In the Hall of the Martian King (2 page)

“You know, sex, war, sports, taxes—”

“In the Hive, nobody talks about taxes. Otherwise it’s the same.”

“You have a gift for keeping Deimons on Deimos,” Avor observed. “Of course, you are a Hive bureaucrat and that is Hive policy.”

“That also means I’ve accomplished one thing that I was supposed to, today, so I guess I should go back and write a bunch
of memos claiming the credit. I’ll see you.”

Jak airswam into the tunnel, merging between an older kobold (diligently paddling along with an expression of utter boredom)
and a group of teenaged boys (airswimming in cylinder formation, discussing how dull life was).

The visit with Avor had been nice, but Jak was still discouraged. His first independent command, beginning in less than two
hours, ought to feel more significant, more like a moment when all of history changed, or more like the heavy hand of doom,
or just more
something.

Reeb Waxajovna was going on vacation. Like any PASC administrator, he had little choice: he went on vacation whenever his
accumulated leave time, desired days at destination, and possible shipping schedules specified a solution to a scheduling
equation at PASC headquarters. He wanted to go back to the Hive, which sat at the Earth-Sun L5 Lagrange libration point, sixty
degrees behind Earth in orbit. A scheduling algorithm somewhere back in the main office had spotted a chance:
Eros’s Torch,
a downbound quarkjet liner (twenty-two days from Mars to the Hive), and
The Song of Copernicus,
an upbound sunclipper (two and a half months from the Hive to Mars via a Venus assist), would provide Waxajovna with three
more days at the Hive than the sixty minimum he had requested. While he did that, Jak Jinnaka would be administering Deimos,
for a total of five months.

Waxajovna was waiting for him. “Mister Jinnaka. Let’s go over everything one more time, so that your obsessive, neurotic supervisor
will not worry himself ill while on vacation.”

“I never said anything like that about you, sir.”

“Of course not, you’re not crazy, Jinnaka, but you are not stupid either, and considering what I’ve been putting you through
for the last few weeks, you
have
to have been thinking it, now and then. Now, humor me on this. Then I have a few last notes.”

The Procurator for Deimos was an unmodified human, a medium-brown-skinned endomorph with slight epicanthic folds, flat cheekbones,
and a snub nose. In messages to his more closely trusted toves, Jak sometimes called Reeb Waxajovna “The Modal Man” because
he seemed to have the most common type of everything. He even looked the average age; only the tired crackle in his voice
revealed that he was older. “Now, then, let’s run over each area budget first.”

After area budgets, there were culture grants, infrastructure financing, projects advice to the local government, revenue
enhancement relations with Deimos’s tax bureau, and some issues about Wager orthodoxy. Only the last of these really mattered;
though individual nations were continually at war, the essential unity of humanity (against the Rubahy if another war were
to break out and against the Galactic State if it ever issued its long-expected Extermination Order,) was absolutely a matter
of survival. The Wager, the religious-philosophic system followed by nineteen out of twenty humans, was the basis of human
unity, and though there were local variations and minor differences in its practice, so far, in seven hundred years, there
had been no major schism. The Hive itself had been founded, in part, to be the center and sustainer of the Wager.

But even on the Wager-related matters, the real creative thinking was done; Jak would merely follow orders and fill out paperwork.

Almost all arriving and departing ships would be Deimos-based Hive Spatial patrols by orbicruisers and armed sunclippers.
Patrol in-and-outs required no real effort; their crews already had quarters, and for every ship that left its berth to go
out on patrol, another came in.

All the real headaches during Jak’s five-month watch would derive from the eleven ships from extramartian space: two downbound
quarkjet liners, four upbound sun-clippers, a down-bound sunclipper, and four warships—a downbound armed sunclipper from New
Hamburg making an allied-port call, and a task force of three Spatial ships, the battlesphere
Like So Not,
warshuttle carrier
Actium,
and orbicruiser
Tree Bowing to the Storm,
upbound to the Neptune system to relieve the Hive’s task force guarding Triton (whether the Spatial guarded Triton from the
Jovians, the Rubahy, or the Tritonians themselves was always an interesting question).

