by Neil Clarke
Terror restarted his heart; the neural connection from the aristocrat’s fingers stopped it again, restarted it, and then made it flutter, before restoring a steady, deep beat.
“When I pull my fingers back out,” the blue-faced man asked, eye sockets glittering and whirling silver and glass, “shall I leave you with your heart operating, or not operating?” He raced Aurigar’s heart into painful thunder, then slowed it to the low throb of deep meditation. “I will choose not operating if you do not make a choice. Operating, or not operating?”
“Operating, if it pleases you, Lord Leader Sir.”
“Oh, whatever I do will please me. Never fear that.” The filaments slid back and out, resolving into fingers just above Aurigar’s chest; the fingers reacquired nails and ridges, and presently looked like anyone else’s. No blood leaked, but Aurigar’s chest tingled where nerves did not quite like how they had been re-meshed. “Thank you, I will have a seat, and from here on we’ll drink on my tab.” Gesturing to Aurigar to resume his seat, the stimumuscled lord sat in the folding chair opposite like a mountain poised upon a dandelion. “What are the people like in the Krevpiceaux country?”
“Well, Lord Leader Sir, I’d have to say . . . well, stolid. Quiet, hardworking, eat-what’s-in-front-of-you types. You’ll never hear any of them saying that any work is degrading. Tell ’em to shovel shit with a manual shovel, or even their hands—they do it, and no complaints.”
“Stupid, do you think?”
Before Aurigar could answer, the carafes of better wine arrived, and the blue man poured a generous glass and pushed it across the table to him. “I don’t care if you get drunk, but stay honest. Would you like some appetizers for the table? I know a man who lives your sort of life often finds great pleasure in eating until he is ill.”
“Yes, Lord Leader Sir.” A lifetime of not being sure when there would be more again had trained Aurigar never to turn down any good thing, even in a surprisingly pleasant nightmare.
When the lord had tasted his wine and Aurigar had finished a glass— and with the promise of a great heap of food on the way—the blue-faced man leaned forward and smiled quite pleasantly. “Now, I already know that you are, by profession, a lost princess man, and that at the moment you are celebrating a successful season. Your bank account in Nue Swuis-she is number AFBX-1453-1962-3554-7889. You booked passage under the name Bifred Prohelo on the Tambourlaine tomorrow, stateroom sixteen. I know how Baldor the Nose met his well-deserved end and why your alibi held up—excellent job, by the way. You are allergic to asparagus, the dog you had as a boy was named Magrat, and you are susceptible to sore feet. Will you accept that it is impossible to lie to me?”
“Yes, Lord Leader Sir.”
“Good answer.”
The naneurs in the wine were adjusting Aurigar’s taste and smell to appreciate it; it was the wine most exactly to his taste he’d ever had. He tried an experiment—he thought Rats are bigger than whales—and instantly the wine tasted like vinegar, his stomach rolled over, and his head hurt. He thought I will tell my lord anything he wants; the wine tasted of sunshine on a meadow just after a cool rain.
“Now,” the aristocrat said. “Back to the question. Would you say the Krevpiceauxi are stupid?”
“They are pigheadedly proud to be ignorant of anything they find in books, but not stupid. They value shrewdness, deception, facing facts, and even verbal quickness, as long as it serves some larger purpose like making a sale or evading police questioning. In fact, they are smart in a way that makes my con easier to work.”
“Interesting. Have more wine—oh, and here are the appetizers—and do go on, taking a bit of time between to chew and savor, eh? What you just said interests me very much.”
Like anyone whose fortunes have suddenly, inexplicably, improved, Aurigar was becoming more comfortable. For just a moment, after the first delightful fish roll, he thought, I can tell him that—and his tongue tasted as if he had been chewing brass. He reminded himself that truth was good and took a sip of excruciatingly delicious wine. “Well, then, Lord Leader Sir, very few people know this about the lost princess business: the girl knows the truth and comes along willingly with the connivance of her family.”
“Really? I had not heard that.”
