A Princess of the Aerie

by John Barnes

  Jak took a very large bite of his suddenly flavorless meat loaf and bolted it; he had consumed about half the piece before she tried speaking to him again.

  “Well,” she said, “I can understand that you have a lot to think about. You know, there are some people who might say that what you really need to do is to give up this obsession with Princess Shyf, who after all is so far above you socially, and I was wondering if you might have a comment on that.”

  A drone buzzed between Jak’s plate and his face; he got a blob of smashed potatoes on it by flipping his fork hard. It moved to a more respectful distance.

  “Well, then,” Sinda added, “what about the rumors that Bex Riveroma has put a price on your head, or rather on your liver, and that anyone who brings it in gets a megautil of untraceable credit?”

  “Liver? I don’t like liver. I’m having meat loaf,” Jak said, “and he could have my meat loaf for fifty utils, no problem. Or I’d trade him liver for two apples and a snack cake.”

  “I suppose you think that’s funny. You’ve consistently tried to make my interviews with you impossible. Why is that?” She tossed her head; it overstepped the intended “magnificent rage” and ventured into “mild spasm.”

  “You have publicly humiliated me, and forged all kinds of things I never said or did, and damaged many of my friendships,” Jak said. “And no matter what I do, you’re going to compose an animation of me saying and doing whatever you want, and nobody will be able to tell the difference without tearing the signal apart on a good-sized computer. So since you can just script what you need, why do you need me to play along? You can have me saying whatever you want for decades to come. So what is all this about?”

  “You’re important to me,” she said, and it was the first time he’d ever heard her voice not in broadcast mode. She had a slight lisp that suggested one of the big Martian cities, or perhaps Ceres. “You’re very important to me. A few years ago I was nobody, I was covering dance trends, not even fashionable ones, I was doing the story on slec so that the old gwonts who didn’t follow anything current at all would finally know what slec was because it was about to be over, masen? Then I got good shots of a brawl and followed up and found the most amazing story about a young man going off to rescue a princess—”

  “You made most of it up.”

  “Of course.” She said it as if he had asked her whether she could fasten a zipper. “I had to, nobody would talk to me. But anyway, it was a fabulous story. But you know what they say, you’re only as good as your last, and here it is two years later and I haven’t developed even one viv series that was faintly comparable. It’s like I’m not even in my own league. And they’re starting to mutter about my allocations of space on the agenda and processing time and everything else, and that’s when you know the vultures are sharpening their knives—”

  “Circling,” Jak said.

  “What?”

  “Ever been to Earth? Vultures circle. I didn’t know what they were the first time I saw it, but vultures circle. People sharpen knives, especially butchers. Vultures don’t have any hands. They wouldn’t sharpen knives, because they don’t use them.”

  “Where do you learn all this stuff? If I worried about things like that I’d never get an accesscast done, and nobody would ever know anything.” She shook her head; the traditional blonde helmet never moved. “My career really needs a restart, and here you are—the one who started it in the first place, by going on a secret mission on behalf of Princess Shyf—and you are on another secret mission for Princess Shyf. Well, it worked for me once, it could work for me again. Not to mention that it made you temporarily about fourth-level famous, for free. Some people pay a megautil to a publicist every year for that.”

  “I didn’t want it.” Jak got up and looked around to empty his tray before he remembered that in the passenger areas, servant robots did things like that. He set his tray back down and airswam out.

  “So any comments on your growing rift with your toktru tove Dujuv Gonzawara?” she said, swimming after.

  He turned in midair, caught a drone, and pounded it against the wall. “This is how Duj deals with these, and I think he’s singing-on right. Any problems I’m having with Dujuv are problems you created, by falsifying interviews and accesscasting things I never said.” He spun away, repulsed and angry.

  Jak would just make it an evening of studying in the stateroom he shared with Dujuv. He was getting close to finishing his second time through Solar System Ethnography since the Dean had set him the task. (One drawback of a correspondence course was that you were done sooner). It would be nice not to have to worry about it while he was on his mission on Mercury.

