The Duke of Uranium

by John Barnes

  When she arrived and they had ordered the Seven Tisanes tray, she looked at him and said, "Now, look, the very first thing you have to remember is that Sib and Bex go back a very long way. In fact I met Sib before I met either of my husbands, may their atoms drift in peace, and by that time he and Bex Riveroma already had a long, deep history of hatred. They were two of the fa-vorite students of one of the greatest Disciplinarians, and two of the favorite students of one of the great social engineering practitioners, and in short they were rivals for everything, all the time. So of course they bad-mouth each other. Of course they say dreadful things about each other. That doesn't make what either one says about the other true. Sibroillo is sentimental and good-hearted, but he's not incompetent; Riveroma will do anything at all to advance his interests or the interests of the mission, but he's not without honor and there's no one better at what he does."

  "It's not that," Jak said. "I mean, I realized he was just trying to send some insults to Sib and maybe sow some dissension in the family. I knew that Sib hadn't taught me that badly, and I knew that even really good plans can go wrong and that people can misjudge a situation for reasons that have nothing to do with ego or foolishness. I know all that. I'm just mad at him for…" He stopped and poured himself a calming tisane, sipped it. "Well, it's not easy to say it because it really sounds childish."

  "That's strange, Jak. Usually Sibroillo doesn't misjudge you that much. And I can tell that he thinks you are angry at him because of the beatings you got and the way things happened so differently from the script he gave you, and it's killing him to feel that way—he feels like he failed you, and at the same time, as a pro, he knows that nothing ever follows the script and improvisation is the heart of the djeste, so he can't see any way in which he could have done anything other than fail you."

  "It's not that," Jak said, again. "It is toktru not that.

  The big problem is just that I speck I'm being toktru childish. That kind of keeps me from talking about it."

  She shrugged. "All right, but I can't be much help until you do."

  He sighed, poured more tisane, stared out at the mostly unoccupied corridor beyond the big window, and said, "Well, all right, here goes. Try not to make fun of me, and I'm warning you right now, you'll be tempted to.

  "What I couldn't stand was finding out that the whole time I was fleeing from him, Bex Riveroma was setting it up and manipulating it. He even told me that he couldn't appear to be helping Sesh, and that if he did look like he was helping her it would kill his job and just possibly get him killed. And I still didn't realize!

  "Then Riveroma set up a completely bizarre situation—which I now know Uncle Sib scripted, collaborating with Riveroma, because Uncle Sib knows what kind of entertainment I like—I mean, really, a guard left alone with me taking off his clothes and turning his back to me while I wasn't tied up! That's exactly the kind of thing I've been gobbling up for years in those intrigue-and-adventures stories I like.

  "Doors kept opening in just the singing-on moments and places, things kept being right singing-on where I needed them, every little coincidence was singing-on. Nobody ever had a lethal weapon if they crossed my path—and the whole time, even though I was scared out of my mind and not really appreciating it, I was also proceeding just as if all the cheap intrigue-and-adventure stuff was the way the world was! It was like I was tricked into playing a role in a viv. And to add to the overall foolishness, this reporter, Mreek Sinda—she's written and produced the whole story just as if the djeste of it were real-life intrigue-and-adventure!"

  "Well," Gweshira said, mildly, "rights to it will at least ensure that you're affluent for a long time, and if it should be a hit, you'll be wealthy."

  "But I feel like a gweetz! All I was doing was following someone else's plan; the whole time I thought I was boldly improvising and winging it as best I could, and it turns out that Sib and this heet Riveroma were pulling the strings the whole way; everyone was right on top of me. It was like I was just playing a game and I thought it was real. And that makes me feel, toktru, like a complete, total, utter gweetz. So having a viv out there that makes a hero of me just seems like more mockery. And I feel like hiding under a rock for a thousand years, and the last heet in the universe that I want to see is Uncle Sib."

  "Hmmph," Gweshira said. "And exactly what parts of life do you expect will not involve playing a game, as if it were real?"

  "But this whole thing was like a viv script!"

  "And what happens in viv if you just sit back and do nothing? Or if you freeze and cower in a corner—some people do, you know, when a viv gets too real, the rescue squads are out every day retrieving people from those vividly imaged hells. Or if you're a lousy shot, or you make bad decisions when time gets short, or any of the thousands of other things that can go wrong in both viv and real? The only difference between viv and real, as far as nerve and skill and being good in a bad spot are concerned—and what else matters, really?—is that in viv there's a do-over, and in real life there's not.

