by John Barnes
“Twenty-two oh eight, local.” Jak had had a three-hour nap. “Put it on a screen on the ceiling, no camera, display modesty notice.”
“Coming up.”
A white square appeared on the ceiling. Dujuv grinned at him. “Hey, old pizo, if you’re in the tub or banging Princess Slut or something, finish quick and catch a Pertrans into Magnificiti, tell it you want to go to the Wednesday Rug Café. Kawib and I are going there to split some pizzas and wine, and you know we can always use another old tove to help us split the bill.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can—just have to dress—the Wednesday Rug?”
“There was a fad here a few decades ago for naming businesses after any two random nouns. It’s all there in the educational and informative guide file, One Thousand Reasons Why Magnificiti Is to All the Cities of the Solar System What the Splendor of the Splendiferous Chrysetic People Is to All the People of Mars. Which is right there in your orientation materials. Of course, what with having a major diplomatic function to attend, you probably didn’t have time to properly peruse it, old tove, whereas Shadow, Pikia, and me got up to reason three hundred twelve reading it together. Then Shadow and Pikia went off to see a museum over in Freehold—it’s only eighty kilometers away. She had some independent study thing she could finish for school by doing that, the museum was in the anything-goes part of that city, and Shadow suggested that she needed a bodyguard more than you or I did. (I think Shadow on the Frost is pretty badly bored, and he’s hoping to use her as bait.)”
Jak laughed aloud at that. “I’m sure that’s it.”
“Well, it’s just as exciting for all of us while the elite hold their ceremonies. Kawib, of course, got to spend his day making everyone repolish all the stuff that was already polished. I bumped into him in the cafeteria, and we started to talk, and we discovered that we like shared boredom better than isolated boredom. And so, to recover from all of this excitement and stimulation, we’re going to go stupefy ourselves on wine and pizza … see you there?”
Jak was still laughing; it was good to have something normal and sane happening. “All right. Diplomatic receptions aren’t exactly lively either.”
“Attending them is usually about half the time I spend on my job, Jak. That’s how I specked you wouldn’t mind a little recreation, either. See you there?”
“Toktru masen.”
“No need to hurry. We’re going to be there for a long time. No reason to be up early. If you haven’t checked the docket lately, apparently tomorrow Waynong and Prince Cyx are going golfing with Shyf, and the rest of us are hanging around.”
Jak shuddered. “Tell me they aren’t going to be looking for a fourth.”
“Possibly the King.”
“Nakasen be praised.” On Mars golf was a mania, because it was more challenging than on Earth; low gravity meant long drives but sticky air meant shots curved more easily and the lightest of breezes had a profound effect. A slightly off shot that might have cost a stroke on Earth was a disaster on Mars. “I’ll get dressed and be right with you.”
Jak took the surface, scenic route rather than shooting through the subsurface tunnels. The Pertrans car glided through Magnificiti, a pretty little town that looked like a random collection of European architectural ideas from all the prespaceflight centuries; towers and spires, pseudotemples with friezes, rows of statues, balls on plinths, and cathedrals with imposing fronts, all packed around a star-shaped pattern of boulevards.
Twilight was still lingering. Since Mars’s atmosphere was so thick so far above the surface, sunset was followed by a very slow dimming, bluing, and purpling of the sky that went on for more than two hours before full night fell. The stars twinkled more here than anywhere in the solar system, but the air dimmed them less than it did on Earth; the effect was of a great scatter of glinting diamonds on an imperial purple cloak.
At their table on the patio at the back of the Wednesday Rug Café, Kawib and Dujuv had two large pizzas surrounded, one partly and one mostly consumed. Kawib was ignoring the partially eaten piece in front of him in favor of his wine. Dujuv was rolling a slice lengthwise, his usual method for eating one in the minimum number of bites.
“Playtnaglazfya,” Dujuv said, pointing to his left with his thumb at the plate and glass waiting. Jak pulled out the chair and sat, dropped a napkin onto his lap, filled the glass, and grabbed a piece of the pizza. He was surprised at how good his appetite was.
