A Princess of the Aerie (17 page)

“You continue to impress me,” Psim Cofinalez said, “and so there’s a small favor … I’m not sure whether it’s one that I’m
doing you, one that you’re doing me, or just a set of favors. Shadow has become persona non grata. Again. If I understand
correctly, he offended his own people by turning his status loss around so quickly that it became a kind of coup that he was
felt not to have deserved. Or then again he may have scratched his butt with his left hand on Tuesday, thus humiliating his
brother’s cousin. I’ve known Rubahy all my life and I’ll be damned if I can speck them.

“The important thing is that I can’t take him with me on the rest of the Big Circuit; everywhere beyond here, he’d be liable
to sudden assault by his enemies.

“So Shadow on the Frost is extremely welcome to reen-list in my Rubahy mercenaries, if he wishes, whenever I return to the
lower solar system, and I’m sorry to lose him, but not as sorry as I would be if he were killed for some obscure reason.

“Now since Jak and Shadow have again fought together, and their oath-bond is thus fresh and renewed, and since it would be
very acceptable—I also verified this with Shadow—for Shadow and Dujuv to also oath-bond with each other—”

“Highly acceptable to me, too,” Dujuv said.

“I knew that without asking, but you’re right. I should have asked. Time was short. At any rate, I propose to pay Shadow’s
salary to bodyguard either or both of you—it will be up to him to assess where he’s most needed. That means he’s employed,
you stay alive, and it’s less than pocket change to me.”

“It sounds like a great idea,” Jak and Dujuv said, simultaneously.

“Of course it’s always awkward to thank anyone for saving one’s life, now isn’t it? And yet that does seem to be what I should
do. So thank you for saving my life.”

King Scaboron looked very much like his daughter would have, if she had been twelve centimeters shorter, her red hair dimming
to gray, without tanpatterning, and with a small white goatee. He blathered on a while, particularly thanking Colonel Mattanga,
which seemed to really precess Sesh; Jak dakked that Colonel Mattanga had called it singing-on—Sesh had been planning to get
rid of Seubla’s mother, now—and that the King’s warm approval was going to delay matters.

“Well,” the Colonel said, when the King had finished blathering, “I have a thought. We shouldn’t waste resources like Jak
and Dujuv just standing around the palace on guard duty. They have proved to be very effective, and already have experience
operating independently, so I thought perhaps we might put them on the Mercury situation.”

“By all means! The Mercury situation! The very thing!”

“Of course they may not achieve anything at all while they are there—the odds are against—”

“But you know, Colonel, we are so often reminded of Principle 181: ‘Whether you succeed or not is not under your control,
but whether you try is.’ And I dare say that one reason for your choice might be that these two young men are, in your estimation,
likely to succeed at resolving the Mercury situation?”

“I would say their odds are better than many others I could send.”

“Well, then, the Mercury situation will be their first assignment. Excellent.”

The King bowed, rose, and left, catching them all in midbow; Princess Shyf waited for them to get secure footing, collected
a good graceful bow from all of them, and swept out. Jak had to admit that while she might not be the human being her father
was—and he still missed the sweet girl he had thought he knew—she was very good at the royal and majestic side of things.

Afterward, Jak, Shadow, and Dujuv gathered with Mattanga at her office. She looked drawn and tired, near collapse. Jak asked,
“What’s the Mercury situation?”

“I was just about to tell you, and once I do, you’ll know much more than the King. Since he actually didn’t know anything
about it but wasn’t about to let anyone see that, suggesting it when I did assured us of his approval. It gets the two of
you far away, and may help Greenworld.

“We can never afford even a fraction of the agents we need, and sometimes trouble breaks out in a place where it’s been quiet
for so long that all we have is a couple of stringers who send in a report every three months. Even a really vital interest
like Mercury has to be neglected if you never have any trouble there.”

Dujuv scratched his head. “This may sound stupid—”

“There are no stupid questions,” she said, “only undiag-nosed ninnies.”

Dujuv laughed. “Thanks, I think. It’s just, when I think of a place like Greenworld—all these parks and clear water and trees
and so on—I wonder what you could need from Mercury, which is one big hot nasty slag heap.”