  "If you'd moved too slowly, or fallen from that tower, or slipped and fallen when you needed to be up and running, or let Riveroma get his boot on your head—well, things would be very different, and there would be no do-over. It was your nerve and your skills that got you through, even if the situation wasn't exactly a hundred percent pure improvised reality. I don't see why it makes such a big difference to you, and I don't see why you hold it against your Uncle Sib that he set that situation up, any more than you hold it against him that he sent you on the mission in the first place. You were the one who had to do everything; he was helping, but you really did do an excellent job. If I thought you had the slightest interest in what's going on in the world, I'd be predicting that someday you'd be a fine agent."

  Jak watched a very nice-looking young woman walk by; she didn't have the hard lean body of Phrysaba or the sheer grace and beauty of Sesh, but it was occurring to him that she'd do in a pinch… or perhaps in a stroke of maybe an outright grope. With Sesh in the Aerie and Phrysaba back on the Spirit, a heet might need to do some shopping.

  "Er, before you began optically molesting that young lady," Gweshira said, after a while, "I was telling you that you might someday make a fine agent. Obviously I'm hoping you would like to be one for Circle Four. Are you interested?"

  He sighed. "Well, I like the kind of athletic side of things, the running and chasing and shooting and all, and the travel is interesting, but the rest of it's way too much like school."

  Gweshira nodded. "Then let me tell you the other reason why I wanted to meet with you today. It seems your Rubahy friend did you a very strange kind of favor—a good one that may turn bad at any time. You may remember that buried deep in your body there's a sliver that contains a list of the physical locations of all the evidence needed to get Bex Riveroma executed a few dozen times over, in so many jurisdictions that an accurate count would be hard to come up with… ?"

  Jak thought for one instant and his eyes widened. The whole room seemed threatening and he glanced around, looking for anyone tall who might be Riveroma in disguise. "You're right. And he knows I have it because he got as far as decoding the antigen group and reading the codes. He knows what's in it and he knows it's in me— he'll be coming after me!" And yet another thought struck Jak. "And now he doesn't have any reason to keep me alive anymore, either. He can just have me grabbed and they can cut it out of me—with or without killing me first. I could get shot and dragged off any minute."

  "So could anyone; it's a dangerous world, it's just that most of the people who live here don't know that. But in the first place, he won't do that because he has to worry about reprisals. And he does worry about them, despite what he tried to convince you of. And also, it seems that Psim Cofinalez is indeed rather different from his brother and father, which at least means the Duchy of Uranium will be a different kind of entity from now on, which I would say is a good thing. One of the first things Ducent Psim did was to discharge Bex Ri
veroma, with a generous settlement package and a nice ticket out to Triton, where his talents are apt to be appreciated and it will be a long time before he comes back to Earth. It should be a year or two before we hear from him, since he won't bother to communicate until he can do it from someplace secure and where there's some ability to take action.

  "When he does get back in touch, and he will, we'll see what can be worked out, and it's possible of course that the information in the sliver will be partly, or even wholly, out of date by that time.

  "At any rate, that was where Shadow on the Frost did you either a big favor or no favor at all. Riveroma was about to capture you; that would have been when he could have extracted the sliver, and released you, and the two of you could have shaken hands in a nice professional manner, and that would be the end of it. Now Shadow didn't know that, and he saw that his honor-bound friend was in danger of capture—"

  "What exactly does 'honor-bound' mean, anyway? To a Rubahy, I mean?"

  "Didn't they cover that in school? I know that they have classes in dealing with the Rubahy."

  "Toktru, Gweshira, when did I ever pay attention to anything in class? Especially when the subject was how to get along with feathered lizards, masen?"

  She groaned and said, "Well, honor-binding places you both in a state of deep obligation to each other; you have to look out for each other in all sorts of situations, and come to each other's aid, and if either of you fails in the obligation for any voluntary reason, you instantly become mortal enemies. So I suggest you look up honor-binding in any good encyclopedia and make sure you know the rules, because if you ever fail in them, Shadow on the Frost won't stop trying to kill you till he's dead himself, and even then it's possible his cousins would be obligated to keep trying. On the other hand, as you may have noticed in the process of getting rescued, there are certain advantages to having a Rubahy honor-bound to you, and it would probably be a good thing to maintain that situation."

  "How did I become honor-bound to a Rubahy in the first place?"

  "Well, that's why you should have paid attention in class. When a Rubahy says that you honor him by being there to die with him, and thanks you for it, that's just politeness to a comrade, but if you then return the compliment and say the same thing, you're honor-bound. It looks casual to us because our culture is so steeped in reciprocity, but the Rubahy are not a very reciprocal society, as you're no doubt finding out, and extending reciprocity in any form is always a deep, heartfelt courtesy. That's why you hear people say 'never say "and you too" to a terrier,' because no matter what they said, you just made the situation extreme.

