The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  He was the Captain. He was supposed to have initiative. He was supposed to be doing something. But what could he do?

  “You don’t have backups?”

  The yufo stood before him, a hill of tentacled flesh. It was closer than before, and he could smell it now, a nice smell, a little yeasty. It spoke in! Mota’s voice now.

  “I don’t really understand what you mean.” He was cold, shivering. Hungry. He wanted a cappuccino.

  “You have the transporter. You scan people to a quantum level. Store the scan. Annihilate them. Reassemble them elsewhere. Are you seriously telling me that it never occurred to you to store the scans?”

  Captain Reynold J. Tsubishi of the APP ship Colossus II was thunderstruck. He really, really wanted a cappuccino now. “I can honestly say that it never had.” He fumbled for an excuse. “The ethical conundra. What if there were two of me? Um.” He thought. “What if—”

  “What is wrong with you people? So what if there were two of you?” There were two of the yufo now. Tsubishi was no expert in distinguishing individuals of this race, but he had the distinct impression that they were the same entity. Times two. Times three now. Now there were four. They surrounded him, bladders going in and out.

  “Annihilation is no big deal.”

  “Accepting it is a survival instinct.”

  “You honestly drag that gigantic lump of metal around the galaxy?”

  “What is wrong with you people?”

  Tsubishi needed some initiative here. This was not a negotiation. He needed to make it one.

  “You’ve murdered five of my crew today. You threatened my ship with torpedoes. We came in peace. You made war. It isn’t too late to rescue the relations between our civilizations if you are willing to negotiate as equals in the galactic community of equals.”

  “Negotiate? Fella—sorry, Captain, I don’t speak for anyone—” Now there was just one yufo and shimmering space where the others had been. The yufo paused for a second. “Give me a second. Integrating the new memories from those forks takes a little doing. Right. Okay. I’m just here on my own behalf. Yes, I fired on your ship—after you fired on me.”

  “Fired on you? You weren’t in that artifact. You wouldn’t fit in ten of those things. It was an unmanned sensor package.”

  “You think I bother to travel around in giant hunks of metal?”

  “Why not? You’ve got impressive transporter technology, but you can’t expect me to believe that you can beam matter over interstellar distances—”

  “Of course not. That’s what subspace radio is for. I upload the latest me to the transporter on the sensor package and then beam as many of myself as I need to the planet’s surface. What kind of idiot would actually put zer body in a giant hollow vehicle and ship it around space? The resource requirements are insane. You don’t really, really do that, do you?”

  Tsubishi covered his face with his hands and groaned. “You’re telling me that you’re just an individual, not representing any government, and that you conquer planets all on your own, using subspace radio and transporter beams?”

  “Yes indeed.”

  “But why?”

  “I told you—I compete to put my flag on a pattern of planets. My friends compete to do the same. The winner is the one who surrounds the largest number of zer opponents’ territory. It’s fun. Why do you put on costumes and ship your asses around the galaxy?”

  The yufo had a remarkable command of Standard. “You’ve got excellent symbology AI,” he said. “Perhaps our civilizations could transfer some technology to one another? Establish trade?” There had to be some way to interest the yufo in keeping Tsubishi around, in letting him back on his ship. The planet was cold and he was hungry. He wanted a cappuccino.

  The yufo shrugged elaborately. “It’s remarkable what you can accomplish when you don’t squander your species resources playing soldier. Sorry, navy. Why would we bother with trade? What could possibly be worth posting around interstellar distances, as opposed to just beaming sub-molecular-perfect copies of goods into wherever they’re in demand? You people are deeply perverse. And to think that you talked forty-two other species into playing along? What a farce!”

  Tsubishi tried for words, but they wouldn’t come. He found that he was chewing an invisible mouthful of speech, working his jaw silently.

  “You’ve really had a bad day, huh? Right. Okay. Here’s what I’ll do for you.”

  There was a cappuccino sitting next to him. He picked it up and sipped reverently at it. It was perfect. It was identical to the one that had been beamed down to him when he arrived on-planet. That meant that the yufo had been sniffing all the transporter beam activity since they arrived. And that meant—

  “You can restore the landing party!”

