The Duke of Uranium

by John Barnes

  Finally he had a thought that made him laugh out loud, startling the morose man who was eating chow fong at the other table in the Ristorante Italiano, where Jak had been idly toying with a cup of espresso. Jak made some gesture of apology, got up, and went down to his stateroom to change, still chuckling.

  He had thought that Uncle Sib had been moralizing as usual, along the lines of "always brush your teeth after meals," when he had said, "You will want to work through the full Disciplines at least twice per day, maybe more." Now Jak finally dakked that Sib had merely been making an accurate prediction. That was what Jak would want to do, at least until he acquired some shipboard toves. There was hardly any better way to kill many hours than in the no-time of the Disciplines, and he could always use more practice.

  After he dressed, he checked the room screen and found that passengers who wanted a full-g workout could use the centrifuged practice rooms in the crew gym. He might as well work out there, considering that he was going to the place that defined full-g; besides, it would help to tire him and make him more likely to sleep. He booked one of the practice rooms immediately and called up a sprite to show him the way.

  He had just climbed through the hub and down the ladder into the practice room, and had barely begun to warm up in earnest, when a ping overhead announced someone at the door. Glad for any source of distraction, Jak pushed the come-in without checking to see who it was.

  THE DUKE OF URANIUM 99

  The ladder extended from the door in the ceiling down to the floor. The shutters slid open. The heet who climbed down was about Jak's age and wearing a baby-blue crew coverall. "I was watching you through the viewer," he said. "When you do Stroke the High Table, do you always do it with your middle finger split from your ring finger?"

  "You had to drop in to check my form?"

  "I had to come up with some way to open a conversation." The heet dropped the last few rungs to touch down gracefully on the padded floor. His skin was deep, warm brown, his eyes set wide with long epicanthal folds. He was squat, built like a wrestler, half a head shorter than Jak, probably heavier, with no fat. "I'm Piaro Fears-the-Stars. Astrogator Clade, but studying to be a master rigger."

  "I'm Jak Jinnaka."

  "Do you want to work out together? You were about to start the Disciplines when I interrupted you—do you have anything scheduled that you have to do soon?"

  "Not a thing, till dinner, which is four hours from now for my seating," Jak said.

  "Well, I have three hours till my mess call. Why don't we do the Disciplines together? Then we can have at least an hour and a half to spar. There's only ten or so other crewies who do the Disciplines that are even close to my age and level, so I know everyone's tricks and they know all of mine. I love it when a passenger who does the Disciplines comes along—it's a chance for some variety, maybe to get surprised, to try things out in a situation that isn't predictable."

  "Sure, let's."

  They set up in opposite corners of the centrifuged workout room, more or less admitting that they would be studying each other's style while working through the first, formal part of the Disciplines. In the quiet back of his mind, as Jak flowed from strike to strike against one dark attacker after another, he took his notes.

  Piaro did almost every possible move with a closed hand, rarely dividing or extending fingers. That made sense—blows were better than grips if you spent most of your time in microgravity, with nothing to amplify the force of a throw or a grapple. On the other hand, there seemed to be no reason at all for Piaro to favor inside foot sweeps more than outside—Jak's style was the reverse—except taste. Blade forms were very different, with edge and point, forehand and backhand, used in very different mixtures and contexts. Projectile hand weapon forms were nearly identical—using a slug thrower is mostly a matter of pointing it in the right direction and holding it steady. With beam weapons, the difference again seemed to be in environment—Jak had been taught the more reliable burn-and-seek technique, Piaro the more precise aim-and-flash, which made sense if you considered what was apt to be behind or around the target in their respective expected environments.

  When they finished the Disciplines, Piaro said, "Well, I saw plenty of differences."

  "Me too. Of course, since we're going to spar, the question is, does the winner win because he's innately better or because his system is better?"

  Piaro stood, stretched, and grinned. "Why don't we thrash that out?"

  "By finding out who gets thrashed? Sure. Freestyle, catch-as-can?"

  "Sure. Ship rules are all weapons simulated, tap out, monitors work on probable."

