by John Barnes
“That’s me.”
“So you are Dujuv.”
“Right, or Duj, informally and with friends.”
Durol Eldothaler nodded. “You can call me Chief, Boss, or Eldothaler-san. Clear?”
They all nodded.
“I noticed you looking at MLB’s main base, there.” He nodded toward the central pinnacle. It looked like the tower of the evil enchanter in a mediocre fantasy viv. Impact craters form with a splash, more like a pebble thrown into a bathtub than a rock against a wall, for at the speeds and energies involved, the distinction between liquid and solid is shadowy. As the spherical spreading wave in the ground encounters resistance, either at its outer edges or far below, a portion of the energy is reflected back, where it sometimes erupts onto the surface, hurling rock and soil upward in a heap. Just as a crater wall is a frozen wave in the surface, so a central pinnacle is a frozen backsplash. Old Eldothaler said, “It’s not much of a pinnacle—a crater this small hardly ever even has one—but enough to make a fortress, or a prison watchtower, eh? Anyway, that’s the problem to be coped with.”
“Pop,” Kyffimna said, “I guess I better tell you before we have to tell all the others. These three are all that’s coming. Either all my messages never got through (which I don’t believe for one second) or more likely what’s going on is that Greenworld Intelligence is not really intending to help, but they sent us three agents that they’d just as soon be rid of—no fault of the agents, nothing wrong with them, I don’t think.”
“Thank you,” Shadow said, with immense dignity.
“So we have to break the news to the others,” Durol said, rubbing his face with his hand. “Well, this is a blow. I don’t suppose any of you is a military genius, a trained saboteur, or a commando?”
“Well,” Jak said, “Dujuv and I are agents in training, and Shadow is a warrior, so we’re not helpless. But no, we aren’t like the teams-of-heroes they send into the situation in the intrigue-and-adventure stories. For your sake, I wish we were.”
“So do I. But you’re who we have, so we’ll have to make the best of you, and ideally find a way to like you while we’re doing it. I don’t imagine that will be too hard, really.”
The ten-wheeler jounced along in the low gravity. Kyffimna brought them up to big steel doors set in the side of a steep cliff in the inside of the crater wall. They passed into the dark shadow and Jak had just an instant’s vision of stars overhead before the big doors dilated in front of them, and they rolled through into the krilj’s airlock. Bright lights came on overhead, the pressure light turned green, and a small mob of Mercurials—old and young, kobolds and simis among them—rushed toward the ten-wheeler, all chattering excitedly. “This is not going to be my favorite speech of all the ones I ever give, I just know it’s not,” Durol muttered, as the cabin door dilated.
CHAPTER 12
Radzundslag
That went better than I was dreading,” Jak said, quietly, to Dujuv, as they scrubbed for dinner, sharing the sink in the little chamber they had been assigned with Shadow. Kyffimna had explained to them that all bathrooms here were arranged to pressurize instantly as needed, but in any other room they would be expected to wear their pressure suits at all times with the helmet always to hand, “especially when you sleep.”
“I don’t know, Jak, yeah, they accepted it coming from him, thank Nakasen and every Principle that he had that much authority and respect, but I don’t think they’re happy at all. And you’re singing-on right, this place is hell. How come in gen school all they ever did was show us pictures of miners standing around machinery, and at the PSA all they do is talk about making sure that Mercury never ends up controlled by any nation unless of course someday the Hive is in a position to grab it?”
Jak shrugged. “That’s what it’s convenient for us to know. Same reason anybody lies or shades the truth, I guess.”
“Yeah, but … well, how come I never knew there was a place like this? Did you hear what that little kid asked his mother when we passed in the hall?”
“Yeah, I did.”
A small boy, maybe seven or so, had audibly asked his mother if Dujuv was Jak’s peon.
“You dak that? Most panths they’ve ever seen are peons. And these people despise peons. No matter how somebody ends up as a peon, they assume it’s a character flaw or something. It’s like something out of the industrial half of the Middle Ages, back when they thought that regional skin color variations meant things. I’m starting to realize something—it’s not all that different with breeds.”
