A Princess of the Aerie

by John Barnes

  His longshore capsule came to a stop between Shadow’s and Dujuv’s, in a docking bay. Jak slung up his jumpie, popped the door, and got out to join Shadow and Dujuv.

  “Hey! Hey! Are you all Jak Jinnaka, Shadow on the Frost, and Dujuv Gonzawara?”

  They turned to see a tall, heavy blonde woman in a pressure suit, her helmet slung to one shoulder strap and heavy gauntlets and boots slung to the other, hurrying down the quay toward them. “I’m Kyffimna Eldothaler,” she said. “I was afraid I was late.”

  “We just got here, ourselves,” Dujuv said.

  She had a toothy grin, Like the ogre’s wife in a fairy tale, Jak thought. In an age of cheap plastic surgery and metabolic adjustments, when it was well-known that a little tinkering with the body when a child was young saved all kinds of body-image problems and psychological damage later, she was not only the ugliest girl Jak had ever seen, she was the first ugly girl Jak had ever seen. Her face was blotchy and oily. Her jaw was big and square. Her pulpy lips did not quite cover her horsey teeth. Her crooked nose was large, and her blonde hair thin and stringy. Even in a pressure suit he could tell that her body was bulky with muscle, no stronger than the lean dancer-bodies he was used to, but far less pleasing.

  “We’re glad to see you,” Jak said. “I’m Jak Jinnaka, this is Dujuv Gonzawara, and Shadow on the Frost.”

  She shook hands with all of them, starting at Shadow’s double-thumbed hand. “I’ve been begging Mattanga for some help for most of a year, now, and all I’ve gotten is vague notes. Where do we go to pick up the rest of your unit?”

  “Our unit?” Dujuv asked.

  “Or does each of you have a unit? Mattanga’s information didn’t come through the decrypt real clear.”

  They all glanced at each other. “Perhaps it is because I am an alien,” Shadow said, “but I have no unit.”

  “Well, then I hope each of you has a large unit,” Kyffimna said to Jak and Dujuv, “because I don’t speck anything small will be enough. If it’s big enough there might actually be an intimidation or fear factor, which would help; I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve laid awake thinking that the right heet with a big enough unit could make everything better overnight.”

  “Umm,” Jak said, desperately trying to clear the horrible images dancing through his mind, “exactly what are you expecting us to be able to do for you?”

  She stared at him. “Oh, no. Did anyone tell you anything about MLB?”

  The three friends looked at each other. “No,” Dujuv said, “I have no idea what that is.”

  Kyffimna seemed almost to sway, as if for an instant she felt faint. “MLB is the organization that I asked Colonel Mattanga for at least a battalion of B&Es to attack and put out of action. When I saw that there were three people coming, and I was supposed to meet you, I thought you three would be the company commanders, or else the commander, second, and senior techny.”

  There was a very long, awkward silence.

  “Why is it,” Dujuv said, “that no matter how far down the river we get sold, there is always more river to sell us down?”

  Shadow emitted a single bubble sound. “If it were happening to anyone else, Dujuv Gonzawara, I would find what you just said hilarious.”

  “Well,” Kyffimna said, visibly trying to brighten, “what are you officially here to do?”

  Jak sighed. “Investigate. Whatever that may mean. Mattanga told us that she had no idea what was going on here.”

  “But I’ve sent reports every week for the past year!”

  “I don’t know whether anyone ever read them, Kyffimna. In fact I speck our real job is just to not be on the Aerie anymore, because politically we were a problem. If we happen to solve your problem, Greenworld will be happy with us, of course, but mostly we’re doing our real job just by not being in Greenworld. So first of all, what’s MLB?”

  “Safer to discuss that once we’re moving,” Kyffimna said. “Listen, when we get back to the krilj, most people are going to be pretty disappointed at the fact that you are not arriving with a battalion of troops, which is what we really need. Masen?”

  “Toktru. Thanks for the warning.”

  “You got anything besides those jumpies to bring along?”