  "Makes sense. They probably can't afford to have you laid up very often."

  "No armor, except your cup, though."

  "Good. I mean, good, it'll be faster, and good, I feel a lot better with the cup! Point a round, dub to escalate, trip to stick?"

  "Yeah."

  Freestyle, or "catch-as-can," is intended to train people for real fighting, and so it is fought until one opponent or the other, in a real fight, would be dead or disabled. How close "would be" gets to "actual" is determined by local custom; the ship's rules were gentle, with the expectation that if the other person got a clear advantage, you would double tap to acknowledge it, and that the artificial intelligences monitoring the fight would be relatively liberal with decisions, declaring whoever gained the first clear irreversible advantage to be the winner of the round.

  Rounds start with bare hands; the first person to escalate to a knife or gun has an obvious advantage, so if you escalate and your opponent wins, your opponent gets two points for the round. If you escalate and your opponent wins without counterescalating, your opponent picks up three points.

  Jak won the first round on a one-time trick. He made the guess that anyone who swept inside as much as Piaro did must be used to fighting someone with a too-narrow stance. So Jak deliberately stood narrow and rocked slightly forward onto the balls of his feet. A split second later, as the expected sweep came in, Jak continued his motion into a spin and lunge, thrusting his left hand against Piaro's head and pivoting his torso for a body drop that put Piaro flat on his back at Jak's feet. As Jak's hands flared into the butterfly entry to the carotid grip, Piaro tapped out and the monitor said, "First round, Jin-naka. One to zero."

  Piaro laughed, got up, and said, "Well, if that was a lucky break, we should do this more so I can even things up. And if it was skill, we should do this more so I can learn your way."

  "What if it's talent?"

  "Then we need to do it more so that you can find out that, talented as you are, I have even more talent."

  The next round was different. Jak wasn't going to try the same sucker trick twice in a row—Piaro was too good for that and besides it was a point of honor.

  This time, Piaro had a way of doing a split stance that drew Jak forward to his weak side, letting Piaro slip in an inside sweep that didn't quite dump Jak, but put him off balance and slowed him. When he reached for a grip to counter, his hand suddenly flew sideways as Piaro's counterpunch rang his head.

  He staggered back one step, and as his back foot came down, Piaro kicked Jak squarely on his armored cup. Jak was startled more than hurt, but as he instinctively bent around his groin, he felt the pulled-but-firm touch of the edge of Piaro's hand on the back of his neck, just as Piaro's knee flew straight up, stopping just as it lightly brushed Jak's face. Jak double tapped just before the monitor said, "Second round, Fears-the-Stars. One all."

  The next half-dozen rounds established that though their styles were very different, they were fairly evenly matched, so sparring was going to stay fun for a long time. Even better than the matchup of skills was the matching attitudes and approaches: they tapped out when beaten, they didn't block their way into mutual stalling, and when either of them was taken by a trick he hadn't seen before, after the round, they took a few minutes to share and work through it together. (As Uncle Sib was too fond of saying, quoting some past master or o
ther, "Getting surprised once is educational, surprising anyone with the same trick more than once is sadism.")

  After twenty-four rounds, it was Jak thirteen, Piaro eleven, and it could just as easily have been the other way. By mutual agreement, they sat down to pant and stretch. "Toktru, I like the way that you're serious," Piaro said. "If you spar with most of the heets on the Spirit, you'll find that mostly their objective is just to keep the round going. Twenty-four rounds in an hour and a half seems about right"

  Jak nodded, drawing a deep breath to speak comfortably. He specked that back on the Hive he had been neglecting his full-grav workouts pretty badly—he was more tired and sore than he should be. He could feel a dozen bruises forming on his legs and arms, the muscles between his shoulder blades ached, one cheek stung where Piaro's foot had slapped him harder than intended, his heart was thundering, and there didn't seem to be enough air in the universe no matter how he gulped it. It was wonderful.

  "Well, my Uncle Sib says he hates people who just keep a round going. He says that the point is to train for serious fighting, and if a fight is serious, it rarely lasts more than a minute. The three rules he gave me about sparring were no dancers, no nubbies, and always catch-as-can."