  “Oh yes, indeed, I can do that.”

  “And you don’t trade for technology, but you might be persuaded to give me—I mean, the Alliance—access to some of this?”

  “Certainly.”

  “And will you?”

  “If you think you want it.”

  Tsubishi nearly fell over himself thanking the yufo. He was mid-sentence when he found himself back on the transporter deck, along with his entire away-team party.

  First things first. Tsubishi headed straight for the fresher, to get out of his baggies and back into uniform. He held his arms over his head and muttered, “Do it,” to the computer, received the crackle-starched uniform and lowered his arms, once again suited and booted, every millimeter an officer of the APP Space Navy.

  And it felt wrong. He didn’t feel like he was wearing a uniform at all. He was wearing a costume. He knew that now. He had the computer signal his officers to meet him in the executive boardroom, whose long table pulsed with realtime strategic maps of the known galaxy, and as he slid into his seat, he recognized it finally and for the first time for what it really was: a game-board.

  “Report, Commander! Mota,” he said. Of course! Mota would have a slideshow whipped up by now. He had a whole executive staff dedicated to preparing them on a moment’s notice. The slideshow would give him time to gather himself, to recover some of the dignity of his office.

  But! Mota just looked at him blankly from within zer exoskeleton, zer big Wobbly eyes unreadable. Tsubishi peered more closely.

  “Commander! Mota, are you out of uniform?”

  ! Mota plucked at zer baggies with a tentacle-tip. “I suppose I am, Reynold.”

  Tsubishi knew the first signs of mutiny. He’d gotten top marks in Command Psych at the Academy. He looked into the faces of his officers, tried to gauge the support there.

  “Commander, you are relieved. Return to your quarters and await my orders.”

  The Wobbly looked impassively at him. The silence stretched. The other officers looked at him with equal coolness. It wasn’t just his command he felt slipping away—it was the idea of command itself. The fragility of the traditions, of the discipline, of the great work that bound them all together. It wavered. Panic seized him, tightened his chest, a feeling he hadn’t known since those days at the Academy when he was breaking himself of the fear of transporters.

  “Please?” he said. It came out in a squeak.

  ! Mota gave him a lazy salute. “All right, Captain. I’ll play another round of the game. For now. But it won’t do you any good.”

  Ze moved to the hatch. It irised open. Behind it, a dozen more! Motas.! Mota joined them and turned around and gave him and the rest of the officers another sarcastic salute.

  “You all enjoy yourselves now,” ze said, and they turned as a body and walked away.

  Tsubishi’s hand was resting on something. A cappuccino. He lifted it to his lips and had a little sip, but he burned his lip and it spilled down the front of his nice starched uniform.

  Costume.

  He set it back down and began, very quietly, to cry.

  JOHN BARNES

  THE LOST PRINCESS MAN

  John Barnes is one of the most prolific an
d popular of all the writers who entered SF in the 1980s. His many books include the novels A Million Open Doors, The Mother of Storms, Orbital Resonance, Kaleidoscope Century, Candle, Earth Made of Glass, The Merchant of Souls, Sin of Origin, One for the Morning Glory, The Sky So Big and Black, The Duke of Uranium, A Princess of the Aerie, In the Hall of the Martian King, Gaudeamus, Finity, Patton’s Spaceship, Washington’s Dirigible, Caesar’s Bicycle, The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky, and others, as well as two novels written with astronaut Buzz Aldrin, The Return and Encounter with Tiber. Long a mainstay of Analog, and now a regular at Jim Baen’s Universe, his short work has been collected in…And Orion and Apostrophes and Apocalypses. His most recent book is the novel The Armies of Memory. Barnes lives in Colorado and works in the field of semiotics.

  Here he takes us to a grim future dominated by superpowered aristocrats, where death is the penalty for disobedience or even a slip of the tongue, and you’d better walk the tightrope very carefully indeed if you want to stay alive—especially if you’re a con man working on a job.

  What are the people like in the Krevpiceaux country?” An aristocrat stood over Aurigar’s table.

  Careful not to spill the carafe of wine or knock the remains of his noodles-and-mussels to the floor, Aurigar staggered up from his chair and bowed. “Lord Leader Sir?”

