by John Barnes
After about an hour, Mreek Sinda cleared her throat. “I think I’d be remiss in my duty if I didn’t at least try to interview the three of you while we’re all trapped here.” They were in free fall, now, all drifting around the small ferry cabin. Camera drones circled Jak and Sinda.
“ ‘Trapped’ is the word,” Jak agreed. “First of all I have a question for you. Why did you make me look like the biggest gweetz in the solar system? Especially when there are literally hundreds of witnesses to contradict that silly story you had coming out of my mouth? You made me look like a liar and a braggart and a complete idiot! Why?!”
“The camera sees what the camera sees,” Sinda said. She had smiled as if dealing with a four-year-old throwing a tantrum.
Jak gaped at her, his outrage an aphasic spike pinning his jaws closed; he glanced at Dujuv, who was pretending to be fascinated by something out the window.
“I did not say any of those things,” Jak finally managed to sputter, and somehow he sounded like a liar even to himself, even knowing that it was perfectly true. “I didn’t say any of them. You or your accesscaster or somebody made all of that up, and created an interview where there wasn’t one, and I want to know why. Why did you do that to me? You’ve made me out to be a bragging lying fool and cost me the trust of many friends and I want to know why. That’s what the question is.”
Sinda shrugged. “If you didn’t want me to put it out on the nets, why did you talk to me? With that poor girl hardly cold yet—and away from your duty station—you were right outside the hall telling me everything. Check the background of the shots and you’ll be able to see that it must have been less than ten minutes after the assassination attempt. In fact—”
She touched her purse and said, “Cue up the lead in from the ball for the Duke of Uranium, post major event, outside the Great Hall doors, Royal Palace, Greenworld. Project on inboard system if they’ll give you access—”
“Got the clip, got access,” her purse said. It had a very resonant baritone, like the second lead in a romantic-adventure viv. “Here it is—projecting.”
The screen formed on a blank wall; the image was sharp and clear, as might be expected with top-of-the-line media gear, showing the crush of celeb-watchers, people who collected sightings of the famous, just outside the main doors. The muffled thud of the bomb, the pistol shots, and the weird veering of the slec only took half a minute before the shrieks and screaming started. (It had seemed like forever while it was happening.) The crowd of celeb-watchers swarmed toward the doors like vampires around a hemophiliac. Royal Palace Guards at the door were reinforced by regular troops as the concealed doors and vomitoria dilated all over the front of the building.
A side door, barely in the frame, opened a crack, and Jak saw himself emerge, look around, look toward the camera, fix his gaze, and run forward, waving a hand. “Mreek Sinda! Mreek Sinda! I need you to interview me right away!”
“Now, are you going to say that that didn’t happen?” Sinda demanded.
“I did not do that! I was right in there in the hall with Dujuv and Shadow and several hundred witnesses, and I didn’t leave till hours later when Xabo officially released us. I don’t think I was ever out of sight of either of my toves here, and I know plenty of people saw me.”
“Do you have any idea how unreliable an eyewitness is?”
“Ahem,” Shadow said. “I—er, Jak, I wish I could completely confirm your whereabouts, but as you know I was engaged in ending threats to the Duke, and that was where all my focus was. And I rather suspect that Dujuv was in a similar situation.”
“I was,” Dujuv said.
“I couldn’t possibly have had time to slip out during the fight,” Jak said. “Remember, I tripped up the one with the bomb, and then I was in it until you two took out the gunmen. I was never more than ten steps away from either of you. Dujuv, I could not have run outside and done an interview, not and been right back at your side when we were dealing with poor Seubla.”
“I still don’t see why you gave an interview if you didn’t want it accesscast,” Sinda said. “But since you’re acting irrationally, I’m going to invoke my media privileges under the safe-conduct treaties, because I don’t want to be harassed while I’m doing my job. If you try to approach me or speak to me I’ll swear out a formal complaint. When I want another interview, I’ll talk to you. Till then, don’t approach.”
Jak wanted to say something, but he felt his tove’s hand over his mouth. “I don’t know who’s telling the truth,” Dujuv said, “but even if you are a liar—and you might be (I guess)—then I’d rather not have my pizo go to jail.”
