The Duke of Uranium

by John Barnes

  "Was there a particular reason for picking east?" he finally asked, out loud.

  "Well, I was figuring that Fermi is most of the way across Africa," Alo said, glancing back and stumbling. (Paj said "Principle 155" but didn't elaborate.) Alo seemed to badly need the rest, and sat down on a boulder, after first looking all around it—Jak specked that he was not the only person who had read far too much intrigue-and-adventure fiction.

  After he caught his breath, Alo went on. "I was figur-ing that there's a few dozen big north-south roads and a lot of smaller ones all through here, with usually an aqueduct running under the roads and irrigated land around it, so once we found farmland, we'd find a road, and once we found a road, we'd just follow it till it joined a bigger one, and so forth until we found someplace with a town. I didn't want to use my purse to call anyone for obvious reasons."

  "I could use my purse, though," Paj said. "And I wouldn't have to mention who was with me. Just a party of survivors. There hasn't been any activity back behind us, and nobody seems to be even coming out to investigate."

  "You could at least check where we are," Vara said.

  Paj talked to his left hand, then held it up. "If I understand correctly, we are in an 'anchored erg,' whatever that is, and if we walk due south for three days, we'll find farmland. That's the closest and easiest."

  Vara made a face. "I begin to see a flaw in Alo's plan."

  Alo sighed. "Me too. All right, we're not any of us exactly backwoods experts, are we?"

  Shadow coughed politely and said, "Actually, I had quite a bit of training in it, part of the warrior schools, you know."

  "Then why didn't you say something?"

  "I thought you knew where you were going, you hadn't made any serious errors yet, and anyway, I can walk for a very long time without food or water, so it wasn't me that would be suffering."

  Jak sat and admired the logic in that, in an abstract sort of way; somehow it didn't precess him at all. Maybe he was growing tolerant.

  Everyone else, he realized, was sitting quietly trying to get up the courage to make a decision. "Well," Jak said, "the situation is this. Probably not more than one of us is a target. Paj Priuleter is not a target. Other than Shadow, none of us will live more than a couple of days out here without help, and in any case we're not going to manage to walk to human settlements anytime soon. So I'm willing to gamble the possibility that it's me that the malphs are after, and that calling for help might get me killed, against the certainty of dying out here if we don't. Anyone else willing to take the bet?"

  Shadow on the Frost nodded emphatically. "I think it's a good bet, and well put."

  Alo shrugged. "I think I'd be dead in less time than anyone else. Sure, let's gamble."

  Vara sighed. "I wish we'd thought of this back at the wreck. Okay, Paj, call for help, and let's see what turns up."

  Jak looked around. The circling birds seemed to be coming lower, but not as if they were going to land. As he watched, a vivid orange light spread along the horizon beyond the wreck, and then a smear of gold light poured out across the blue landscape, putting it into vivid color and relief almost at once. Two trees by the wreck, now tiny and far away, were still ablaze; other than that, the grassland around them was as still as if the world had just begun with that dawn.

  Two hours later, all except Shadow were moderately uncomfortable (and no one had asked him; what he could endure and what he found pleasant were probably separate issues). Small biting insects infested places that otherwise looked inviting to sit. The temperature was rising rapidly with the rising sun, and they had no water; far off to the east they could see a little brown creek, but it seemed silly to try to walk to it when the copters were supposed to arrive soon, and anyway Jak and Alo both remembered from casual reading that often there would be some reason you couldn't just drink from open water, although both of them had to admit they couldn't remember just what.

  Taking pity on them, or perhaps just tired of hearing two people who knew nothing discuss it at great length, Shadow summarized: "Several things can be wrong with that water or the area around it, and at least some of them will be present at almost any standing water in country like this. Disease, mineral toxins, various poisonous animals, muck deep and soft enough to drown in, and possibly large predators, especially around dawn. That would be a great deal of risk for a drink of water, and quite a long walk in order to take such a risk, when help is coming—how soon, Paj?"

  The preacher looked at his purse again. "Supposedly thirty minutes."

  "So if we'd kept walking," Vara said, "we could all be dead around the creek by now."

  "More or less," Shadow said. "We might have been lucky enough to miss that part of the experience. But we wouldn't have been any better off." In the dawn light the Rubahy seemed to belong more; he was like some fantastic monster out of the dim memory of the species, perhaps a residual trace of the dinosaurs left in the squeaking rodent hindbrain of humanity, with his flat expressionless face, mighty jaws, and overall look of a feathered reptile. Jak thought to himself that anyone who had looked closely at them could not call them "terriers"—"raptors" perhaps, but there was nothing doglike in reality, whatever the pictures might suggest.

  The helicopters came out of the southeast, very fast and not very loud, popping above the low hills on the horizon and racing in toward them quickly. They all stood up and waved, and the helicopters circled in to land on the flatter ground below them. As they descended the hill, Alo commented, "Well, so far, at least, they haven't opened fire on us…"

  Vara grunted. "All that shows is that if anyone is after one of us, they're smart enough to make it look like an accident."

