On its side it bore the traditional fist-and-pine-tree of Greenworld, and on its nose the sword, chain, and crown of the Karrinynya Dynasty.

  Kawib said “Recognize voice and open” and the canopy irised into the main body. Towing their bags, they all air-swam into it, Kawib sitting down in the pilot’s chair. “Everyone have everything? Good. Close up.” The canopy slid closed over their heads as easily and silently as it had opened, closing with no visible joint.

  “All right, let me finish power-up, and I’ll get us in motion,” Kawib said.

  “You hand-fly this?” Dujuv asked.

  “Would you like to move up to the copilot’s chair and watch?”

  Dujuv didn’t need a second invitation.

  Kawib’s checkout seemed to take about twenty seconds. The basic controls looked to be a stick, rudder, and throttle that might have been familiar to any Late Medieval pilot. “You can stow your bags in any of the lockers in the side-walls,” Kawib said, “and make sure you strap in—we won’t be doing any high accelerations, because this thing really can’t, but the acceleration does change a lot and it can be startling. Any questions before I call in a clearance and we go? I may not be toktru conversational once we’re in motion.”

  “Is it that complex to fly one of these?” Dujuv asked.

  Kawib chuckled. “I ought to pretend it is, to impress you all, but the fact is that I could just tell it to take us home, and it would do it all automatically, like any other AI-flown ship. Might even do a better job than I’m going to do. But I would like to try to break a personal record for hand-flying this thing from the docking body to Greenworld, and that’s where my concentration will be.”

  Dujuv grinned. “So we’re racing!”

  “Well, yeah, but only against a personal record.”

  “That’s okay, tove, I just got off a Hive Spatial battle-sphere. Where fun is not done. So the fact that you’re doing anything at all just because you’ll enjoy it—well. Glad to be aboard, Captain.”

  “Technically,” Kawib said, “I can only be a captain while this thing is off the cable, which is only at intervals. At the moment I’m the driver at best. Anyway, glad to have you along for the ride. Just don’t touch anything, and if I do anything brilliant I’ll let you all know to applaud wildly.”

  What a hopper could do
, and a gripliner could not, was pass. Bursts from its cold jets let it leap sideways at the last moment to avoid slower-moving gripliners ahead of it, then return to the cable in front of them. Or now and then, when traffic was heavy for a few hundred kilometers up the line, Kawib would jump a few dozen kilometers in space to a hole in the traffic in a less-busy cable, flashing around yet another gripliner, bouncing off the cable on a burst of the cold jets, seeing the silver flash of the traffic in the sunlight four or five kilometers away, then rolling 180 degrees and firing the cold jets again to match up with the cable.

  Kawib was only flying the humanly-possible parts; he could no more have truly hand-flown at those speeds than he could have steered a bullet. (In fact a bullet moved much more slowly.) Computers had to do the linducer grapple-and-ungrapple processes, and even the last kilometer of the approaches. But Jak still noted that their bounces and excursions off the cables and between them were executed gracefully and cleanly, and he liked the air of quiet satisfaction with which Kawib carried out the maneuvers. Perhaps no one had been a “real” pilot since the days of biplanes, jet fighters, or the early shuttles—Jak wasn’t sure when computers and high speeds had eliminated them—but if Kawib’s piloting wasn’t quite real, his panache more than made up for it.

  “Weehu, fun one,” Kawib said. The cold jets hit with all they had and the hopper zoomed away from the cable; before them, a swath of green and yellow grain fields surrounding little red-roofed villages had been swelling across their forward view. Now they shot across it as they approached, and Jak could see occasional glints from the transparent upper surface. As they drew nearer still, getting close to the edge, Jak caught a glimpse of wide rocky beach and stormy deep-blue water. Then beneath the clear upper surface there was nothing but heavy, dark clouds, rushing up at them.

  The black starry sky of space opened beyond the edge, and in an instant the white clouds, the dark air and water, and the black underside of the habitat flashed by, and they were moving back into Arm Eight.