The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  “I do enjoy pardoning you,” the lord said. He took a sip and held it in his mouth before swallowing; you were supposed to do that to train the naneurs, Aurigar remembered, and did it himself. The extraordinary wine hastened to surpass itself. The lord asked, “But you say most of them go willingly and knowingly?”

  “Well, yes. Only about half the money comes from brothel-owners; the rest is the kickbacks I get in insurance fraud collected by the family. Anyone who buys a fostindent takes out kidnap insurance, and it pays the whole estimated value over the forty-marq indenture and then some. So not only is the girl getting herself a better life, but the family gets a big shot of insurance money, just after one of my false-front companies purchases their outstanding debt at a very deep discount. Then they pay that debt back, to me, at full value. Everyone wins—me, the girl, the family, the family’s creditors, the brothel-owners—well, everyone except the insurance companies.”

  “Given the appeal of the idea, I don’t see why these things are not more widely known.”

  “Honestly, it is in the interests of lost princess men to maintain the horror stories, Lord Leader Sir. It needs to look like a real kidnapping or the insurance company will not pay. Thus, I need to tell the girl a plausible story and make sure she repeats it to several trustworthy blabbermouths—I even coach them to tell it well.” He put on a falsetto that he thought was much more girlish than it really was. ‘ “We told her he was a con man and that the lost princess was the oldest con in the book, but she had stars in her eyes, poor thing.’ Add a bit of the theatrical to the actual departure—perhaps the girl screaming and her sponsor-parents taking a few wild shots in my direction—and it looks much less like fraud to the detectives.”

  “And the Krevpiceauxi, who are cunning but not intellectual, are good for this con…because?”

  “They’re blunt, not easily fooled, and hate authority. After listening for a while, the girl says, ‘I think you are working the lost princess con, and the minute you have me off planet, you will pump me full of drugs, and I will wake up chained to a bed with a large number of Imperial troops lined up and waiting to have a turn on me.’ At which point, I say, ‘Well, of course.’”

  “You admit it?”

  “Absolutely, Lord Leader Sir. I then explain that it is better for me if she comes along willingly—fewer clues for the insurance detectives—and that her first stop will be a luxury hospital where she will be geneted into stunning beauty, and tweaked to make her depression-proof, nymphomaniacal, multiorgasmic, and extremely self-confident. Good conversation is highly prized as well, and many men have fetishes for talents like singing or drawing, so the girls also get a year or two developing their most developable talents and receiving a good broad education. The worst is only that during the marq or so it takes to heal into her new form, she will itch a great deal, since her old flesh feels like scar tissue being sloughed off as the new grows in.

  “As for Imperial troops, she will encounter them one at a time if at all—and if she’s lucky. They are themselves heavily geneted, well educated, highly paid specialists, like herself, and more likely to hire her to come along as a companion on a five-solar-system exotic tour than as fun for a night.

  “Besides, under the sumptuary laws, she will be a luxury good. She can’t legally be sold to poor or even middle class people unless she is so badly behaved that her owners do so as punishment. As for being owned, we are all theoretically owned by His Supreme Might—”

  “His Late Supreme Might,” the lord said. “Or had you not heard?”

  “I’m a very focused professional; I dwell the crime, investment, and lifestyle instrucks, but not politics, sports, or entertainment.” Aurigar hoped that he sounded dignified, but since wayward sauce had spotted his shirt, probably not.

  The aristocrat nodded. “Well, then. I am High Supreme Lord Cetuso, which you may know is a junior branch of the Imperial House itself—no, get up, protocol would call for you to get onto the floor entirely facedown, and in this place that would make an utter mess of you, much worse than that little blob on your shirt you keep daubing at. Would you happen to know, since you are concerned with high-ranking lineages, just what the hereditary function of the Cetusos is?”

  Aurigar realized. “Samwal defend us!”

