The Duke of Uranium

by John Barnes

Slec was dense, swift, heavy-to-light in a moment, yet sustained through a whole evening. If it wasn't possible to really record what happened when a group like Y4UB worked in a space like Centrifuge with a toktru singing-on crowd, that was part of the charm. You genuinely had to be there.

  Things always started simply. When the band was founding the first set, they started with a beat, some colored light, a few sounds, and a random pattern of turn-bling for the room as a whole; everyone would get up and begin to dance in the air, at first tentatively, and the band would look for some interesting moves or appearances from which to grow the first piece. It was widely believed, anyway, that if you moved with confidence, you were much more likely to attract the attention of the band, and if that happened, the piece would be more about you than about most of the crowd—about as deep a compliment as you could hope for.

  Jak was good at slec; everyone said he was one of the lightest dancers. But Sesh was in her own class, toktru superb. She danced like an eagle flies, as if she had been shaped to no other purpose. Jak was athletic and gymnastic, and many people had told him he was very graceful—he privately attributed it to all the practice at the Disciplines—but when he danced with Sesh, he always felt just a tiny bit clumsy, by comparison with her unerring grace; her sheer shining style seemed to rebuke the universe for not being as beautiful as it ought to be. Dancing with her, Jak seemed a little awkward to himself, as if he were having to jerk slightly to stay on her beat, and a little colorless, as if even his best moves were faded, and a little heavy, as if he had somehow slipped out of fashion.

  On the other hand, Jak consoled himself, hardly anyone else could keep up with Sesh at all.

  Dujuv and Myxenna weren't quite on the same level as dancers that Sesh and Jak were, but they were still a delight to watch; his powerful panth body flowed like a fine martial artist doing katas, and Myx's confident eroticism seemed to say, "Well, yes, of course, I'm the most beautiful person you've ever seen, and of course you want to."

  Jak had given up on dancing with Myx for three reasons; first of all, he tended to take on some of the characteristics of his partner, and it was simply more pleasant to take on Sesh's joyful finesse and singing-on style than it was to take on Myxenna's aggressive sexiness. Secondly, when he danced with Myx, it always upset Dujuv, who then had to pretend that he was not upset (something at which he was rarely any good), and it wasn't worth it to Jak to precess his toktru tove. Finally, Jak just hated the jokes Sesh made about "midair optical fucking."

  Tonight the mesh between Y4UB and the four friends was singing-on. In the first ten minutes, Y4UB pulled a melody sample off Sesh and a counterpoint bass line from Jak. Shortly after they pulled a color-wash mix off a close pass between Myx and Duj. Then the sampling cameras flew away to look elsewhere, and the four swung into stunts (when they were sampling you, stunts confused the AIs and made it likely that they would just pass over you).

  Jak and Sesh clasped hands as their four feet touched surface, hitting the gravity just as it went perpendicular at perhaps .01 g. As they bounced away, the gravity shifted about sixty degrees and decreased by half. They took advantage of that, shooting into a big swing, orbiting each other joined by outstretched arms, and then releasing into one of their signature moves, the double Immelman.

  At least that was what Jak thought they were going to do. He arched into the big arc, belly outward, embracing a circle about five meters in diameter, and came around. When he reached over his head, looking up to catch Sesh in a trapeze-grab, there was no one there.

  He tucked and spun, processing, tumbling so that he could look for her. He expected to find that either some oaf had forced Sesh out of her flight path, or some gweetz had tried to cut in (and that Sesh had already given him an educational clop to the chops).

  Instead, below and to the side, well away from anywhere Sesh would have gone naturally, he saw her struggling with four men, all of them much too old to be in here. They were dragging her to an emergency exit.

  One of them, his back turned toward Jak, had her head locked in his armpit. One was fighting to get her wrists together to bind them, one was just in process of tying her ankles, and the fourth was airswimrning a tow line toward the emergency exit.

  Jak didn't hesitate; he felt his mind become cool, blank, and alert as it did in the Disciplines, and he tucked and dove, taking advantage of another shift of the great tumbling ball that was Centrifuge. He airswam as fast as he could, building up as much momentum as twenty meters would allow.

