by John Barnes
“Sure,” Jak said, holding his hand up as if he were a dog presenting a paw on command.
“I don’t know, strictly, what I’m doing this time, Jak. Maybe I’m giving you the freedom because I want you to have it. Don’t think this means I became your friend. It only means … you’re free.”
She let go of his hand and left.
After a while, Jak walked out into the warm sunlight of the polar night, through the quiet dark alleys, hearing and seeing nothing, until at last he found a narrow stretch of sand, a dune that had blown into a crevice, where he could stretch out on his back and sleep in the sun.
Borcles woke him with a touch on his shoulder. “And a pleasant morning to you,” Borcles said. “You’re absolutely right, this is a lovely place to sleep, and it’s a fabulous change of venue for practice today. Let’s start on the tewaza, shall we?”
“So that’s the issue; now that we know what’s in that lifelog, do we turn it loose in the solar system? (In many places it won’t be believed anyway … )” King Dexorth said.
“I don’t think it matters if it all comes crashing down, as long as what grows to replace it is founded on truth,” Dujuv said.
“But what if the Galactic Court issues an Extermination Order while we’re having a solar-system-wide religious war?” Myxenna demanded. “And a lot of people are going to suffer in the upheavals. It’s not such a bad world, even if it’s founded on delusions—”
The argument went on for hours; the longer it went, the less Jak felt that he had a side.
After the meeting, Jak returned to his room to find Myxenna already in there, sitting on his bed. “I really don’t know why I have a lock,” he said.
“I was going to ask you the same thing. Your purse badly needs an upgrade; its security is about shot.” She yawned and stretched. “So, you’re rid of the Princess. She released you and the deconditioning seems to have worked. You’ll have troublesome feelings now and then, but that will fade, and one day you’ll be completely free of her. Even now, she doesn’t really exert more than a mild influence on your decisions. I am authorized to ask you if you feel better.”
“ ‘I am authorized …’ Are we still friends, Myx? Or do you just represent Hive Intel?”
“Depends on what moment you ask me, old pizo, but if it’s up to me, we’re always friends, solid pizos, toktru toves.”
“But you also are a rising star in Hive Intel. Whereas, at the moment, I’m a resource of dubious value,” Jak said. “And I speck that has something to do with your being here.”
“That’s right,” she said. “There’s a very simple plan that can completely redeem the mission for you. You’ll get the lifelog for the Hive, and you’ll get the credit to Clarbo Waynong, and you’ll get a regular posting with Hive Intel. Or, of course, you can wander off in anger and self-pity just because the world isn’t what you want it to be. Your choice.”
“What if I decide I just want to walk away from everything? Take a regular civilian agency posting, maybe even see if PASC will take me back as a low-ranker?”
“You’d be the assistant administrator at some mine in the asteroids, you know.”
“I could do that job.”
“You could.” She said it flatly, obviously agreeing that it was possible. “Shyf just turned you free because she thought you were too much of a hero, a do-er, an achiever, to be her slave. I always thought you were the friend of mine who was going places. And your Uncle Sib—well, that isn’t really fair to mention him, at a time like this, masen? But you’re right. I know you could put your head down, suck up the boredom, and do that.” She looked at him. “I just don’t think you will.”
With a sinking feeling, Jak said, “All right, what’s the plan?”
It occurred to Jak that this was his third attempt at stealing the Nakasen lifelog, and the first for which he had any faith in the planning. Myxenna had procured a Harris Fast-box recording block of a matching age and general description. She had penetrated Dujuv’s and Xlini’s purses to obtain passwords. The plan was simply that she would let Jak into the archive, he would switch the empty recording block for the Nakasen lifelog, and he would deliver it to Clarbo Waynong, who would immediately be picked up by a Hive submersible shuttle, which would then jump up to orbit with him, thus taking the Nakasen lifelog into Hive Intel’s possession. Jak knew that though there were undoubtedly many partial copies, the full and authenticated copy was irreplaceable to begin with (since only the block itself could vouch for the recording within Nakasen’s lifetime, as opposed to its being a clever forgery) and furthermore, since most lifelogs contained literally decades of vid footage, it was unlikely that it had all been copied even yet. Even if it had, without the physical block to authenticate, Hive Intel would always be in a position to disinform against anything unacceptable that came out of the Nakasen lifelog, making sure that respectable people thought it was a forgery.
