The Duke of Uranium

by John Barnes

  Jak sighed. "They tell me it's more like a few seconds of excitement a year. Anyway, I am getting an early start. I'm sort of an irregular—I have a relative in the business and this is my entree to it."

  "Well, it's good that you're getting a start," Clevis said, gulping a big mouthful of a sticky red-orange pudding. "It's certainly much more exciting than what most wasps end up doing with their lives."

  Jak knew that Hive citizens were commonly called wasps, and that the term could be friendly, hostile, or anything between, but this was the first time he'd heard it used with complete neutrality—just the name of the thing. "I'm afraid you've dakked it singing-on," he said. "The Hive is rich and safe, so if you want excitement you have to look elsewhere. People complain, all the time, about that."

  Piaro said, "Now that's one way crewies are toktru not different. On the ship, people complain, all the time, about always being worried."

  "We even name our families after our anxieties," Pabrino pointed out, and the conversation drifted back to crewie naming customs.

  At the end of dinner, Jak was happy to find he was invited to the Bachelors' Mess on a permanent basis; furthermore, besides Piaro, two more heets who practiced the Disciplines wanted to spar with him, Brill wanted to play chess, and Pabrino wanted to play Maniples, although they would have to carefully work out when the possible time was since a Maniples match was more in-teresting and challenging if it was continuous, playing one took a double shift, and double shifts off were rare. But Clevis and Brill had some control over scheduling, and would be happy to create the block of time for Pabrino to play against Jak—"After all," Brill explained, "we're all going to bet on it."

  Jak returned to his stateroom feeling that this voyage wasn't going to be nearly so long as it had seemed just a few hours before.

  Chapter 5

  They Weren't Trying to Trick You, Exactly

  In the next few days, Jak could hardly help noticing that while he really liked his newfound toves, they had things to do and he didn't. Piaro, Pabrino, Clevis, and Brill were all toktru toves, but games, conversations, workouts, and sparring all ended the same way—whoever Jak was with had to go work.

  Jak didn't resent his new toves for having to work— after all, they would all be on the Spirit for the rest of their lives and it only made sense for them to contribute to it. What bothered him was that he had nothing to go and do; neither his outward nor his secret missions required him to do anything other than enjoy the ride as best he might. It made him feel nonfunctional, probably the way an S.P. felt all the time, and that made him think of Sesh… he realized that he missed her very badly, perhaps because shipboard rules were set up so that normally you could only see crewies of the gender you weren't attracted to, so he hadn't seen anyone female, distant glimpses and one elderly passenger excepted, since coming aboard.

  He didn't know it at the time, but he was already working on that problem. He had let his secondary cover story spill just as Uncle Sib had told him to do, and was happy to see that Sib apparently knew his craft. Unlike on the Hive, onboard a ship, adult and teenage crewies talked and gossiped all the time, instead of keeping to their own social circles. Consequently, Jak's story of being an apprentice diplomatic courier could not possibly hold up with adults; real diplomatic couriers were older, well-trained specialists, and routine corporate couriers weren't paid enough to travel interplanetary. Besides, shipment by stealthed drop capsule was normally more secure—"You can intercept anyone, somewhere, because they have to travel with a big heat source and something to make air and food, at low accelerations, and all that usually gives you a way in," Uncle Sib had explained, "but a black surface-chilled radar-transparent sphere the size of a volleyball, traveling cold and ballistic, along any of an infinite number of orbits millions of miles long, is a real interception problem."

  Jak's claim to be an apprentice in a family business (in an industry in which there were no family businesses) was the "secondary cover"—the story designed to be blown in order to make the primary cover more believable.