  They were paying no attention to him, so he went after the one holding Sesh's head. Jak came in on his back, as fast as he could, hitting with the classic sucker block, the way that a defensive back in slamball does when the offside slammer loses track of the defense.

  Jak's shoulder rammed against the backs of the man's thighs. He grabbed the back of the man's shirt and spun. The man flipped backward abruptly, and as Jak released him, his face swung into place to be a perfect target for a two-footed kick. With all his strength, Jak drove his heels into the man's cheeks.

  The reaction shot Jak out of the fight and into a return loop, while hurling his opponent away in a backward end-for-end spin, probably unconscious. One malph out of the melee, anyway.

  As Jak swung around in his return loop, his hands biting air as hard as he could, something bright-colored streaked through his peripheral vision, screaming like a cat on fire. Dujuv was getting into the fight.

  Jak finished his loop and closed in on the heet who had been airswimming the line; Duj swooped down on the man tying Sesh's ankles, snagging a grip on his coat to carry the man along, putting him on the outside of a recurved turn, and hurling him away with the split-reed throw, all but instantly. The man was probably not out of the fracas for good but it would take some seconds for him to get back to it.

  In the background, Jak could hear someone shouting, "All in now't Panth! They have a panth!" Now he was a bare two meters from his opponent. He coiled to attack.

  The back of Jak's head seemed to cave in and he started to tumble. The pain was horrible and he could barley focus his eyes. He caught a glimpse of Dujuv tangled in a net, two men holding the lines, a third one whaling away at the bagged panth with a jointed bat. Duj was screaming with rage and thrashing fiercely, but he was helpless.

  Jak's tumbling arc brought him up against the outer surface, awkwardly, making his back sting and his head ring even more. He saw Sesh, again, and sprang off the wall, trying to get back into the brawl.

  There were now six of them surrounding her. Jak's back was still numb from impact. His head wasn't what it should be after the blow he had taken there. As he closed in, the men airswimming to meet him seemed to move faster than anyone should be able to in micrograv-ity, and there was a wavering about them that he didn't like.

  Sesh was tied completely and gagged, and the line was towing her toward the emergency exit, faster than Jak could swim to her. Their eyes met for just a moment; he could see her terror pleading for rescue, in that bare instant before the rotation shifted again, and he lost his orientation as the netting flew around him, grabbed him in a fierce hug, and spun him in a dizzy whirl.

  Her final scream, smothered by the gag, felt to Jak like a kick in the stomach. Sesh was dragged out of his field of view. The net yanked brutally, taking Jak, wrapped in it, up against the outer surface just as the gravity shifted that way. He saw boots touching down all around him. Then there was a flurry of fists, feet, and clubs, fading rapidly into terrible pain and utter darkness.

  Chapter 3

  You at Least Understand That There Are Two Teams

  Jak had enjoyed so many intrigue-and-adventure stories whose second or third chapter began with some sentence, image, or experience like "He awoke in a white room" that his first thought, when he awoke in the white room, was that he must be dreaming one of those stories. It seemed likely that he was, actually. Assuming the rules for that type of story were being followed, almost always, the white room would turn out, o
n further investigation, to be a hospital room. As Jak adjusted to being awake, he specked that he was in a hospital room.

  On the other hand, he couldn't even remember being in pain at all in a dream, and he was in considerable pain right now. But in the stories, he should have been in pain…

  He drifted back into dreams that he was sure were dreams.

  When his eyes opened again, he saw the same hospital room. At a minimum, this was a recurring dream.

  In a story, this is where someone would come by to explain what's going on, so any moment someone should show up to tell me what happened… after. . . The thought seemed incomplete, and he tried to finish it for a while, drifting close again to rejoining the for-sure dreams.

  After I got wanged.

  It all came back—Sesh, the kidnapping, the fight. Jak really was in a hospital room, flat on his back, after a bad wanging. For a while he had been hearing the flat mechanical voice of a monitor repeating "Brain activity shows that the patient is awake." A face moved into Jak's view, and resolved into Uncle Sib.