Jak was wearing a gi, cloak, and high-tops to be less conspicuous, all black to blend in better. The side door of the archive opened to his purse’s command just as it was supposed to. He walked through the silent shelves of books, papers, and recordings, following a tiny infrared sprite in his goggles.
The high security archive room opened easily, and Jak stepped inside. The little vault, just big enough for the lifelog, also popped open at his purse’s command. He pulled out the lifelog and put in the fake; closed it back up; and retraced his steps, locking doors behind him. In three minutes he had the thing.
Waynong was waiting right where he was supposed to be. Myx had made it clear that Jak was to wait until Waynong was actually on the submersible before taking his eyes off the young patrician and the lifelog. So they stood there in the dark, on the narrow pier, waiting.
“I don’t exactly know how to thank you,” Waynong said, after a while.
“For what?”
“For being so good at your job. For letting me see how much I’m not good at it. For being polite to me when you had every reason not to be. King Dexorth was right, you know. There’s a lot for me to learn. And I’ve been resisting it most of my life. You helped me to see that it really did make a difference what I learned, and how I did things. I’ll probably never be very smart, nor even very well informed, but thanks to you, and Dujuv, and to King Dexorth, and Paxhaven generally, I don’t think of knowledge or learning as some kind of nasty conspiracy intended to keep me from my rightful place. I might not even think I have a rightful place anymore. Not, at least, till I know a few things.”
The smooth black water in front of them stirred. A dark smooth surface rose, and water ran off it. A hatch opened, forming a darker circle within the dark ovoid of the exposed submersible shuttle. Waynong and Jak clasped forearms, and then Waynong, carefully clutching the precious object to his chest, stepped down into the waiting craft. It closed up and was gone.
As Jak walked back through the narrow alleys, he thought about how little excitement there had been on that mission—tension, yes, but excitement, almost none—a textbook demonstration about how things got into textbooks—
Distant thunder—the submersible would have waited to break surface till it was over the horizon, and now it was rising from the Phobos-lit sea, ascending in a stream of water and flame.
Hisses and whooshes all around Jak; fifty big mounted lasers and dozens of fast missiles let go. Turrets all over this side of the atoll erupted simultaneously.
Thundercracks as the air rushed into the vacuums the lasers had cleared.
A searchlight pinned Jak. A calm voice told him to put his hands up.
Even through the glare of the Paxhavian police lights, Jak still saw the bright white burning cloud that plunged from high in the sky, over the horizon, and down into the pitiless ocean. They had shot down the spacecraft carrying Clarbo Waynong and the lifelog, and from a crash like that there could be no survivors.
“Jinnaka, hand over the lifelog,” a hooded and masked man said, approaching him. “And then you can guid
e us to whoever that shuttle dropped off.”
“The shuttle made a pickup, not a dropoff,” Jak said, standing there with his head still ringing from all the artillery fire, and dazed by the sudden change of fortune. “The lifelog was on it.”
For many hours afterward, he was hustled from room to room, and people shouted at him. He kept repeating what he knew, and finally they stopped asking.
Another part of the mission was utterly routine and conventional; once it didn’t matter; all captured agents were released and exchanged. Paxhaven released Jak direct from prison to Dujuv’s custody, in the dusty little Harmless Zone town of Blue Cyan Yellow Amber, whose major industry seemed to be being diplomatically neutral. Pikia was with Dujuv when he came to pick Jak up; she hugged Jak, but Dujuv did not even shake his hand. “I am instructed to tell you that you should get your messages at once, in secure mode,” Dujuv said, handing Jak his purse and goggles.
