The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  Aurigar realized. There was no better word—it was the first and only realization of his life.

  “Well,” he said. “I know how to make this work.” He was unsurprised to recall that Geepo owed him a large favor. “I know a man I can get, the best in the Empire in multimapping dwellfaces.”

  “Why would you know such a person and what would we want with him?”

  “Geepo is profoundly useful in salvage operations. Every so often, genetion goes wrong, or a girl decides to balk or try to escape, or for some reason her buyer simply cannot sell her physically, so we put her into dwell, and interface her into a simulation that generates decisions and behavior for some other simulation that is salable. A girl may dwell the life of a beautiful princess madly in love with a gallant knight, and behave accordingly in dwell, while dozens or hundreds of men assume the role of the traveling salesman—she experiences them as the knight, they experience her as the bored housewife. Not as good as real, but salable in the cheap markets.”

  “And this Geepo is good at dwellfaces?”

  “The very best in the human trades. The three times I’ve used him, he has been phenomenally expensive, and utterly worth it. He is difficult to work with, like every real artist, but certainly fond of money—”

  “Like every real artist. I believe I see your point.”

  Miriette beamed. “Three of you this time.” She smiled particularly at Geepo. “Do you prefer to explain the actual deal yourself, or are you one of those that always wants the lackeys to do the talking?”

  “Er, actually,” Geepo said, rubbing his upper lip in a way that made Aurigar think of rabbits, “I’m a lackey here myself.”

  “Oh,” she said, fixing him with the “you are fascinating” stare. “We’ll have to talk. Now, Aurigar, are you going to tell me what all this is about?”

  “Well,” he said, “I have convinced my principals that you could not be easily tricked into a dwelltank.”

  “From which I would never emerge?”

  “Exactly.”

  She nodded. “Then let me tell you what I guessed. Your principals, who are probably the owners of a certain very large chain of brothels based in the 11/6 arm of the galaxy—”

  “I have not named them,” Aurigar said.

  “Nor have I. At any rate, these principals of yours estimated that my managerial and business skills were considerably in excess of theirs, true?”

  “Actually they believe that left to yourself you would have a galactic monopoly within nineteen marqs.”

  “I was planning for eleven,” she said.

  “There is little doubt you know better than they,” Cetuso put in.

  “There is no doubt, Lord Leader Sir. Now, if they could get me to run their enterprise, that monopoly could be theirs, and soon. So you would have taken me to your palace in Jinkhangy, Lord Leader Sir, where all preparation would be under way for my ‘coronation.’ I would have gone into dwell for an ‘extensive briefing’ or ‘protocol training’ or whatever, and never have awakened in reality—but in dwell I would have gone through the coronation, appointed my cabinet, begun the process of ruling the galaxy. Back in reality, I would have been running all the brothels in the galaxy, through a multimapping interface.”

  “You have discerned the entire thing,” Cetuso said gravely. “I hope you are not offended. You must admit it was rather a good scheme.”

  “It was,” she admitted. “And their commitment to it is demonstrated by the sheer enormity of the bribe they must have offered you to take part. Tell me, Aurigar, how many of your other lost princesses are now ‘ruling the galaxy’ while actually doing accounts receivables for a discount clothing chain?”

  Aurigar shrugged, inwardly pleased that he had anticipated the question. “Being able to fake being a great lay is very common,” he said. “First-rate administrative talent is much rarer, and most businesses are not large or complex enough to need it. You are rather in the nature of a unique case.”

  “Of course I am; I should have realized. All right, then, let me propose an alternative. Your principals will hire me to run their entire operation for them, via dwell. For one-fifth of every day, time to be set by me, I will unhook, run my own operation, and do just as I please. My operation will not be absorbed into theirs. I expect generous compensation and a sizable piece of the overall operation. I will take a long list of precautions to make sure that I return from my first dwell, and I will be fully empowered while in dwellspace, so that I can arrange matters such that you will never dare to think of trying to hold me in dwellspace. Does that sound fair?”

