A Princess of the Aerie

by John Barnes

  “Same old Shadow, I can tell,” Jak said, and the Rubahy made noises like big slow bubbles in a metal bucket (the equivalent of laughter). One of Shadow’s favorite jokes was to pretend to misunderstand Standard, or human culture, say exactly the most inappropriate possible thing, and watch humans struggle to decide whether or not to explain.

  “It is good to be with humans who dak jokes, again,” Shadow said. “The Duke of Uranium is a fine person, but he lacks your gift for laughter. I have been promoted to his personal guard. No merit involved, I assure you—it was just essential for me to have some post other than common soldier in his Rubahy mercenary battalion.”

  “Essential?” Dujuv made the mistake of asking.

  “A simple matter, really. My uncle-group-for-shared-honor was at odds with my uncle-group-for-bloodline-distinction, over the behavior of a few distant cousins, and everything else got pulled into the dispute—you know how these family things can be. Anyway, all of my uncle-groups at least agreed that my service to the Duke gained honor for both me and my family, which meant of course that my sister-side cousin-friends therefore felt I was gaining too much of the sort of personal honor that could upset the political balance in the family, and they threatened to have me recalled, which might actually have been merely a ploy by some of our noble houses to get me where it would be socially acceptable to assassinate me. You can imagine I was not in favor of that. So a friendly aunt, married into my circle of mutual and interlocked oath-friends, happened to be the cousin-sex-partner of my commanding officer, who, I am happy to boast, did not want to lose me. He promoted me to a higher rank at which point I could no longer serve under him but would accrue less honor for each act, which perfectly qualified me to be a bodyguard, and then recommended me to the Duke, who graciously accepted.”

  “I’m glad things worked out,” Dujuv said.

  “And your schooling, Dujuv, tove of my tove, it goes all right?”

  “It goes better than mine,” Jak admitted. “Dujuv works harder, plus, toktru, I speck he has more brains.”

  “I’m a panth,” Dujuv said, firmly.

  “And that is a chair, and I am a Rubahy,” Shadow said, gravely. “It is good to see both of you. I have duties now, but we will be in the Aerie for a month or more, and surely it can happen that we will all have some off-duty together.”

  “I’d like that a lot,” Jak said.

  “Well then, a quiet night to us all, and I will call you in the morning.” Shadow moved away into the crowd.

  After a few more minutes of watching well-dressed people mill around, Jak specked it was “quite possible that the most exciting part of the evening has already happened.”

  “Toktru, masen? And no naps. I think I’m going to stretch the rules and get into the food; Kawib can always tell the Princess that if you’re going to keep a panth, you’ve got to feed a panth.”

  “I speck I can hold this job down by myself till you get back,” Jak said.

  Duj vanished into the crowd, leaving Jak alone with what passed for thoughts.

  “Excuse me, er, Jak?”

  It was Seubla, Kawib’s demmy, in a pale lavender gown that had probably been chosen for her by the Princess, since it seemed deliberately unflattering. With her nearly-white hair pulled back, accentuating her plain proletarian features, she looked like a vacuum-welder’s daughter going to a costume party as the fairy queen. And this is someone Sesh fears so much, Jak thought, and was glad, not for the first time, that there wasn’t a drop of aristo blood in his own veins.

  “Yes,” Jak said.

  “I have a message from the Princess, and excuse the rudeness, but she insists that I tell you that it is absolutely an order. ‘You are to talk to Mreek Sinda, who is waiting outside to interview you. You will give her exactly ten minutes of your time, and answer all questions in a way suitable for accesscasting, and not do anything stupid.’ All a quote, Jak, I’m sorry, that’s not how I’d have said it.”

  Jak allowed himself a slight smile. “I know that, Seubla. I recognize the style.”

  The corner of her mouth twitched. “It’s nice to be understood.” She disappeared into the crowd.

  Jak sighed and went out for his interview with Sinda. It wasn’t terrible—none of the ones back when she was making her hit series had been, either. Jak’s answers seemed bland even to him, but Sinda didn’t seem terribly worried about it one way or another, and she thanked him, nicely enough, at exactly ten minutes. He headed inside. Apparently tonight was going to be a series of switches between dullness and dullness, with dullness in between.