  He did his best to ignore Mreek Sinda airswimming after him, trying to narrate the situation as if she were pursuing a criminal. He opened the door as she was shouting, “Is there any chance—would you care to speculate—the Duke of Uranium’s loaning you his personal bodyguard, Shadow on the Frost, and your joint investigation of a possible organized crime operation on Mercury, may indicate some interest in a personal alliance between the new Duke and the heir to Greenworld?”

  Jak was starting to close the door in her face when he saw Dujuv and Phrysaba, sitting on Dujuv’s bed, cross-legged, facing each other. Though he couldn’t have said why, there was a feeling of interrupting something—

  Sinda barged in and said, “And here’s my opportunity to talk to both of you and settle discrepancies in some of your versions of what actually happened—”

  “I’m calling security,” Jak said. “Sorry, toves, she was following me and I was trying to get away. Didn’t get the door closed fast enough.”

  “Dujuv Gonzawara, do you feel that your friend’s deliberate attempt to steal credit which we have established clearly belonged to you—”

  Dujuv sprang out of the cross-legged position like a missile, and ricocheted off three walls in the crowded little room. When he had finished his sudden flight—while not touching anyone but making the other three jump back, all shouting in surprise—he had two drones in each of his two big fists. Smiling, he beat them all to pieces against each other.

  Jak gave Sinda a hard shove on the forehead and she fell in a backward somersault out the door, which he slammed. “That’ll probably be a hundred credit fine,” he said, “but it was worth it. Sorry, pizos, I just didn’t stop her before she was in here.”

  Duj had a slightly smug look. “ ’Sokay. The exercise was good for me.”

  “Did you want to say hi or anything tonight, Phrysaba?” Jak asked awkwardly. “A fusion happened late in my shift and by the time I got back it was too late to call you and suggest dinner.”

  “That’s all right,” Phrysaba said, eyes sparkling. “I called Dujuv. I’ve just been hearing the story of his life.”

  “A lot of meals and a lot of beating people up?” Jak asked.

  Phrysaba looked slightly outraged. “Your friend is a sensitive, intelligent young man and there’s a lot to him.”

  Dujuv turned an odd shade; his skin was dark enough so that it wasn’t easy to tell, but Jak sort of assumed that a major blush was happening—either that or a cerebral hemorrhage. “Weehu, I dak that, Phrysaba. Always have. I just don’t mention it because it always makes Dujuv toktru tongue-tied.”

  Dujuv emitted a squeak of agreement.

  “Then were you kind to point it out and make it worse?” she demanded.

  “No, I wasn’t. Sorry, Duj.”

  “Eek hoo kay,” Dujuv managed, sounding as if his neck were being squeezed.

  Phrysaba said, “Well, what’s really sad is, I have a short swing sleep tonight, they’re moving my shift a little earlier to give me more lab time for school, so I hate to do this, but I’m officially breaking up the party. I can find my own way home—I kind of remember how the ship’s laid out—” she said, smirking, as she saw both of them about to offer to escort her back to her cabin. “Duj, it’s been fascinating, really, and I want to hear more, and I mean that, mase
n? Jak, I really do have to just sleep tonight.”

  After she was gone, Dujuv said, “She’s a nice girl.”

  “She is. She’s one of the best arguments I know for getting over the conditioning that Shyf gave me.”

  “Shyf?”

  “Princess Shyf. You know, red hair, nice body, psycho-slut maniac, tyrant-in-training? I’m sure I introduced you.”

  Dujuv laughed. “You didn’t call her Sesh.”

  “I don’t think there’s very much of Sesh left. Which is another reason why … well, Phrysaba’s just one of many reasons.”

  “Reasons like Fnina?”

  “Oh, Nakasen’s bulging bag! Not her. She’s probably already been through two boyfriends since she last wrote, and she’ll have another six before I get home, Duj. Though if Sinda keeps putting those animations of me on the viv, I’m afraid Fnina will be right back when I get home.”

  “What was that Sinda bitch after this time?”

  “I speck footage she could chop up and use to create animations that have me lying and bragging like a toktru gweetz. Hey—I just had a thought.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “It was just a little one. She said something about discrepancies in our versions of what happened. Did she interview you and Shadow?”