  They didn’t, so she just shrugged, gestured toward one of the tunnels, and said, “All right, then, this way. We’re cutting a corner off Bigpile to the rocket port, then flying out to the Crater Hamner krilj, just a couple of kilometers but it’s tangley going through town here.”

  They blundered and stumbled after her through uncountable corridors, none level, straight, or at right angles, all lined with shops, shacks, and shanties. In the perpetual room temperature of the sealed city, walls were only for security against theft, surfaces to hang things from, and modesty.

  Kyffimna explained that the older spaces in the city were played out mining tunnels; as Bigpile’s population grew, it gained density as developers drilled and sold off private tunnels between tenanted spaces. As each new tunnel filled up and became less fashionable, successively poorer waves of new immigrants took advantage of falling prices to put in successively more appalling shacks. When there was no more legal room left, the poor waited till no one was paying attention, and filled in the rest of the space one way or another. The center stayed clear only as long as affluent neighbors were willing to pay the pokheets to knock apart any building that blocked a traffic path.

  “Why are the tunnel walls so many different colors and textures?” Dujuv asked.

  “Because slag is always being remelted and repoured,” Kyffimna said. “Say in one year titanium is high priced. We get a bunch of titanium-bearing rock together, melt it, run it through a separator; along the way maybe we take out the nickel or the silver, if prices are good on those, as lagniappe. Any oxygen, nitrogen, or valuable bio-stuff like that, we claim for our own use. Then we have this big load of waste magma—liquid rock, mostly metals, nothing of value in it, white-hot and dangerous. It gets used for fill in old tunnels, or for paving, or as the heavy stuff in substitution pumping.”

  “So how did that turn all the walls all these different colors?” Dujuv asked.

  “You are a panth, aren’t you?” As if she were explaining things to a not very bright child, she said, “In all those centuries of mining, a lot of waste magma, with a lot of different composition, goes down a lot of holes, masen? There’s veins of stuff that’s been melted, pumped, processed, and dumped ten and fifteen times, all over Mercury, depending on what was needed and where there was stuff. If a field is rich and has a lot of different ores of different grades, there will be a lot of hole-making and a lot of hole-filling over a few centuries. Then if a city—like Bigpile—grows there, all the tunnels you drill are going to be punching through all those old deposits of six-times-cooked rock, which will have all kinds of stuff in it, which will make it all different colors. Masen?”

  “I did not speck your point at first, either,” Shadow on the Frost said, “so I do not think that the problem was that my oath-bound tove Dujuv Gonzawara was a panth. I speck it was that the explanation was needlessly obscure, with too much assumed.”

  Kyffimna stopped walking and stood still. “I think you are trying to tell me that I was rude to your friend.”

  “Singing-on,” Shadow said gravely. “Do you need any further explanation?”

  She winced. “Dujuv, did I offend you?”

  “Somewhat. When you’re a panth you get used to being treated like an idiot.”

  “Then I’m very sorry,” Kyffimna said. She extended her hand, and Dujuv shook it.

  “Now,” Kyffimna said, “we’re far enough out of our way, so maybe nobody’s listening. The malphs are MLB, the Mercury Labor Brigade, which is set up as a vested corporation but is actually a protection mob moving in on about a dozen mining sites, and taking control of maybe sixty quaccos, so far. MLB has juice everywhere. Corporations won’t try to do anything about them, the union tells us to cooperate with them, we contacted a
couple of zybots and they wouldn’t talk to us. Even stringers for spy agencies say that their home offices aren’t interested.

  “So whoever MLB are, they’re richer than God and with more guns. Their headquarters is in Crater Hamner, which my quacco has been working for a generation—and they just showed up, started drilling in the central pinnacle, we went out to talk to them, and they shot two of the quacco dead, beat the shit out of our leader, and told us from now on they were our sole customer and that they would take care of supplying all our old ones. They’re recruiting young dumb muscle right now, taking over more sites and more quaccos, building up strength—at the rate they’re going, they’ll own Bigpile in a month, and Mercury in a year.

