by John Barnes
“And you haven’t even factored in the orbicruiser,” Jak pointed out.
“They won’t be the problem,” Waxajovna explained. “Orbicruiser captains and crews are usually tight little families that don’t like anyone else. They’ll come onto Deimos for about ten minutes, spend all of it buying liquor and hiring prostitutes to go back on board with them—”
“Isn’t that contrary—”
“If you even think of enforcing those regulations, I’ll see that your next post is administering sanitation at a methane mine in the Kuiper Belt. Half the art of administering, Jinnaka, is leaving well enough alone. Now, everything is in good shape and you have worked hard to make sure that it is. I would imagine that you are specking that, headaches of the port call excepted, the next five months will be spectacularly boring.”
“As a matter of fact, sir, yes.”
“Well, don’t bet on it. Let me emphasize that, again. Don’t bet on it. The world can always become lively. The kind of surprises that can happen is a surprise all by itself.” Reeb Waxajovna stretched and yawned. “I always hated old farts who told war stories, but there is some purpose in it at the moment, so let me just tell you about a few things that can break up the routine, in a ‘routine’ temporary command. I promise I won’t go into detail, slap me if I do, all right?”
“Looking forward to it, sir.”
Waxajovna grinned. “I would, too. Anyway, in my first ten years of occasional commands, I had to deal with a sudden outbreak of mutated chicken pox. And I was temp acting station chief at Tycho during the week the police stumbled across a serial killer with thirty bodies in a rented cold locker.
“Then there was arriving at a miserable little asteroid out at Saturn L5, as the vice procurator—same job you have now. My ferry docked six hours after the procurator had been shot dead by a jealous husband. The previous vice-p was already on the ferry out to the sunclipper, past the point of no return. And the Hive was in inferior conjunction with the sun, so I had to send the message around relays.
“Five hours later PASC’s reply arrived. Four instructions. One, bury him. Two, assume command as acting chief for at least the next three years. Three, in eighty-four hours the battlesphere Up Yours—never a better named ship in history as far as I was concerned!—would be bringing me a secret weapons project with a staff of twelve hundred people, all of whom would have to be housed, fed, and cared for, and which would also require a couple of cubic kilometers of new space to be constructed for the project. That was more people and more space than the colony had at the time.”
“What was four?”
Waxajovna winced. “They told me to buck up and quit whining. Now, as I said there would be, there’s a point to my old war stories. And the point is: my experiences are why I insisted on making sure you were so overprepared before I left. I’ve been preparing you to be a juggler with a baby in the air.”
“Um?”
“It’s a metaphor I learned from a mentor a long time ago. A juggler is supposed to keep lots of balls in the air, that’s what makes him a juggler. Nobody’s very interested unless he juggles something very dangerous or very precious—a rare glass goblet, or a jar of nitroglycerin, or a baby. And if you’re juggling a baby, no one cares about any tennis balls or oranges you’ve also got in the air—just get that baby down unhurt, and the audience thinks you’re the greatest juggler they’ve ever seen. Have I stretched this metaphor far enough to tear it yet?”
“We’re getting there. So the point is that if some emergency does come up—”
“Solve one big problem, brilliantly, once, and you will look brilliant. And if it’s easier because everything else is all wrapped up and running on automatic, you can look more brilliant than you really are. Which means you’d be promoted away from here, which obviously benefits you, and also benefits me politically—since you have talent, it’s better to have you as a protégé than a rival, masen?
“So if all the accelerated drudgery of the last few weeks pays off, you’ll have a tremendously better chance at the sort of brilliant success you need to be promoted away from Greasy Rock.”
“Um, I thought—”
“I forbid the term officially because it offends Deimons. For that matter it offends me. But I know perfectly well that to you, this place is Greasy Rock.”
“I dak. How likely do you really think it is that something like that will come up?”
“Based on all past experience, maybe fifty percent. After all, you and I have had two things that could have become real emergencies—that almost-war between Yellow Magenta Green Blue and Yellow Amber Cyan Red, and that sewage strike that the Jovian agitator—what was her name?”