The rest of the trip was uneventful; conversation was only about the occasional glimpses of interesting things in the sky, backward glances at the Aerie, a moment when the Hive and Earth passed in near conjunction, and the distant view of the outward bound Serendipity of Alpha Draconis, a Rubahy sunclipper making the long run from Mercury and Venus back to Pluto. “I have cousins aboard her,” Shadow said, “but then there are so few of us, and we have been isolated for so long, that it is hardly possible for ten Rubahy to gather without there being cousins present.” He stared at the bright curves and bows in the viewport, very quietly, for a long time.
Dujuv asked, “Do you wish you were on it?”
“At least four of the crew would gain great honor by assassinating me,” Shadow on the Frost said, “but if you mean, do I long for home? Well, I long for many of the people there. Eventually these problems of honor and precedence and so on will work out, but just now, it seems so very long until I can be out working the lines, every day for three years, upward into the dark, feeling that every time I turn a wrench, set a dial, or read a needle, we sail a little closer to home. There is a poet of ours who speaks of the three-year homeward journey of a Rubahy sunclipper from Mercury to Pluto.” He whistled a short passage; it was melodic and sad, with an odd, perky lilt in the last few notes. “Translated into your words, it would be:
A year. Sol gutters to a bright star.
A year. Empty dark between steel stars.
A year. Dim snowy globe. Oaths kept. Home.
“But I am told that our poetry says nothing to you, so enough of this. I shall talk myself into depression, which is bad for reflexes and alertness, and that in turn is bad for survival.”
“I do hope you find your way home, old tove,” Dujuv said.
As they approached the Spirit of Singing Port, the vast sunclipper filled almost 180 degrees of their vision. Sails, lines, and all spread for tacking, the ship was over sixteen thousand kilometers wide at its widest point, and almost ten thousand kilometers long from its outermost tripo to the tip of the trailing heat exchanger.
In all of that, it was hard to see the little glittering star of the one-kilometer-wide metal sphere where several thousand crewies, men, women, and children, lived their whole lives. Solar sails are fast but not powerful, and all that vast microns-thick spread of sail was only to drive that little ball, barely a kilometer across. The sky was filled with the sails, but the home of twenty-five hundred crew would barely be visible until they were nearly there.
Presently the mechanical voice asked them to strap in, and they did. After some minutes the little ferry jumped sideways, then up toward their heads, then back, a kick-boxer’s footwork. The accelerations were brief and small, not more than ten seconds or a quarter g.
The ship proper was now a dark circle about the diameter of a pencil at arm’s length. Neither Jak’s viewport nor any of the screens showed the ribbon of the sunclipper’s loop until they aligned. Half a minute before coupling, their seats began to rotate and extend under them so that they could take the coming acceleration fully supported, lying on their backs.
One view camera switched to a close-up and Jak saw the linducer grapple grab the loop. The instant it closed, four g slammed him down against the padding of his seat. He could have raised an arm only with difficulty, and breathing was a struggle. He relaxed and let
his breath woof out, knowing it wouldn’t be long.
The linducer grapple pulled mightily against the loop, which whirled halfway round the thirty-kilometer circle in less than a minute, bringing their velocity to zero relative to the ship. The grapple let go, the acceleration stopped as if turned off by a switch, and they floated weightlessly into the Spirit’s receiving dock. “Everyone on board will de-board now,” the automatic voice said. “Relaunch is in six minutes twenty-nine seconds, repeat six minutes twenty-nine, from now. Everyone off now.”
Jak slung his jumpie on and airswam forward through the hatch into the flextunnel to the ship’s receiving bay. In the big airlock, a DNA reader scraped the inside of his arm and turned green when it confirmed his identity.
He airswam through the inner hatch and was wrapped in a twining human body, tumbling in midair. A hot face pressed against his and then a warm tongue was in his mouth, thrusting deep, and the girl’s mouth against his softened and opened further as he responded. The kiss might have gone even longer if in their tumbling Jak’s back hadn’t finally bumped against the wall, jarring them from each other. As they came up for air, Jak looked into the familiar big dark eyes with a slight epicanthic fold, and the delicate features in soft cocoa skin framed by short coppery hair. “Well, hi, there, Phrysaba.”