  At his station by the main staircase, Jak found Dujuv standing and chatting with an old, good friend—Psim Cofinalez, the Duke of Uranium himself. Psim shook his hand as if he were grasping a lifeline, and his smile was warm with pleasure. “What an odd—but delightful—coincidence that you were here just when we were. It’s so good to be able to see someone who was a friend back before they had a reason to be.” The Duke was about ten years older than the two toves, and he was muscular, with wide-set shoulders, very dark hair and mustache, and very pale skin. “We’ll have to find some time when we can talk without formality—I know that’s always impossible but I also know that it’s always worth it to try.”

  “That would be wonderful, sir.”

  “I’m also delighted to hear from Dujuv that you are continuing to be your usual selves at the PSA.” The Duke’s eyes twinkled. “Just remember you promised to defect to the Hive, and that I don’t want two proficient bureaucrats showing up at my door when you graduate.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Though two corrupt graft-grubbers are always welcome.”

  Subsonic thunder announced that slec was about to begin. “They’re founding the first set,” Jak said. “I didn’t speck they’d do slec when they have so many older guests.”

  The Duke grinned, a flash of that common touch that the media played up so much. “Thanks for not adding ‘such as yourself.’ This is the Princess’s party, even if her father is here. She gets her way. I can’t imagine that that’s unusual. Anyway, I must go demonstrate that I dak slec; Princess Shyf won’t speak to me if I don’t.”

  He bowed and faded into the crowd, working his way toward the dance floor. Jak climbed up a few stairs for a better view. He was curious. He’d only seen slec in a big sphere with gravity low enough to airswim—all three dimensions equivalent. Here, in two-and-a-fraction dimensions, on a dance floor, it seemed tighter, more constricted, apt to fall into repetition.

  Dujuv, standing next to Jak, said, “It’s not obvious, but the problem is the Princess. See how she’s almost always on a screen and how often that screen has the green dot? They’re mostly sampling off her, and barely changing the synesthesia. So it’s not as much of a conversation as it’s supposed to be. Kind of like if she was talking and people kept asking her to talk more about her favorite subjects and retell her favorite jokes—she gets more attention but it encourages her to be less interesting.”

  Jak nodded. “How did you know that was what I was trying to figure out?”

  “The way you kept scanning from screens to floor and back. Sesh used to be so graceful, creative, and clever—slec groups would beg her to attend because they loved sampling off her. Isn’t it toktru strange that now that she has control, she makes herself duller?”

  Jak’s thoughts spiraled off; somehow it seemed to fit with Sesh’s slow torment of Kawib and Seubla, and with how friendly and cheerful Psim was after having had his brother thrown to his death just weeks ago, and even with the way—

  “Weehu, watch the King,” Dujuv said.

  King Scaboron was a small, slender man. He might have been a fencer or a gymnast in his youth, 150 years ago. He stood at the edge of the floor, watching his daughter mesh slec with Psim Cofinalez—they meshed well.

  The King frowned, advanced onto the floor, and, to Jak’s surprise, slowly swayed to the midbeat, the slowest at the moment. Scaboron glanced at a screen; he mov
ed less tentatively, more firmly, he was definitely dancing now, and a green light went on as the low beat and the three high beats all began to sample off the King’s motion. Sesh looked enraged for just an instant; Jak thought only he had seen it, until Dujuv whispered, “Well, that’s precessed her.”

  “I don’t think the King wants his heir interested in a Cofinalez,” Jak murmured back. “They went to a lot of trouble—hell, we went to a lot of trouble—to prevent any possibility of a match. And she’s definitely got the look for Psim.”

  Scaboron advanced slowly onto the floor, and the crowd parted around him. Behind him, a few of the older ladies followed, copying his moves, creating a kind of impromptu line. He danced seriously, precisely, never reaching beyond what his body could do, displaying his command of a farrago of the steps of the last two hundred years. Responding, the musician-engineers extended the synesthesia and opened its loops, adding dimensions and moving the quadratics into their period doubling and period quadrupling ranges.

