The Duke of Uranium

by John Barnes

  The attacker lost one end of the cord, and though it dragged and burned, it flew off Jak's neck. He avoided gasping, and instead expelled his trapped air in a ki-ai! as he kicked where the attacker's head should have been, trying to fly backward to get a moment for a good breath. But as Jak kicked, the attacker's foot supped up the inside of Jak's thigh, using it to guide in until the ball of the opponent's foot slammed into Jak's armored cup.

  A bell rang.

  Jak went limp for an instant, calmed himself, took that long-delayed breath, then stood and bowed. "So now it's 2030 to 1489 overall."

  Sib laughed. "Still obsessed with the score, eh? But most of my wins happened when you were twelve years old and just starting to do this." He held up his hand and spoke into his purse. "What's the score between Jak and me over the last two years, and what do the stats look like in general?"

  "477 to 434 across the last two years," the purse said. "Across the last year, 231 to 226. It is projected that within one year, at present rates of change, Jak Jinnaka will surpass you in probability of success. In about eleven years at present rates of change, Jak will surpass you overall."

  'Thank you, off," Sib said. "You see, Jak? All a matter of patience. Now we need to get you fed fast enough so you'll have time to get all prettied up for your concert. Let me just okay the food delivery and they should be ready to vac it over. As it happens, I noticed that you went to the Old China Cafe for your after-school meal, so rather than Chinese I'm having Lunar Greek delivered—baked hamster with bechamel on glutles, with mango pastry for dessert—if you can manage to force that down."

  It was Jak's favorite takeout, and they both knew it. "I guess I'll have to. Wouldn't want to hurt your feelings."

  They had all agreed to meet up at the Genorma Ferry Station, to catch the gripliner over to Centrifuge together; the four of them would take a private compartment together. Jak was the first to arrive, which was typical. He waited in the vast, echoing lobby. Most of the time gripliners ran nearly empty; there were just a few peak-time trips that filled up. Thus most of the time the big space wasn't needed for arriving or departing crowds, and it merely looked like a very large and unattractive abandoned shopping mall with an unusual ceiling display. In the great vaulted ceiling, divided into thousands of meter-wide windows, the eight cables that connected Genorma Station on the Hive with Amroneg Station on the Ring formed silvery lines cutting through the stars; the cables ran to just outside the windows, for the gripliner airlocks were positioned in an octagon around the lobby. As Jak watched, a gripliner was just arriving, a silver cylinder the size of three gymnasiums sliding down the bright line of the linducer cable like a drop of mercury on a wire, as it lost the very last of its speed before slipping into the airlock to dock.

  Jak wandered aimlessly around the central shopping area, shuttered now because it was still some hours until First Shift would be getting up and going to work. As he made one trip or another around the cluster of cafes, newsstands, and office supply stores, Dujuv would turn up.

  Glancing at his reflection in the shop windows as he passed, Jak thought he was doing a superior job of being conspicuous in a good way—his clothes for the evening were the very model of clash-splash-and-smash; he looked right from head to foot. He had chosen to wear his new singlet with spirals of nonfunctional buttons, over his zebra print coverall, with lace-up red gripslip-pers with grown-lizard soles. Over the singlet, he wore his lavender cutaway with big, droopy, double-rolled sleeves, popular that year at the Academy and just starting to spread down into gen school; he'd have to take that off, of course, for the dancing, but right now it definitely added. The unattached collar and bowler hat completed the look; he stood out in a way that said he had taste and style, not quite perhaps at the heliopause of fashion, but toktru his orbit was close to tangential to it.

  The crowd now coming in for the next gripliner seemed to be mostly families with young children. Jak remembered vaguely that there was a big public play area near Centrifuge, so quite possibly it was just all the Third Shifters who had the day off. The station echoed with screams and shouts; very low gravity is a hard place in which to cope with very small children—when they can leap five meters into the air, and they take ten full seconds to descend from that height, more if they air-swim, little kids rapidly begin exploring whole new dimensions of misbehavior. Jak quickly lost count of the number of times he heard a parent hissing or growling to a child, "Do that one more time and I'll leash you like a two-year-old."

