A Princess of the Aerie

by John Barnes

  Jak’s Green B&Es strapped on their missiles or bombs, got on their little transport craft, and began trying to filter across the planet’s surface into Black territory. His aircraft popped low when they flew, just enough to scout, staying submerged most of the time. Quietly, as his scouts developed a picture of a major attack shaping up in the northeastern quadrisphere, Jak moved his battlestation, so that the attack would be exposed about ten minutes before it expected to be, and prepared his warshuttle to pop over the horizon 180 degrees away. It was always possible that one of his smaller units might get a chance to lock a missile on to the Black battlestation, the move that ended the game.

  His forward B&Es moved farther into the northeastern quadrisphere, and at a cost of three beanies sent in on suicide LRPs, found the main concentration of Pabrino’s forces, right where Jak had guessed they might be, starting to move. He sent every other beanie within reach forward, tasking each of them to do as much harm as possible. Almost immediately one of them nailed a low-passing Black orbicruiser with a surprise missile hit.

  Meanwhile Jak’s battlestation descended ever lower, well below synchronous orbit, heading northeast. Then Jak was tied up in viv combat for a while; he and Pabrino fought a dozen small combats as Jak’s B&Es and submersible aircraft covered Pabrino’s forces with pinprick attacks.

  Since Jak was always attacking with low-value forces, the exchange was almost always in his favor on paper—each attacking beanie or submersible aircraft cost Pabrino far more than their nominal worth, just as if Jak had been playing chess with nothing but pawns and Pabrino had had nothing but rooks. But since every attack amounted to a suicide attack, and low-valued forces were all Jak had, this couldn’t go on long. Still, Pabrino’s forces were in very satisfactory disarray when Jak’s battlestation cleared the horizon, and, a whole planet away, Jak also launched his warshuttle.

  The battlestation put a gratifying amount of fire all over Pabrino’s scattered forces, and his matériel losses were huge. But then Jak’s sneak attack warshuttle was pounced on by a waiting Black orbicruiser, and three man-carried missiles, sitting quietly in concealed forward positions, locked on his battlestation. The game was over, with another win for Pabrino.

  As they pulled off their viv helmets, Jak saw that his tove was panting, sweaty, and pale. “Are you all right?”

  “You nearly had me. That was magnificent, Jak. Just what I needed. You’re pretty amazing—I knew I could count on you but I didn’t know how much.”

  “Count on me for what?”

  “To improvise well.” Pabrino bent over and rested his hands on his knees, sucking in more cool air. “Maniples has gotten stale, pizo. I know that, even if most of the Masters don’t. Look at games from a hundred years ago, when most of today’s Masters were apprentices, and they’re no different from today. Nobody at the top rank has had to play under extreme conditions or any way other than by the book for decades. So nobody knows anything about it, except the stuff they learned back when they were beginners—and what they mostly learned then was not to get into those situations. Maniples is getting to be a game of mastering the book and being good at viv.”

  “You think you’re good enough to change that?”

  “I’m good—good enough to find almost all of the last century of recorded games boring—and I want to.”

  “Weehu. Well, I would have to say that even knowing I was losing, that was the most interesting game I’ve played in years.” Jak was stripping out of his viv suit, and he reached for a cold glass of juice. “Public baths after this?”

  “Toktru. Speck we can get in a couple more matches before Mercury?”

  “As many as you like,” Jak said. The young genius had shown him twenty things in that game that he’d never known about Maniples before. Next season PSA might do better than anyone expected.

  * * *

  One night, when his tove had a work shift, Jak and Phrysaba were lying in the cabin he shared with Dujuv, cuddled after lovemaking. “Jak, I feel funny about some things. Will you ever get over this obsession with the Princess? I mean, I know she had you conditioned and you had no choice—”

  “Uh, they say it wears off but never completely.”

  She sat up in bed, leaned forward, kissed his cheek, and breathed in his ear, “Do you love me?”