  "Huh. I can see why no dancers, and always catch-as-can—practicing formal styles of combat might lead to passing up opportunities in the real thing, masen? But what's a nubby?"

  "A heet who really loves to win at sparring, so he trains himself, and/or gets illegal modifications, to be able to accept tremendous amounts of pain and still be fully functional. Then he adds insane quantities of strength training and muscle-building drugs to the mix, and he always tries to fight with minimum monitoring, even with no monitoring if you're stupid enough to agree to it. Then he just ignores the damage you do and comes in and gets you with those gorilla muscles. Most of them are real proud of all that damage they've taken, so they only get functional repairs, not cosmetic ones, afterward, and they always make sure you can see their scars.

  "Of course like any kid I ignored Uncle Sib's advice a couple of times, and toktru, I paid. I got wanged once by this giant heet after I broke his arm and bunded him, for real, I mean, no tap-out about it, one of the malph's eyes was out of the socket and the monitor still didn't stop the fight. He just closed in and crushed my windpipe. I pulled four days in the hospital, he pulled twenty-three, but officially he won and that was what mattered to him. And he sent me a thank-you note because I'd broken his nose in a way that he thought looked real light."

  Piaro shuddered. "Anybody who cares that much about wanging me that way can have all the honor he wants, in exchange for not doing it." He stretched forward over his crossed legs, working out soreness from his lower back. "You know you're not required to eat at your dinner seating. And passenger food is the same as crew food."

  "So… ?"

  "At your seating, you'll discover that every other passenger on board is at least fifteen years older than you are. Most of them will be trying to impress each other with how bored they are to be here, how many times they've done this before, and how much they didn't want to travel but it was just too important so they had to make this inconvenient, wretched trip even though they would so much rather just stay home. So I thought maybe you might want to join me at mess, as my guest, and meet some crewies around our age?"

  "Sure. Toktru sure."

  There were about thirty heets in the Bachelors' Mess, ranging in age from about fifteen to about twenty-five, but the noise and confusion seemed more like a hundred. Piaro ate at the middle table, so Jak was right in the center.

  Dining at a twentieth of a g, one-quarter of what he was used to at home, made Jak into the evening's entertainment. His new messmates, used to very low grav from infancy, could drink from an open-topped cup and eat soup with a spoon without missing a drop; Jak could only envy them as he supplied the table with a good deal more amusement than he supplied himself with nutrition. His most amusing performance, everyone agreed later, was when he inadvertently hit himself in the face with a quarter of a cup of orange juice; the part that didn't quite go into his left ear sailed over his shoulder and headed for the older bachelors' table. A big heet with orange hair and very dark skin, laughing as if it were the funniest thing he'd ever seen, caught the whole arcing flow in an empty cup, receiving a round of applause from the room.

  "Well," Piaro said, "my record is intact—I've brought someone to disgrace the table again." But his eyes twinkled as he said it.

  The big man nodded, bowed, and gently handed the cup to Jak. "At least your drink is aerated. No flat taste. Don't take this too personally. Without passenger guests, half our dinner-table conversation would vanish."

  Clevis, sitting on Jak's right, who seemed to be the oldest one in the middle bachelors' table, said, "Toktru." He sliced a chunk of pressed protein that appeared to be only slightly smaller than his head, and swallowed it with what seemed to be only a little chewing for form's sake. "Piaro has been well known for bringing passengers to mess since about the time that we were all having strained carrots together. We like to argue about whether it's his friendly way to be sadistic or vice versa. But we're all glad he does it. Younger passengers, stuck on the ship alone, get really bored and miserable, so it's good to give them a social life. And we all know each other way too well, so it's good to make us mix with new people. So welcome, and don't worry much—within about two days you'll have control of liquids. Assuming you did back when you lived in higher gravity, anyway."

  Jak nodded politely, and the uproar around him resumed.

  After a while, he asked Piaro, "Mind if I ask you a question that might be personal? If it's offensive, please excuse my ignorance."

