The Duke of Uranium

by John Barnes

  Less than twenty minutes after being relieved, Jak was at the head of the line. A light pinged on over the terminal operated by a woman of about forty; Jak swam over and relieved her, and within moments he was back into his screen, in that curious state of focused meditation, deciding between harmlessness and disaster. It was the tenth hour of the approach; they were far less than halfway through the process.

  Chapter 7

  On the Bad Side of Entropy

  The hours went by in a blur; watching the screens was like sparring, dancing, or playing some of the more intense viv games—you couldn't afford an instant to speck about what you had just done or what might be coming next, all of your concentration had to be on doing the right thing in the present. Jak kept his focus, aiming for that singing-on state familiar from the Disciplines, and kept working. When he had his next relief, the loop had grown from about ten kilometers' diameter to almost thirty, and was becoming steadily better behaved.

  The line of people taking relief breaks was longer now, as more people had been brought up from cargo packing, which was mostly complete. That meant everyone got a perhaps-five-minutes-longer break. The hold was now jammed to all surfaces with packed containers, and the outside of the ship was beginning to bristle with containers tied to longshore capsules, waiting to slide up the tracks onto the loop when the time came. Probably a third of the ship's crew was working outside at the mo-ment, lining up the containers for loop launch and keeping the rigging from fouling.

  People taking a break could look directly out through a big viewport at the planet Mercury itself. They were overtaking Mercury in its orbit, moving six km per second faster than the planet itself, only about 25,000 kilometers now from their closest approach, so Mercury loomed into the space beside the outer sail, fifteen times as big as the moon from the Earth and far brighter. The straight lines of the great ore roads were visible on the daylight side; on the night side they continued as strings of lights cutting across a curve blacker than the illuminated dust around it, like a photograph cut and pasted to its own negative.

  The immense Caloris Basin, one of the larger impact craters in the solar system, was about two-thirds in daylight; the third that was in dark was widely scattered with bright lights, for the processes that had shaped Caloris had provided vast, rich deposits of many kinds of ores close to the surface, and there were mines everywhere. Within the dark part of the Caloris Basin, a little sprawl of bright dots, looking as if some giant had glued the Pleiades down on the face of the planet, marked Chaudville, and north and to its left Bigpile was a cross-shaped patch of bright lights; those and the roads were the only man-made features that Jak could definitely identify.

  A soft, melodic ringing from the public address system announced that it was important to listen to the next message. Everyone in line, and at every station, was silent at once. "Mercury ground control indicates that we have a substorm in our path," the voice of the captain said. "No possibility of a course correction unless we abort. Storm is rated as slight-to-moderate in risk. I'm going to ask all personnel to come inside within ten—"

  A strange, undeniable sensation grabbed Jak's attention; he realized later that it was the subtle shift in direction of acceleration, felt inside as if the gravity had shifted. At the instant he felt it, he knew only that it was something he didn't want to feel, something wrong.

  Through the viewport, he saw an odd, folded curve that had not been there a moment ago.

  One mainsail had collapsed, and was fouling several other sails; as random fusions spread up the lines, the simple, beautiful curves of the sails were becoming a tangle like a wadded bedsheet.

  The crewies spinning up the loop stayed at their posts and kept working, but even they kept stealing glimpses at the big viewport. Then, as suddenly as the shadow of a bird passing overhead, tangled sails dropped past the viewport. A terrible groan ran through the ship as the unaccustomed forces yanked at its structural members; there was a noise like a great explosion, and then nothing but the usual background noise of the life-support systems. At all the terminals, the loop workers sat back, as if stunned by a rock that had flown out of the screen at them.

  "This is the captain. People, we're on the bad side of entropy. The boom you heard was the jettison of the loop coil, taking the loop with it—along with about a quarter of our total sail area. Preliminary radar result shows that we will at least not have to pay damages for collisions or unauthorized landings; it will probably go into a salvageable solar orbit. Cargo switched is scrubbed, repeat, scrubbed. Financial consequences will be assessed as soon as possible for crew debate and vote. Astrogation assures me that we have enough of a gravity assist so that with remaining sail we can reach Earth in about thirty-six days, just eight days behind schedule, and once there we will be docking wherever the insurers tell us to, for an overhaul and a decision. I'm terribly sorry to say, however, that at the moment we have a complete failure to function as an effective business." There was a long pause. "I now ask that all personnel, including those inside, run a pizo check. We are receiving no transponder signals from the debris, so there is no one alive trapped in it; we need to know if everyone is still here. Please remain quiet and orderly until pizo check is completed. If you don't have a pizo, please use your purse; call 8888 and type in 444 at the cue to let us know that you are all right. Cue in five, four, three, two, one."

  At the bell tone, Jak logged in. He didn't have a pizo because he was not yet officially a member of the ship's company.

  One of the many ways in which this had happened at the worst possible time was that your pizo was normally a co-worker with whom you shared shifts, and ideally interests as well, so that you were in a good position to check on them at once. During cargo switch, though, everyone worked everywhere, as needed, and often one pizo had been working outside on sails while another was inside on container loading. Mostly, they found each other through their purses immediately, but the few remaining cases were an anxious matter.

