A Princess of the Aerie (22 page)

“You made most of it up.”

“Of course.” She said it as if he had asked her whether she could fasten a zipper. “I had to, nobody would talk to me. But
anyway, it was a fabulous story. But you know what they say, you’re only as good as your last, and here it is two years later
and I haven’t developed even one viv series that was faintly comparable. It’s like I’m not even in my own league. And they’re
starting to mutter about my allocations of space on the agenda and processing time and everything else, and that’s when you
know the vultures are sharpening their knives—”

“Circling,” Jak said.

“What?”

“Ever been to Earth? Vultures circle. I didn’t know what they were the first time I saw it, but vultures circle. People sharpen
knives, especially butchers. Vultures don’t have any hands. They wouldn’t sharpen knives, because they don’t use them.”

“Where do you learn all this stuff? If I worried about things like that I’d never get an accesscast done, and nobody would
ever know anything.” She shook her head; the traditional blonde helmet never moved. “My career really needs a restart, and
here you are—the one who started it in the first place, by going on a secret mission on behalf of Princess Shyf—and you are
on
another
secret mission for Princess Shyf. Well, it worked for me once, it could work for me again. Not to mention that it made you
temporarily about fourth-level famous, for free. Some people pay a megautil to a publicist every year for that.”

“I didn’t want it.” Jak got up and looked around to empty his tray before he remembered that in the passenger areas, servant
robots did things like that. He set his tray back down and airswam out.

“So any comments on your growing rift with your toktru tove Dujuv Gonzawara?” she said, swimming after.

He turned in midair, caught a drone, and pounded it against the wall. “This is how Duj deals with these, and I think he’s
singing-on right. Any problems I’m having with Dujuv are problems you created, by falsifying interviews and accesscasting
things I never said.” He spun away, repulsed and angry.

Jak would just make it an evening of studying in the stateroom he shared with Dujuv. He was getting close to finishing his
second time through Solar System Ethnography since the Dean had set him the task. (One drawback of a correspondence course
was that you were done sooner). It would be nice not to have to worry about it while he was on his mission on Mercury.

He did his best to ignore Mreek Sinda airswimming after him, trying to narrate the situation as if she were pursuing a criminal.
He opened the door as she was shouting, “Is there any chance—would you care to speculate—the Duke of Uranium’s loaning you
his personal bodyguard, Shadow on the Frost, and your joint investigation of a possible organized crime operation on Mercury,
may indicate some interest in a personal alliance between the new Duke and the heir to Greenworld?”

Jak was starting to close the door in her face when he saw Dujuv and Phrysaba, sitting on Dujuv’s bed, cross-legged, facing
each other. Though he couldn’t have said why, there was a feeling of interrupting something—

Sinda barged in and said, “And here’s my opportunity to talk to both of you and settle discrepancies in some of your versions
of what actually happened—”

“I’m calling security,” Jak said. “Sorry, toves, she was following me and I was trying to get away. Didn’t get the door closed
fast enough.”

“Dujuv Gonzawara, do you feel that your friend’s deliberate attempt to steal credit which we have established clearly belonged
to you—”

Dujuv sprang out of the cross-legged position like a missile, and ricocheted off three walls in the crowded little room. When
he had finished his sudden flight—while not touching anyone but making the other three jump back, all shouting in surprise—he
had two drones in each of his two big fists. Smiling, he beat them all to pieces against each other.

Jak gave Sinda a hard shove on the forehead and she fell in a backward somersault out the door, which he slammed. “That’ll
probably be a hundred credit fine,” he said, “but it was worth it. Sorry, pizos, I just didn’t stop her before she was in
here.”

Duj had a slightly smug look. “ ’Sokay. The exercise was good for me.”

“Did you want to say hi or anything tonight, Phrysaba?” Jak asked awkwardly. “A fusion happened late in my shift and by the
time I got back it was too late to call you and suggest dinner.”

“That’s all right,” Phrysaba said, eyes sparkling. “I called Dujuv. I’ve just been hearing the story of his life.”

“A lot of meals and a lot of beating people up?” Jak asked.

Phrysaba looked slightly outraged. “Your friend is a sensitive, intelligent young man and there’s a lot to him.”