  “You’re important to me and I like you a lot. I like sex with you.”

  “And since you didn’t just start off with yes, that means you don’t.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That witch!” Phrysaba squeezed Jak as if trying to mash Sesh out of him. “She was so evil while she was on the ship—ordering people around and objecting to everything that was just normal shipboard procedure and … she particularly hated me …”

  Jak felt the rage boiling up. He kept his voice very level and said, “Remember my conditioning. I’m getting furious with you for saying such things.”

  She made a soft little fist and lightly pounded on his chest. “You’re not open and free and friendly the way you were before, and she’s just using you—she’ll never be yours, she’s a princess, and even if you can overlook that, she sure can’t—and so here you are, hurting inside, I can tell, and because she had you conditioned, right now you can’t even listen to me call her a nasty exploitive bitch, which isn’t half of what she is.”

  Jak felt all his muscles tense and rage rising along his spine; he raised his hand in warning. Phrysaba grabbed it, pulled it to her mouth, and kissed the mound below his thumb, firmly, tenderly, and very slowly, pressing it between her lips and warming it with her breath. Jak’s hand turned and stroked her cheek. She pressed back against it and whispered, “Now roll over and let me rub the knots out of your back.”

  Her soothing, warming fingers paused below his left shoulder blade. “What’s this scar?”

  “It’s where they put in the sliver that contains a list of locations for all the evidence of five of Bex Riveroma’s major crimes. It’s in my liver, someplace hard to find. I guess that was the easiest direction to put it in from—easiest on the surgeon, not necessarily easiest on me.”

  She pressed her fingers in deep around the back of his neck. “So how would they get it out?”

  “Well, doing it singing-on, Riveroma has directions for a surgeon to follow, because we got as far as exchanging some information. Doing it crudely, they’d just cut my liver out and gently puree it to find the sliver. Either would work.”

  “Scares you to think about it?”

  “Unh-hunh. Ever since that fight at the Palace, seeing people killed and mutilated up close, I’m feeling a certain amount of kinship with everything that’s made out of meat.”

  “Even Rubahy?”

  He rolled over to face her. “Maybe especially Rubahy. I really was a bigot a couple of years back, wasn’t I?”

  “Yeah, too much of a bigot even to speck that I was criticizing you.” Her hand traced over his upper belly. “So where would that sliver be, here?”

  “No idea. I don’t actually know enough about the human body to be able to picture it at all, to tell you the truth.” He turned toward her and for the first time since boarding the ship, more than a week ago, relaxed all the way. He held her as if he had suddenly, like a trusting child, decided to be comforted.

  “And it’s where the evidence of five crimes is?”

  “It’s a list of all the locations where all the evidence can be found. Places like safe-deposit boxes and archives and police inactive-file cases, and for all I know shallow graves and hollow trees. I gather there’s a lot of evidence and it’s stored in a lot of places, and from what I know about the five crimes, that makes sense.”

  “What are the five crimes?”

  “Well, in the words of the message that I was supposed to recite to Riveroma the first time I met him (I did, and it got me a hell of a beating): ‘The information concerns the location of all the extant, court-admissibl
e evidence regarding the Fat Man, the Dagger and Daisy, the business about the burning armchair, the disappearance of Titan’s Dancer, and KX-126, including all such evidence regarding your involvement.’ You know, when I was first carrying that message, I didn’t know what any of them were, which gives you an idea how much I followed the news or anything else, since two of them are famous. Now I know all of them except the burning armchair.

  “The one I’d really like to know about is Titan’s Dancer. How could anyone have had anything to do with that? A ship is missing for two hundred years after, to all appearances, going dead on a routine cargo voyage and floating out of the solar system because there was nothing nearby to salvage it. Then it comes back at the highest velocity ever recorded from a crewed vehicle—this from a sunclipper that can maybe get up to a fifteenth of a g—hails us from outside Pluto’s orbit, comes in to Earth without making any further communications despite all the requests, furls sails, comes all the way into the docks at Singing Port, there’s even vid of people waving from the windows, and it vanishes—just totally disappears in an interval too short to register on any instrument—just before it was supposed to dock. What technology is there that could do such a thing, and how would a petty hood like Riveroma have access to it?”