“Well, you know, Lord Leader Sir, lost princesses are all the rage in dwellgames. Everyone has played a dozen dwellgames in which the smooth talking stranger—that would be me—”
The lord smiled warmly. “You amuse me. My sources say you are very good at it.”
“Yes, I suppose I am good at it. I have stayed away from brilliance, which is hazardous.”
“And that in itself is brilliant in its own way. So, then, you—the smooth talker—show up in some remote location where there is an unhappy beautiful girl—”
“Rarely beautiful. Genetion is cheap, and a necessity anyway to put off the insurance-company detectives. The ‘lost princess’ can be, honestly, plain-faced, with a body that looks like it was piled up at random, and an absolutely lunar complexion. My clients will genete her until she looks better than most real princesses, begging the Lord Leader Sir’s pardon if he is related to any.”
“Pardon readily granted.” The lord knocked back half a glass at a gulp, with a visible shudder. “I am related to thousands of them. So you wander among these stolid farm-folk, and you find some girl to convince that she is a lost princess—usually the lost princess?”
“Another myth, Lord Leader Sir. I never tell anyone that she is the Princess Ululara, because she has certainly been warned about strangers who tell her that story. Indeed, I dismiss any such idea; I say, ‘Look, sweetie, there’s about a billion settled planets under the Imperium, the Emperor’s family had one baby disappear, so out of maybe four quadrillion humans in the galaxy, you’re the princess?’ Besides, usually their age on their fostindenture papers is wrong for Ululara. I show them that. I say, ‘Forget it. If somebody really did snatch Princess Ululara just before the bomb went off, they dropped her down the stairs and killed her, or drowned her in the bathtub, the first day. Then they tossed the little thing into the nearest instant composter and she was potting-soil five minutes later. More likely, it’s all just a phantom of the security system and she vaporized with everyone else in the palace. Either way, she’s been dead twenty-nine marqs—and you are not she.’ Actually, usually I say ‘you ain’t her,’ to fit in better.”
“And how do the girls respond to that?”
“They’re disappointed—they were harboring the hope, as most unhappy fostindented girls of that generation do. Then I say, ‘You seem upset. Perhaps you were hoping that you weren’t just another fostindent. You want to know why you don’t get along with your family, they don’t understand you and worry about ridiculous things—oh, I can see that you’re not really one of them, it’s obvious.’ They are, of course, astonished at how well I know them.” He flapped a hand to dismiss a lifetime of hard-earned skill. “And so forth, you know. Eventually, I reveal that I am searching for quite a different princess, of a quite minor house, though perfectly verifiable.”
“Verifiable?”
“Well, for example, this year I told two girls of sixteen marqs that they might be Princess Pegasa Whon, who would be sixteen, and was kidnapped at about the right date. It’s a big galaxy. In four quadrillion people, there are about one hundred million princesses, and, oddly enough, perhaps ten thousand lost ones. At a rough approximation, that’s a hundred lost princesses of any particular age, though I don’t do much business above forty marqs. One little data search to match age and physical type, and you’re in business. Or I am, begging Lord Leader Sir’s pardon.”
“I do enjoy pardoning you,” the lord said. He took a sip and held it in his mouth before swallowing; you were supposed to do that to train the naneurs, Aurigar remembered, and did it himself. The extraordinary wine hastened to surpass itself. The lord asked, “But you say most of them go willingly and knowingly?”
“Well, yes. Only a
bout half the money comes from brothel-owners; the rest is the kickbacks I get in insurance fraud collected by the family. Anyone who buys a fostindent takes out kidnap insurance, and it pays the whole estimated value over the forty-marq indenture and then some. So not only is the girl getting herself a better life, but the family gets a big shot of insurance money, just after one of my false-front companies purchases their outstanding debt at a very deep discount. Then they pay that debt back, to me, at full value. Everyone wins—me, the girl, the family, the family’s creditors, the brothel-owners—well, everyone except the insurance companies.”
“Given the appeal of the idea, I don’t see why these things are not more widely known.”