  “That would be fine if all they were doing was taking over. Every Mercurial knows what this place needs is a good strong tyrant to organize things and make the off-planet companies stop the competitive plundering, pay for some public works—you know there’s not a public school or waterworks, or one kilometer of nonprivate pipe or wire, on this planet?—and put down the cutthroat way we all steal each other’s business. If these heets were just vicious tyrants, half of us would be on their side, just to get out from under the Invisible Thumb.”

  “The Invisible Thumb? Is that what their organization is called, like the Black Hand?”

  She snorted derisively. “It’s a nasty joke. Like everything on Mercury. The only free education available on this planet is the accesscast stuff with all the advertising, and to get your certificate from that, you have to learn a lot of free-market economics. The first-year class, for seven-year-olds, introduces Uncle Adam Smith, this weird-looking heet in knee britches that I guess was the pope or the president or something back on Earth a long time ago, and he teaches the first economics class, which is called ‘The Wonderful Invisible Hand.’ When a miner discovers that the price of something changed between taking out the loan and getting it out of the ground, and the buyer can walk away from the contract but the bank can seize the miner’s gear, and the explanation is ‘the free market’—the miner feels that Invisible Thumb going in deep.

  “A lot of us would throw in with anybody who promised to take over and give us some order, just to get a gentler, more predictable Invisible Thumb, but these MLB heets are actually worse than what we had before. They set prices too low to live on, force us to take out loans, and take advantage of the fact that the Freedom for Mercury Treaty authorizes peonage.”

  “Peeing on what?” Dujuv asked.

  “Peonage,” Shadow on the Frost said. “Hereditary and heritable, no doubt.”

  “That’s right.”

  Jak looked at Kyffimna and didn’t want her to jump on Dujuv for not knowing again, so he said, “All right, obviously Shadow knows what peonage is, but I don’t.”

  “Debt slavery. Get behind enough payments and the bank owns you—and your kids—till you work it off.”

  “Nakasen’s bulging bag,” Dujuv said, “you’re talking about bank banks. Real banks. I didn’t even know those still existed.”

  “They do here,” Kyffimna said. “Mercury really is the place where everything is for sale, and where the buyers are the kings. Want to set up a bank? They’re legal, because everything is legal here. Want to sell xleeth, and start all your customers down the road to being severely retarded but with the biggest, happiest smiles you’ve ever seen? Nobody would stop you from setting up your booth on a playground, unless you weren’t giving the owner a cut. Want to cook and eat a kid? If you can find a seller for a five-year-old peon, and cover all the liens, hey, you can start chopping the parsley and preheat the oven. And no pokheet will come around to bother you. We have our feets here; the vid is always reminding us how we’re completely free.”

  Jak shuddered. “You know, there are people who say they could never bear the regimented society of the Hive, and that the idea of being a wasp makes them ill, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so homesick.”

  “Just remember that at least half the metal the Hive is made out of came from here. And now you know how they get it. I’m glad you all live better there—really I am—it wouldn’t help us for you to be poor. But don’t think this place has nothing to do with you.”

  Dujuv was staring blankly, as if looking for something to say, and finally he just choked up and let tears run down his face. Kyffimna looked at him in amazement.

  “Since you had heard that panths were supposed to be dumb,” Jak said, sarcastically, throwing an arm protectively around his old tove, “didn’t you hear that they’re also supposed to be unnaturally sensitive? It goes with their big hearts and deep loyalty.” He turned to comfort his friend, putting Dujuv’s face against his neck, as he had learned to do when they were young teenagers and a viv or a movie got to his friend.

  “I’d never heard that,” Kyffimna said, “but … well, there are lots of panths here. You’ll see plenty. And because they’re valuable for the kind of work we do, the banks have a real tradition of pushing them into peonage if at all possible. It’s the same with simis and kobolds and just about any other breed that does well here. A lot of women get out of peonage by agreeing to carry three or four fertilized panth ova to term; since they’re born while their mother is a peon, they are automatically peons too; she goes free and they’re peons till middle age or so. But … no, nobody ever told me panths were sensitive. Toktru, mostly people just tell them what to do.”