  “He may have to. Yes. We are the authenticators of the Imperial line. It is well known that the late Emperor was quite mad and could not be geneted into anything that should be allowed to breed, so he died without issue. The Galactic Imperium should now pass to his sister, the lost princess Ululara. If she is alive, we must find her and restore her. If she is dead, there are other, more distant, heirs. But if she is neither proved dead nor found alive…well, the fourth Civil War, a thousand years ago, left us with ten thousand vitrified worlds and more than a hundred exploded suns.”

  “And you think that one of my lost princesses—”

  “Seven marqs ago. We have her trail right up to where she talked to you. The insurance-company detectives—a strikingly incompetent lot, by the way—”

  “They ought to be incompetent. I pay them enough.” Aurigar drained his glass. “Then here’s to the new Empress. The only Krevpiceauxi—that’s why you asked about that benighted continent on that armpit of a planet, yes?—well, the Krevpiceauxi of exactly that age would be Miriette Phodway. I am pleased to inform you, Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, that I can take you straight to her. I think you will get along very well with her.”

  “Is she—forgive the question—at all mad?”

  “Not at all insane, Lord Leader Cetuso Sir. And since she did so well and I did not deceive her in any way, not furious either—in fact she’s risen far from that start; nowadays she’s one of my best customers, buying a girl or two every marq from me.”

  “Then you will introduce me. Afterward, I will of course cover the cost of your unused ticket and then put you on a much better liner to wherever you wish to go, with ten lost princesses worth of profit added to your kick—at a minimum, more if I need you longer. Is she far off?”

  “At Waystonn, and in two days, there’s a liner departing—”

  “A liner? If you can bear to let us pack this food and wine to go, you can resume drinking and dining on my yacht in about twenty minutes, and we can be on our way. Unless you have some matter to settle?”

  “I had, but let him live, Lord Leader Sir. Good fortune should be shared.”

  Aurigar could not think of Miriette as Ululara, though he supposed eventually he would have to. “Right this way,” she said, taking his arm, and beckoning Lord Leader Cetuso Sir to follow them. “Where’d you hire the geneted goon?”

  “Actually, I work for the Lord Leader,” Aurigar said. A glance back told him that Cetuso was mercifully amused at being called a geneted goon—or, considering who had said it, perhaps obsequiously amused.

  Waystonn was about the hundredth busiest port in the Galactic Empire—but since there were just over forty-one billion, one hundred nineteen million ports, that was hardly a small distinction. It occupied the entire surface of a conveniently far-out moon of a conveniently close-in gas giant around a conveniently small star, and the only other occupied orbit of the star, below the gas giant, held a stable Lagrange hex of superheavies. Thus for the port of Waystonn, near the galactic center and with several arm-to-arm trajectories running through it, the total escape velocity was low and the slingshot effect tremendous, so that getting out to jump distance was easy and cheap. Waystonn also had a dense inert-organics atmosphere with a high Reynolds number and a large scale height, and thus aerobraking to the surface was cheap.

  Whatever all that meant. Cetuso had assigned him to know it, but had never asked him to repeat it.

  Anyway, all that really mattered was that the lost Ululara had progressed from being a hayakawite miner’s indentured fosterling to being one of the hundred most important procurers in the Galactic Empire in less than eight marqs.

  The Empress-to-be beamed at him like a favorite uncle. “We
ll, so, you now have an employer, and therefore this must be about his business rather than yours. So…?”

  Telling the truth was beginning to come naturally. “Well,” he said. “This is Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, keeper of the Imperial bloodline, and it seems I made a mistake when I talked to you.”

  Cetuso launched into the story. She listened intently through the whole thing and then burst into great, glad, uproarious laughter. “Wow, wow, wow, Aurigar. We have both really moved up in the world. So now instead of purported kidnappings of farmers’ daughters, you’ve moved up to capturing successful businesswomen, and you’re doing so well that you can afford a geneted actor to make your story plausible. Well, then, let’s have a tissue sample from each of you,” she said, “and since it will take four hours to run a high-end search, in memory of how much good you did me, Aurigar, and of how much you have both made me laugh, I shall send you up to private rooms where you will each have, so to speak, one on the house.”