“Greenworld’s wealth is founded on solar power. Our biggest export, both manufacturing equipment and licensing patents. Solar
power depends on weird, scarce metals that are easier to get from Mercury—strange stuff like yttrium and lutetium and actinium.
You’d have to ask the engineers why they need all that stuff, or what they cook up from it, but it adds up to a lot of money
through here, so when the engineers say they need two tons of terbium—that was an actual situation a couple of years ago—then
we will get them two tons of terbium.”

“And Mercury’s the only place they have it?” Dujuv asked. “Sorry to keep asking questions that are probably turning me into
a diagnosed ninny.”

“It’s the
cheap
source for most lanthanide and actinide metals. First of all it’s easy to get at there—impacts and volcanism left the whole
planet honeycombed with veins and splattered with drifts of hundreds of different ores, and then the Bombardment put a lot
of deep fractures into that thin weak crust, creating even more pathways down to the core. The Rubahy attack probably did
as much as four or five centuries of exploratory mining, in fact—we have a more complete map of what metals are where, for
Mercury, than we do for any other planet, including Earth.”

“Not our intention,” Shadow on the Frost said, “but you’re welcome to any good you got from it.”

“Then it’s cheap to extract the metal—there’s more solar energy per square meter than on any other planet.
And
it’s cheap to haul the metal once you extract it—very low delta v for escape, and all that solar power on the sails. Even
if the whole solar system were one big free-trade zone or one big socialist economy, Mercury would still be our mining world.”

“So the way the Mercurial miners get screwed is just sort of icing on the cake,” Jak observed, remembering some Solar System
Ethnography and only mildly horrified to realize it was useful.

“ ‘Getting screwed’ is a little overdone,” Mattanga said mildly. “Most of them are convicts or undesirables from around the
solar system, so in the first place, they don’t deserve much. Mercury has been settled for twelve hundred years out of the
solar system’s prisons, deadbeat bins, and welfare rolls, so, frankly, who cares? And in the second place, they screw themselves—that
anarchist setup they insist on means a corporate free-for-all.”

“Um,” Jak said, “I don’t know if they insist on it.”

“Every time someone tries to set up a government on Mercury, the League of Polities pays a handful of mercenaries to organize
the Mercurials themselves to overthrow it. That doesn’t look like people who really want a government.”

Jak was remembering that his test scores hadn’t been very good in that area, so he nodded for her to go on. After all, he’d
be there soon enough, and then he could have whatever opinions he wanted.

“Anyway,” Mattanga said, “in the last few months, prices have gone up, quantities have gone down, a lot of our old suppliers
won’t talk to us at all, and we hear about sabotage, unsafe conditions, and a severe labor shortage. Some crime syndicate
or zybot is organizing Mercury. It’s not the workers. People who live in a scary environment like Mercury don’t
do
sabotage.

“On the whole planet we’ve only ever really been able to afford three stringer agents. Just as the trouble started, two of
them stopped reporting and became much wealthier—so we assume they were bought and turned. The third one is Kyffimna Eldothaler,
of the Eldothaler Quacco, which works Crater Hamner. She’s been sending us all sorts of wild tales—no wonder the opposition,
whoever that is, left her on our side. She’ll be the contact who picks you up but she won’t be an asset; your job in part
is to find out what the truth is, as opposed to what she’s been sending us. Once you find out—act in our interests. It’s not
at all unlike the assignment Dean Caccitepe gave you.” She smiled at their startled expressions. “Oh, yes, we’ve been in touch.
We’re old friends. We share a sense of humor, you know.”

Jak suddenly saw a resemblance in the smile; he didn’t care for it at all. But before he could feel really nervous, Mattanga
turned to Dujuv and said, very quietly, “And by the way, for what it’s worth—probably nothing—you made a friend tonight that
you can never lose.”

When they called the hospital, they learned that Myxenna would be unconscious for the next month, while they grew her a new
left leg.

X
abo said that Kawib was on leave for a few days. “He did say to thank you, Jak, for demonstrating that the RPG is not just
the Rutty Princess’s Gigolos, and as for Dujuv—well, he couldn’t quite say, even to me, how much he thanks you.”

“I just wish I’d done something effective,” Dujuv said.

“You did. If you hadn’t done that, Xil Argenglass would have spent the rest of his life collecting rewards. You put some justice
into a universe where it’s hard to come by. If you don’t mind, I’d like to shake your hand.”