  She shrugged. “Well, I can at least fill in one part of the mystery, it’s a pretty open secret among the spaceborn. Titan’s Dancer faked the original accident. There was an experimental star drive, not faster than light or any such miracle, but enough to get you up to some nines of light-speed so that time would almost stop and you could go anywhere about as fast as a radio wave could, slow down there, visit, crank it back up to speed, and come back. Of course you’d return a long, long way into the future, but thanks to time dilation, you could make the voyage, and return without having aged much.

  “The Council of Captains meets every now and then in a secret electronic conference, and what they decided to use the drive for was to send Titan’s Dancer out to scout a star system as a candidate for Canaan. Which they found, and returned on schedule, and gave us a report on encrypted tightbeam as they came into the solar system. That’s how we know that Canaan is out there.”

  Jak sank into his bed as she worked harder on his back, and let his mind drift. When he had first heard of Canaan, it had been an interesting bit of legend; now he knew from his Solar System Ethnography class that “Canaan myths” were supposed to be “a major sociosemiotic problem for Hive policy,” though all the textbooks were silent as to why, and his tutor had only replied to Jak’s inquiring message with, “Restricted by Hive Intel, need-to-know basis.”

  Out here, though, Canaan seemed to be no myth at all, but about as real as any other place Jak hadn’t visited yet. No one knew when or how the Galactic Court now sitting in the Hive would arrive at its verdict on the war crimes trials arising from the First Rubahy War—the age of the Bombardment and the grand invasion, three hundred years before Nakasen’s time—but both humans and Rubahy had committed acts which might be counted as major offenses against the Galactic State, and not having known that there even was a Galactic State was in no way an excuse or even a mitigating factor.

  Human and Rubahy analysts alike believed that probably in a few centuries the court would issue an Extermination Order—a death sentence for both species. The two species would be each other’s only allies in trying to fight off the exterminators, whose power and numbers were unknowable.

  But if that day came, because the merchant sunclippers were utterly unsuited to war, all of them planned to furl sails, run black, drift out of the solar system, and set sail for Canaan, a marginally habitable world rumored to be more or less forty light-years or so from Earth. Presumably the humans and the Rubahy would find a way to share that world peaceably. “What was Titan’s Dancer going to do when they got to Singing Port?”

  “Publish the details of the fast star drive, for one thing. It was a cheap gadget; the solar system is full of dissidents and rebels of all kinds, and with a cheap enough drive, a lot of them would have been leaving. Human and Rubahy could have scattered all over this arm of the galaxy, and then see if the Galactic State could wipe us out. Also, scoutships could have gone out and found out how big the Galactic State really is, whether it has any other enemies, things that might make a big difference if the day ever comes.”

  “But surely the only copy of the directions for making the fast star drive wasn’t on Titan’s Dancer.”

  “Titan’s Dancer was the one that disappeared with a lot of publicity, but the other copies disappeared too, some of them in pretty nasty ways. But every adult crewie knows what it was—it was a way to make a Casimir volume laser directly, so that instead of having to capture heat and run a generator, you could use the whole output as propulsion photons. But the reason we know what it was, was that a warning came back to the Council of Captains. And if you check, you will discover that all research on lasable Casimir volumes ceased a few decades ago, and the older papers are all missing. Most people think the Galactic State caught the project and quietly put an end to it. But that makes it all the more puzzling what Bex Riveroma had to do with it. If he was some kind of operative for the Galactic State, and a traitor to our species, why bother to keep that secret? Wouldn’t they be able to protect him?”