“Honestly, it is in the interests of lost princess men to maintain the horror stories, Lord Leader Sir. It needs to look like a real kidnapping or the insurance company will not pay. Thus, I need to tell the girl a plausible story and make sure she repeats it to several trustworthy blabber-mouths—I even coach them to tell it well.” He put on a falsetto that he thought was much more girlish than it really was. ‘We told her he was a con man and that the lost princess was the oldest con in the book, but she had stars in her eyes, poor thing.’ Add a bit of the theatrical to the actual departure—perhaps the girl screaming and her sponsor-parents taking a few wild shots in my direction—and it looks much less like fraud to the detectives.”
“And the Krevpiceauxi, who are cunning but not intellectual, are good for this con . . . because?”
“They’re blunt, not easily fooled, and hate authority. After listening for a while, the girl says, ‘I think you are working the lost princess con, and the minute you have me off planet, you will pump me full of drugs, and I will wake up chained to a bed with a large number of Imperial troops lined up and waiting to have a turn on me.’ At which point, I say, ‘Well, of course.’”
“You admit it?”
“Absolutely, Lord Leader Sir. I then explain that it is better for me if she comes along willingly—fewer clues for the insurance detectives—and that her first stop will be a luxury hospital where she will be geneted into stunning beauty, and tweaked to make her depression-proof, nymphoma-niacal, multiorgasmic, and extremely self-confident. Good conversation is highly prized as well, and many men have fetishes for talents like singing or drawing, so the girls also get a year or two developing their most developable talents and receiving a good broad education. The worst is only that during the marq or so it takes to heal into her new form, she will itch a great deal, since her old flesh feels like scar tissue being sloughed off as the new grows in.
“As for Imperial troops, she will encounter them one at a time if at all—and if she’s lucky. They are themselves heavily geneted, well educated, highly paid specialists, like herself, and more likely to hire her to come along as a companion on a five-solar-system exotic tour than as fun for a night.
“Besides, under the sumptuary laws, she will be a luxury good. She can’t legally be sold to poor or even middle class people unless she is so badly behaved that her owners do so as punishment. As for being owned, we are all theoretically owned by His Supreme Might—”
“His Late Supreme Might,” the lord said. “Or had you not heard?”
“I’m a very focused professional; I dwell the crime, investment, and lifestyle instrucks, but not politics, sports, or entertainment.” Aurigar hoped that he sounded dignified, but since wayward sauce had spotted his shirt, probably not.
The aristocrat nodded. “Well, then. I am High Supreme Lord Cetuso, which you may know is a junior branch of the Imperial House itself—no, get up, protocol would call for you to get onto the floor entirely facedown, and in this place that would make an utter mess of you, much worse than that little blob on your shirt you keep daubing at. Would you happen to know, since you are concerned with high-ranking lineages, just what the hereditary function of the Cetusos is?”
Aurigar realized. “Samwal defend us!”
“He may have to. Yes. We are the authenticators of the Imperial line. It is well known that the late Emperor was quite mad and could not be geneted into anything that should be allowed to breed, so he died without issue. The Galactic Imperium should now pass to his sister, the lost princess Ululara. If she is alive, we must find her and restore her. If she is dead, there are other, more distant, heirs. But if she is neither proved dead nor found alive . . . well, the fourth Civil War, a thousand years ago, left us with ten thousand vitrified worlds and more than a hundred exploded suns.”
“And you think that one of my lost princesses—”
“Seven marqs ago. We have her trail right up to where she talked to you. The insurance-company detectives—a strikingly incompetent lot, by the way—”
“They ought to be incompetent. I pay them enough.” Aurigar drained his glass. “Then here’s to the new Empress. The only Krevpiceauxi— that’s why you asked about that benighted continent on that armpit of a planet, yes?—well, the Krevpiceauxi of exactly that age would be Miriette Phodway. I am pleased to inform you, Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, that I can take you straight to her. I think you will get along very well with her.”
“Is she—forgive the question—at all mad?”