  The primary cover lay slightly closer to the truth. It was that Jak was infatuated with Princess Shyf after his long relationship with her (very nearly true); that he was carrying a message from the King of Greenworld to Psim Cofinalez, demanding that he release the Crown Princess (in the neighborhood of the truth); that doing this was extremely risky (mildly risky—Psim was thought to have relatively little of the celebrated Cofinalez personality made up of equal parts of rage, im-petuousness, and aggression); that Jak had volunteered to do it (true) because everyone else was afraid to (false); and that Jak was therefore risking his life for love while professional diplomats cowered at home (absolutely false). Supposedly Jak would be taking a ransom offer to the second son of the Duke of Uranium, who, it was hoped, would then release Princess Shyf instead of holding her prisoner (vaguely like the truth); the offer was all that Greenworld could afford but most likely not enough (false); and once Psim refused, Jak was to deliver an ultimatum that would begin a war between Greenworld and Uranium (false) and was therefore facing imprisonment and probably torture himself (completely false) all for love (again, vaguely like the truth).

  Sib's instructions had been to appear confused when people asked questions about the secondary, and then to divulge the primary to anyone who seemed to be friendly and trying to win his trust. "Don't even think about the real story," Sib had said, "always keep reasserting the secondary cover even in front of people who already know the primary, and gabble like an idiot about the primary."

  Within a mere few days, therefore, as Piaro, Pabrino, and Brill had successively become close enough friends, Jak had leaked the story to them. Since they had sworn to maintain absolute secrecy, they had told only a few toves, who had each told only a few toves, until in less than a week the whole ship had heard the story.

  Because Jak was pleasant and friendly and delivered the story with the same wide-eyed sincerity he usually used when lying to Uncle Sib about some illegal, stupid, or immoral thing at which the authorities had nearly caught him, most people felt deep sympathy for the brave young man in a hopeless quest to rescue the princess who was far above him socially. Jak would explain, "I probably won't even get to see her, or any part of Earth except the spaceport, a couple of palaces, and a jail. But it's something I can do for her, and I get to feel like I tried"

  What neither Jak nor Sib had reckoned on was that aside from being a good story, Jak's primary cover was also a good story, and although the custom was for crewies to avoid passengers that they might be attracted to, reducing expensive exogamic crew loss, communication within the crew was very free, so the younger female crewies heard about it quickly. Soon Jak was madly popular with a dozen girls who had never seen him (nor he them).

  When Jak did become aware of it, it changed his life forever—and afterward, he could never decide whether that was for the better or not.

  He had finally gotten to play Maniples with Pabrino. When he had agreed he had had no idea how big a deal this would be; his first clue was that they not only had to find a suitable double break in Pabrino's schedule, they also had to find a break in which most of the middle cohort of bachelors could watch the contest, and the con-test was carried live on shipboard viv, with probably a third of the crew experiencing it in real time and many of those who had to work recording it for later.

  The crewies were excited because as far as they were concerned, the match meant something. Pabrino was the youngest ship's champion ever at Maniples, good enough to have defeated champions from four other ships during co-orbits and co-approaches over the years, the first when he was just eleven. In fact, Pabrino had never been beaten in intership play. Jak was a worthy opponent—he had played second singles for his gen school team and been ranked around number ten for gen school seniors in the Hive—and because ship and Hive players played each other rarely, it was difficult to learn much about their relative strengths by comparing their records. This made the whole matc
h much more uncertain, and crewies like to gamble—numerous desserts, cleaning shifts, graveyard watches, and outside rec times were at stake. But it also meant a chance to find out how Pabrino might do out in the wider world, and that was even more exciting; was he just "pretty good for spaceborn" or was he just possibly one of the rare masters?

  Everyone said that Maniples was loosely based on chess, but they might as reasonably have said it was based on real warfare, or on intrigue-and-adventure fiction, or on scissors-paper-stone. There were two sides, Green and Black, each with a small fleet of warcraft and a small force of B&Es. Their home bases, armed with enormous numbers of bomb and beam weapons, were armed, slowly-mobile space stations in synchronous orbit around a planet, beginning at a point 180 degrees away from each other, so that neither base could see the other at the start. A great deal of the micro-game consisted in trying to move forces through the always-shifting Dispu-Zone visible to both bases. The planet was always arbitrarily created just a half hour before play began; it would be the size of Mars, but much wanner, fully habitable, with the surface exactly fifty percent ocean and the land divided into prairie, forest, desert, polar caps, mountains, swamps, permafrost, and jungle according to the arbitrary generating program.