  After about a half hour, the tall girl behind Jak in line said, This is bad. If everything was fine, it would have finished by now." She wiped her eyes. "I'm just glad that Krea was on my purse two seconds after the captain announced pizo check."

  Jak had been about to say he hoped that it would be someone that neither he nor she knew, but luckily before he spoke he realized how stupid that was. In the little world of the ship, there was no such thing as a person you didn't know.

  "So, since I'm new, do you mind telling me what's going on? What are they doing right now?"

  "Following up on pizo check, rechecking all their missing ones, just to make sure it's not the one in a million chance of a purse being damaged and the owner being okay, or some gweetz who took off his purse while working, or anything like that. Or it could be that they've got some noncalls, which always take longer to check back on. That was a big scary accident. There could be more than one person… lost… and if both pizos in a pair are lost, that takes a while longer to detect. Then once they rerun the pizo check on the missing people, they'll start looking for the moment-to-moment record, and see if they can find what happened where the missing person last was. But once it's been this long, the news is never good."

  Jak looked from face to face of all the people around him. Every one of them was nodding; apparently everything the girl was saying was toktru. He and the girl floated there, treading air to station-keep in the micro-gravity that shifted quickly because they were so close to both the sun and Mercury. They had nothing to say, but they did have a terrible need for company. Ten more minutes crawled by. In all the huge space, with everyone floating idly, there was hardly a word spoken; many people were quietly staring at some surface near themselves, breathing deeply, getting ready for the news.

  Jak worried that he wouldn't respond right, would interfere with their grief by not feeling or expressing it in the way the spaceborn did. He wasn't afraid of being rude—Uncle Sib had schooled him too well for that— but he did fear that he w
ould intrude, would just not fit in, because it would be obvious that he couldn't grieve for someone he didn't know.

  As it turned out, that worry was pointless; the reason it had taken so long was that two pizos had been lost together. Brill and Clevis had been outside, trimming sail, when the Spirit had run onto the substorm, and were still trying to get back to the ship in the little two-person line car when the sails had collapsed and enfolded them, sweeping down past the ship and into the loop.

  With so much sharp monomolecular material around and so much energy in the loop, whatever had happened to them had been quick. A directed microwave signal had found and turned on their purses in the wreckage, and the recovered records showed immediate cessation of vital signs in each of them, less than a second apart, less than three seconds after the loop coil was jettisoned.

  In the next few days, the Spirit of Singing Port felt as if its every hold were crammed with sadness. The memorial services were attended by everyone, and Jak discovered that what everyone said was true—crewies were thorough about their emotions. He had been to two funerals on the Hive, and in both of those people had appeared to be more embarrassed than anything else about the fact that a friend was dead. Here, people wailed and screamed and shouted, and faces were drenched. Jak didn't quite feel like doing that himself, but it was comforting to be able to cry openly for Clevis and Brill. They had been two toktru toves, and Jak had never lost anyone before.

  The funerals had released some feelings, but only time would heal them. For many days the Bachelors' Mess, which had always seemed about to explode with lively energy, was a place where people ate quickly, most leaving as soon as they were done, a few sitting silently with coffee for hours afterward. Often Jak was one of the ones who sat quietly, with Pabrino and Piaro, sometimes talking about their toves, more often just being company for each other. Jak and Phrysaba sometimes had coffee or played some game, but the energy seemed to have gone out of that too.

  The Spirit of Singing Port limped upward to Earth like a beaten dog, as if the ship itself understood how defeated they were. The captain, the CEO, and the officers spent long hours in conference with the insurers, and returned to their families to say that everyone was being polite, everyone was being nice, and nobody was being specific.

  Insurance would not cover a full re-outfit Insurers did not do that. They wrote riders onto the contracts to make sure a crew didn't carry supplemental insurance, because a ship in a bad corner, obligated to the insurers, was more profitable than any premium that any free ship could hope to pay; to a great extent the purpose of insuring free merchants was to capture them into the short-haul trade.

  Some bank in the insurers' pocket would be happy to offer them a short-term loan at ruinous interest to cover re-outfitting the ship, as long as they signed away all control over their own operations. Then the Spirit of Singing Port would pay it back by doing a hundred or so of the lucrative runs of the sinusoid trade—Hive to Mercury to Aerie to Mercury to Earth to Mercury and back to the Hive, with contractual obligation to make no ventures out into the dark beyond Mars until the loan was paid off. It would be a harsh way to live—a full cargo switch at every port, port flybys not more than three months apart—but ships had gotten out from under such obligations before, and Phrysaba and Piaro might not yet be fifty at the time the debt was paid off and they could resume free-trading. (Of course, by then they would have to retrain the whole crew.)