“ ‘Well, hi, there.’ What do I have to do to get some enthusiasm? Eat your head?” Her eyes were twinkling with pleasure. She still had a smile that could grab Jak by the heart and squeeze till he thought it might pop.
Jak became aware that something was buzzing around him in a cloud—Mreek Sinda’s drones were swirling around them. One was shooting a close-up of Phrysaba’s breast, three of her buttocks. Beyond the tiny flying cameras, he saw Dujuv laughing madly and hanging on to Shadow, who was making the resonant bloop-and-tang noise that was Rubahy laughter.
He looked a little to the side, where something else was moving; it was Phrysaba’s brother, Piaro, Jak’s oldest tove on the ship, and beside him, Pabrino Prudent-Reckoner, a brilliant younger heet of whom Jak was very fond, and who seemed to have grown about a head in height since Jak had seen him last. Piaro was grinning broadly and said, “I hope you won’t expect everyone to welcome you the way my sister does.” Pabrino smiled at that, but seemed quiet and thoughtful.
Then Mreek Sinda loudly said, “So how does this affect your relationship with Her Utmost Grace Shyf?”
Jak looked very, very seriously at the camera nearest him and said, with undisguised deep passion,
Mary had a little duck,
She kept it in her bed,
And everyone—
Sinda made an annoyed noise; the drones flitted back into her bag as she demanded that someone show her the way to her stateroom.
“Nobody appreciates art anymore,” Jak said, and Dujuv smiled at that and said, “Toktru.” Jak was happy just to be where he was, for the first time in a long time.
CHAPTER 10
About Fourth-Level Famous, for Free
Jak, Shadow, and Dujuv had all CUPVed on a sunclipper before, Shadow most of all. Dujuv started off replacing panels in the auxiliary propulsion tubes, grumbling amiably that it was just like being back in the Spatial, but after three days he was rotated to the reactor room to broaden his experience. Jak started outside in the rigging, doing the never-ending untangling, separating, and mending of lines; it was challenging work, moderately dangerous because monosil cables were so fine that they could sever a limb with very little force. Shadow, with much more experience—he was a proficient astrogator, and he always traveled as a CUPV on his many voyages—worked in the worryball.
In between CUPV duties, there were the endless amusements of shipboard social life: games and sports plus all the passionate little clubs that followed opera, or flatscreen film, or poetry, or anything that could be something to talk about. Dujuv, with few people around who could really give him a workout at any sport, was in danger of boredom for a day or two until Phrysaba invited him into the Ancient Languages Club, which was just starting a project of reading Late Medieval and early space-era Mexican poetry; soon he was constantly practicing his Spanish, murmuring back and forth to his purse.
Shadow was fond of chess, poker, and go. The Rubahy approach was different from the human, which made it more interesting to play each other, the Rubahy trying to grasp why humans disliked purely ground-taking go, or emphasized bluffing, the humans trying to dak why the Rubahy so valued knights, and what they meant by the “rhythmic backflow” of a hand.
When he wasn’t with Phrysaba, who seemed to want to spend all of their time together just chatting and making love, Jak spent as much time as he could at Disciplines katas, performed while interacting with viv. The Disciplines were the climax of a story at least two thousand years long, the story of how humans became fighters, through a progress from necessity to raw sport to refined art to interactive game and finally to a True Way (in the sense of Principle 158: “Respect every True Way, but not because it is a True Way; distrust every True Way but keep in mind that it may be a True Way”). They were endlessly time-consuming and fascinating, and Jak had been introduced to them young enough to have no memory of having resisted them.
Each blow, stroke, shot, throw, block, or burn was executed seven times on each side; for each, your fist, foot, blade, elbow, knee, forehead, pistol, or other weapon must be exactly on trajectory, or in your viv goggles the out-of-place, off-target parts of your body would glow, in colors for which direction you were off spatially, the brightness indicating the error in timing. About half of the time, now, Jak could get all the way through the Disciplines, 1,918 attacks beginning with a left jab at the larynx and finishing with a right backhand diagonal eye-to-ankle burn, covering unarmed, short blade, long blade, slug thrower, and beam combat, in about an hour, attacking slightly slower than once every two seconds, with his virtual body black the whole way.