  “Not if he wanted to live among his own kind,” Jak pointed out, “to have someone to talk to, or for sex, or just to have someone sleep next to him. It’s a pretty basic impulse, you know.”

  She snuggled against him. “Never heard of it.”

  Jak had only fifteen minutes left in his shift when, through a moment’s inattention, he let a couple of lines fuse on one mainsail. Forty-five minutes to repair it, at least—no one would blame him if he left it for the next shift—but it was his fault. He rigged up the line car and let it take him sixty kilometers up the cable.

  From the open car, vaults and curves of the sails covered the sky, as if he were approaching the surface of a planet covered with clean metallic laundry, with a distinct horizon far out in space. A dozen or more reflected suns shone from the sails, and of course the big real one lay behind. The Spirit’s habitat behind him alternately eclipsed and revealed the sun; its shadow lay on the sails in front of him. At each eclipse, the stars appeared, as if turned on by a switch. Presently he could see his own car’s shadow dancing back and forth on the sails, sometimes ducking into the shadow of the habitat.

  Near the point where the fusion had started, Jak used the manipulator arms to weld a new piece of monosil onto the cable that lay outside his car, just a kilometer short of the fusion point. Monosil rolled out from the spool as he gingerly advanced toward the fusion. If he went too far too fast, the nearby cable could slice into the car, or into Jak.

  As he drew near to the point where the cables would converge, he cut the outside cable, and the mechanical arm flung it out to the side; the free end would be sucked through the car’s central column backward and fuse onto the already fused monosil there.

  Then Jak let the little car, resembling a metal garden gazebo, climb four kilometers of fused monosil, until it was just below the Y where the fused cable again bifurcated. The sails seemed close enough to touch, but it was an illusion; in fact they would have been many days’ walk away, if anyone could have rope-walked the lines. Now Jak used the mechanical arm to pick up the spool and hold it far away from the car, up beyond the gazebo-roof; he welded the new length onto the free cable, and then snipped it free of the spool. At once, the monosil line moved away from the other line that had trapped it, and swung back out toward its proper place, four hundred meters away. Jak rode up his line to finish fusing the old surplus on, and it was done.

  He looked back toward the ship, which was about as big as Earth seen from the Moon, a big dark metal ball, and it seemed very welcoming; back there, a whole small town of people were born, lived, and died, and got up every morning with something to do. Jak considered the possibility of turning crewie permanently, as he often did
when life was difficult, and as always, he had no real objections, just the feeling that his destiny was elsewhere.

  He set the car to return to the tending platform on automatic. The ship grew from a ball in the sky to a world, the platform braked, vacuum-silent, to the deck, and Jak grabbed the pull-rail and went inside.

  He had had a late shift that day; after his post-shift shower, it was too late for the Bachelor’s Mess, and it was too late to com Phrysaba and see if she wanted to eat in one of the cafes—she’d be at mess, probably, with her astrogation class. For the first time, ever, Jak was going to have to dine at Passenger’s Mess.

  The food was the same, but the noise level was a small fraction of what he was used to. In Passenger’s Mess the tables were small and isolated, and people huddled murmuring over them, except for the table where a large, loud heet with a Hive accent (fast, flat, and slurred) was explaining everything about Venus to three bored women. The conversation, or lecture, really, was interrupted now and then by laughter, giggles, and squeals as they all revealed that although they had been on the sunclipper for at least three months, they hadn’t really mastered eating in low grav yet. Jak sat at a table by himself, as far as possible from them.

  He had no more than touched his meal when Mreek Sinda slid into the seat opposite him. “Hello, I thought I’d see you before now, I suppose CUPVs usually eat with the crewies, can’t imagine why they do that, they’re visiting people who never visit anyone, that can’t be lively, but that seems to be what all the CUPVs do, or at least what you and Dujuv Gonzawara and Shadow on the Frost do. Anyway, this won’t take long but I do have some further questions.”