He put on his goggles and plugged them into his purse. There was one message from Myxenna; nothing more than the sentence “Sorry, Jak, they didn’t tell me everything.”
There was also a message from Caccitepe. The man was an ange, and that breed’s long nose and long limbs always reminded Jak of some bird about to swoop down—some bird whose dietary habits were generally nasty, fixated on Jak. The message reminded Jak of nothing so much as Principle 203: “Nothing is so galling as praise from an enemy.”
Caccitepe smiled constantly as he delivered the message. “You may not realize this, but you have had considerable success. Listen closely as this is a self-wiping message and it will play only once. Our possession of the lifelog would have been highly desirable, of course, but the destruction of physical authentication for whatever material anyone may have copied is more than adequate to our purposes. Thanks to you, and some censorship and some disinformation campaigns, the Wager will be secure. In the matter of the loss of Clarbo Waynong: Mister Waynong’s performance on your joint mission had already caused us to reconsider the wisdom of helping him to high office; we had begun to think that a man of his competence could help no one, no matter how much he had been helped. He is no longer a possible future prime minister. This can only be seen as positive, whatever the personal cost to Mister Waynong may have been. And his heroic death on a vital secret mission will enhance the prestige of the Waynong family, with whom we retain close ties, and so the loss to the Hive, the Waynongs, or to Hive Intel must be reckoned slight indeed.
“So, in short, the Wager is secure, and the political future of Hive Intel is secure, and those were our purposes. If we did not achieve them in exactly the way intended, we still achieved them.”
When Jak put his goggles away, and turned to Dujuv, his old tove said, “This waiting room is secure. Jak, I’m going to tell you a few things, and then leave. You can certainly get on the launch back up to Deimos without my help. First of all, I’m going to resign from the Roving Consuls and start a career in professional slamball, a little late but still I should do all right. The reason for doing that is partly that I still would like to play slamball for a few years, but also that I’m going to use it as a springboard for running for office. On the Socialist ticket. I intend to beat every damn patrician whose family has been running the Hive for the last five hundred years, and beat him or her so badly that he takes the long dive into the black hole. Remember how we use to tease Myx about how soon she’d be running for prime minister? She’ll have to run against me. And I’ll be running as the incumbent. And I’ll kick her overheated ass.
“And I’m hoping I won’t see you again. Because I don’t think the way you always wang your toves harder than your enemies is deliberate, Jak. I don’t think the way you use and hurt everyone who cares about you is on purpose, but it always seems to happen anyway, masen? It’s bad luck to stand near you.
“Just the same, if you send me a message, I’ll answer—probably—masen?” Dujuv said. The door constricted before Jak could even squeak out a good-bye through his suddenly too-tight throat. He lurched to his feet, too late, and saw Dujuv’s hovercar already pulling away. Very tentatively, Pikia put her hand under his arm; he rested his other hand on hers, and after a moment, he began to cry.
CHAPTER 15
Find Your Path
Jak wasn’t sure why Pikia had followed him back to his apartment, but she was company, and friendly company, and he was grateful to have her there. His bags had been sent on from the warshuttle and were sitting in his front entryway when they airswam in; Jak ordered coffee in bulbs and a box of mixed rolls vacced over from the Sweet and Flaky, and while they waited, he unpacked, just tossing clean and dirty clothing alike into the freshener’s slot. The vac door in the kitchen chimed; he opened it to find two big coffee bulbs and a box of his favorite rolls with “Nice to have you back—Avor” scribbled on the lid. At least I’m appreciated by someone, he thought.
“So what are you planning on doing next?” Pikia asked, digging into an immense creamhorn.