Jak could think of nothing else to say, so he changed the subject. “I’m about as clean as I’m getting without a shower. How are you doing?”
“I’m there. Let’s dress.”
In the dining room, all of the children, from about the age of fourteen down, were piled on Shadow, sitting on his lap, staring a few inches from his face, and spraying questions at him. Under the pile of children, Shadow seemed to be enjoying it.
They asked amazingly rude questions, ones that Jak would normally have expected to see make a Rubahy’s rage spines spring out, but Shadow on the Frost mostly made the bubbling noise, explained that that was a laugh, and answered. Yes, he could feel it if they pulled a feather, so please not to do that. No, he didn’t really look much like a terrier dog and he didn’t know why people called Rubahy that. Yes, he had a very large family, and he didn’t always get along with all of them, but some of them were very nice and they were all family. (He glanced up at Jak and Dujuv and bubbled after that one.) No, his teeth were very sharp and scary, but he had never used them to bite a human, and he had no idea what we tasted like.
“I hope you will never see my rage spines,” he said to one little girl. “I know what they show in the movies, but we don’t have them permanently sticking out of our backs—how would we ever sit in a chair, eh? And we don’t really control them. When we’re angry and need to fight, they just pop out. And I don’t like being angry or frightened, any more than you do.”
“You never smile.”
“There are no muscles in my face; I can’t move it.”
“And you whistle when you talk.”
“That’s because my voice box is shaped like one of your old-fashioned slot-flutes. Yours is shaped more like the noisemaker in one of your whoopee cushions, which is why it buzzes.”
One of the older boys laughed and said, “When we talk, do we sound like we’re farting, to you?”
Shadow made the bubbling noise so hard and loud that it sounded like the metallic bucket might shatter, a weird burst of blooping and clanking that seemed to delight the children.
“And are Rubahy ticklish?” one little boy asked.
It turned out they were. After a while, Jak and Dujuv rescued Shadow, gently reminding the kids that though fun, their tove was not a toy.
“I’d have thought, with the way your people emphasize courtesy,” Jak said, “that our kids would make you miserable or furious, since it takes us a long time to learn manners.”
After catching his breath, Shadow said, “Oh, if they were adults I’d have eviscerated a dozen of them, but they’re children, Jak. Bright, funny, brave, and harmless—like kittens.”
Dinner was served, and just as Jak’s SSE text had warned was customary, they all got bowls from a common pot rather than individual orders. It was a pleasant gooey mess of chunks of beefrat and vegetables in thick broth; Jak specked it to be “stew,” the stuff they were always eating in fantasy vivs. Those elves knew what they were doing.
“Shadow,” Dujuv said, “you mentioned that you thought the kids were nice, uh, the way kittens are nice, masen?”
“Yes, Dujuv.”
“Well, this is a stupid question—I know the Rubahy keep some Earth animals as pets, rabbits, cats, ferrets, and pigs I’ve heard of … does your species have pets of your own?”
Shadow whistled a low resonant blat, equivalent to a deep sigh. “We did have pets. But the invasion fleet did not bring
pets, and when the human secret weapon sent Alpha Draconis nova, everything back there burned. We might have salvaged DNA, but as you know, the Beyobathu sued for our homeworld as a salvage-of-war planet, and they pull much influence with the Galactic State. They got court permission and had already sterilized our homeworld, to improve their case that it was available for salvage, before we even found out that there was a court. So we have a few meat animals, cloned from frozen samples in the invasion’s food lockers. Nothing we kept as pets.”
Jak had seen pictures of Beyobathu; they were sort of two-headed plesiosaurs, supposedly sole proprietors of one whole globular cluster, with almost a billion years of recorded history. “Isn’t one of the judges on the Galactic Court a Beyobathu?”
“Yes. He has promised to be fair.” Jak was always amazed at how much irony a being with no facial expressions could communicate. “Anyway, yes, we had pets. Especially the elawathil, which I suppose you would say looked like a half-sized, short-necked ostrich. They had some of the loyalty and playfulness of your dogs, but could talk a little, like your parrots, and were about as bright as your dolphins. They co-evolved with us—one of our great poets says that ‘elawathil and Rubahy were together before we were ourselves.’ In a thousand of your years, we have not ceased to miss to them.”