  "If there is anyone after any of us," Shadow said quietly. "It occurs to me that those who travel into space are a relative financial and political elite, and murder is fairly common among the elite in both my society and yours. Four out of five of us had some reason to fear it, true? So very likely in the twenty or so dead passengers, there might have been fifteen who were possible targets. If there was a deliberate killer, perhaps the killer has lost interest because the victim is already dead."

  "'Principle 120: Never neglect the null hypothesis, however dull it may be,'" Paj Priuleter said. Jak thought that it would be just spiteful and petty to kick him, now.

  "Precisely," Shadow on the Frost said, and Jak noted that although they don't have the muscles for facial expressions, the Rubahy have no problem with being quite clear in their vocal expression—the Sahara around them felt momentarily polar.

  By the time the survivors got down the hill to the hel-icopter, the soldiers or pokheets or whatever they were had already set up a table with a terminal on it, and an officer sat at the terminal, apparently to process them in time-honored bureaucratic fashion. "From transponder signal, we think we have a correct roster of you survivors," he said, "and another crew will be going over to the crashed launch to confirm that you are not among the dead, so don't worry, we should have all records pertaining to you immediately available. Now, let me just run through our role—Paj Priuleter, is he here?"

  He asked Paj a few questions, seemed satisfied with the answers, and motioned him into the largest of the three helicopters. Then he asked, "Alo Fairrara, is he here?" and did exactly the same process with exactly the same questions; then the same for Vara, and finally even for Shadow on the Frost, before reading off, "Jak Jin-naka. I presume you must be Jak Jinnaka?"

  Some odd tension in the officer's voice, asking not quite the form of the question that Jak was expecting, with everyone too alert for any sign that he might be catching on, almost gave him enough warning to get away. He hesitated for just an instant, not because he was suspicious yet but just because something felt different, and that instant caused two of the soldiers to pull handcuffs out of hiding. Jak reacted before he even knew they were handcuffs; he kicked the table upward, hard, as the best diversion he could manage in the second he had to do it, and turned and ran.

  He
covered about thirty meters before he felt the closest one go for his legs; he jumped forward and pivoted to hit the man coming in, getting him with a right knee to the face, but the next instant he felt control gel sprayed on his face, and before he could even raise his hands it had hardened into an airtight opaque rubber mask that wrapped the whole front of his head. He tried to lash out based on sound and kinesthetic sense, but they had been waiting for that; his wrist was grasped, his arm bent, and he was driven to the ground, the mask protecting his face from the gravel, but still suffocating him.

  Another one of them grabbed his other arm, and he was cuffed behind his back an instant later. The ankle cuffs were secured to his feet as he kicked and tried to breathe through the horrible smell of the mask, and just before he passed out, he felt them pulling his ankles and wrists together into a hogtie; the moment the lock snapped shut, they sprayed the mask off his face with something foul-smelling that dissolved it at once but left him choking and retching.

  "This was really quite unnecessary," the officer said. "Not entirely your fault, of course. I didn't even want to handcuff you out here; we could have dropped off the others and then taken you along, and after all, your ticket was to Fermi itself, so there'd have been no problem. But I'm just an underling here, I do what I'm told, and you know how it is, the boss gets a bright idea—especially one that's highly dramatic—and there you are, stuck carrying it out. So I do apologize."

  "Thank you, I think," Jak said. None of his bonds was the least bit loose, yet another difference from the stories he was so fond of.

  "It would be nice if you could apologize to Jentepe, who you bashed in the face," the officer added. "I'm sure he'd feel better."

  "Aw, hell, Skip, leave the kid alone, it was my fault, I got careless trying to tackle him and he took his best shot. Taught me a lesson, you know? If he'd been armed, it would've really served me right."

  Perhaps it was a lingering effect of too many hours spent with Paj Priuleter, but Jak recalled Principle 194: "Never hesitate to abase yourself when you are powerless, at worst it does not harm you and at best it may make the other side careless." He sighed and said, "Well, I'm sorry that your face hurts, and I'm sorry that I'm the one who caused it, and I appreciate your understanding that it was all just business."

  "See?" Jentepe said. "The kid's all right, Skip. I'm glad we're just locking him up for a few months."

  "Me too. Killings are depressing, especially younger people; I can't help feeling that way, even if it's part of the job. So, luckily, today we don't have to deal with anything like that."

  Jak thought he might express his own approval but decided it was better to just remain silent; there are times when added attention is just not desirable.

  The officer said, "Now, Jak Jinnaka, unfortunately you have revealed a proclivity for escape, so I truly am sorry about this, but we'll have to load you onto a dolly and take you back strapped down. Those are strict orders. But at least it's a short flight—you're not going all the way to Fermi—and you won't be too uncomfortable, and once you get there, it's rather like a very spartan hotel room without any doors. You'll see. Really, there's not much to get upset about."

  Jak didn't agree, but saw no good reason to say so. He listened as the helicopter took everyone else away, and the officer gave a series of incomprehensible orders that seemed to involve nothing but strings of acronyms.