  Not that leashes on two-year-olds were doing much good; the common slang for a two-year-old on a leash was "yoyo," and not merely for the resemblance to the toy. As Jak watched, two leashes, then two tantrums, then two mothers all became hopelessly entangled.

  His view through the big viewports in the central dome far over his head was disturbed only by the occasional high-jumping older child. The stars seemed motionless overhead, although the ferry station crawled along the big track that circled the Hive. The Hive itself didn't rotate at all; there was no reason for it to do so, since it got its gravity from the black hole of the power plant at its center, and kept its sunside cool and its dark-side warm with an active circulatory system. But gravity was a drawback for many industrial processes and recreation in zero-g was one of the great pleasures to which humanity had become addicted in a millennium and a half of spaceflight. Hence the Ring orbited the Hive at a distance of about 3500 kilometers above its surface decks, a tubular industrial park, playground, port, sports arena, farm, and whatever else it needed to be, less than half a kilometer across but more than 28,000 km long. It was connected by a few hundred ribbons of linducer track running between regularly-spaced gripliner stations on the underside of the Ring and moving stations on the great track that belted the Hive, so that the Hive-side stations followed along, like a toy dog on wheels, under the Ring. Thus the gripliner stations were the only places on the Hive that had regular, predictable days and nights and rising and setting stars.

  Just at the moment, the station was rolling around the dark side of the Hive, and the sun was brightly lighting the Ring, which appeared as a thin white streak running all the way across the dome of the sky, with a barely discernible thickness.

  Upholding tradition, Dujuv was the next to arrive. He was dressed like Jak but more conservatively, so his clothes clashed rather more, still showing the influence of the hyperbolic clash-splash-and-smash of the last generation. Everything was patterned and all the patterns seemed to vibrate against each other; his cutaway was asymmetric and his bowler had a diffracting surface on which jagged rainbows danced. The eye settled on his clothing less easily than on Jak's, but with his beautiful panth's body, he didn't quite need so much help from his clothes. Still, he could have done a bit better, with a bit more imagination; he was about five percent to the heavy side of Jak.

  "You look perfect," Jak lied.

  The girls appeared exactly as late as they were supposed to. It was the decade of underwear and slashing, anyway, and in the varying microgravity of Centrifuge, what was under a skirt would matter at least as much as the skirt itself. They both wore cling bodices under frilly camisoles under three filmy layers of slashed sleeveless tops, with everything pulled through; below the waist, they wore open-fronted gozzies cut to a modest mid-thigh (for Sesh) and a millimeter short of arrest (for Myx), beneath which they wore several layers of decorated pants, also all pulled through the slashing. Natu-rally Sesh wore simple zero-g athletic slippers for dancing, and Myxenna wore red spike-heeled boots for effect. The combination of slashes, openings, and translucencies made a swirl of flattering color, and the constantly frustrated expectation of seeing more than was intended would "draw the cameras, toktru," Jak said, appreciatively. "You could both end up as motifs."

  Dujuv was still gaping.

  "Oh, honestly, I just look toktru light," Myx said. "It's still me, Dujy. Toktru." She grabbed him and kissed him hard, which seemed to bring him out of that spell, and plunge him into another.
>
  Once they boarded the gripliner, they had just time to settle into their compartment, reclining their seats fully and opening their complimentary drinks, before the gripliner headed out to the Ring. Linducers like those on the gripliners and Pertrans produced constant force, which meant constant acceleration, which was experienced as constant gravity, just as Einstein or Newton might have explained it. The gripliners shot along their cables at .9 g, accelerating all the way to flipover at the midpoint, then, after the five seconds of weightlessness while the view out the windows rotated 180°, slowed at the same .9 g for the rest of the way. The trip would take about twenty-two minutes.