  Jak felt Dujuv’s hot tears dribbling into his collar, and held his sobbing friend’s shoulders. The vault where they were standing was mostly empty except for some tents made up of old wrapping plastic. It was lit by a dozen wavering fuel-cell lamps that were clearly at the end of their lifetimes and had just been left here, on top of piles of similar dead lights. A group of kobolds ran through the vault, carrying boxes, and the one unmodified human woman with them was the only one wearing a purse; Jak specked what that must mean. “You know, I really think they’ve sent us to hell.”

  “That’s right,” Kyffimna said. “To meet the newest, meanest devil here.”

  On airless Mercury, a rocket is just a nozzle, below a spherical thermos tank full of very high-pressure liquid sodium, below a wide disk-shaped cab, all held together with a minimum of struts and girders. Vented to vacuum, hot high-pressure sodium makes a fine propellant, and since sodium is so common and abundant in the surface regolith of Mercury, and apt to clog and contaminate separator plates, it is given away free just to get rid of it. The rocket stays plugged into the electrical mains to keep the sodium hot until the moment of launch; it takes off in one burst of sodium and lands tail-down in another. The sodium in the tank stays more than hot enough, for a ballistic flight to the antipodes takes only fourteen minutes.

  In this case, the flight was less than two hundred kilometers, and the time was less than a minute; the little ship kicked hard once, they were weightless for a short period, and then it kicked hard again and they touched down. The landing area was just a broad, flat space within Hamner, a ten-kilometer-across crater where the main krilj of the Eldothaler Quacco had been for seventy years.

  A strange-looking tractor rolled up to the rocket, towing a sodium hose and a power lead. On top of it was a small passenger cab in the middle of a large, bare gridded platform, about three meters off the ground. Underneath, five trusses formed a pentacle of long arms, each ending in two big wheels of open steel mesh. “Pop brought the ten-wheeler,” Kyffimna said. “We can all ride inside.”

  The little rocket didn’t have an airlock or an elevator, just an air capture to depressurize the cabin, a door that opened, and a permanently mounted ladder and fireman’s pole; Jak and Shadow opted for the ladder, Kyffimna and Dujuv for the pole, and they dropped the fifteen meters onto the mirror-bright smear of freshly frozen sodium. Kyffimna trotted up to the ten-wheeler, and they followed. The big woman reached over her head to grip one of the big steel mesh tires, and climbed up it to the truss, then on top of the upper member of the truss and across the platform to wait by
the cabin.

  Around them, the crater walls loomed high and steep. Frozen falls, curtains, and spouts showed where waste magma had been dumped.

  The tops of the crater walls formed a jagged rip in the black sky; with sun glinting from his helmet, Jak could not see the stars, but presumably at night, or from deep shadow, they would be as numerous as they were from the dark side of a spaceship. Long low dust piles lay at the feet of the crater walls.

  Kyffimna’s father dragged the sodium hose over to the rocket and plugged it in, then hooked in the power lead.

  In less than a minute the light over the rocket’s sodium connection glowed green. He unhooked the sodium hose and dropped it; it went dragging back toward its unseen origin, bouncing and slapping over the dusty, pitted surface. He left the power lead connected and tucked the cable so that it ran under the nozzle; whenever the rocket got a passenger or a call and took off again, it would signal the station to shut off the power, then burn away the cable as it took off.

  Then he climbed up the wheel and the long arm of the ten-wheeler and joined the group, gesturing for them to follow him into the cabin; the door irised closed behind them, and a moment later the green pressure-okay came on. He removed his helmet and clipped it to his shoulder strap; everyone else followed suit.

  Jak thought the man must be close to three hundred. His hair had probably once been whitish-blonde like Kyffimna’s, but now it was a messy mix of yellow, white, and gray; his watery eyes were ice-in-gin blue, his skin streaked with red patches and little exploded veins, and the imperfect symmetry of his strong-featured face suggested that he had been the practice partner for either a not-quite-proficient plastic surgeon or an all-too-proficient boxer.

  “My name is Durol Eldothaler, and if you don’t mind, our order of precedence is such that I call everyone else by first name, which means you are Shadow, and one of you is Jak—”