  The objective of the game was to get a fast missile targeted and locked in on the enemy base, at which point the enemy would be forced to surrender. If the bases were moved far enough to become visible to each other, immediate mutual annihilation ensued, officially a draw.

  Each side had one big heavily armed sunclipper, with nearly the firepower of the base, capable of escape velocity (but vulnerable to fire from the base, slow to accelerate, extremely visible because of its size); three low-to-high-orbit space-only orbicruisers, with much better acceleration than the sunclipper but smaller and fewer weapons, stealthed but visible every time their engines ran; nine lightly armed surface-to-low-orbit warshuttles, with high acceleration in short bursts, stealthed to be visible only during their brief engine firings; twenty-seven submersible aircraft; and eighty-one B&Es, each equipped with a single-seat helicopter/hovercraft capable of carrying his personal gear and either one small fission bomb/mine, or one base-wrecking missile—not both. During the half hour of studying the planet before battle began, in the area where its own base was visible from the surface, each side was allowed to place thirty-six landing fields, any of which could handle its whole surface-capable fleet, and all with plentiful spare parts, fuel, and ammunition.

  Stealth was deliberately imperfect; it reduced the distance at which radar or light rendered a thing visible, but never to zero.

  When one piece attacked another, combat was resolved by simulator duels. Your coordination, reflexes, and training played a role as much as your strategic abilities.

  Uncle Sib thought Maniples was important, and even though Jak never listened to him, he had absorbed that attitude. Jak had many times endured an Uncle Sib monologue something like "There are just six forces at work in the present epoch, three positive and three negative, which unite humanity; remove any two of them and we would fall apart into anarchy. Two are traditional and internal, both positive: the desire to copulate with strangers and the drive to get rich. Two are external, both negative: the risk of more wars with the Rubahy, and the risk that when the Galactic Court have finally heard all the evidence and arguments and done all the mysterious things they keep doing, they will issue the Extermination Order and try to put an end to the human race. And two are internal and relatively new, one positive and one negative: Maniples and slamball. All right, I'll stop, I know you've heard it before, just eat and get out of here."

  Some people, especially on Mars where the public passion for it was very great, devoted their lives to Maniples. "Great games" anthologies, in which you could experience what had come through the goggles, headphones, and vivsuits of the masters as they played each other, were consistent best-sellers as entertainment. Like chess, go, bridge, or belludi, it seemed arbitrarily simple, yet its possibilities were inexhaustible.

  Almost everyone started to play Maniples around age six. Most people found they had no talent and played it little or not at all after adolescence; many continued as hobbyists; some few brilliant ones became professional and began ascending the ranks of Masters; the very few who became Greater Masters or above could live in just about any human settlement in the solar system as the most welcome and honored of guests. To study for one year with any of the half-dozen Greatest Masters still living, who had all passed their three hundredth birthdays, cost half a terautil, as much as a large sunclipper, a patent of economic nobility for a noncritical resource, or a private preserve a kilometer square on the lightest deck in the Hive.

  So the heavily intermarried, mutually dependent families that were the crew of the Spirit of Singing Port were fascinated with the possibility that in their midst, far from any of the luxuries, competition, support, or importance of the great cities of space or the planets, just possibly they might have a genius at one of humanity's great pastimes. This didn't mean that they took it easy on Pabrino or coddled him. If anything, they expected more of him. But it did mean that when Pabrino played anyone new, in real time and not via simulation, it was watched by just about the entire crew.

  Jak was relieved to discover that Pabrino was superb—so much better than Jak that he could form no real estimate. If Jak had been the person who revealed Pabrino's limitations (if any), he might have suffered the traditional fate of the bearer of bad news, socially if not literally.