“Vala Brnibov.”
“Yes, right, I remember the software wouldn’t accept her death warrant at first because it wanted there to be one more vowel in her name. Held her up in the airlock for half an hour—must have been terrible for her, not knowing what was going on and having to wait for the door to open for that long. Well, anyway, as a very junior vice procurator in charge, if you had coped with either situation solo, it would have worked wonders for your career.
“By the way, don’t suffer an attack of cleverness and make something come up. I say that because, though I know that you are smarter and more circumspect than that, your uncle—”
“I’d already thought of that, sir, and messaged him on the subject, very bluntly, and you can depend upon it that I’ll watch him toktru close while he’s here.”
Jak’s Uncle Sibroillo was coming down from Ceres to Deimos on Eros’s Torch, the same ship on which Waxajovna would be departing. He was a leader in Circle Four, a notorious zybot that was tolerated (barely) in the Hive and hunted zealously everywhere else. All zybots were theoretically illegal everywhere (no one wanted to let any social engineering conspiracy have a free hand) but most of the great powers tolerated a few zybots as clandestine auxiliaries to their own covert operations. Even then they had to be watched, for a zybot was a weapon that could turn in the hand.
Thanks to Uncle Sib, Jak had had his wild adventures on Earth, the Aerie, and Mercury; Sib’s Circle Four involvement had gotten Jak nearly killed more times than he could easily count; and Sib had implanted, deep in Jak’s liver, a microscopic memory sliver containing enough information to convict and execute one of the solar system’s most dangerous criminals, Bex Riveroma. Riveroma wanted that sliver at any cost, and did not regard damage to Jak’s liver as a cost—given his choice, he’d rather just have the liver without Jak.
But Sibroillo was also the man who had raised Jak, all the family he had. Jak was fond of the old gwont. Besides, Sib was supposedly not coming here on zybot business; he was celebrating his two hundredth birthday by going out on the Big Circuit, the trip around the solar system that took a few years to complete if you stopped and visited all the major inhabited places—the four lower planets, Earth’s moon, the Aerie, Ceres, the moons of the upper planets, and at least a flyby of dark, cold Pluto/Charon where the Rubahy civilization squatted in its last haven.
“Luckily, sir, Uncle Sibroillo is traveling with Gweshira, his demmy, and she’s pretty good at slowing him down and keeping a leash on him.”
“But isn’t she—”
“She’s Circle Four herself, sir, yes, but she doesn’t have his compulsion to rush in where angels fear to tread. (Nobody has a compulsion like his, believe me, sir.) Gweshira and I will sit on him, one way or another. Since he lived on Mars when he was young, and has toves to visit, I’m hoping he’ll stay down there till I stuff him onto a departing ship; he’s got departures for Venus, Vesta, or the Uranus system possible within a few months.”
The Big Circuit never went in up-from-the-sun-and-back-down order. Planets move, sunclippers travel in arcs rather than straight lines, and quarkjets very nearly ignore solar gravity. Weaving among the complex tangle of possible trajectories, tourists on the Big Circuit bounced up and down the sun’s gravity well on sunclippers, or leapt across it on quar
kjets, picking up a few worlds on each bounce.
“I’ll keep a tight rein on Uncle Sib,” Jak reiterated, mentally crossing his fingers.
“You really do have considerable administrative talent.” Waxajovna smiled. “That was exactly what I wanted to hear, and as Principle 106 reminds us, ‘Telling your boss what he wants to hear is the very essence of administrative talent.’ Now, you are no doubt aware that I have a great-great-granddaughter, who lives with me, and who is named Pikia.”
“It would be difficult for me to be unaware of it, sir.”
Waxajovna tried not to smile. “Let me just guess at your private opinions.”
“Um.”
“I see your diplomatic technique is coming along, Jinnaka.
“Now, life is very dull for Pikia. If I were to take her to the Hive with me, she would have ample chances to make life exciting, and do ten or so things that would keep her out of the PSA and therefore out of any decent career, forever. It’s a family phase that I have now seen through five generations, masen? I need to keep her out here in the dull until she’s ready for the world, and boost her record so that she’s admitted to the PSA.