The table fell quiet. Then Shadow on the Frost said, “But I am spoiling the gathering! Someone start some fun, please!”
As if on cue, Tlokro, one of the kobolds, came in with a gigantic bowl of chocolate pudding, announcing that there was plenty. Jak had filled up on stew, so he had only one bowl of the pudding, but everyone else seemed to put away at least three or four bowls. “Wonder what their calorie demand is like around here,” Jak murmured to Dujuv.
“Something like mine, I bet. Toktru, Jak, it may be hell, but the food is wonderful. And I haven’t seen a fat Mercurial yet, either—the big-boned people really are just big-boned. They must exercise.”
Kyffimna, who had been sitting next to Dujuv quietly for the whole meeting, made a strange sputtering noise that sounded exactly like a woman trying to suppress a giggle so that she won’t spew chocolate pudding through her nose. “Oh, yes, Dujuv. Plenty of that.” She rested a hand lightly on his arm. Dujuv sat up as if shocked. It was Jak’s turn to work on controlling his pudding. Obviously it was tricky stuff.
After dessert they passed big jugs of a heavy-bodied, thick red wine, laced with soporifics, painkillers, and euphorics; it didn’t taste like much but the effect made up for it. Everyone older than toddlers got roaring drunk, musical instruments came out, and the chamber rang with laughter and singing in harmony in the echoing vaulted main chamber of the krilj.
These people definitely deserved a better break, Jak thought, and I have no idea how to get it for them.
Soon wine and comfort took their toll. After smaller children and older adults had drifted off to their chambers, and the stories—mostly about accidents in which people had been killed, as far as Jak could tell, with a leavening of tales of people caught having sex in odd circumstances—began to ramble and repeat, Durol said, “Well, before we tire them out any further, I guess there’s a little conversation that I ought to have privately with Jak, Dujuv, and Shadow. Kyffimna, I need you in it too, since you’re my second in command, and then I guess I want Bref in case we need to look at some computer stuff.”
An older boy or younger man (his face was young and blotchy but he was tall, the neck that stuck out of his pressure suit collar was long and skinny but the shoulders were wide), said, “And me too, please? I should know too.”
Durol resisted a smile. “Narav, if I tried to exclude you, you’d just listen at the door. And besides, you’re right, as a family thing, you should get used to going where your sister and brother go, and seeing what they’re responsible for. Say Kyffimna and I get drunk one night and knife each other, you might be second in command.”
Narav looked like he wanted to complain about the teasing, but he just said, “Thanks,” perhaps because he was grateful to be included.
They gathered around the screen in the little domed chamber that was Durol’s office, lounging on the mats on the floor, and Durol said, “All right, so we aren’t going to solve this with a battalion of B&Es, which would work. So we’re back to using what we have at hand, plus whatever advantages we can get from two apprentice spies and an experienced mercenary that the other side probably doesn’t know we have yet.”
“It might help our guests to have some idea how all this happened,” Bref said, “and some of what we already know.” He was about seventeen or eighteen, Jak guessed, filled in more than his rawboned brother, with a quieter, more serious affect.
“Give it to them. I’m going to go get us all some cocoa. Just realized this little meeting might go an hour. Would’ve started sooner if I’d thought of it.” Durol lurched up and through the door, muttering about getting old.
“Pay no attention to the old gwont,” Bref said, “he’ll make it to a hundred and twenty. He’s too tough and mean to go sooner.”
Dujuv glanced at Jak as if he’d been stung; Jak nodded. To a hundred and twenty? That was middle-aged … or it was everywhere they had ever been. Jak saw that Kyffimna had noted the look that passed between them and didn’t look happy about it.