  Not that Jak didn't try his best to give a good account of himself. But Pabrino was better at the great majority of things that mattered. A B&E controlled by Jak usually won against a B&E controlled by Pabrino in single combat, and they were about even with surface-to-space warshuttles, but in all other kinds of combat Pabrino excelled him, and in strategy Jak was very far out of his depth.

  Though the match took over six hours, Jak knew perfectly well how it would end ten minutes after it started, when a ground shot he'd never have thought possible came out of an area he had thought was secure, and Jak lost a Black orbicruiser moving to high orbit. Jak counterattacked the Green B&Es who had done it, killing all three of them, but lost two Black aircraft in the exchange.

  In the ensuing hours the disparity in material only became worse, as Jak was forced into one unfavorable sacrifice after another. When what appeared to be a final mass wave attack by Green came crashing at him, he had barely deployed his few remaining Black forces into the DispuZone when Green B&Es seized four of his landing fields. As he whirled to meet that threat, a Green warshuttle popped up over a stretch of horizon that lack of material had forced Jak to leave unguarded. Its missile locked on the Black base, and that was the end of the game.

  Pabrino's potential as the player who would inscribe the Spirit of Singing Port's name in history was once again confirmed. Jak was certain that Pabrino was better than the best gen school players in the Hive, maybe a great deal better, and said so as they emerged from their vivsuits, damp and acrid with sweat.

  Both laughing with relief, they gulped the fruit drinks that Piaro held out to them. The other bachelors crowded around to shake hands, thump backs, and generally celebrate a day when they all did something unusual. "I'd like to play you a few more times," Jak said, "but I don't speck anyone will bet on me again."

  "Just having a new opponent is great," Pabrino said, pushing a damp mess of black hair off his forehead. "Fewer predictable tricks. Best fight I've had in more than a year. It would be great to do this a couple more times."

  Brill handed them each a wet towel, and they mopped their faces and exposed skin with it. 'This is a good start but I sure hope there's time for a real shower before dinner," Jak said.

  Piaro nodded. "More time than you'd think. This happens to be one of the scheduled days for families to eat together. And by request of my family—I tried to warn them, really I did, but they wouldn't listen—you're eating with mine. That's in about an hour and a half
, so grab your kit, go get showered and presentable, and I'll come by your stateroom and pick you up."

  "You've never even talked about your family," Jak said.

  "Well, a lot of times, on shipboard, you don't. Most ways your workmates and your messmates have a bigger impact on your life. But family counts for some-thing, and as it happens I've got one. The regulation one mother and one father, plus a twin sister who would have murdered me if I hadn't brought you to dinner. She has this idea that you're going to be interesting."

  Jak grinned. "What if I am?"

  "Then my sister is even dumber than I've always thought. This is someone who—well, never mind. If I start telling stories about her, she'll start telling them about me, and though mine about her are the absolute and completely humiliating truth, hers about me are a tiny grain of truth wrapped in such a thick shroud of exaggeration and fabrication that… oh, well. Best not to start. So, anyway, Phrysaba wants to meet you, and you're coming, tove. I promise somehow I'll make it up to you."

  Jak couldn't imagine what was so interesting about himself, but he went off to the stateroom whistling anyway, and made sure he smelled and looked good. After all, female attention is flattering regardless of the female, he reasoned to himself, and it had been a while since he'd had any, and even though Piaro apparently didn't get along with his sister, all the same she was probably no worse than a bit on the plain side, or maybe whiny or rude, and Piaro was a good tove and Jak could be charming and pleasant, to help out a friend.

  Jak was about as unprepared for Phrysaba as it was possible to be, because it had never occurred to him that a brother might be so biased against his sister, and so he had thought Piaro's account must be somewhere in the neighborhood of reality, at least. With the wide array of opportunities on the Hive, and the very early opportunities to have one's own life and explore one's own interests, sibling rivalry is rare and mild there. But on shipboard, with every position up for grabs and life tightly controlled, jockeying for position within the family is as natural as scratching an itch, and about as hard to learn not to do in public. So Piaro had been anything but an objective reporter.