  Still confused and thinking of what happened in stories, Jak asked, "Are you going to say I gave you all a good scare?"

  "Actually, you didn't," Sibroillo said, smiling. "No. Not at all. By the time they called me, they knew that you were going to make it, so the question was how fast they could get your neuro repaired, and they could tell me right away that you were not in any real danger. Your friend Dujuv Gonzawara has already been up for more than a day—probably that enhanced healing they build into a panth—and you'll be all done in sixteen hours or so. You'll recover faster, they say, if you're conscious now and then, which is why they're waking you up now, even though the regenerating nerves sting like hell."

  "They do," Jak agreed.

  "We don't think you're even going to lose much short-term memory. You have a pretty hard head and your brains don't rattle around nearly as much as I would have guessed. We could have awakened you two days ago, in fact, but we waited for major tissue regeneration to finish, so that you would only know in the abstract that one of your testicles had been raptured and one of your eyes had been thumbed out, after you were unconscious. Since you now have new ones as good as the originals, it shouldn't really matter, but—"

  "It probably shouldn't," Jak agreed, "but, toktru, it precesses me all the same. Which eye and which nut?"

  "The left, for both. But you're good as new now."

  "The principle matters," Jak said. "I was already unconscious, so they had no reason to do that."

  "Probably just sending you a message," Sib agreed. "They did it after they had already grabbed Sesh Kirop-ing and the snatch team had escaped with her."

  "Sesh! I didn't even think—"

  "Of course not, you were unconscious."

  "Well, uh, yeah. Okay. But why would anyone kidnap her, anyway? I guess her family is rich—do they still kidnap people for ransom? It seems like something you read about in history books. I never heard of it happening—"

  "It still happens, but very rarely. And it's not what happened to Sesh."

  "Well, then, does anyone have any idea where she is? Do you know what they wanted with her? Why would anyone kidnap Sesh?"

  "That's three forms of the same question, as I've been trying to explain to cops, soldiers, and diplomats for the last four weeks."

  "Four weeks! Sesh could be anywhere! They could have done anything to her!"

  "Well, no, Jak. Not at all. As I've been trying to explain to all these idiot officials (with very little success, by the way) we can make a very good guess about where she is and what is happening to her, and though it is very serious, she is in no personal danger, and we undoubtedly still have plenty of time."

  Jak could not believe that Sib was taking this so calmly. "Her parents must be in a panic. They got so worked up about it whenever I brought her home an hour late—"

  "Her parents? They barely know her and they're much more concerned with the politics of the situation." Sib seemed extremely puzzled, as if Jak had brought up the most irrelevant possible point. Then he laughed. "Oh, my. You mean Pritararu and Feyxorra. Well, of course, they're upset, and they are fond of her, but they're also professionals, and this was a very slick job and no one is going to hold it against them—"

  "Professionals?"

  Uncle Sib appeared, if possible, more astonished than before. "So she didn't tell you at all! We all assumed that she would eventually—that's part of why we threw the two of you together, so that she'd have a safe confidant and one we could watch—goodness! And she never divulged a word of it. Didn't even tell you that those were her guards, not her parents—damn near perfect security habits. She's quite a girl! You rarely see anyone like that, especially not that young. When I was in service to the Satrap of—"

  "Where is she and what is going on?" Jak hissed. He had never before dakked how maddening it was to need information from someone that you really wanted to strangle.

  Sibroillo blinked a couple of times, and then said, con-tritely, "Of course, Sesh means a great deal to you, in a completely nonprofessional way, eh? And here I am talking about her as just part of the job, and you worrying all the time. All right, I'll clear it up a bit.

  "Now, to understand where Sesh is, properly, you have to understand who she is, which is not Sesh Kirop-ing, but Shyf Karrinynya, or more formally, Her Utmost Grace the Princess Shyf, Eleventh of the Karrinynya Dynasty of the Kingdom of Greenworld, by the Blessed Choice of Mother Gaia. And as a matter of practical politics, she's the heir to the throne whenever her father, King Scaboron, retires or dies."