  In Miriette’s office, Aurigar sat quietly, occasionally dozing and exhausted, reverently converting the last two hours into perpetual happy memory. Cetuso entered, moving as ever like a dancer half his age and a third of his size, and slipped into the larger chair, appropriating the hassock. A serving robot glided in and set out two glasses for the men. Silently, they toasted and drank.

  After a long and equally reverent silence from Cetuso, and a second glass served and begun, Aurigar ventured, “It probably reflects my lack of sophistication, but this was without question the best time I’ve ever had in a house.”

  “Whether or not you lack sophistication,” the Lord Leader Sir responded, “your experience in no way reflects that, because this was also my favorite experience of all time, which is to say, given my resources, appetites, and time devoted to exploration, it might be the finest available anywhere, ever.”

  Miriette looked into the office. “Well,” she said. “That was a very interesting investigation. I trust the accommodations were suitable, Aurigar?”

  “Very.”

  “And Lord Leader Cetuso Sir,” she said, dropping a very impressive curtsy. “Also satisfactory?”

  “Beyond words,” he said, rising to his feet and bowing very low. “Then I take it you have confirmed my identity.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “And I am more impressed with Aurigar than ever. To make whatever con he is running plausible, he has actually corrupted a very highly placed public official. I know I want into this deal now, whatever it is, but of course you’ll have to tell me what you are actually up to, and cut me in as a partner. Whatever is behind all this must be simply astonishing. I know you’ll have to confer with whoever your hidden partners are, but as soon as you can tell me what’s really going on, come right back, and we’ll see what sort of deal we can do.” Her eyes sparkled and she kissed Aurigar on both cheeks. “And Aurigar, even if your partners won’t let you tell me, don’t be a stranger anyway. You have no idea how much you impress me.”

  “Really, it’s almost to be expected,” Lord Leader Cetuso said. “All Imperials get extensive genetion. Heirs and near-heirs get even more, beginning right at the embryo stage. Even our late, mad Emperor was a polymathic genius; the madness was due to a botched assassination attempt by his mother, and some unfortunate abuse at the hands of his older brother of equally revered memory. So, naturally, Ululara, or Miriette, is beautiful, competent, cold-blooded, pragmatic, charismatic, all the things she needs to be. She was literally born to rule the galaxy. Climbing up from high-end prostitute to mistress of a hundred brothels in a few short years might have been a challenge for other people, but it was well within her capabilities.” He told the robot, “Standard setup for Aurigar.”

  “I’m not hungry, Lord Leader Sir.”

  “Have something to eat anyway. It always reduces your worrying and mellows your mood, and that helps you to be the splendid companion you usually are. And it’s your clear, calm thought I need now.”

  The robot brought the platter, and Aurigar munched, forlornly at first, but then resolutely, as if it might be taken away from him, and finally with that certain calm decision that generally preceded his best ideas. He looked up to see Cetuso smiling, and thought he detected a twinkle in one of the mirrors of his eye sockets.

  “I do hate being predictable,” Aurigar said.

  “We all do, but it’s part of what makes us useful.” Cetuso smiled at him. Aurigar felt cold fear that the Lord Leader Sir might be genuinely fond of him. “Now, if you need to eat all of that and then nap,” Cetuso said, “you have plenty of time; considering the distances and numbers involved, we probably have the better part of a marq to get the Empress onto the throne, and loyal client members of my family will make sure no one does anything rash. So rest, eat, and think of what we should do next.”

  A thought bothered Aurigar, but refused to come to the surface, so he spoke without it. “Just supposing we do find a way to persuade her that she is who she actually is, and assuming she wants the job, is there going to be a problem with any of a billion worlds or so realizing that they are being ruled from afar by—pardon the expression, but a former—”

  Cetuso laughed. “Oh, there will be a predictable number of uprisings. So long as it’s just a planet by itself, the Imperial forces will do the usual—the multiple decimation for which they are famous.”

  Aurigar shuddered. “I heard stories about that, growing up.”