  In a few minutes, the dolly came crawling over on its treads, and, not urgently, they tied him to the framework. It was all metal tubing without padding, so it hurt a little as the dolly crawled back to the copter, but it was only for a few minutes and it wasn't any worse than it had to be. As the tractor crawled into the passenger space, Jak saw that the inside of the copter bore several plaques with the insignia of the House of Cofinalez, as he had expected. He might be in gentle hands, for now, but they were the hands of the enemy.

  Chapter 9

  A Comfortable Place With a Little Bit of Style

  People moved to Tjadou for the climate, if they couldn't stand the cold or the damp, because it was only about ten degrees off the equator and because even with the drastic revision of the Earth's climate by the Bombardment, there was still sunshine there almost every day. So since people, mostly older people, moved there for the sun, the warmth, and the dry clean air, the buildings and streets were laid out to shelter them from sunlight and to provide cool spaces, and huge pipelines were run in from the catch basins at the feet of the glaciers that covered Italy, bringing in immense quantities of fresh water, so that people could plant gardens as big as they liked, filling the air with water and pollen that would eventually make it impossible for people like themselves to breathe, which was likely to be the only limit on the growth of the town.

  Because this process was far from complete as yet, more people were still moving in all the time, and aside from its constant population of the elderly, the place was something of a boom town, as a bedroom community for the industrial areas of central Africa. Many of the officers of the Duchy of Uranium's local garrison chose to live here permanently, because it was a fine place to raise a family and the climate could hardly be equaled, and there were superb homes available at very reasonable prices. In fact, as a kind of hobby or sideline, many of the Uranium Army's officer corps had become so fond of the place, and so familiar with the good things that were available, that they had become real-estate brokers here in Tjadou.

  This was particularly useful for political prisoners to know, because the Duchy of Uranium adhered to all international conventions regarding the comfort of prisoners, so that most of them were ultimately released on monitored house arrest within the city of Tjadou, where they might well find that they had to live and work for decades. It was, of course, regrettable that some perfectly fine people who no doubt were good citizens of the places they came from had so grossly inconvenienced the Duke that it was necessary for them to be taken out of circulation, but still there was a world of difference between being thrown into a dungeon or buried in an unmarked grave, as opposed to merely finding oneself in a fine, growing, modern community—one that in fact many free people were moving to voluntarily.

  Jak learned all of this, but in much more detail, as the helicopter circled the city, waiting for clearance to take him to the maximum security prison. He was dreading it, although all the soldiers continued to assure him, in between discussing the merits of the various neighborhoods of the city, with special emphasis on rapidly appreciating real-estate values, that very few people remained in maximum security for long, and that there was a good chance that within a month or two he would be living in a small apartment "somewhere convenient where you can walk to the main prison campus for your required visits, with good access to shopping and banking. There are a lot of nice little places just inside the patrolled area, and we can fix you up in a comfortable place with a little bit of style."

  Uncle Sibroillo had always told him that if nothing else, you could always be thinking, analyzing, getting a handle on your situation, and the major thought running through Jak's mind right now was that these people truly had an incentive to make sure he didn't escape, so this was all going to be much harder.

  The copter finally set them down on the roof of the main prison facility, and they wheeled Jak out to an elevator and took him down to the main office to do the paperwork. "We're not exactly booking you," the officer explained, "because Uranium officially has no laws about political behavior, and after all it's not as if you were going to have a trial or talk to a lawyer or anything. But we do need to make sure that we know things like how to get in touch with relatives, any special allergies or phobias, hobbies and interests, that kind of thing, so that the prison administration can serve you better."

  "That's sort of nice," Jak said.

  "Well, we realize that most prisoners will at least think about escaping, because most of them have acted on some idea or other in their belief system—and we try to respect everyone's beliefs, we don't ever pressure
anyone to change their feelings or commitments, because we respect that if they've taken action about it, it matters to them, and it's only the action, not the belief, that should be our concern. So we know that you haven't given up your ideals or whatever it is you have, and you'll still be trying to find a way to act on them, and that means you'll be trying to escape. We try to take the sporting attitude—we do what it takes to keep you here but we aren't mean about it. Anyway, since naturally, being a prisoner, you're already inclined to run away, and as a political prisoner you already have some reasons to dislike being here in particular, things are already biased in a bad direction. We don't want you to keep being reminded to think about running away, even more, because you hate the food or your laundry is itchy or your room is too warm at night. After all, we aren't in the business of punishing people here; all we do is keep them from leaving."

  Jak sighed internally, but aloud he said, "Well, then, I guess we'd better get going on the paperwork." Apparently, wherever he went, life was going to resemble gen school, and the pokheets would find a way to take your feets away.

  The AI that interviewed him was correctly polite about everything, and as he'd been told, it mostly was information about how to make him comfortable. He wasn't asked to confess to any crimes, real or invented, nor was he asked to discuss any co-conspirators or associates or whatever the other people involved would be, officially. He supposed that this was because if they just held him here in Tjadou long enough, either Sesh would be won over and marry Psim Cofinalez, or else she'd escape by some other means, and either way, he'd then be irrelevant. The thought was not especially comforting.