That night, as Dujuv and Jak sat at dinner in the farmhouse restaurant in New Bethlehem, Dujuv said, “I’m not feeling very
proud of being a wasp just now. ‘Friendly monarch’—Shyf isn’t anybody’s friend except maybe her own. ‘Assistance’? Murder.
And that was a
wasp
that did that to her.”

“It was quick,” Jak pointed out, mildly.

“I can do all kinds of things quickly,” Dujuv said, “leaving you as dead as Seubla. Would it be okay if I did?”

“I was looking for a good side.”

“That’s like looking for the straightforward side of Dean Caccitepe, or the chaste side of Myx, old tove. You can walk around
in circles a long time but you’re not finding it.”

“Toktru. Sorry.”

“Well, you saw what it did to her, and I don’t care that it only hurt for an instant; that
had
to hurt, and for her mother and her mekko to see her like that … and like I said, that was done by a
wasp
as a favor to get in good
with a hereditary monarch.
Doesn’t that seem to you like pretty weird behavior for the biggest republic in the solar system, the ‘mother of republics’?
The djeste makes me want to puke.”

“Duj,” Jak said, “you can get into incredible amounts of trouble for saying things like that.”

“Is that what you’re worrying about, Jak, or is it that you could get into trouble if you listened and didn’t object?”

Jak had no reply.

That evening, as he walked his night patrol, Jak’s sprite veered toward the Heir’s Palace, and despite the beginnings of conditioned
physical excitement, his stomach dropped to the ground. He felt as if he were about to attend a Christmas morning hanging,
but as he neared the Palace, whether it was the sprite urging him on or his own mounting eagerness, he hurried more and more.
When the door dilated in front of him and Sesh said “Come in,” he was smiling despite himself. He stepped through.

His face stung and his ear rang with the force of her slap. The door shuttered closed behind him. She hit him again, backhand,
her knuckles scraping across his face. She stood naked before him, a magnificently raging slim redheaded elf. “You stupid
side of almost-attractive beef, I really ought to have you killed. You fuck competently, but your real talent seems to be
with fucking things up.”

Sesh grabbed him and gave him a long deep kiss. He had never felt so ill, or so aroused, before.

“See?” she said. “When the conditioning is fresh, you don’t have any choice.” She pulled his face down and kissed him again;
his heart pounded and he felt more excited than ever. Then she pushed him away and slapped him. “You are
supposed
to be a Royal Palace Guard. Look good and do what I like.
You
had to jump in and be a hero and everything, and with your silly Disciplines, and your big stupid friend leaped right in
and killed the only person in the room who was doing his job. And it might be a decade before I can try again.”

Jak didn’t know what to say, so he blurted out the only thought in his mind. “But he’s your father. And he seems like a kind
person …” He barely avoided voicing
kinder than you.

“ ‘Kind!’ That’s all I hear about him. Kind, kind, kind. He acts like he wants to end up in the official history as Scaboron
the Kind! Let me tell you that I feel a lot more for my old nurses and bodyguards than I’m ever going to feel for that silly
stupid old sentimental gwont. He actually believes in all that ‘Make sure you appear to deserve your privileges’ crap.”

In the middle of it all, Jak felt a remote shock because “Make sure you appear to deserve your privileges” was Principle 133,
and although he himself never felt much about the Principles, he felt vulnerable and frightened about people who could mock
them or repudiate them. Perhaps it was what Nakasen had said in Principle 163, “If you are a thief, always make sure you have
good locks, because being robbed will really upset you.”

She must have mistaken hesitation for judgment. She added, “Grow up, Jak. This is how the aristos live and die, and it’s how
it has to be. When I think about what that old fool has done to Greenworld—we have peacekeeping forces in fifteen nations,
and relief and reconstruction workers everywhere, and useless people on science scholarships at a dozen useless institutions,
and at the same time the Royal Palace is turning into a fuddy old
ruin,
and Greenworld hasn’t been on any media or party circuit for so long that no one even remembers when it last was, and there’s
no style and no sense of place and
nothing
happening here. And all that stuff he does just encourages the republicans, which costs us a fortune in secret police. When
I take over, things in the Palace will be
gorgeous,
media will
swarm,
every hot artist will
die
to be here, and there’s going to be such a thing as Greenworld
style!
And it will be so easy to do!