  The slec became more architectural, less tactile, the harmony more aggressive about its ambiguity. Chords marched through it in ranks of feeling, counterpoint congealing into alert flanking guards of meaning. The line behind King Scaboron formed a long spiral that turned toward the center. The timbre flavored its way through woodwinds and cymbals and then spiraled sideways into horns and bells. It wasn’t slec as Jak had ever heard or seen it before, but it was beautiful.

  Scaboron raised an arm, extending it toward Sesh. She ignored it, turned her back, and walked off the floor. She hurried, seeming on the edge of running.

  In his left peripheral vision, something raced around the end of the curving staircase on which Jak stood.

  The tail of a server’s coat flickered past the farther newel, as the running man turned under the staircase.

  When he had first arrived, Jak had noted without thinking that it was open down there. Before he dakked in words, Jak had jumped over the balustrade, turning to face the space under the stairs.

  He misjudged slightly. As his feet planted, the running heet was off to Jak’s left. The man whipped a small black globe up behind his ear.

  Bomb.

  Jak sidestepped left, foot closing to foot, not crossing, and as the ball of his right foot took his weight, the attacker’s arm was already whipping forward, the globe moving with swift certainty from its spot by the man’s ear toward the moment of release. Not more than five centimeters short of where the bomb would have been released, Jak’s roundhouse kick lashed against the throwing arm, catching the assassin’s carpal bone with the curl of Jak’s big toe, making the throw go wild and the bomb sail all the way over the dance floor into the crowd beyond.

  Jak cat-screamed as, on a polished floor in the one-third g of Greenworld, he felt his planted foot lose contact. His angular momentum carried him around. He would fall with his head in reach of his opponent’s kick. He braced—

  Dujuv landed beside him, slamming three hard blows into the stumbling assassin, shattering his ribcage and skull and breaking his neck. As Jak caught his balance, he heard the slec sound slew into a weird gabble as everyone on the dance floor moved at once and personal bodyguards rushed in from all sides. Then the slec chopped off all at once. One great gasp/shout from the whole crowd started—

  The blast was deafening, but it was a smallish concussion bomb. As Jak rolled to his feet he thought, Probably a diversion—

  A serving chef with a slug-thrower raced toward the dance floor. Jak sprang at him, trying to close the distance. The man turned. The gun came up at Jak.

  With a familiar wild full-throated pulsating shriek, like a dinosaur on fire mixed with a monkey shaken to death, a white-and-black smear howled through Jak’s vision, throwing the shattered and torn man sideways. Shadow on the Frost was getting into the fight.

  Dujuv leapt, knocking a pistol out of another heet’s hand. Bewildered, Jak looked around. Four attackers had rushed out of the kitchen just as the bomb burst. Hampered by the crowd, confused by the sudden appearance of a Rubahy and a panth at their rear, they were perhaps two steps slow, and all over the ballroom, personal bodyguards had time to get their principals down and under cover.

  The two assassins still standing could not see their targets. Turning back to back, they looked around. Jak took two steps toward them.

  Then Dujuv and Shadow, in tandem, bounded onto the two gunmen, arms and legs blurring in a furious assault, shattering faces, chests, and bellies with more than human speed and strength; both assassins were dead before they skidded backward onto the floor.

  Most people were only becoming aware that anything had happened now that it was all over, screaming because they had turned to find the person beside them covered with blood, or torn open, or horribly burned.

  The world almost came back to normal speed, before Jak heard Dujuv’s battle-scream and the hiss of a laser burning flesh, just behind him. Jak rushed toward the sound, against a stampede of girls in long gowns. Dujuv stood in a clearing in the crowd, his hands locked in the kata juji jime grip, holding the dead man up by the neck. The dead man’s head bobbled on his broken neck; Dujuv must have grabbed deep and put a lot of left hand pull into it.

  “Duj, are you all right?”

  His friend looked at him with a stricken, sick expression. “A lot of people were running around over here. I just happened to look when he did it. He must have been trying to use the crowd and the excitement to cover what he was doing. He just pulled out a military laser and shot her.” Dujuv finally let go, absentmindedly; the corpse slid to the floor like a doll stuffed with wet sand.