  "A princess…" Jak let the thought settle slowly into his mind; it didn't fit well or comfortably, and he kept trying to find something that would help him make sense of the idea that his beautiful, funny toktru-tove-and-sex-partner, who he knew as a passionate clothes-horse, gossip, and dancer… was supposed to one day rule a kingdom. After struggling for a moment, he managed to blurt out, "No wonder she wasn't worried about finding a job."

  Sib grinned. "Toktru! As your friends would put it. No wonder. I can't quite believe she never told you. What an astonishing grasp of security protocol, in a person so young! It seems very unfair that she should be kidnapped when she was so extraordinarily good about security practices, now doesn't it? I really must insist that you go and get her back from her captors, as soon as you're fit to travel."

  "Uncle Sib, you can't possibly mean that we're rich enough to pay a princess's ransom?"

  "We have a wealth of information, pizo, and that's worth more than cash, as a common rule. And I didn't say we were going to pay a ransom, I said you were going to go get her. Different operation entirely. Now, the orange light has come on over your head, which means that you've had about the optimal load of brain stimulation for this time awake, and it's time for you to go back to sleep. So do. Have some confusing dreams filled with pointless anxiety, and when you're awake again, we'll talk some more."

  The world seemed reassuringly familiar, probably because Jak was used to being confused, annoyed, and pre-cessed by his uncle. He immediately felt better and slid down toward sleep. "Where is Greenworld, anyway?" he murmured. "Is it that big island on earth where Narssaq Pock is?"

  "No," Sib said, "it's in the Aerie, at the tip of the eighth branch. Greenworld is a kingdom low in wealth, middling in size, and huge in importance. The principal products are—"

  Some reflexes are so deeply conditioned that nothing overpowers them, not even physical pain, concern for a friend, or anger at having been battered and mutilated. The moment that Sib began to lecture about politics and economics, Jak fell into deep, dreamless, refreshing sleep.

  Thirst woke him. He sat up in bed with only minor pain from stiff muscles, and a mechanical arm reached down and extended a black nipple; he sucked a long, cold, delicious draft of icewater.

  As soon as he finished the deep, chilling drink, he truly singing-on dakked what he desperately needed.

  The toilet stall was only a me
ter from his bed, and Jak had bounced back into bed, hoping not to get caught in case he wasn't supposed to be up, before he realized how much better he must be, if he could do all that with no difficulty.

  That was pleasant, but not as pleasant as the machines asking him if he was hungry and presenting him with a menu. He immediately ordered one of everything, plus an extra one of all the things he especially liked.

  Every plate of the main courses was demolished, and at least fifty percent of each dessert was gone as well, before he recalled his conversation with Uncle Sib. He continued eating and contemplated what it all might mean. The djeste of it seemed to be that he was about to get his wish for travel, and quite possibly for adventure. Somehow it all seemed like an intrigue-and-adventure viv, and though Jak was singing-on good at those, he had no illusions that it could have really prepared him for the real thing.

  Well, Sib seemed to speck that whatever trouble Sesh was in, Jak could get her out of it. It wasn't much comfort—he kept thinking of her, hurt and scared, and he couldn't imagine what he could do if she was being held against her will. After all, he hadn't been particularly effective at keeping her from being kidnapped in the first place. Nonetheless, if Uncle Sib thought he could do it, very likely it would turn out that he could.

  He turned the issue over and over in his head as he continued to eat. The food wasn't bad and there was plenty.

  He finally reached the point where one more dessert would be too many, slipped out of bed again to wash his face and hands, and slid back in, trying to decide between looking for pornography on the hospital's entertainment screens, calling up Dujuv to see if he was doing anything interesting yet, or just getting more sleep. He decided that Dujuv would be the most entertaining.

  His tove's face on the screen was a little more battered than it had ever been before, which added some character, but also made Jak think of what a going over the two of them must have had, to still look like that after so many days. Duj was grinning. "Hey, tove, you're still with me. I told'em you were too ugly to kill."