“Now, I’ve arranged the sort of internship here, in our office, that one arranges for a relative. So she will be calling on you, here, first thing tomorrow. Her job is to help you. Your job is to cause whatever she does to constitute help, so that later you can write a glowing report about how helpful she was. And this way, everyone gets some help, and after all, we all need help, don’t we?”
“I was just thinking that, sir.”
“Good thinking, pizo. Now, I really must go back to my quarters one last time, and make sure that my bags really were picked up and are on their way to Eros’s Torch. Unofficially, hello to your uncle, tell him to behave, and tell him to stay away from the ones that look like opossums—uh, better tell him that when his demmy’s not around.”
“You knew each other?”
“Much too well. Everyone knows your uncle. It’s a miracle that anyone named Jinnaka can get a job anywhere.” With a happy wave, Reeb Waxajovna airswam out of Jak’s office, leaving Jak, for the first time, in charge of forty thousand people living in and on a tiny world.
CHAPTER 2
Your Special Little Princess
In interplanetary travel, momentum is money, changes in momentum have to be paid for in scarce and expensive energy, and therefore ships rarely descend into orbit, preferring to pass the planets, moons, and big stations at distances of anywhere from one hundred thousand to one million kilometers, exchanging passengers and cargo via ferries, launches, or longshore capsules.
Reeb Waxajovna was now on a ferry headed out to Eros’s Torch, but had many hours to fly until his ferry would catch it; Sib and Gweshira were coming in on a different ferry, had only just left the ship, and would not arrive until early the next morning. At least, Jak reflected, orbital mechanics usually gave you enough time to clean the bathroom and hide the sex toys before off-planet visitors arrived.
Jak’s official quarters were one of his few real perks— 850 square meters on three levels, which gave him space enough for exercise and full-viv rooms, a centrifuged lap-swimming pool, and a ballroom perfect for a party if he’d had any friends.
He stripped into the laundry freshener, raised his left hand to his mouth, and told his purse to “have the butron clean, press, and hang all this. Order my standard Lunar Greek meal from Kosta’s, and have it delivered. I’ll want it after I practice the Disciplines.”
The fingerless blue glove asked, “Shall I start preparations for an early bedtime?”
“Yes, thank you.” Jak stroked the reward spot as he walked into his dressing area. He opened the charging locker and pulled on the fighting suit and viv helmet for the Disciplines.
Uncle Sib always said that the Disciplines was a martial art in about the same way that sex was a biological activity or chocolate was a food—technically true but it missed most of what mattered. Most afternoons, when Jak began Disciplines katas, he was instantly calm, focused, and alive. But his mind was not on it today. As he fought the endlessly attacking black figure, flickers of color and flashes of light all over Jak’s own body indicated when his hands and feet were not on the right trajectory at the right time, and to his disgust, he actually missed twice with the short blade and once with the slug thrower in the weapons katas.
He had his purse delay his bath, and sat and meditated for a short while, but he found that even meditating was difficult, and whatever was bothering him, it remained elusive. After a time, he sighed and gave up, asking his purse, “Bath ready?”
“Yes, at temperature.”
Jak pulled off his fighting suit and dropped it into the freshener; the butron would move it to the charging locker once it was clean.
In the bathroom, Jak set his purse down within easy reach (purses were waterproof but disliked immersion in dark, sudsy water). He had barely settled into the suds when his purse said, “Two messages from top priority people.”
Jak leaned out of the tub and pushed the reward spot again. He might be spoiling this purse slightly, but it was essential that it be loyal. The purse did so many routine tasks for its wearer that the right to wear one was part of the Hive Charter. But to have the necessary judgment and sensitivity to be the constant companion of a human being, a purse had to be far too smart to be programmed; it could only be trained. And like any personality, much of its nature was determined by the subtle accidents of its physical nature.