Dujuv turned an odd shade; his skin was dark enough so that it wasn’t easy to tell, but Jak sort of assumed that a major blush
was happening—either that or a cerebral hemorrhage. “Weehu, I dak
that,
Phrysaba. Always have. I just don’t mention it because it always makes Dujuv toktru tongue-tied.”

Dujuv emitted a squeak of agreement.

“Then were you kind to point it out and make it worse?” she demanded.

“No, I wasn’t. Sorry, Duj.”

“Eek hoo kay,” Dujuv managed, sounding as if his neck were being squeezed.

Phrysaba said, “Well, what’s really sad is, I have a short swing sleep tonight, they’re moving my shift a little earlier to
give me more lab time for school, so I hate to do this, but I’m officially breaking up the party. I can find my own way home—I
kind of remember how the ship’s laid out—” she said, smirking, as she saw both of them about to offer to escort her back to
her cabin. “Duj, it’s been fascinating, really, and I want to hear more, and I mean that, masen? Jak, I really do have to
just sleep tonight.”

After she was gone, Dujuv said, “She’s a nice girl.”

“She is. She’s one of the best arguments I know for getting over the conditioning that Shyf gave me.”

“Shyf?”

“Princess Shyf. You know, red hair, nice body, psycho-slut maniac, tyrant-in-training? I’m sure I introduced you.”

Dujuv laughed. “You didn’t call her Sesh.”

“I don’t think there’s very much of Sesh left. Which is another reason why … well, Phrysaba’s just one of many reasons.”

“Reasons like Fnina?”

“Oh, Nakasen’s bulging bag! Not her. She’s probably already been through two boyfriends since she last wrote, and she’ll have
another six before I get home, Duj. Though if Sinda keeps putting those animations of me on the viv, I’m afraid Fnina will
be right back when I get home.”

“What was that Sinda bitch after this time?”

“I speck footage she could chop up and use to create animations that have me lying and bragging like a toktru gweetz. Hey—I
just had a thought.”

“Did it hurt?”

“It was just a little one. She said something about discrepancies in our versions of what happened. Did she interview you
and Shadow?”

“Uh, yeah. Maybe it was a big mistake, but … well, I wanted to know she’d actually heard someone tell her what had really
happened.”

“I did.”

“But I wasn’t there to hear you—and you have to speck that if she cooked up your version, it was awfully convincing, pizo,
masen? So now I know that she had the truth, at least once. And that makes me feel better.”

“Well, then it’s good that you talked to her.”

After some uncomfortable silence, Jak pulled out his reader, to review the cultural ethnography of Mercury, and Dujuv rolled
over and went to sleep with his clothes on.

W
hile they waited for the longshore capsules to come around to the cargo bay, Jak had his purse review his Solar System Ethnography
notes; he was finding it harder and harder to pretend that this stuff was useless. Probably Uncle Sib was right, and the conspiracy
of the entire rest of the universe was winning.

Mercury is the densest planet in the solar system, and the density is caused by its very high percentage of metal; it resembles
the stripped core of a big planet, with just a thin crust and mantle. Its atmosphere is thinner than any vacuum you can make
in a laboratory and it races through its short orbit, down close to the sun, faster than any other planet. That much was physics.

Physics dictates economics. Mercury had more metal and power to smelt it, more powerful sunlight for solar sails, better conditions
for gravity assists, and more windows for them per unit time, than any other planet, by far. Quick to get to, quick to come
from, available more often, and made out of valuable cargo, Mercury was the merchanters’ best friend. The saying was that
there was always gold in Mercury.

Economics, in turn, dictates politics. Jak, Dujuv, and Shadow were going to Mercury’s second-largest city, but it was doubtful
that anyone other than a Mercurial would call it a city rather than a shantytown, or perhaps just a warren. There was gold
in Mercury but not for Mercurials.