  “Notice the durability of the effect. The last time your homeworld rebelled, and had to be set straight, was more than eight thousand marqs ago. There is something about the ‘ten tenths’ concept that stays in the mind.”

  Aurigar remembered a vast stone desert stretching out before him, some time before his father left, because he remembered he was holding Magrat’s collar and listening to his father explain: “It’s simple, Aurie, they ‘delete ten tenths,’ as they call it. One-tenth of all those of noble blood. One-tenth of all commoners. One-tenth of all slaves. One of the ten largest cities. Ten of the hundred largest cities. One hundred of the thousand largest cities. One-tenth of all livestock. One-tenth of all growing crops. One-tenth of all the forests. All the soil down to rock from one-tenth of the habitable surface. You see, everyone knows the formula, and everyone knows not to rebel, or not to let rebels get control of the planet. And the Emperor is always merciful; overlaps count. By slicing off the piece in front of us, he met not just the soil requirement, but half a dozen of the others as well. Nearly all the cities needed to make up the quota were located there, for example.”

  Aurigar remembered how much he had hated his father, how sad he had always felt when looking at the decimated parts of worlds from spaceship windows, and how pathetic it seemed to him that he had never once had to coerce or trick a girl into the lost princess routine; every one of them had come willingly, because it was so much better than what she had.

  He forced his attention back to the present, but couldn’t help asking, “But why does the Emperor care?”

  “Empress, as soon as we can make it clear to her that that’s what she is.”

  “I meant in general, Lord Leader Sir,” Aurigar said, skirting the edge of the great lord’s dislike for lectures not delivered by himself, “but all right, why does the Empress care if she has a planet fewer, here and there, out of a billion? She could just seal them off for a while, just a loose blockade to raise prices, and then wait for trade pressure and apathy to bring them back into line.”

  To Aurigar’s surprise, Cetuso sat back, rubbed his bare blue scalp thoughtfully, and said, “Why does anyone do anything, dear fellow? We have the technology to make every one of four quadrillion human beings as rich and comfortable as that person could reasonably consume, and to sustain that forever; between dwell, jump, and nano, there’s no reason why anyone would ever need to leave home except for fun, and no reason why there needs to be a charge on anything. So why do you suppose we have people in dreadful and dangerous jobs such as mining, ranching, and prostitution? Why don
’t we just synthesize materials from lifeless planets, jump it to where the people are, grow perfect food in tanks for everyone, and indulge everyone’s sensual whims eternally in dwellspace? We could do that, you know, for everyone, and still have plenty left over for the people who wanted to travel or go camping or whatever.”

  Aurigar stared at him. “I’ve never thought of that. I just thought there were a lot of shitty jobs someone had to do. Do you have an answer?”

  “Of course, dear fellow. We aristocrats are born with all the answers, you know, it’s just a matter of getting them loaded into our heads. And the answer is: there’s only one real pleasure; everything else is just satisfactions of urges. And the one real pleasure is getting one’s way over and against resistance. The only thing human beings really enjoy is making other people do what they don’t want to. Simple as that. Why do you think there are waiters, shop clerks, and prostitutes? In this age—and for the past thirty kilomarqs at least—everything they actually do or provide could be done better and cheaper by nano or dwell, and everyone could have as much of that as they want. We need poor people, and other gender and biological and spiritual underclasses, so that there will be people who—ideally hating it, or submissively fawning over it—must do what rich people tell them, because otherwise there’s no point to being rich. That’s all. Simple, isn’t it, dear fellow—now that you’re about to be rich?”

  Ninety-four, Aurigar thought, counting the number of times Cetuso called him “dear fellow.” He wasn’t sure yet why he was counting; he had only started to count them in the last day or so, but now his mind always watched that little register, the “dear fellow” count. And why am I able to keep it so accurately? For that matter, he thought, I knew so much about Waystonn that I would never need to know, and Cetuso prefers my advice to all others, even though I’m just a tenth-rate con man and procurer. And now my father, who was barely there when I was a child, surfaces in a critical memory—