A Princess of the Aerie

by John Barnes

  CHAPTER 18

  Nothing Personal

  Actually,” Myx said, “I haven’t seen Shyf myself for days.” She stretched and rolled over; Jak admired the job the reconstructors had done. Not only was Myx’s new left leg as functional as the old, it was as pretty and as pleasant to the touch, and having thoroughly explored, Jak could attest that the attachment was seamless. “Are you still brain-locked on her?”

  “Yes,” Jak admitted.

  “I don’t suppose I can get your mind off her for a few minutes, since you can’t get your body onto her?”

  “I’m still a little tired from the last time,” Jak said, “and besides, I speck maybe I should get dressed, and get up, and go sign up for some shifts at the barracks.”

  Myxenna rolled over onto her belly and pushed up onto all fours; Jak admired the sway of her full breasts. “Hunh,” Myx said. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d be interested enough to do that. The ship leaves in two weeks, and nobody’s going to care if we just hang around and party, masen? I only put on the fancy dress and go up to court and do the lady-in-waiting thing because it’s fun.”

  “And her little night activities—”

  “She still wants some of us to watch, now and then. She gave me to Kawib as a present for a while—I think in her weird mind she wanted to try to cheer him up—but of course he wasn’t interested, and I certainly didn’t want to press things. The main thing she uses me for is a crying towel.”

  “For what?”

  “Oh, for Seubla, of course. That poor girl tried so hard to be Shyf’s friend—not that I blame her, how else could she hope to stay alive?—and it looks like, now, looking back, she did become Shyf’s friend. So now Shyf is lonely and doesn’t have anyone to talk to or argue with, and she spends a lot of time telling me about that. Which I avoid whenever I can. Life, like me, is short.”

  “And can be delightful.”

  “Oh, there’s the difference. I am, life can be.” The blue starring in her green eyes twinkled, but she put on a serious face and said, “Now don’t change the subject. Why would you be going back up to the barracks to rejoin the gigolo corps?”

  “Maybe I just like the fancy clothes,” Jak said.

  “They don’t make me do military drill when I wear mine.”

  “Well, yeah, but I look like crap in a long gown.” Jak sat up and reached for his underwear.

  Myx sighed in frustration. “All right, pizo, I admit it, I feel like I really want to dak what you’re up to. Especially because, if you haven’t noticed, I’ve been trying to tell you that Shyf is crazier than ever, more cut up inside into more weird sharp nasty little pieces, and the worst possible thing you can be is someone she likes. It’s like being the pet bunny of a sadistic ten-year-old boy; he wants to wub his wittle face on your soft fur, and he’s wondering what it would be like to hang you. If you had any brains, you would stay away from her. What’s this sudden attack of a sense of duty about? Did you bang your head on the head- board while I was too busy to notice? Or is it something left over from the conditioning? I thought that had faded.”

  “I think it has. I’m not sure I could explain it myself.”

  “Well, then,” Myxenna said, “will going tomorrow morning, instead of this evening, make any difference?”

  Jak shrugged.

  Myxenna wet her lips and smiled that smile. Jak started to see her side of the argument, and it became convincing when she stood up and pressed herself against him.

  The next morning, while Myx was still asleep, Jak got up and walked to the RPG barracks. He was carrying his uniform slung over his shoulder in his jumpie, and he might have been anyone with any minor errand to run.

  There was no way of cutting through the Palace grounds faster; the interwoven canals, tall hedges, ponds, gardens, and thickets meant that you pretty much had to stay on the path, even in one-third g, unless he wanted to try jumping a hedge at the risk of landing in a slough.

  Ahead of him, a low-flying hawk—the things weren’t the smartest creatures that the genies had ever made— stalked Jak’s sprite, and he laughed as it swooped down twice, obviously puzzled by the moving object that became just a spot of bright light when it got near.

  He had been back in Greenworld for ten days and this was the first real walk he’d taken. He loved the winding grassy walkways between the hedges. He liked ambling slowly through the narrow thoroughfares with their dozens of little shops, each selling some single highly specialized handicraft. Complex reversed curves at a lintel end echoed the transoms over the windows and facades, so that the whole effect was fractal and swirly and intensely alive.