  “Uh, yeah. Maybe it was a big mistake, but … well, I wanted to know she’d actually heard someone tell her what had really happened.”

  “I did.”

  “But I wasn’t there to hear you—and you have to speck that if she cooked up your version, it was awfully convincing, pizo, masen? So now I know that she had the truth, at least once. And that makes me feel better.”

  “Well, then it’s good that you talked to her.”

  After some uncomfortable silence, Jak pulled out his reader, to review the cultural ethnography of Mercury, and Dujuv rolled over and went to sleep with his clothes on.

  CHAPTER 11

  Start Chopping the Parsley

  While they waited for the longshore capsules to come around to the cargo bay, Jak had his purse review his Solar System Ethnography notes; he was finding it harder and harder to pretend that this stuff was useless. Probably Uncle Sib was right, and the conspiracy of the entire rest of the universe was winning.

  Mercury is the densest planet in the solar system, and the density is caused by its very high percentage of metal; it resembles the stripped core of a big planet, with just a thin crust and mantle. Its atmosphere is thinner than any vacuum you can make in a laboratory and it races through its short orbit, down close to the sun, faster than any other planet. That much was physics.

  Physics dictates economics. Mercury had more metal and power to smelt it, more powerful sunlight for solar sails, better conditions for gravity assists, and more windows for them per unit time, than any other planet, by far. Quick to get to, quick to come from, available more often, and made out of valuable cargo, Mercury was the merchanters’ best friend. The saying was that there was always gold in Mercury.

  Economics, in turn, dictates politics. Jak, Dujuv, and Shadow were going to Mercury’s second-largest city, but it was doubtful that anyone other than a Mercurial would call it a city rather than a shantytown, or perhaps just a warren. There was gold in Mercury but not for Mercurials.

  Mercury was to the solar system what the Netherlands, Persian Gulf, or geosynchronous orbit had been to medieval Earth: a place so valuable that no one could be allowed to control it. A League of Polities treaty disallowed permanent claims and pledged the big powers to prevent anyone’s gaining permanent control over Mercury. Custom interpreted this to include any local government, which was fiercely choked back by treaty officials. Bigpile, a city of millions, had a police and emergency force of about two hundred and a municipal bureaucracy of three dozen. Law enforcement extended only as far as the line of sight of the nearest pokheet, if that. Officially it was believed that Big-pile collected one percent of taxes due; unofficially no official believed the number was that high. About two hundred corporations headquartered there, with perhaps a thousand branch offices of offworld corporations, and in every office bodyguards were about as numerous as workers, and it was a treasured employee benefit to be given sleeping space inside the corporate keep.

  Nothing dictates culture but everything shapes it. The fierce conditions, unfavorable economics, prohibition against an effective state, sanctioned lawlessness, absentee ownership—and Mercury’s role as de facto dustbin for the prison-sweepings of the whole solar system—had created fierce loyalties to the quaccos, which were in various ways like a clan, an employee-owned company, an extended family with many adoptees, and an infantry company, but mostly were just like a quacco. The text had spent a long time on that; the one thing that Jak gathered, most clearly, was that bitter experience had taught treaty administrators that anything that forced any substantial number of quaccos to leave their home kriljs, either to migrate or to break up, would mean instant revolution. You could call a Mercurial a son of a whore with a fair chance of being right, and he’d shrug and say, “You should’ve seen what Dad used to do,” but suggest that his quacco was in any way not the very best one on Mercury, and you’d be in a fight to the death (and if you won, between forty and a hundred quacco-mates would be looking for their turn at you).

  The Spirit would be going into orbit around Mercury for six weeks or so; after her shakedown to Jupiter during the past two years, it was time to do a real tune-and-fit now that they knew the peculiarities of the new rigging, Duke Psim’s gift to them for services rendered on Jak’s last great adventure. They had excellent reason to choose this world for re-fitting. Mercury’s quaccos of fitters and riggers were legendary for their precision and craft, and intended to keep things that way. Furthermore, Mercury was the fastest and cheapest planet to get away from; after setting sail from stations around Earth or Venus, it would take a full month to reach escape velocity and get out into solar orbit, but from Mercury it would take less than ten days.