Thus, when Bex Riveroma had forced Jak’s old purse to suicide—murdered it, really, as far as Jak was concerned— his new purse had had to be trained all over again to be able to access the restored memories, in much the way that a new arm grafted onto a tennis player had to re-learn, before it could play as well as its predecessor—and it would never play the same.
This was a good purse, but Jak missed the old one. One more score to be settled with Riveroma. (If Riveroma didn’t settle first.)
“All right, then,” Jak said, “you can put the first message up on the wall across from me.”
Jak looked into the utterly expressionless face of his old toktru tove and oath-friend Shadow on the Frost. Shadow lived among humankind, instead of in the Rubahy colonies in the Pluto/Charon system, for reasons that probably made sense to a Rubahy. Human and Rubahy politics and institutions intertranslated badly, but as far as Jak could make out, his Rubahy tove was thought to be so promising that too much was expected of him for any Rubahy to fulfill, thus offending both his allies and his enemies whenever he succeeded (because it damaged their own relative standing) and whenever he failed (because it showed him unworthy of either their love or their hatred). Or it could be something else entirely. Perhaps in another thousand years human and Rubahy would dak each other better, if they didn’t annihilate each other and if the Galactic Court didn’t order both species exterminated. Meanwhile, Shadow on the Frost was a pizo to have with you when it all went into the soup, and a toktru tove, and that was all Jak really needed to know.
Shadow was slightly short for a Rubahy, which meant he was tall for a man. His large jaws and long front teeth, with extra slicers, marked him as hereditary warrior caste, and as on most warriors the pinfeathers that densely covered his body were white with one black patch on the back of his right shoulder. His scent organs, on top of his head, were two big loose flaps of flesh covered with special feathers, and looked much like ears. His were unusually long and elliptical, causing other Rubahy to call him “Bunny,” a nickname that he hated passionately.
Because of the scent organs, square jaw, and black button eyes, speciesist humans sometimes called Rubahy by the insulting term “terrier,” but there was really nothing doglike about them. Rubahy looked something like tall thin feathered apes with baboon-jaws, and something like thin tyrannosaurs with gorilla arms, but to anyone who had ever seen them, they looked like Rubahy; once you knew a few, they tended to look like warriors, truth-tellers, makers, teachers,
or any of the about ninety other castes; and to Jak, Shadow just looked like Shadow.
“Jak, my toktru tove, it is my obligation to message you now and then, since we are oath-bound. I have no real news; being bound to both you and your tove, Dujuv Gonzawara, I have chosen to be where the danger and excitement are greater, thus giving myself a somewhat better chance to win real honor, but to tell you the truth, Jak, old tove” — Shadow’s soft, whistling voice, which was as much like a flute as the human voice was like a trumpet, dropped into a warmer, more informal style—“it is so dull down here that I cannot imagine how it can be duller up there. We travel from capital to capital within the Harmless Zone, we see five or eight or eleven nations a day, and the greater part of my time is spent sitting watchfully as Dujuv signs his name and puts his thumbprints on various documents. I have concluded that the nations of the Harmless Zone are a very elaborate prank which you humans are playing on we poor Rubahy.” He told some stories of how they had flattered this petty king or that one, observing that “Your nations are like dogs, and whereas the large ones will merely emit a disgruntled woof when small children tug their ears, the small ones go into yapping frenzies for every fancied insult. And the Harmless Zone is filled with toy poodles and chihuahuas.”
The Harmless Zone was called that, not for its harmless people, but because it was an area for nations that were engineered to be harmless to other nations. Nakasen’s Principle 23 was that “A functioning metasociety meets the demand for as many different kinds of society as possible.” The Harmless Zone was where Principle 23 was most aggressively applied. The Chryse Basin had been an industrial center almost from the days of early settlement, and afterward the economic heart of the Second Martian Empire, but at the end of the Seventh Rubahy War, the Second Empire was dead, and the all but depopulated, ruined Chryse was demilitarized and divided among hundreds of refugee bands. Today, of the six thousand human nations, more than one thousand were in the Harmless Zone, and not one of them had the significance of a fruit fly fart.