  "Principle 201," Piaro said, smiling, referring to the one that said, "Always excuse ignorance and punish malice; only a malicious person is ignorant of the difference."

  "Well, all right then. Your family name is Fears-the-Stars?"

  "I know it's not in the Nakasen form, if that's what you're getting at. We practice a very different form of the Wager on the ships than you do in the Hive."

  "I knew that," said Jak, who had been warned all his life that it was heresy, "but what I meant was it seems like a strange name for anyone who's going to spend the rest of his life in a spaceship."

  "Not really. Most of the spaceborn have names that refer to fear, caution, or distrust. Usually of the family specialty. It's a compliment, in its way. A crewie that isn't afraid of what he works with is too dumb to trust. It's a good thing for an astrogator to fear the stars, because the stars can be deceptive, and if you get fooled, you can end up on a course that leaves you bankrupt or starved. So they teach us fear from the start, any way they can, even on your first day on a job on your fifth birthday."

  "On your fifth birthday—what do they assign you to do? Make your own bed, tie your shoes? How do they teach you to be afraid of a job a five-year-old can do?"

  From Jak's left, Clevis explained, "Oh, people do that stuff as soon as they can, mostly by the time they're four. No, five-year-olds trim sails, watch scopes to back up the software, keep an eye on the reactor, now and then mind the helm. That's how you acquire fear."

  "I can see that. I'm afraid already. A little kid in a job like that—do they even have the ability, at that age, to dak what happens if they screw up?"

  Piaro shrugged. "Oh, we don't just assign them a job and give them their feets. There's always somebody who's at least twelve standing over you when you're little. To take control if you stop paying attention, and to supply that sense of danger."

  "You stand there and remind the little kid?"

  "No, the real danger, to a little kid, is that if you do it wrong, or stop doing it, you get whacked on the back of your head."

  Jak was stunned; hadn't Paj Nakasen specifically forbidden striking a child in the Teachings? (Or had it only been in the Suggestions Concerning the Teachings!) He was so startled, in fact, that he very nearly violated two of the Principles himsel
f, just thinking for so long—134, "Do not reveal your thoughts to anyone whose power over you is unknown," and 86, "When it is necessary to dissemble, do it quickly." So Jak said, "You know adults never hit a kid on the Hive? Or, when they do, it's a criminal offense."

  "People say that about most places," Pabrino said. He was tall, thin, pale-skinned, and very dark-haired, probably the youngest heet at the middle table. "I always wonder how anyone can learn anything in school if there's no incentive."

  "Well, I learned as little as I possibly could, so you might have a point at that. But even if there's not as much inside my head, the back of it is definitely happier."

  Clevis nodded. "I've known many passengers, including quite a few wasps, and I'd have to say that's one way we're really different from you. Crewies don't worry so much about being happy, or any other emotional state. I didn't like getting hit, but I always knew that it wasn't because somebody was enjoying it or working off his frustrations or anything. We say crewie kids should get hit like bolts get tightened—that is, you don't tighten a bolt because you like tightening, or because it's a bad bolt or you hate the bolt, you tighten it because it's better when it's tight."

  Jak shuddered. "I can't imagine."

  Piaro grinned. "Well, I had some trouble imagining, myself, when I heard about how they have sex on Venus."

  "Yeah, but that's fun to imagine."

  It was too much of a cliche to be a good joke, but it gave the whole table something to share a laugh about.

  "So why are you traveling?" Piaro asked. "And are you getting off at Mercury?"

  "I guess you could say I'm a diplomatic courier," Jak said, just as he'd been instructed to say. "Headed for Earth, the stop after." He had a cover story he was supposed to spill at every opportunity, and this was the story that was supposed to eventually give him a chance to spill his cover story.

  "Weehu! No wonder you're starting the Disciplines on your first day aboard. We carry a lot of diplomatic couriers, and it looks like it's the dullest job in the world, except for, what, a few minutes a year when someone's trying to take the pouch? I had no idea anyone started at that career so young. Most of the ones we see are in their thirties at least."