  Down another street, he found he had walked into a promenade, and he politely moved to the right, walking nearer the shopfronts, to leave the center to the passing young men and women, for he had no intention of participating in the mutual inspections himself, and anyway he was dressed more than a few levels too informally. He noted, though, just in case future reference would be useful, that he saw no military uniforms or court livery; whether it was a whole street of republicans, or mufti was always expected, Jak didn’t know, but he made a note to his new purse to learn something about the customs.

  Clearly the ethnographic stuff was taking hold. He winced at the self-teasing.

  As he walked the last greensward, between the cascading fountains, to the barracks, the perturb alarm hooted, and he crouched low, letting the brief moment of lightness and heaviness pass. All around him, fountains crashed and passersby whooped; it was a nice day to be splashed with cool water.

  Kawib Presgano was behind the desk again. “Jak Jinnaka. Congratulations on your successful mission; I understand they reinstated you with back pay after your success?”

  “They did,” Jak said.

  “I wonder how old I will be before I get to do anything.”

  Jak didn’t know what to say, so he just watched as Kawib made some more notes. “So,” the thin, pale young man said, “you do realize that you are utterly mad.” He seemed to try to force his old sardonic smile back on; it didn’t look like it fit anymore, probably because he couldn’t help meaning what he had said.

  “I’d like a regular watch assignment.”

  “I was told that when you came in, I was to give you all night watches. Doesn’t that make you think about going back to your hotel and staying there?”

  “It’s what I want.”

  “I don’t want to know what that’s supposed to mean.” The two shook hands like thieves who hope never to meet again.

  During his first night patrol, Jak alternated between rehearsing the things he needed to say, and experimenting with how silent and alert he could be as he followed the gray-white cross. After a while, he stopped rehearsing, and just followed the cross. His own inward silence matched the dark silence of his surroundings.

  Soon he could comfortably hear every crunch of his boots on the pavement, then the hiss of his every breath, and finally the low deep pulse of every slow heartbeat, in the state of total awareness that the Disciplines sought to achieve.

  After leading him aimlessly around the maze for hours, the sprite went to the Heir’s Palace by the shortest and quickest possible route. Senses up and heart quiet, Jak followed.

  Sesh liked drama and surprises. He had half-expected to find her naked. Instead she was sitting, fully dressed, at a writing desk in the center of the room. She gestured for him to take the seat opposite her, and he sat, hands on his knees, as if she were interviewing him for a job, or explaining his algebra grade.

  She hesitated. In the instant before she spoke, Jak let his eyes enjoy her gracile lines, perfect thick crimson hair, and rich soft brown skin.

  “Well,” Sesh said, “remember that at the time that you received Riveroma’s false message, there was a real one diverted? I told you what was in it. Do you remember?”

  She stretched and turned, balancing and aligning that dancer’s back with the grace of a waking kitten. When she turned back to look at him, he
ad turned a little to the side and face partly blocked from his view by that curtain of soft crimson curls, the eyes that looked straight into his were the color of clear Martian twilight, dark as night yet purely blue, like looking a hundred kilometers down a well into a running reactor. “Well,” she said, “I’m waiting for an answer to my question. And princesses are not supposed to be kept waiting. Do you remember what was in that letter to you, from me, which you never got?”

  “You were getting rid of me.”

  “Right.” She sighed and brought her hands up onto the desk, resting them there with arms crossed; he admired the flat, chiseled muscles of her bare arms. His gaze drifted up to her chocolate-and-coffee tanpatterned shoulders, so vivid against her soft, cream-colored tunic. Sesh sighed again, and her fingers rolled in a little arpeggio of frustration and impatience.