  Or perhaps something high risk and high profit could be found, "Just a shot at an OBS," Phrysaba said, as she and Jak sat holding hands and looking out a viewport at the steady tumble of the stars in their slow eternal corkscrew around the ship. "We could pay for the sails and lines practically out of petty cash, and the loop isn't that much, but it takes a fortune to cover what we're being charged for delivering our cargo at least five months late, which is what's happening—a bit over a month to Earth, a month to refit, a month to work up to Earth escape velocity, and two months back to Mercury. Not to mention that we'll probably end up with an extra week here and there in refit, and an extra week here and there waiting for a window. The Spirit is pretty well trapped, and it could be a century—think about that, a third of our lives—before we're all the way back to normal free operations."

  "What's an OBS?" Jak asked.

  "It's another one of our legends, I suppose. One Big Score. Taking a load of a cargo so valuable to someone who wants it so much that we can name our own price. Plutonium to the Rubahy, for example."

  "You'd do that? You'd sell something you can make atom bombs out of to the terriers?"

  She winced at "terriers," but she just said, very mildly and reasonably, "Only about half of the thousands of nations have signed that treaty, and we don't belong to any nation anyway, and besides the ban is just a political gesture, Jak. The Rubahy have to have fissionables, for their power reactors—they're living on Pluto and Charon, for Nakasen's sake, they can't use solar power, the sun just looks like a star out there, and do you want them getting Casimir power?—besides the Rubahy do get fissionables, one way and another. Human politicians like to strike postures about the subject, but you can't expect an intelligent species to agree to starve and freeze just to make our voters happy. And there are a half-dozen other cargos that would work if you don't like the idea of fissionables to the Rubahy. Slaves from Earth to some of the mining settlements. Three or four different drugs I could name. Certain necessary parts for Casimir bombs to Triton, or maybe just a few hundred meres under cover, enough to overrun the occupying forces.

  "Helping another rebellion on Triton get going might actually be the best we could do, financially, actually. Every time they rebel, the Tritonians always set up a hard-cash government that pays in gold or fissionables, so you always get something you can spend.

  "So if we want to save the ship's feets, do or die, here's what we'd do: pick up four hundred meres and four hundred slaves on Earth. Swing by a mining settlement somewhere in the main belt. Dump the slaves, pick up Casimir melters, which convert to bombs very nicely. Out to Triton to sell the melters and deliver the meres. Go into Neptune orbit till the rebels win and can pay us—that wouldn't take long. They pay in plutonium, and we take the nine-year haul to Pluto, sell the plutonium to the Rubahy, fill our holds there, and bring tons and tons of platinum and xleeth back on Earth. Actually just enough platinum to provide a plausible cover for trafficking in xleeth, and we'd probably offload that to a smuggler rather than bring it in."

  Jak stared at her. "You'd actually—"

  "Just trying to give you a context. Our regular bank would probably do a nudge-nudge wink-wink arrangement with us to just take plutonium to the Rubahy on a straight shot. And unlike the drugs, slaves, meres, or Casimir bombs, the plutonium wouldn't get used for anything bad; let's face it, the Rubahy are not going to jump us all. They've built an impressive little civilization out there, and individually they're great fighters, but they aren't a military power and a few hundred tons of fissionables won't make them one."

  "So is that what you're going to do?"

  "I suspect that the captain, her pizo, and the senior officers are looking at every possible thing, including some that are dirtier than what I mentioned. We'll do whatever we can, or whatever we have to. But so will the other side, and insurers would really prefer it if every single ship were on a routine back-and-forth milk run, with the outer dark reserved for old ships that couldn't make a dime. Left to themselves, the insurers would starve half the settlements in the solar system. So now they've got us tied down on the bed, and it might be that the only way we get untied is to be cooperative and keep telling them how much we really like it, and just hope that they'll get careless and trust us and we can suddenly take their balls off."

  "That's a vivid way to put it."

  She shrugged. "The Spirit of Singing Port was a free ship the day she was born and her company has been free for two hundred fifty years. Every irritating little rule and reg on board, every long-term policy, every goal
, everything we dream about and every frustration we make for ourselves, is our own, made by us, for reasons we dak. And some of our reasons have to do with getting stuff to where it's going, and doing our part for humanity, and all that, and some of them have to do with necessities like profit, but there's also coming around Neptune to see the sun's dim light washing over its cold face, and looking at the Aerie from a distance and knowing that that monstrous tangled mishmash of metal and glass, big as a Jovian moon, over four hundred independent nations, or just making the long drop from an upper world down to Mercury and knowing that you're warm and safe and cozy with your toves but you're also streaking like a comet through the solar system. Without the way we feel about things, this all might as well just be a job."

  * * *

  For the first time in generations, the Spirit of Singing Port was in Singing Port, at the great shipyards where she had been built, waiting for negotiations to finish so that her re-outfitting could begin. Her power was on trickle, her remaining sails furled, and to all appearances she was no more than a pod attached to the inside of that huge metal cavern, twenty by ten kilometers, open to the vacuum via the great open doors above and below.

  Through the viewport in the passenger area of the Spirit, Jak could see through the Earthside entrance to the shipyard; fifteen hundred years of spaceflight had not made the view less spectacular. Between the bands and whorls of cloud, the plains of Asia spread out in the noon sun, dotted everywhere with the little circular lakes that marked the pocks, the impact points from the Rubahy bombardment.