With a mighty gal-lulp! Dujuv bolted the rest of his gigantic mouthful of pizza, and washed it down with half a glass of wine. “We’re just getting started.”
“Er, actually, I’m finished, with the food, anyway,” Kawib said.
“With Duj figured into the average,” Jak assured him, “ ‘we’ll’ be just getting started for hours yet to come. How have you been?”
Kawib Presgano was wearing a plain, unornamented coverall, appropriate for military or security people in foreign territory. He was still slim, tall, a long-and-lean natural athlete who had stayed in training, just as he had been three years ago when Jak and Dujuv had first met him.
Jak, Dujuv, and Shadow had witnessed the Princess’s way of operating firsthand: like all Karrinynya, to appoint her most dangerous rivals and opponents to positions of great trust, so that the moment they failed her in the slightest regard, they could be executed for treason or sedition. Jak had been there the night that an agent of Hive Intelligence, in a “mistake” arranged by Shyf, had shot and killed Seubla Mattanga, Kawib’s fiancée and a potential pretender to the throne in her own right. He had seen the things Shyf had put Kawib through as commander of the Royal Palace Guard. And now he was her personal officer for intelligence and security … charged with keeping her safe and liable to be killed as soon as his efforts did not seem quite perfect. “If it’s painful, you don’t have to tell me.”
“Well, it’s been pretty much what you would have guessed. I watch everything. I look for anything that might look even a little suspicious. I get reconditioned twice a week, and I don’t get to take a break the next day. It’s all a silly, weird game, Jak. I try not to make a mistake, since I’ll die for the first one … and I wait for the first one to come.” He shrugged, drained his wineglass, filled it again, and took another sip. “It’s good to have a leave and people to spend it with.”
“Glad we can help you,” Dujuv said, carefully rolling the next piece of pizza. “Nakasen’s hairy bag, what a waste of talent, Kawib. You could have been anything. It’s a pity you didn’t run away when you were sixteen, before she ever came to Greenworld. I take it there’s nowhere you could run now?”
“Sooner or later a bounty killer would come and get me. I suppose I could live free for a while, maybe in the Jovian League somewhere—if I didn’t mind living in a police state—or maybe assume a name and go to Triton or Mercury like any bankrupt or petty crook.”
“You could do worse than Mercury,” Dujuv commented. “Like I was telling you before Jak got here, they’re decent people. Poor and beaten down and everything else, but if you joined up in a quacco, you’d have toves who would die for you and a place where you were needed.”
“For what?”
“They can always use another strong back there. Better still, you’re educated. You could read and write for the adults who can’t, help with the technical side, even teach the kids. And nobody in your quacco would rat you out. You wouldn’t have to watch your back, and you might get a chance to quietly go sane.”
“Recover from the conditioning.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“You know that for someone like me that’s years of misery?”
“That’s what they tell you.” Dujuv stretched. “Look, don’t let me get you in trouble. I suggest that you reject whatever I say, just in case anyone is listening in, masen? But if any of it makes sense, remember it. If you once got to Mercury, with a few hardchips of currency, what you’d do is throw away your purse and your ID, buy a temporary-on-planet permit from
one of the city governments, under any old name you like, then walk down to the hiring hall and use the rest of your cash to buy a starter membership in any quacco that needs an educated hand. That’s not traceable. As for the conditioning, hell, yeah, you’d be in withdrawal. I went through that myself, twice, panths bond naturally and get the same effect. Thought I was going to die. Thought it wasn’t worth it. Thought I’d never make it through. And when I did make it through, on the other side, it was. Well, what kind of people end up on Mercury? Trust me, every quacco has a lot of experience with drying out drunks and detoxing druggies and working the control programming out of various kinds of slaves. They’d take care of you, and you’d live.”
“As a shattered mess.”