  "Now, before you insult or hurt your friend—and thereby make an extraordinarily deadly enemy of him— I suggest that you spend some time studying up on Rubahy customs."

  With as much contrition as he could manage—which was always very little—Jak nodded his head and said, "All right. I'll look it up, and"—the same young woman went by in the other direction, looking vaguely puzzled; Jak wondered whether she might be lost, or stood up by someone, or wearing anything under that thin shift, and need his help—"well, anyway, I'll do that."

  "Of course you will," Gweshira said, in a tone that indicated that she didn't believe it but felt no need to press the point.

  "Uh, I had one other question," Jak said, "and I was just wondering, since you got to read all the sealed files and so on about the case, whether it's a question that there's even an answer to."

  "If I don't know the answer, I'll say I don't know. If I'm not allowed to say, I'll say I don't know. I won't give you any hints about which 'I don't know' that is. Otherwise, I'll answer."

  "Fair enough," Jak said. "And it may just not be possible to know. Why did Riveroma have that launch I was on shot down? It must have cost a fortune in money, time, and effort to hack into the old sandgun system and do that, and he couldn't have been certain I'd be killed, and since he didn't know what I was coming to communicate about, anyway, why would he shoot me down before he heard the offer? The whole thing made no sense at all."

  Gweshira laughed, long and hard, and said, "Jak, that was something we looked into right away. Riveroma had nothing to do with it. Remember Paj Priuleter, the preacher among the survivors? His wife was trying to kill him for the life insurance, and she wanted the kind of freak accident that gets double indemnity."

  Jak laughed too. "Nothing ever goes exactly as planned, does it?"

  "Nothing. Which is why I really want you to forgive Sib, look up honor-binding, and get on with things, be-cause, toktru, old pizo, whether we try to lead a quiet life or go looking for trouble, none of us ever knows what's coming next." She stood up, so he did; they shook hands. "Well, I hope you have some fun in these few days before you start at the Academy."

  "It just figures that for the first time in all those years of schooling, probably no one will ask me to write any essays about what I did on my vacation. Yeah, Duj and I have fun stuff planned; I'm supposed to meet him up at the pole in half an hour or so—Myx is coming in, finally, on that very conveniently scheduled warship from Uranium that just happened to have an extra berth. I speck Myx and Duj just want me to be the ref."

  Gweshira smiled. "Whatever you do, don't stand between them. See you later."

  She turned and walked away. Jak had a few minutes to kill before he'd need to call Rover and have it take him to the station, and since he knew Duj was always a few minutes late anyway, there wasn't much pressure of any kind. He decided to walk for a bit.

  He heard a loud woman's voice; she sounded young. "What's the name of that club, again? I thought I knew it. I thought it was something about a flower—can you remind me?" Her voice was coming from around the nearest corner.

  "I'm not equipped for that," the Pertrans reminded her in its flat mechanical tone.

  When he came around one corner, Jak saw the beautiful young woman he'd noticed while talking to Gweshira. She was standing by a Pertrans at that stop. "Crane O'Hanna," she said, suddenly, "that's the club. But hold a minute."

  Crane O'Hanna was the very lightest of the light dance clubs—expensive, but interesting.

  "Hey," she said, "aren't you on viv? Jak somebody?"

  "Yeah," he said.

  "I've been through that viv a hundred times," she said, and sighed. She turned and got into the Pertrans car. "Crane O'Hanna," she said, again, very loudly.

  The Pertrans car pulled away.

  She had certainly had a nice body, and dressed to make sure everyone knew it. And she'd gone out of her way to make sure that Jak in particular knew where she was going.

  He thought for less than half a second before he summoned Rover and headed for the same club, not knowing what he had in mind, but figuring it could develop. No doubt Myx and Duj would manage to have a perfectly fine fight without him. As Gweshira said, nothing, absolutely nothing, ever went according to plan.

  Acknowledgments

  George Orwell said that writing a novel is like contracting a lingering illness; the metaphorical illness would have been much more severe and lingered much longer this time without gracious and judiciously timed pressure by Betsy Mitchell, my editor; efficient and prompt support on business matters by Ashley Grayson, Carolyn Grayson, and Dan Hooker, of the Ashley Grayson Literary Agency; and quick, voluminous, precise research by Jes Tate, my research assistant. Thanks to them, I kept more hair, gained less weight, and delivered almost on time.

  About The Author

  JOHN BARNES lives in downtown Denver and writes full time. At various times he has worked full time as a gardener, systems analyst, statistician, theatrical lighting designer, and college professor. More than fifty entries by John Barnes appear in the 4th edition of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. His most recent books include The Sky So Big And Black, The Merchants Of Souls, The Return (wth Buzz Aldrin), and Candle.

 

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