“Not at all insane, Lord Leader Cetuso Sir. And since she did so well and I did not deceive her in any way, not furious either—in fact she’s risen far from that start; nowadays she’s one of my best customers, buying a girl or two every marq from me.”
“Then you will introduce me. Afterward, I will of course cover the cost of your unused ticket and then put you on a much better liner to wherever you wish to go, with ten lost princesses worth of profit added to your kick—at a minimum, more if I need you longer. Is she far off?”
“At Waystonn, and in two days, there’s a liner departing—”
“A liner? If you can bear to let us pack this food and wine to go, you can resume drinking and dining on my yacht in about twenty minutes, and we can be on our way. Unless you have some matter to settle?”
“I had, but let him live, Lord Leader Sir. Good fortune should be shared.”
·
Aurigar could not think of Miriette as Ululara, though he supposed eventually he would have to. “Right this way,” she said, taking his arm, and beckoning Lord Leader Cetuso Sir to follow them. “Where’d you hire the geneted goon?”
“Actually, I work for the Lord Leader,” Aurigar said. A glance back told him that Cetuso was mercifully amused at being called a geneted goon— or, considering who had said it, perhaps obsequiously amused.
Waystonn was about the hundredth busiest port in the Galactic Empire—but since there were just over forty-one billion, one hundred nineteen million ports, that was hardly a small distinction. It occupied the entire surface of a conveniently far-out moon of a conveniently close-in gas giant around a conveniently small star, and the only other occupied orbit of the star, below the gas giant, held a stable Lagrange hex of super-heavies. Thus for the port of Waystonn, near the galactic center and with several arm-to-arm trajectories running through it, the total escape velocity was low and the slingshot effect tremendous, so that getting out to jump distance was easy and cheap. Waystonn also had a dense inert-or-ganics atmosphere with a high Reynolds number and a large scale height, and thus aerobraking to the surface was cheap.
Whatever all that meant. Cetuso had assigned him to know it, but had never asked him to repeat it.
Anyway, all that really mattered was that the lost Ululara had progressed from being a hayakawite miner’s indentured fosterling to being one of the hundred most important procurers in the Galactic Empire in less than eight marqs.
The Empress-to-be beamed at him like a favorite uncle. “Well, so, you now have an employer, and therefore this must be about his business rather than yours. So . . . ?”
Telling the truth was beginning to come naturally. “Well,” he said. “This is Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, keeper of the Imperial bloodline, and it seems I made a mistake when I talked to you.”
Ce
tuso launched into the story. She listened intently through the whole thing and then burst into great, glad, uproarious laughter. “Wow, wow, wow, Aurigar. We have both really moved up in the world. So now instead of purported kidnappings of farmers’ daughters, you’ve moved up to capturing successful businesswomen, and you’re doing so well that you can afford a geneted actor to make your story plausible. Well, then, let’s have a tissue sample from each of you,” she said, “and since it will take four hours to run a high-end search, in memory of how much good you did me, Aurigar, and of how much you have both made me laugh, I shall send you up to private rooms where you will each have, so to speak, one on the house.”
In Miriette’s office, Aurigar sat quietly, occasionally dozing and exhausted, reverently converting the last two hours into perpetual happy memory. Cetuso entered, moving as ever like a dancer half his age and a third of his size, and slipped into the larger chair, appropriating the hassock. A serving robot glided in and set out two glasses for the men. Silently, they toasted and drank.
After a long and equally reverent silence from Cetuso, and a second glass served and begun, Aurigar ventured, “It probably reflects my lack of sophistication, but this was without question the best time I’ve ever had in a house.”
“Whether or not you lack sophistication,” the Lord Leader Sir responded, “your experience in no way reflects that, because this was also my favorite experience of all time, which is to say, given my resources, appetites, and time devoted to exploration, it might be the finest available anywhere, ever.”
Miriette looked into the office. “Well,” she said. “That was a very interesting investigation. I trust the accommodations were suitable, Auri-gar?”
“Very.”
“And Lord Leader Cetuso Sir,” she said, dropping a very impressive curtsy. “Also satisfactory?”