Mercury was to the solar system what the Netherlands, Persian Gulf, or geosynchronous orbit had been to medieval Earth: a
place so valuable that no one could be allowed to control it. A League of Polities treaty disallowed permanent claims and
pledged the big powers to prevent anyone’s gaining permanent control over Mercury. Custom interpreted this to include any
local government, which was fiercely choked back by treaty officials. Bigpile, a city of millions, had a police and emergency
force of about two hundred and a municipal bureaucracy of three dozen. Law enforcement extended only as far as the line of
sight of the nearest pokheet, if that. Officially it was believed that Big-pile collected one percent of taxes due; unofficially
no official believed the number was that high. About two hundred corporations headquartered there, with perhaps a thousand
branch offices of offworld corporations, and in every office bodyguards were about as numerous as workers, and it was a treasured
employee benefit to be given sleeping space inside the corporate keep.

Nothing dictates culture but everything shapes it. The fierce conditions, unfavorable economics, prohibition against an effective
state, sanctioned lawlessness, absentee ownership—and Mercury’s role as de facto dustbin for the prison-sweepings of the whole
solar system—had created fierce loyalties to the quaccos, which were in various ways like a clan, an employee-owned company,
an extended family with many adoptees, and an infantry company, but mostly were just like a quacco. The text had spent a long
time on that; the one thing that Jak gathered, most clearly, was that bitter experience had taught treaty administrators that
anything that forced any substantial number of quaccos to leave their home kriljs, either to migrate or to break up, would
mean instant revolution. You could call a Mercurial a son of a whore with a fair chance of being right, and he’d shrug and
say, “You should’ve seen what
Dad
used to do,” but suggest that his quacco was in any way not the very best one on Mercury, and you’d be in a fight to the
death (and if you won, between forty and a hundred quacco-mates would be looking for their turn at you).

The
Spirit
would be going into orbit around Mercury for six weeks or so; after her shakedown to Jupiter during the past two years, it
was time to do a real tune-and-fit now that they knew the peculiarities of the new rigging, Duke Psim’s gift to them for services
rendered on Jak’s last great adventure. They had excellent reason to choose this world for re-fitting. Mercury’s quaccos of
fitters and riggers were legendary for their precision and craft, and intended to keep things that way. Furthermore, Mercury
was the fastest and cheapest planet to get away from; after setting sail from stations around Earth or Venus, it would take
a full month to reach escape velocity and get out into solar orbit, but from Mercury it would take less than ten days.

With so many weeks in orbit, they didn’t need to do a rushed cargo switch. Jak, Dujuv, and Shadow had volunteered to fly longshore
capsules down onto the Bigpile loop; it spared the expense of a ferry, and three crewies would not have to touch the hated
dirt.

They tossed their jumpies into the cabs of the longshore capsules, closed suits for takeoff, and let the linducers move them
gently out through the cargo airlocks and onto the outer surface of the ship, then up the track to the loop. Longshore capsules
didn’t have to be piloted in less-crowded parts of space, but Mercury saw at least one sun-clipper a week, and about twenty
short-haul merchanters, most of them doing fast flybys, and so the little planet lived in a near-swarm of longshore capsules
and ferries. Supposedly a human pilot added judgment; Jak specked it was more like requiring a mindful hostage with every
cargo.

They lined up and whipped around the
Spirit
’s loop, flung in an elliptical orbit down to the Bigpile loop. Bigpile was a Maltese-cross-shaped city, a wadded tangle,
mostly underground, of tunnels and chambers where no one held a single clear title to any of the land and the laws amounted
to,
Don’t precess any private security guards enough to make them shoot you.
Above the tunnels, its surface was covered with the brightly glowing observation domes of the big hotels, pricey condos,
and corporate keeps. It lay just northeast of the Caloris Basin (the vast crater in Mercury’s northern hemisphere that was
almost a tenth of the planet’s own diameter), between the inner and outer scarps, in very heavily broken, pitted, cratered,
and domed highlands.

As the three longshore capsules descended, Jak was flying rear; Shadow’s longshore capsule, twenty kilometers ahead, was a
little glinting cylinder, about the size of Jak’s thumbnail at arm’s length; Dujuv’s capsule, half as far away, appeared twice
as big. Mercury swelled into a world beneath them, and as they passed from night across the morning terminator, the land below
changed from strands and sprays of lights to the face of hell: dust and rock, in craters and peaks and smeared plains, fractured
and cracked all over. Thirteen hundred years of mining had changed everything and left it the same.