  “I was carefully instructed,” Aurigar said, “not to argue about any issues regarding safeguards, or the definitions of words such as ‘generous’ or ‘sizable.’ Our principals are aware of the great need to rebuild the trust that they admittedly squandered. I think you may consider that we have a deal.”

  “Aurigar, my only remaining question is, why an honest pimp, con man, fraud, and kidnapper like yourself would get involved in something as nasty as large-scale corporate activity?”

  “The money was good.”

  “Oh, but if that’s your excuse, what will be next? Politics? Well, suit yourself, but I hate to see your talent squandered so squalidly.”

  “Can you see what she has been doing in there?” Cetuso asked, for the fifth time.

  Geepo shrugged, pulled his visor down, and spread his sensegloved fingers into the plextank before him. His fingers danced and wriggled over myriad pseudosurfaces. “Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, she has been through all the business records, penetrated all the locked files, and outcopied everything. She has also set up a remarkably complex and probably unanalyzable system of bombs, traps, alarms, triggers, and poisons so no one can ever hold her in dwellspace against her will.”

  “Of course,” Cetuso said, “you are keeping track of those and can enable us to keep her inside—”

  “That is not what was agreed to! It would be extremely unethical. Even the beginnings of an attempt would make detection certain by a person of ordinary skill, and the princess is building the cleverest protection I’ve ever seen. We are dealing with no mean or small mind here, Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, and I should be terrified to try to step in contrary to her wishes.”

  Cetuso’s tone was dark and the silver flashes in his eye sockets were ominous. “So there is no way to control her—all we can do is try to stay on her good side?”

  Remembering that the lord was three times Geepo’s weight in super-fast, superstrong muscle—and could not be prosecuted for killing a commoner—Geepo could barely nod.

  Cetuso sighed. “Well, Aurigar, from what you know of madams, would you want one running the galaxy?”

  “Well, yes and no, Lord Leader Sir. No, in that most of them are cruel and petty. Yes, in that they tend to be decisive, knowledgeable about human nature, and focused on the main chance.”

  “And from what I know of princesses, they have generally been pressured into some semblance of grace and largeness of spirit, but they are obsessed with improving people, prone to vacillating, and disdainful of the most practical and effective way of doing anything. Probably we are about to acquire an Empress with the personal ethics of a pimp and the broad vision of a spoiled aristocrat, about like any other political leadership of the last few kilomarqs. Hard on ordinary people I suppose, but what isn’t? And we have no reason to care about them. Time to pursue preferment, eh, dear fellow?”

  Four hundred thirty-two, and now it will turn out I already have preferment.

  “Already taken care of,” Geepo said. “I cast each of us, in the princess’s dwellspace, as particularly proficient branch managers, with dwellspace abilities mapped to our real talents on the outside. Your diplomatic ability, Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, for example, maps to a gift for motivating exotic women and attracting discerning customers—”

  “You mean I’ve been cast as a particularly classy pimp for jaded, kinky aristocrats?”

  “Exactly, Lord
Leader Sir. I would say you are certain to gain a post in the Inner Cabinet. Of course, interacting with you through her interface and yours, she will think you are that pimp, but when she communicates with you, her avatar on the screen will call you by your right name and cabinet rank. After a while, you will barely notice that anything is different.”

  “This mapping, between pimp and cabinet post—was it easy?”

  “Exceedingly so, Lord Leader Sir.”

  “I guessed as much.” The mirrors in his dark eye sockets flashed brightly a few times, and his blue face was still, except for the hint of a satisfied smile.

  Aurigar looked around from his command station. There were at least a thousand screenminders within sight, most of them directly over his head, and if it were not for the semicircle of plextanks in which he stood, each showing an aspect of the situation surrounding the six worlds remaining in rebellion, he might have been in any large orbiting office complex around any inhabited planet.