  “You heard the question the first time.”

  The lord bulged with stimumuscle. His face had been fashionably planed-and-pitched and geneted gun-steel blue; it looked like the entrance to the villain’s fortress in a dwellgame.

  He will be extremely fast, too, they optimize the nervous system at the same time they grow stimumuscle, and he’s legal to carry any weapon and I don’t even have resident alien carry permit and Oh! Samwal defend me, I can’t run, I can’t fight, probably he’s even smarter than I am, Aurigar thought.

  “I have never been to the Creffenho country, Lord Leader Sir,” Aurigar said, “but it is said that—”

  “You’re telling the truth.” Lenses and mirrors flickered in Lord Leader Sir’s eye socket, briefly spoiling the illusion of an empty black pit. “But it is disturbing that you are pretending to have misheard the question.” The lord extended his hand, palm up, and his fingers flowed forward, splitting into myriad filaments. Through Aurigar’s shirt, they stung like jellyfish tentacles and gripped like screws. They moved Aurigar’s skin out of the way, then his flesh, flowed around his ribs, and stopped his heart.

  Terror restarted his heart; the neural connection from the aristocrat’s fingers stopped it again, restarted it, and then made it flutter, before restoring a steady, deep beat.

  “When I pull my fingers back out,” the blue-faced man asked, eye sockets glittering and whirling silver and glass, “shall I leave you with your heart operating, or not operating?” He raced Aurigar’s heart into painful thunder, then slowed it to the low throb of deep meditation. “I will choose not operating if you do not make a choice. Operating, or not operating?”

  “Operating, if it pleases you, Lord Leader Sir.”

  “Oh, whatever I do will please me. Never fear that.” The filaments slid back and out, resolving into fingers just above Aurigar’s chest; the fingers reacquired nails and ridges, and presently looked like anyone else’s. No blood leaked, but Aurigar’s chest tingled where nerves did not quite like how they had been re-meshed. “Thank you, I will have a seat, and from here on we’ll drink on my tab.” Gesturing to Aurigar to resume his seat, the stimumuscled lord sat in the folding chair opposite like a mountain poised upon a dandelion. “What are the people like in the Krevpiceaux country?”

  “Well, Lord Leader Sir, I’d have to say…well, stolid. Quiet, hardworking, eat-what’s-in-front-of-you types. You’ll never hear any of them saying that any work is degrading. Tell’em to shovel shit with a manual shovel, or even their hands—they do it, and no complaints.”

  “Stupid, do you think?”

  Before Aurigar could answer, the carafes of better wine arrived, and the blue man poured a generous glass and pushed it across the table to him. “I don’t care if you get drunk, but stay honest. Would you like some appetizers for the table? I know a man who lives your sort of life often finds great pleasure in eating until he is ill.”

  “Yes, Lord Leader Sir.” A lifetime of not being sure when there would be more again had trained Aurigar never to turn down any good thing, even in a surprisingly pleasant nightmare.

  When the lord had tasted his wine and Aurigar had finished a glass—and with the promise of a great heap of food on the way—the blue-faced man leaned forward and smiled quite pleasantly. “Now, I already know that you are, by profession, a lost princess man, and that at the moment you are celebrating a successful season. Your bank account in Nue Swuisshe is number AFBX-1453–1962–3554–7889. You booked passage under the name Bifred Prohelo on the Tambourlaine tomorrow, stateroom sixteen. I know how Baldor the Nose met his well-deserved end and why your alibi held up—excellent job, by the way. You are allergic to asparagus, the dog you had as a boy was named Magrat, and you are susceptible to sore feet. Will you accept that it is impossible to lie to me?”

  “Yes, Lord Leader Sir.”

  “Good answer.”

  The naneurs in the wine were adjusting Aurigar’s taste and smell to appreciate it; it was the wine most exactly to his taste he’d ever had. He tried an experiment—he thought Rats are bigger than whales—and instantly the wine tasted like vinegar, his stomach rolled over, and his head hurt. He thought I will tell my lord anything he wants; the wine tasted of sunshine on a meadow just after a cool rain.