  “Now, you see, things are different. Oh, not that different. There would still be excellent reasons for getting rid of you. You are still, of course, not much more than a lively boy in bed—real talent there seldom goes with a knack for heroics. You are still republican at heart—you don’t properly appreciate that I am a princess. But you are more interesting now. You’re a perfect addition to my media image; a dashing heroic commoner lover is an asset beyond price in the battle to stay popular. I’d never have thought you would be willing to step all the way into the image. I would have marked you down as a naive boy, based on your devotion to all these ‘toktru toves’ of yours. I’d have said that you would never betray a friend, but, well, I was wrong.”

  “No, you’re wrong now,” he said. “I treated Dujuv and Shadow like that because it was our best chance to beat Riveroma.”

  “I’m sure that’s what you told yourself,” she said. “Jak, there are senior operatives who haven’t half your sangfroid. You left Dujuv to be tortured while you did a pointless stunt—killed what, five heets? Just somehow or other, coincidentally, that happened to make a fabulous climax to Sinda’s new series about you. Well, such men are useful. And very attractive. Like the Hive itself—apparently big, warmhearted, forgiving, not too smart, way too sincere; actually with a black hole for a heart. You might have made a prince of yourself, back in humanity’s glory days—you could have slaughtered a million people to get a crown, and then afterwards firmly believed it was for everyone’s good, and enjoyed the slaughter and the crown alike.

  “Well, now that I really know you, my only problem is securing your loyalty. So here you sit, Jak, bathed in my pheromone mix … given a view that makes me nearly perfect … listening to a voice cadenced for hypnosis …” She beamed at him, and then gave him her Sesh-giggle again. Jak had never felt so in love before. “Undress,” she said. “I haven’t been a delicate little virgin in weeks.”

  Afterward she breathed “Calm love” in his ear, and he lay holding her, happy and at peace, until she said, “Now, something is bothering you a lot. Tell me all about it.”

  He adored her; holding her was the greatest peace he had ever known. The words he had rehearsed seemed a million years in the past, in some other language entirely. “You and Mreek Sinda set me up. You really did record that message I got. It took me forever to realize how much it costs Sinda’s company to make even very short, semi-convincing viv animations, which any code-breaking AI can tell from the real thing, even if her nitwit audience can’t. And your message was twenty minutes long and perfect. The way you did it was, you recorded that message, probably three or four times, cut it all into samples, and averaged it. That way it looked extremely real, because it was, but the cutting-and-averaging process was just detectable at the limits of what analysis can do, so when Mattanga looked into it, it looked like the best fake in history. It all makes sense, too. Sinda really did need a new story, and you really needed to be a celebrity—being a princess just gets you into the club, being a celebrity gets you a chance at going places, masen?”

  “Toktru,” she said.

  “Did you always plan to send me where Riveroma might capture or kill me?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Sinda did. That was irritating, that she didn’t tell me, but toktru, Jak, I’d have sent you anyway. Not because we needed anything done on Mercury— it didn’t matter whether Riveroma ran that. Suppose he had won? He’d have had to sell metals at pretty much the same rates as the quaccos do now. If he’d tried to push metals prices much higher, the resourcers on Venus and the asteroid miners would have expanded and beaten his prices down. Whether Riveroma or the corporations or the miners’ union controls Mercury, the only difference is who cashes the checks, not how much they’re for, and I suppose whether some very ugly people with very dull lives live longer or shorter. But at least it is turning into lovely publicity, and the Greenworld and Uranium troops that went there to ‘restore order’ are doing a nice job of getting some schools and hospitals and so forth put up, and making things just enough better so that Psim and I will have the miners’ loyalty for a generation or so. Many thanks to your toktru tove Dujuv, by the way, who is very good about talking us into things we were already going to do anyway; it makes everything so much more credible.”

  “The miners really need—”

  “The miners really need a media consultant. They’ll get their schools and health plan and so forth out of this, but they should be sitting at the table as one of the players in the solar system, and once again, they’re shut out. Too bad for them they didn’t have a real hardcase bastard like Riveroma take over. He’d have gotten them somewhere.”

  Jak discovered that the “calm love” command precluded arguing; he specked that was one of Sesh’s favorite things about it. “Well, if you didn’t intend to send me after Riveroma, what did you intend?”