  But he was the commander of the Galactic Expeditionary Force, and he could confirm it by looking at the plextank showing six suns, all that remained of the Cleanlist Rebellion against the Empress; she had refused their surrender for the sake of example. At his touch, the plextank display rearranged to show up-close images of each system, no longer to scale, but with all six stars and seventeen inhabited worlds visible as spheres, the systems arranged in a hex around a central data console.

  It’s not even new, now, but it’s still strange, he thought, and idly plucked at the sleeve of the silly getup he had to wear in public.

  At his side, Cetuso said, “You’ve really done well for yourself, dear fellow.”

  “I suppose so, Lor—er, Cetuso.” Seventeen thousand four hundred twenty-seven.

  The blue man smiled. “Still not used to your peerage?”

  “I doubt I ever will be. To judge by the—”

  The image in the central tank vanished; Ululara, in full Imperial regalia, appeared. “Supremor Aurigar, are we ready?”

  He felt in the plextank once more, for form’s sake. “We are.”

  “Then proceed at once. We have a victory celebration to start.”

  Aurigar shrugged and spoke the order. More than a thousand screenminders watched for errors or to countermand as thousands of robots, each prepositioned on a sizable asteroid, sprayed the surface with trillions of nanobots. In a matter of a few hundred nanomarqs, well before any remote sensor could hope to detect them, the nanobots had spread their conducting filament-nets of conductors; an instant later, an antimatter fizzle bomb popped up from the main robot and burst, feeding energy into the nanobots’ vast antennae, supplying the energy for the transformation.

  “Only four not responding, sir,” Cetuso said; for this operation he was the Assistant Supremor.

  I like “sir” better than “dear fellow.” Aurigar nodded. “We expected fifteen to twenty intercepts. This is good.” Modern warfare, Aurigar reflected, was now all espionage, remote sensing, and cryptography; with nanobots, quantum computation, and jump tech, you would be hit by every weapon that you didn’t detect before it was fired. The four lost weapons had been found and mined by the enemy, killed perhaps three nanomarqs after activation, before they could even deploy their nanobots. Right now, light was spreading out from the antimatter fizzles that powered the conversion, and as the light reached them, a hundred thousand sensors in each of the uninhabited systems would be relaying it through jump transmitters to the enemy. They would know the attack was under way within seventeen micromarqs—but the enemy would not exist within one micromarq.

  Still, the enemy backlash must have started by now, their jumpweapons forming and leaping to revenge. Aurigar wondered whether the Imperial forces would take any hits at all; the last time, they had not, but intel estimated a 10 percent chance that the enemy had determined the location of Jinkhangy. To the Empress’s image in the plextank before him, he said, “Word on the enemy counterattack?”

  Geepo said, “Consider yourself congratulated, sir. Crypto, intel, and search found twenty-six enemy weapon seeds and mined them; they detonated simultaneously with our attack.”

  “Detonate” was not quite the right word; Aurigar’s silent mines had opened wormholes into the cores of blue-white giant stars, and the enemy weapons-to-be had vanished as planet-sized masses of stellar core had burst into existence within the asteroids on which they sat.

  “Any jumpspace interceptions?”

  “The usual. We sprayed the jumpspace approaches to Jinkhangy with interceptors. Thirteen hits, most of which were probably smugglers or ships that didn’t stick to the flight plan, which will certainly teach them a lesson. Our best estimate is that not more than three of them were enemy weapons. All in all, not just a successful operation but a cheap one, and—”

  “Silence, please, from everyone,” Aurigar said.

  They all fell quiet; his peculiar passion for dead silence at the moment of truth was legendary, and the legend was known to be accurate—as were the legends about what happened when he did not get that dread, respectful silence.

  Ululara’s image ghosted over the hex arrangement of the six Cleanlist systems, arranged to show stars and inhabited planets as spheres and the major stations as points. The countdown in the center of the plextank reached zero.