Of course his only serious, trained opponent—Bex Riveroma—in his only real fight, ever, had wanged the living shit out of Jak. And no matter how many times Jak dove into the Disciplines, or how attentively he tried to work the katas, or how passionately he pursued them, he could not seem to defeat that horrible Sesh-craving. His ache for the Princess was a screaming monkey that sat by his side when he meditated, chattered in his ear while he warmed up, shrieked at him all through the katas, and seized his attention again, undiminished, the moment that he dragged his exhausted body out of the centrifuge and to the showers; compared to the challenge of shutting that out, Bex Riveroma had been a teddy bear.
On his first day off, as Jak was just stuffing his fighting suit into his bag to head for the gym, Pabrino dropped by. Pabrino was eighteen, a skinny young heet who would be handsome as soon as he filled out and added some grace to his height—a potential Great Master, or even higher, at Maniples. A couple of years ago when Jak had played him, it had been grotesquely unequal; within a year, before he turned seventeen, Pabrino had been declared a full Master, and there was talk of his being a Great Master within the next year.
Jak had assumed Pabrino would not want to play with him for the same reason that Jak didn’t want to play Scrabble against a hamster. But Pabrino arrived with viv sets ready to go, and a room already rented, and said, “I know this is short notice but I just got dismissed from a shift early, and I was thinking maybe we could play.”
“Sure, if you don’t mind my being totally inept.”
“You’re epter than anybody else on the ship right now is ept, pizo, except Shadow, and I need a tune-up against someone human. We’ll be in Mercury orbit for six weeks, and I’m playing a dozen Masters, two of them Great Masters, with maybe even an exhibition match against a retired Greater Master. And I was looking at your numbers from your last season for PSA. Your game is a lot better than it was when we played before. Now, do I get a friendly match with an old pizo?”
“Absolutely of course, toktru.”
Every few hundred years human culture seemed to spontaneously genera
te a game with no known author, limitless challenges, and an odd combination of extreme simplicity in concept with a complexity in execution that would baffle any but the finest minds. Chess, bridge, go, and belludi had each been such; Maniples was the latest, if you could call a six-hundred-year history “latest.” It was nominally a battle between two equal sides over a Mars-sized planet with a randomly chosen configuration of exactly equal land and water, using the forces a minor military power might have on hand. Of course there were no known actual empty planets like the one fought over, any more than there were perfectly level battlefields without cover as there were in chess and go, or perfectly competitive markets as in belludi.
In Maniples, when combat occurred between pieces, the circumstances of the combat were determined by the play up to that moment, but the combat itself was fought as a duel in viv. A player with combat skills might, on occasion, fight off an ambush, or make a less than sterling set of moves come out right, against a weaker combatant.
The match puzzled Jak. He won the coin flip and started, as Green, with Pabrino playing Black. Pabrino’s opening game was clearly not about winning; his adroit fakes and sudden reversals were built around very unfavorable sacrifice ratios, so that he stripped Jak of all his major pieces (except the battlestation, which was the equivalent of the king in chess), but left Jak with large advantages in B&Es and submersible aircraft, plus one warshuttle (of the nine he began with) still remaining.
Clearly Pabrino was so far ahead of Jak that he was just playing with him, but there had to be some point to the play; the younger man was not the sort of egomaniac who would be doing all this just to show that he could. Jak was supposed to do something; the standard thing to do at this point would be to resign, but they were only twenty minutes into the game.
Well, the first rule of any competition is that you work with what you have; no point wishing to be a genius at Maniples, any more than to wish for longer arms to box with or bigger lungs to run with. Unable to concentrate on a few big pieces that would take the lead for and in turn be supported by the small ones, Jak fragmented his forces further and approached things in the spirit of Principle 22: “In conflict, if you are the flea, do what harm you can; if you are the dog, scratch no harder than necessary.”