  To the four toves, it seemed that they reclined in comfortable chairs, in relatively high gravity, while the Hive fell away from them; then after eleven minutes, there was a brief disorienting whirl; and then for eleven more minutes they reclined as the Ring rose under them and resolved itself into a great belt of light, then of greenery, then of streets and homes and workplaces, until finally it was the ground about to be beneath their feet—but it never quite became that, because the gripliner slowed all the way to dock inside the Ring, joining it in free fall, and once it did, there was no "beneath."

  As they emerged from the gripliner, Jak treated himself to a look back at the Hive; he always loved this view. Though they were 3500 km from its surface, the giant space station was eighty times the apparent width of the sun, more than a fifth as wide as the sky itself. The tiny dots of the stations rolling on their tracks ceaselessly around the Hive, the whirling flash of thin silver that was the launch loop at the Hive's North Pole, and the sparkling engine flares of the little Maintefice rockets carrying workers around on the surface all delighted him. There was something about knowing that you lived in the grandest place in the universes.

  Centrifuge was only about thirty km from Amroneg Station, where the gripliner docked on the Ring, and the Pertrans took only moments to get them from the station to the club. The club itself was a great windowless steel sphere, a quarter of a kilometer across, encaged in a webwork of steel girders; at the moment it was stationary, and the transparent bridge tube from the Ring to the club was open. The four toves walked up the bridge tube, stars at their feet, over their heads and all around them, to find that as always, Sesh's sense of timing had been singing-on, and they arrived at the back of a short line, just before a long line accumulated behind them.

  In the weightless interior of the sphere, they swam away from the bridge entrance, which would be closed when the concert began, and into the vast chamber. At its center, about fifteen meters across, was a transparent sphere that contained the booths, monitors, seats, and control boards that Y4UB was setting up and checking out. Once the slec started, the bridge entrance would be closed and the club would tumble, generating artificial gravity whose direction and force constantly changed, while the central sphere remained motionless and weightless within.

  While Y4UB set up and checked out their equipment, a few of the more passionate technogweetzes floated around the central sphere watching them, but everyone else just floated in the immense enclosed space, hanging around and talking to friends. As always, one of the prime topics was whether or not Centrifuge would stay open.

  The owners of Centrifuge would no doubt have liked it if they could have gotten continuous use out of the place, like most spaces on the Ring; this was some of the lightest real estate in the solar system. But Centrifuge was really only suitable to slec, and there just wasn't any other use for such a space. Slec had a following big enough so that the revenues were attractive, but it had never quite broken through to a mass audience, probably because its esthetic required people to experience it live and dancing—there would be little point in listening to pure audio recordings of it, and no one, as yet, had specked a way to position and operate cameras for a remote audience to toktru dak the djeste. So each successive team of investors thought that the time for mass market slec had arrived, and each turned out to be wrong, and Centrifuge went on closing and re-opening. "Sooner or later someone will lose patience enough to convert the place to some other use," Myxenna pointed out. "Or they'll come up with whatever else you can do in a microgravity space where the gravity varies in both force and direction at random. It pretty much has to happen. By that time we'll probably be old gwonts and won't care about slec, anyway."

  "That's kind of sad," Dujuv said.

  "Very sad. So we'd better have fun while it lasts," she said. "I'm going to circulate—it's better to get the diem carpe'd while it's still fresh." She tucked, rolled, air-kicked, drifted to the side, and sprang off hard, shooting by the central sphere and arcing to disappear behind it.

  "Duj, if you go following after her, you'll look toktru pathetic," Jak said. "She'll come back in a while."

  The panth relaxed a moment and then sighed. "But if I don't, I'll wonder what she's up to."

  "She's finding a bunch of overmuscled, underclothed heets to flirt with," Sesh said, impatiently. "Now you know. So stick around your toktru toves and relax a little, masen?"