  “Now,” the aristocrat said. “Back to the question. Would you say the Krevpiceauxi are stupid?”

  “They are pigheadedly proud to be ignorant of anything they find in books, but not stupid. They value shrewdness, deception, facing facts, and even verbal quickness, as long as it serves some larger purpose like making a sale or evading police questioning. In fact, they are smart in a way that makes my con easier to work.”

  “Interesting. Have more wine—oh, and here are the appetizers—and do go on, taking a bit of time between to chew and savor, eh? What you just said interests me very much.”

  Like anyone whose fortunes have suddenly, inexplicably, improved, Aurigar was becoming more comfortable. For just a moment, after the first delightful fish roll, he thought, I can tell him that—and his tongue tasted as if he had been chewing brass. He reminded himself that truth was good and took a sip of excruciatingly delicious wine. “Well, then, Lord Leader Sir, very few people know this about the lost princess business: the girl knows the truth and comes along willingly with the connivance of her family.”

  “Really? I had not heard that.”

  “Well, you know, Lord Leader Sir, lost princesses are all the rage in dwellgames. Everyone has played a dozen dwellgames in which the smooth talking stranger—that would be me—”

  The lord smiled warmly. “You amuse me. My sources say you are very good at it.”

  “Yes, I suppose I am good at it. I have stayed away from brilliance, which is hazardous.”

  “And that in itself is brilliant in its own way. So, then, you—the smooth talker—show up in some remote location where there is an unhappy beautiful girl—”

  “Rarely beautiful. Genetion is cheap, and a necessity anyway to put off the insurance-company detectives. The ‘lost princess’ can be, honestly, plain-faced, with a body that looks like it was piled up at random, and an absolutely lunar complexion. My clients will genete her until she looks better than most real princesses, begging the Lord Leader Sir’s pardon if he is related to any.”

  “Pardon readily granted.” The lord knocked back half a glass at a gulp, with a visible shudder. “I am related to thousands of them. So you wander among these stolid farm-folk, and you find some girl to convince that she is a lost princess—usually the lost princess?”

  “Another myth, Lord Leader Sir. I never tell anyone that she is the Princess Ululara, because she has certai
nly been warned about strangers who tell her that story. Indeed, I dismiss any such idea; I say, ‘Look, sweetie, there’s about a billion settled planets under the Imperium, the Emperor’s family had one baby disappear, so out of maybe four quadrillion humans in the galaxy, you’re the princess?’ Besides, usually their age on their fostindenture papers is wrong for Ululara. I show them that. I say, ‘Forget it. If somebody really did snatch Princess Ululara just before the bomb went off, they dropped her down the stairs and killed her, or drowned her in the bathtub, the first day. Then they tossed the little thing into the nearest instant composter and she was potting-soil five minutes later. More likely, it’s all just a phantom of the security system and she vaporized with everyone else in the palace. Either way, she’s been dead twenty-nine marqs—and you are not she.’ Actually, usually I say ‘you ain’t her,’ to fit in better.”

  “And how do the girls respond to that?”

  “They’re disappointed—they were harboring the hope, as most unhappy fostindented girls of that generation do. Then I say, ‘You seem upset. Perhaps you were hoping that you weren’t just another fostindent. You want to know why you don’t get along with your family, they don’t understand you and worry about ridiculous things—oh, I can see that you’re not really one of them, it’s obvious.’ They are, of course, astonished at how well I know them.” He flapped a hand to dismiss a lifetime of hard-earned skill. “And so forth, you know. Eventually, I reveal that I am searching for quite a different princess, of a quite minor house, though perfectly verifiable.”

  “Verifiable?”

  “Well, for example, this year I told two girls of sixteen marqs that they might be Princess Pegasa Whon, who would be sixteen, and was kidnapped at about the right date. It’s a big galaxy. In four quadrillion people, there are about one hundred million princesses, and, oddly enough, perhaps ten thousand lost ones. At a rough approximation, that’s a hundred lost princesses of any particular age, though I don’t do much business above forty marqs. One little data search to match age and physical type, and you’re in business. Or I am, begging Lord Leader Sir’s pardon.”