“Maybe an example to make myself clear? While I was at Eldothaler Quacco, we got a new heet in who’d been a professor, once, and ended up on Mercury because of a little problem with xleeth. On xleeth, he was happy all the time, just too inept to be trusted to flush a toilet. Off xleeth, he was well aware that his IQ was down to about eighty-five, that he’d once been somebody and now he was a shovel propulsion unit. And his pleasure centers were pretty burned down, so he didn’t enjoy even the simple pleasures much. For some reason, it was worth it to him to be free, stupid, and sad.” Dujuv hefted the piece of pizza, apparently decided the balance was right, and took it in three bites. “Look, I’m not your judge and I haven’t been through a tenth of what you have. But people who really want to be free are free, or dead.”
“And if I’m not free or dead, I didn’t want freedom that much?”
Dujuv swallowed without chewing. “Let’s talk of more pleasant things.”
“Is there anything else much to talk about?” Kawib asked.
“I guess not. Want to just eat and drink?”
“Maybe … Dujuv, how can you be so sure that I’ll be happier on Mercury, or Triton—the choice between broiling and freezing—where I’ll be nobody but a false name on the right front of my pressure suit?”
“I didn’t say you’d be happier. You’d just be able to use more of your abilities, stop looking over your shoulder, maybe sleep at night, have stuff to do that mattered. That kind of thing. But being happy? I didn’t say anything about that.”
“But you think I should go.” Kawib drained his glass again.
Trying to lighten the mood, Jak said, “Sometimes I think Duj believes we all should go to those places.”
The thoughtful expression on Dujuv’s face would have confused every bigot in the solar system—a panth obviously lost in contemplation—but when he spoke again, Jak and Kawib were just as confused. “Oh, I don’t think the really terrible places are good for the people who are there. I wish they could all get out of there. The radzundslag on Mercury has most people only living a bit past a hundred years, and Triton’s a pretty brutal place too. I think I’d go mad living in a Venerean resource crawler, and I’m not planning to vacation in any of the asteroid mines. No question, decent schools, and enough rest, and exercise that works your whole body, and food and air without poison are good things—just look at the people in the Hive and the Aerie, or on Earth or Mars. And most ways there’s more freedom for most people out here in the good parts of the solar system; I can just open my mouth and say that it’s a disgrace to our species that on Mercury there’s still slavery and banking, and nothing happens to me. Say that on a street corner in Chaudville or Bigpile and several private companies will be putting a price on your head within minutes, and some bounty hunter will collect it within days. No, I don’t think the resource extraction areas are good places and I don’t think everyone should go there.
“But they are a good place to vanish, and that’s what Kawib needs to do if he’s ever to have his freedom.
“And—this sounds so stupid that I don’t want to say it, but I guess I should—they’re more real there.”
“That doesn’t sound stupid,” Jak said, noticing that the wine was beginning to take hold of him.
“Maybe I should say it sounds like a lot of stupid people sound, so it’s sort of stupid by association. I don’t think that being uncomfortable, overworked, and exploited makes anyone more real. I don’t think misery creates wisdom. Really the opposite. But what working hard with the physical world, for not much reward, does do for a person, is it keeps them from thinking that little games that happen in the brain are real. A heet who spends all his time setting probes or running a separator, so that his quacco won’t be seized and he won’t be sold off as a peon, doesn’t necessarily know much about what is real (his perspective is too narrow and he may not have time to think about it). But he does have a singing-on sense of what’s not real—like most of politics and practically everything that’s reported on the news: He does know that most of the jockeying between aristos is no concern of his.”
“You’re sounding heretical,” Jak said, “and verging on republican.”
“ ‘Then make the most of it,’ ” Dujuv said, obviously quoting someone (Jak didn’t know who, but since Duj was an enthusiast for dead languages, it could have been any of a very large number of obscure dead people). “Ever notice you can recite all two hundred thirty-four Principles, and read all through the Teachings and the Suggestions, and you still won’t find a single word about kindness, or gentleness, or keeping your honor? One of the best things about a heet busting his tail down in a mine, or out on the lines of a sun-clipper, is that he knows that kind is better than cruel, and that he’d rather be around people who told the truth than people who didn’t. Most of the affluent people in the ‘better’ parts of the solar system seem to have missed those points. So yeah, I guess I lean republican these days. Maybe even Socialist, which will get me fired, of course, but I can always go play slamball or sign on a sunclipper. It just seems to me that we’ve got nearly unlimited resources at hand and we’ve been in space for fifteen hundred years; we ought to think about getting rid of at least poverty and slavery, and on nights when I’ve had enough wine, I sometimes think we ought to get rid of torture and political repression too.”