  “This is Xil Argenglass,” one woman said. “I saw him with the laser too, but why would he do that? He’s just a businessman with an import-export franchise. He’s at all the parties because he has money, even though he’s very dull—I guess that he won’t be at any parties anymore—I mean, I don’t think I should have said that, isn’t there some rule about not saying bad things about dead people?—well, anyway, I don’t know why he’d even be carrying a weapon, let alone—”

  “Shut up, Ania,” the heet beside her said. “I saw it too. We need to leave.” They turned and went.

  Jak looked up and saw that there was a body on the floor, perhaps five meters beyond Dujuv, in a pale lavender dress—he ran.

  Even with a two-finger-wide charred strip running from ear to ear across the bridge of her nose like a mask, black burned craters where her eyes had burst from the heat, the dead girl was still unmistakably Seubla.

  Jak looked up from her, his eyes stinging with tears, hoping he would not have to be the one to tell Kawib, and saw Myx being loaded onto a gurney; when had all these medics come in? There must be twenty or so injured by the bomb and stray shots, and the ballroom was now flooded with medics. Myxenna’s gurney bore the tag for a serious injury that had been stabilized; she’d be in the second group to go to the hospital.

  Jak walked slowly toward her; Dujuv rushed past.

  Myx was conscious. The way the blood-drenched sheet draped over the hash of her left leg indicated that she would be spending the next month in the regeneration tank. She nodded at Jak, then ran her hand over Dujuv’s hairless head, tenderly, firmly, and said, “Look me in the eyes, Dujy. Don’t look at my leg. Come on, Dujuv, up here, just look at my face. Poor old silly tove, this might be worse for you than it is for me, masen? The pain block is working, I can’t feel it at all, toktru. Now, they’re going to take good care of me, and I’ll be fine, and you did your best. It’s not your fault. All right?”

  Dujuv’s face was streaked with tears. “All right.”

  “Feel better?”

  He nodded, unable to speak.

  She touched his cheek, made eye contact, and said, very directly, “I am very pleased with you.”

  “Thank you.” He sobbed, little squeaks as if he were being punched hard and fast in the belly.

  Myxenna looked up at Jak. “He’s a panth, Jak, he needs to know I’m grateful and pleased wit
h him, otherwise he can get severely depressed or even suicidal. And you’ve been very good, Dujuv. Very, very good. I trust you and I know I can depend on you.” She wiped his eyes with her hand.

  Dujuv covered her small, delicate hand with his big square one, and pressed her palm against his cheek. “Thanks. So stupid, masen? I feel like a big dog. And you shouldn’t be the one taking care of me.”

  “Not stupid at all, Dujy. It’s all right. You saved me and a lot of people. And I am taken care of; I’m not in any danger now.” She looked up at Jak again. “I saw Seubla fall. Is she—”

  “Dead. I saw her die,” Dujuv whispered. “I was only a step away from him. I’d seen him pull the weapon but I couldn’t get there in time—”

  “You did your best,” Jak said, “and Dujuv, without you and Shadow, this would have been a massacre.”

  Robots grabbed Myxenna’s gurney and wheeled her out. Dujuv stood there, still weeping and shaking, and Jak said, “Come on, we have to get ready to report. You were great, Duj. Absolutely the best there’s ever been.” He put his arm around his friend.

  Dujuv dragged the back of a huge hand across his face, smearing tears most of the way around his bald head. “I appreciate how hard you’re trying, but I’m going to feel like shit for a while, masen? It’ll pass.”

  Shadow on the Frost stopped by. “Until the Duke is secure, I am not free, but I will visit as soon as I can. Dujuv Gonzawara, I earned glory here today merely by having helped you. You are a splendid warrior.”

  They stayed, not sure what else to do. Kawib came in, learned it was true, and rushed off to see Seubla’s body, and Xabo went with him, without giving them any further orders. Jak and Dujuv guided people to transportation, called ambulances, started a table of lost-and-found objects, made sure that the people who seemed to be in shock had someone to escort them home, and in general helped out like a couple of traffic cops. When almost everyone had gone except the pokheets, who seemed mostly to be standing in a circle asking each other if any of them had any ideas, a uniformed soldier from the Greenworld Army asked the two toves to follow him.