Jak sipped the coffee and thought how much he wished he could say there would be a couple of months of pure bureaucratic boredom. Perhaps there would, but he was no longer willing to bet on it. “I don’t have much control of my life, you know. So I guess I don’t really need to do much planning. Later on, I might try to persuade Dujuv to sit down with me and talk it all over—but I doubt that he will, and chances are that neither of us will have the time, and, oh, well. I wish he saw things differently but toktru he’s just responding to the way he really sees them. In his place I’m not sure I’d see it any other way, either. When I plot myself in his orbit, I come out the same place he does, masen?
“So … I’ve lost a tove.” Jak tossed the last of his laundry into the freshener. He hung up his empty bags and gave his toiletry bag to the butron to be unpacked in the bathroom. “Well, that’s all the unpacking. Home again.”
Pikia watched him from the wall perch she had grabbed; the creamhorn had vanished and she was now making a similar assault on a prune danish. She looked as if she really wanted to say something, and watched Jak as if looking for an opening, but she didn’t speak. Finally, after a few more bites had erased the danish, and a big squeeze of coffee had washed it down, she seemed to shrug at the obviousness of her own comment, but she said, “Well, maybe you’ll think of some way to patch things up with Dujuv before you go.”
“I don’t think there will ever be time enough for that in all the world, Pikia. If it were just one thing I had done, something very out of character or something, and there were some reason for Dujuv to think that it wasn’t ever going to happen again, I think he might manage to forgive me. But not the way things have gone.”
“This is crazy.” She had a strangely angry expression.
Jak looked at that for a long breath; Pikia’s face was set as if for a fight, and her eyes were focused far away, as if she were lost somewhere inside her own skull, her jaw muscles tensing and flexing to the rhythm of whatever argument was raging there.
Jak could not even see, at all, what any of it even had to do with her. “This is really bothering you.”
“Yes, it is.” She didn’t look away, exactly, but her eyes met his, and then returned to that faraway imaginary place. “I … Jak, out of all the smart ambitious young people I have ever seen pass through Deimos, you’re the one who has toktru come the closest to making any sense to me. I always knew what you were trying to do and why. And you were completely devoted to Dujuv. No question. No reservations about it. You just were. So for him to reject you because of a few things you had to do … well, it scares me. Toktru it scares me. Because I don’t want to lose the few toves I’ve got to some weird set of rules and judgments that don’t make any sense: I mean … I guess I mean that I think you and I are sort of two of a kind, Jak, maybe that’s what I found out on this adventure with you. I want to be like you, if you can forgive my saying it. I think maybe in a way I already am. And I understand that we are friends, even though we might sometimes have to do some bad things
to each other. So I can imagine what it must feel like to lose your toktru tove that way.”
He dakked her singing-on, and he didn’t feel like politely pretending he didn’t. “You’re right. People are weird.”
Pikia smiled at him, looked down, and said, in a complete non sequitur, “So, are we going to stay in touch?”
“Is one of us going somewhere?”
“Both. Hive Intel won’t leave you here long. And I’m going to the PSA. I talked with Great-great-grandpa Reeb and he said that to not be admitted into the PSA now, I’d have to be convicted of excessive cruelty while killing my pimp. The weird thing is that even though he now knows you were always working for Hive Intel, Great-great-grandpa Reeb really does like you, Jak, and he’s very proud of both of us.” She stepped closer to him, and not looking at him at all, said, “And I’m proud of you too, if that matters.”
Smiling in what he hoped was a brotherly kind of way, he caught Pikia’s hands in his own (it kept her from closing into a hug). “Well, you know that it matters. You’re a tove, Pikia. You and I are going to stay toktru toves forever. And in touch with each other. I would miss you if we didn’t.”
When she hugged him she held him close, but she didn’t press against him. “Dujuv’s a real gweetz,” she whispered.
Something forced Jak to admit, “Uh, I think actually he just wants friends who are as good a friend as he’s a friend, if you see what I mean, and I’m afraid Duj is a pretty good judge of character.”