Jak snorted. “And if people weren’t forced by poverty or prods, who would do the shitwork?”
“People who were paid enough.”
Kawib jumped in. “Oh, toktru masen. What are you going to do, pay a resourcer on Venus more than you pay an orchestra conductor on the Aerie?”
Dujuv shrugged. “As a whole, humanity could afford to pay everyone like a king. And there are a lot of jobs that could and should be done by robots anyway. What’s two hundred years of a human life worth? That’s how much most miners on Mercury lose out of their life spans.”
“Most of them are criminals. Mercury was settled by prison ships—” Jak said.
“See, this is what mystifies me about the way people think, Jak. Anyone who asks his purse can confirm this in about three seconds, counting your talking time: most prisoners who went to Mercury went for debt, not for crimes, and anyway the present population is mostly their descendants, not the original debtors or criminals. Even if you actually do think that overspending your credit rates a century off your lifetime, and living as a slave in a tunnel in hell, should that happen to you because of what your grandfather did? Come on, you were on Mercury too, would you send somebody into a krilj there, as a peon, because his mom was a compulsive shopper?”
“If you made any changes like what you’re talking about,” Jak said, “the great majority of people in the solar system—who are well off and comfortable—”
“Now why is it that before there can be any improvement for people who have nothing, the people who already have too much have to get more?”
“Because,” Sib said, sitting down beside Jak, “they like what they have and if you want them to change you have to offer them something they will like better. Your alternative would be robbing them at gunpoint, which I assume you don’t favor.”
“That’s why I spend a lot of time thinking,” Dujuv agreed.
“You should spend more. S
ome professions and some philosophies just never work together—and with your talent, you shouldn’t lose track of your profession.” Sib’s voice was curiously hard-edged and insistent for casual conversation, but he sat down and poured a glass like anyone else and said, “Kawib Presgano, we haven’t met before, but I’m Sibroillo Jinnaka, Jak’s uncle, and also a stringer for Hive Intel. Which post, I hope, will not last much longer, because a regular agent should be here in a few days, and they really need someone who outranks the agent they’ve got in charge.”
“Yes, they do.” Kawib made a face. “I don’t speck what you’re saying about the philosophy and the profession not going together—”
“Very often it’s not what attitude you take, or what beliefs you hold, but the fact that you try to do anything about them that makes a mess. ‘Follow your sword through life, for if you are behind your sword, and it moves forward, and you wield it with alertness, you are in the safest place you can be.’ ” Sib tasted his wine and nodded.
Though politics was Jak’s profession, he didn’t want to talk shop right now. “I like the idea of following the sword.”
“You were raised to it,” Sib pointed out. “But it’s a viewpoint that only makes sense if we never question the people we follow the sword for.” He tugged at his goatee. “Get used to the idea that even their vices are virtues. Cruelty and aggression enhance their power. Incompetence and silliness enhance our loyalty. I’ve had a very pleasant and interesting life, all spent following my sword, metaphorically speaking of course—and that’s because my sword always had the common sense to go where it did the most good for the aristos. They’re the ones who have the money to pay for us.”
Dujuv sighed. “I speck you but I don’t want to dak it, masen? It all seemed much simpler on the ground.”
“That’s because on the ground your main concerns are staying alive and carrying out your mission,” Sibroillo said, and this was the first time this evening that his tone to Dujuv was polite and gentle. “Because you just followed your sword, and left the question of who to fight (and why) to the people that the question belongs to. Now, tell me about this draft for slamball players that you’ve been caught in?”