  Thirty-some stations flashed and were gone; an asteroid-mass of vacuum-energy receivers had popped out of jumpspace inside each one, converting instantaneously to relativistic nucleons. About forty million people, Aurigar thought, gone in less time than it takes a signal to cross a synapse.

  The view, with Ululara still ghosted over it, switched to just-activated sleeper satellites over the seventeen planets. Aurigar had just time to think of all the continents and oceans, cities, mountains, deserts, glaciers, temples to a thousand gods, dew-scented mornings and glorious stormy sunsets in progress, kisses never to be finished and hands reaching for each other that would never touch, eighty billion people and a trillion works of art.

  The jumpweapons entering the cores of the seventeen worlds opened wormholes to the great black hole at the galaxy’s core. Within the space of one breath, planetary surfaces sagged and fell like a deflating balloon. Each place where a planet had been flashed white-hot as the energy just outside the event horizon escaped from the ripping apart and the brutal collisions of the last bits of matter. Then the spy satellites, too, plunged into the black hole.

  The view switched briefly to more distant cameras; the black holes swelling from each wormhole were dark spheres, bending starlight weirdly around themselves, swelling for just a moment until the wormholes destabilized and the black ball of the event horizon contracted back to starry void.

  There was no point in sending the stars into nova, except as examples. That was all the point the Empress required. The six stars flared brilliantly; over the next few days they would briefly reach far out beyond their former habitable zones, and then gradually recede. Nothing would ever live in those systems again. In a few dekamarqs, the inhabitants of neighboring systems would throw carefully orchestrated festivals to celebrate the brief flarings in their night sky—and be reminded that though she was called “the merciful and mighty,” she remained Her Supreme Might.

  Aurigar sighed. He wondered how many of the eighty billion had been standing close to someone they loved, so that as that awful fall began, they had been able to clutch a hand or hug close to each other.

  Total forever: 17,427. Good enough. Aurigar drew a breath and waited.

  Geepo screamed.

  Cetuso made a strangled sound.

  Aurigar smiled. “That would be Jinkhangy,” he said. “Just a start; the provincial capital worlds are going even as we speak, and the galaxy is now swarming with self-replicating robots seeking out and blasting every instrument of Imperial authority into nucleons.”

  Geepo’s and Cetuso’s slack expressions were amusing, but Aurigar took no time to relish them. “Oh, the Cleanlists had to go, of course—evil as the Impe
rium, and ten times madder. Now, for my next act of public service, I eliminate the Imperium. The homeworlds of the high aristocracy are vanishing at this moment, and billions of ships hurrying around on Imperial business are turning to plasma in real space, or unresolvability in jumpspace. The people of each individual planet will work out their own destinies. All the stars are free.”

  The whole speech rang curiously flat, considering that Aurigar had been mentally rehearsing it since the “dear fellow” count was less than one thousand. Well, no doubt it is neither the first nor the last line well-composed in advance to be spoiled when it is delivered.

  Cetuso moaned, his jaw hanging open, and the mirrors and lenses in his eye sockets turned slowly and out of coordination; probably he had not yet understood. Aurigar considered taunting him—your favorite lackey, my dear fellow! was not what you thought. You and your adored Empress and the whole aristocracy and system of domination perish now! and I shall piss upon your steaming remains. But whereas the thought was swift as light itself, the words would have been far too slow, so before Cetuso’s moan of uncomprehending despair acquired even a hint of comprehension, Aurigar slashed the cutting laser vertically from the blue man’s head to his feet, so that he fell into two pieces with steam pouring from his flash-cooked guts in the middle.

  Aurigar stepped forward, looked down into the red gap between the blue half-faces, and smelled the roasted reek of the man’s entrails. The mirrors and lenses now flashed and turned with the last of their momentum. He holstered his weapon, opened his trousers, and urinated, filling the eye sockets. “For every time you fed me, for every time you said I amused you, and for seventeen thousand four hundred twenty-seven times you called me ‘dear fellow.’”

  Geepo was sobbing.