“Anyway,” Bref said, “it’s easy enough to tell. Just over a year ago—Earth year, of course, not our little bitty Mercury years—we were getting a little broke because prices had been kind of low, and we’d had a magma accident where one of our fifteen-wheelers ended up slagged—”
“I’m still real sorry about that,” Narav said, “but it was a perfectly understandable accident, and—”
“Brother, I wasn’t going to mention you at all, till you brought it up.” He glanced sideways at Jak. “And Narav’s right, could’ve happened to anybody, ain’t his fault, ain’t anyone’s. You want to fault anyone, you fault that Safe-world Mercurial Insurance, because they decided it was twenty percent negligence so what they did was, they gave us thirty percent of the payout as a loan instead of cash money, and that put us over the line so that other creditors started jacking rates and payments and all on the variable loans.
“Anyway, we were in some trouble, not bigger than trouble we’d had before, but trouble, so we leased the other side of the crater, a hundred-and-twenty-degree slice of just the rim wall, to MLB, which at the time just looked like a new startup labor company. After two generations in this crater we knew there wasn’t much over there, and we told ’em, but they wanted it anyway. Well, less than a hundred hours after they got here, they were doing all kinds of things in the central pinnacle, which they hadn’t rented at all, so Pop went over to tell them that he didn’t like squatting, and they shot the two heets he took with him, and gave him a beating. Which is actually why he walks that way, not because he’s getting old.
“Then they showed him that they’d bought up about three-quarters of our debt—I guess they just shot Prano and Bleron, and gave him the beating first, for fun, because they already knew they had his nutsack in their visegrips—but being our friends and all, they were prepared to offer us a way out. They made us their subsidiary, took a hundred percent control, and we get out just as soon as we pay off all the loans, which at current rates ought to be about seventy-five years. We stopped discussing the central pinnacle, and since then they’ve built that into a regular fortress. And nobody from here, even though theoretically we’re their landlord, has been allowed to have a look at what they’re doing on their side of the crater wall, but I can tell you anyway.”
He raised his left hand, pulled off his suit glove, faced his purse toward him, and probed and spoke to it.
“We got you one of those over-the-suit-glove ones,” Narav pointed out.
“Radzundslag got it. Gets everything, sooner or later, masen? Now quiet for a second, so I can get this display up.”
The screen lit up and a set of columns appeared; on one side, there was a list of family names—o
r rather quacco names, Jak realized—including “Eldothaler,” this quacco. Then there was a list of metals, with masses and prices listed; and then a column of zeros. To the right was a list of “Metals sold, MLB” which listed about the same masses and much higher prices.
“It’s like this,” Bref said. “One of the few Treaty Laws we have here that’s any good is that the quacco that extracts the metal has to get eighty-five percent of the price of that metal when it’s sold offplanet—which is defined as actually received and paid for at the other end, up at the Hive or the Aerie or Ceres or wherever. Or another way to look at it is that all the middlemen combined aren’t legally allowed to get more than fifteen percent. It tends to encourage direct buying between industry out there and mining back here, which is good for both—lowers their prices and raises ours.
“Now, on the books, it looks like we’ve sold everything to MLB for the past few months, at way below market prices, and they should only be able to go up fifteen percent on what they’ve paid us. But supposedly none of that cheap metal we were forced to sell them has been resold. Just suspiciously similar quantities have been sold—at much higher prices—by MLB.
“Now, the way the enforcement works is, there’s a trace isotope mix, registered and recorded, that every quacco puts into each metal lot before we deliver. The central office assigns each mix, so that every metal lot ever shipped is unique, and theoretically even if it’s melted down, the stuff stays labeled.”
Jak asked, “What if someone melts metal from a bunch of different batches, mixes it, and sells that?”
Narav laughed. “My brother can give you a very patronizing lecture on that subject, like he did me. ‘Because, Slag-in-Your-Skull, you can’t sell it legally unless it matches one of your assigned tracer mixes, and metal from mixed lots will always have a bunch of tracers in it that you weren’t assigned, so the only way to resell stolen metal is to put it all through isotope separation, clean it completely, and then put your tracer in it.’ Which is why Bref thinks they’re probably not even mining over on the other side of the crater.”