  He did, for about ten minutes, until he saw Myx floating in a knot of heets. Then he made the face that meant he knew he was being a gweetz but couldn't help himself. With a sigh, Dujuv pushed off on a trajectory that would allow him to drift gradually into the crowd that floated steadily around Myx as she slowly circled the room, perhaps twenty meters from the great curving burnished-silver wall. As he joined the crowd, Sesh observed, "It's sort of like a solar system. There's Dujuv, orbiting in close, like a planet, and then a flock of heets orbiting further away but trying to get in, like the Kiuper Belt, and then a few girls hanging around at the very outer edges, like the Oort Cloud."

  "Except that when one of the comets gets out of the Kuiper Belt and heads in toward the sun, it's Duj that goes hyperbolic," Jak said.

  "First one of us that accuses the other of being elliptical gets slapped."

  "Toktru."

  "Seriously, though," Sesh said, "Myx and Duj. After all this time, I still don't understand it. They're so different, I don't dak how they dak each other." She pulled herself around so that she could float comfortably face-to-face with Jak, legs and arms gently intertwined.

  Jak shrugged. "I know what he sees in her. I just don't speck how he can keep seeing it."

  "I never get it either." She looked at the crowd, again, and laughed. "I have to admit that she's funny and charming and sexy—"

  "And singing-on beautiful."

  Sesh nodded eagerly. 'Toktru beautiful. But Duj has this weird throwback loyal-monogamy obsession, and Myx can't possibly fit into that anywhere. The strange thing is that he could find more than enough attractive girls, who would love to be his demmy, and they'd really dak what he wanted and give it to him. So I don't know why he's obsessed with getting Myxenna Bonxiao, of all people, to behave contrary to her nature. I mean—when you were with her, what, a few times—"

  'Twice."

  "You didn't try to get her to be anything other than the way she is."

  "The way she is, is what I was interested in," Jak said.

  Sesh beamed at him. "That's my tove. And you've always let me have the same feets. But with Duj… can you imagine what he's going to be like when he's touring with his slamball team—and knowing him, he'll be getting plenty while he's on the road—and she's at the PSA, with a lot of smart ambitious heets?"

  "My tove will be absolutely completely totally insane, toktru. But he's used to that."

  Sesh was about to say something, but the great curving walls around them began to move slightly, and a low bass rumble echoed back and forth across Centrifuge; Y4UB was founding their first piece.

  Slec, like so many other kinds of contemporary art, was third remove. The first remove had been the solution to problems of technical execution, something that had begun even before spacefaring; today the djeste of the first remove was so complete that only hobbyist-antiquarians bothered to learn to use hand tools like brushes, pencils, or guitars, or to compose sent
ences or place cameras. The second remove was that of routine creativity: in the last few centuries, AIs had become complex and proficient enough so that if you gave them the outlines of a few "highlight" scenes or a good central image, they could write a Shakespeare play, Kundera novel, or Petrarch sonnet that was singing-on like the real thing; given a photograph, they could paint the scene in a way a human being couldn't distinguish from Leonardo or Van Gogh; given a sequence of a few pitches, they could compose so like Beethoven that Beethoven himself couldn't have heard the difference. And once there were AIs that could do that, the process was instantly industrialized, so that nowadays it produced the background noise or the intellectual wallpaper of civilization.

  The third remove was the synesthetic remove, developed just in the last couple of generations. For thousands of years creators had relied on an intuitive sense that some music was "blue" or "red," or that a given curve on a sculpture was "sweet" or that it "sang," or that high comedy is like a souffle"; sufficient time and processing capability had led to machines for which such metaphors were not merely intelligible, but meaningful and machine-processable.

  Y4UB was not so much a band of musicians as it was a team of engineer-critics, who could sweep through hundreds of cameras to look for the interesting dance move, the worthwhile facial expression, the pose, the clothes, or the bons mots, sample that, feed it to the synthesizer, and turn it into melody, motif, harmony, or rhythm for the jamming AIs that wove the endless music. Each member of Y4UB was also a proficient phraser, tossing ideas^ and words into the mix via their microphones, where they sometimes became parts of the light show, sometimes bits of the music, now and then an overall theme, and even, sometimes, lyrics for any of the thousands of synthesized voices that might break from the speakers at any moment.