  With so many weeks in orbit, they didn’t need to do a rushed cargo switch. Jak, Dujuv, and Shadow had volunteered to fly longshore capsules down onto the Bigpile loop; it spared the expense of a ferry, and three crewies would not have to touch the hated dirt.

  They tossed their jumpies into the cabs of the longshore capsules, closed suits for takeoff, and let the linducers move them gently out through the cargo airlocks and onto the outer surface of the ship, then up the track to the loop. Longshore capsules didn’t have to be piloted in less-crowded parts of space, but Mercury saw at least one sun-clipper a week, and about twenty short-haul merchanters, most of them doing fast flybys, and so the little planet lived in a near-swarm of longshore capsules and ferries. Supposedly a human pilot added judgment; Jak specked it was more like requiring a mindful hostage with every cargo.

  They lined up and whipped around the Spirit’s loop, flung in an elliptical orbit down to the Bigpile loop. Bigpile was a Maltese-cross-shaped city, a wadded tangle, mostly underground, of tunnels and chambers where no one held a single clear title to any of the land and the laws amounted to, Don’t precess any private security guards enough to make them shoot you. Above the tunnels, its surface was covered with the brightly glowing observation domes of the big hotels, pricey condos, and corporate keeps. It lay just northeast of the Caloris Basin (the vast crater in Mercury’s northern hemisphere that was almost a tenth of the planet’s own diameter), between the inner and outer scarps, in very heavily broken, pitted, cratered, and domed highlands.

  As the three longshore capsules descended, Jak was flying rear; Shadow’s longshore capsule, twenty kilometers ahead, was a little glinting cylinder, about the size of Jak’s thumbnail at arm’s length; Dujuv’s capsule, half as far away, appeared twice as big. Mercury swelled into a world beneath them, and as they passed from night across the morning terminator, the land below changed from strands and sprays of lights to the face of hell: dust and rock, in craters and peaks and smeared plains, fractured and cracked all over. Thirt
een hundred years of mining had changed everything and left it the same.

  Short bursts from the hot jets sent them out of a high equatorial orbit and into a lower one angled to catch the Bigpile loop, far north of the equator; the cold jets rotated the little vessels and the hot jets fired once again, dropping them into a lower, faster orbit, and then the cold jets fired once more to reorient them. They approached the loop flying forward, with their heads pointed toward the planet (not “down” yet, for they were still in free fall).

  Jak watched the loop approach at about three kilometers per second. Ahead of him, Shadow’s longshore capsule grabbed and whirled down toward the surface. Three seconds later, Dujuv followed. Now the two sides of the wicket seemed to drift together to form a single white line in the window, reaching toward Jak from the lighted cross of Big-pile. At such speeds, human steering and judgment are useless. Jak saw that everything was green, and with a second to go, pushed the “okay to land.” A moment later, the cold jets fired a series of highly calibrated bursts, which sounded like clearing a clogged sinus. The longshore capsule bounced around for a moment, and then the linducer grapple grabbed the loop.

  Gravity appeared instantly in the “wrong” direction, away from Mercury, so that the planet seemed to be overhead. Two g’s pushed Jak down into his seat cushion. In the space of a minute and a half, Mercury seemed to roll from overhead to directly in front of him to underneath him, drawing closer all the time, and as the centripetal forces from the loop aligned more and more with the planet’s gravity, he seemed to become steadily heavier, then lighter as the velocity slowed to a few meters per second. The longshore capsule coasted down to Bigpile Station.

  As gravity became comfortable, steady, and footward, and the land below rose up toward him, Jak closed his face-plate and pressure-checked for arrival. The longshore capsule’s upper inducers released it from the loop, its lower ones grabbed a track, and Jak was moving slowly over the melted-and-shattered short-horizoned landscape, between the silvery domes, dishes, boxes, pipes, spheres, and wires, as if in a Pertrans car. They passed through an airlock into the main receiving area. The pressure safety sign came on, and he unsealed.