  “I thought I could bend you and Dujuv, and maybe Myx, into a fatal fight with some of the Royal Palace Guards. Ideally I could have provoked them into an attempted coup and the three of you could have foiled it, and several RPGs and ladies in waiting would have gotten dead—I’d have rigged things to make sure it came out that way—and I’d have had several fewer problems to worry about, and a lot of favorable coverage because Sinda’s story about you was bound to reflect well on me.

  “Instead, that stupid half-animal, your tove, bonded right to the ones I most wanted killed. So Sinda wanted to send you to Mercury, and Mattanga came up with a way to get you out of Greenworld—only Riveroma failed us, too. One of Mattanga’s best schemes ever, too.”

  “If she’s so good, why did you fire her?”

  “I didn’t. She suffered an accident.”

  Jak froze; he knew the game, he knew the rules, but he remembered Mattanga’s kindness to him, her gratitude to Dujuv—

  Sesh sat up in bed, sucking in her gut, sticking out her breasts, and putting on a pouty face. “Now I know you’re angry; it’s just the ‘calm love’ that’s keeping you from being able to touch the feeling. That’s why you feel weird and disoriented and numb.”

  He nodded; that was what he felt.

  “It was nothing personal. All right, it’s soundproof in here … let’s have some excitement and danger. When you were a well-intentioned goof with a nice body, you could be fun in the right mood, but now that I know the devious treacherous bastard underneath, I’m toktru hot for you. Release rage. Hard.”

  Halfway through, he looked into her eyes and knew that apart from the speed and force, what she was really enjoying was his self-disgust.

  When it was over, she put her arms around him and murmured “Calm love, calm love, calm love,” until he fell asleep with her lying on his chest, breathing the dense synthetic pheromone mix from her hair, warmer and happier than he’d ever felt before.

  Until the ship left, he did his Disciplines practice, enjoyed Myxenna’s body, wandered around Greenworld seeing the sights, and made his nightly patrols. Always, while he watched the sprite, he willed it to turn suddenly toward the Heir’s Palace. It never did.

  When the time came, he packed his jumpie and, along with Shadow and Myxenna, boarded the
Ceres Throne, a quarkjet liner; the Princess was generous about that. Ceres Throne had no need to run dark, like a warship; her quark-jets supplied a steady tenth of a g, exactly what passengers tended to find most comfortable, and the 258 million kilometers from the Aerie to the Hive was a nearly straight line, clipping well inside Venus’s orbit and taking only twelve days. Liners actually spent much more time having their thrusters rebuilt and their Casimir volumes retuned—a necessity at every stop—than they did en route, but from a passenger’s viewpoint, it was great, assuming you could afford a ticket that cost as much as large home on the light decks of the Hive. Jak didn’t expect he’d be getting too many more rides like this one.

  At Greenworld, on shipboard, and once he was home, Jak recorded and sent a message to Dujuv twice a day, giving him the same story and explanation over and over; about every two weeks, Dujuv would send a short, curt note, text only, telling him what he had been doing (mainly recording testimony, arguing with lawyers and agents, and occasionally working out in the field), about his new hobby (Dujuv had gotten bitten badly by the ancient languages bug, as had Phrysaba, and the two of them were now pen-pals in three dead languages), and about his political activity (Dujuv had joined the United Breeds, an organization that sent whiny, hectoring letters to the media about stereotyping and tried to make breed children feel special—at least that was as much as Jak could speck). No note from Dujuv ever referred to anything about their friendship or Jak’s behavior.

  While on Ceres Throne, Jak did his CUPV duties mostly around the reactor and synthesizers, and started to learn a little astrogation from Shadow. He saw little of Myx; turned loose among fashionable young rich men, she was nearly always busy.

  On his off shifts, he sat in the observation lounges, beside Shadow. Occasionally he listened to the strange, violent, seemingly aimless stories of the Rubahy. Mostly they just sat facing outward toward the dark dotted with stars.