“That armed sunclipper will be no problem at all,” Waxajovna observed, “because nobody’s going to be allowed off it. New Hamburg
has a major defection problem, so
Bunne
will co-orbit rather than dock, and send over officer parties by longshore capsule.

“But any trouble that the Hamburgers save you, our own task force will make up for. Battlesphere crewies always drink and
fuck themselves silly, and
Actium
will be worse— two hundred fifty warshuttle crews.
And then
add in that they’re all going up to Triton on a direct ride from here—so after this one port call they’re in for thirty-seven
more weeks of training on simulators, then two years at Triton, where Forces personnel are confined to base due to terrorist
threats. And then at least forty weeks in all getting back down to the Hive.

“Which means their lives are looking to absolutely stink for the next three and a half years, and their last ten days to blow
off steam will happen here.

“So the pilots, navigators, weaponeers, and beanies will all be roaming bar to bar and whorehouse to whorehouse, looking for
chances to beat each other up, and the officers will all be publicly telling them to cut it out and privately betting on whose
crewies can stomp whose, and the warshuttle crewies will clash with the battlesphere crewies …”

“And you haven’t even factored in the orbicruiser,” Jak pointed out.

“
They
won’t be the problem,” Waxajovna explained. “Orbicruiser captains and crews are usually tight little families that don’t
like anyone else. They’ll come onto Deimos for about ten minutes, spend all of it buying liquor and hiring prostitutes to
go back on board with them—”

“Isn’t that contrary—”

“If you even think of enforcing those regulations, I’ll see that your next post is administering sanitation at a methane mine
in the Kuiper Belt. Half the art of administering, Jinnaka, is leaving well enough alone. Now, everything is in good shape
and you have worked hard to make sure that it is. I would imagine that you are specking that, headaches of the port call excepted,
the next five months will be spectacularly boring.”

“As a matter of fact, sir, yes.”

“Well, don’t bet on it. Let me emphasize that, again.
Don’t
bet on it. The world can always become lively. The
kind
of surprises that can happen is a surprise all by itself.” Reeb Waxajovna stretched and yawned. “I always hated old farts
who told war stories, but there
is
some purpose in it at the moment, so let me just tell you about a few things that can break up the routine, in a ‘routine’
temporary command. I promise I won’t go into detail, slap me if I do, all right?”

“Looking forward to it, sir.”

Waxajovna grinned. “I would, too. Anyway, in my first ten years of occasional commands, I had to deal with a sudden outbreak
of mutated chicken pox. And I was temp acting station chief at Tycho during the week the police stumbled across a serial killer
with thirty bodies in a rented cold locker.

“Then there was arriving at a miserable little asteroid out at Saturn L5, as the vice procurator—same job you have now. My
ferry docked six hours after the procurator had been shot dead by a jealous husband. The previous vice-p was already on the
ferry out to the sunclipper, past the point of no return. And the Hive was in inferior conjunction with the sun, so I had
to send the message around relays.

“Five hours later PASC’s reply arrived. Four instructions. One, bury him. Two, assume command as acting chief for at least
the next three years. Three, in eighty-four hours the battlesphere
Up Yours
—never a better named ship in history as far as I was concerned!—would be bringing me a secret weapons project with a staff
of twelve hundred people, all of whom would have to be housed, fed, and cared for, and which would also require a couple of
cubic kilometers of new space to be constructed for the project. That was more people and more space than the colony had at
the time.”

“What was four?”

Waxajovna winced. “They told me to buck up and quit whining. Now, as I said there would be, there’s a point to my old war
stories. And the point is: my experiences are why I insisted on making sure you were so overprepared before I left. I’ve been
preparing you to be a juggler with a baby in the air.”

“Um?”

“It’s a metaphor I learned from a mentor a long time ago. A juggler is supposed to keep lots of balls in the air, that’s what
makes him a juggler. Nobody’s very interested unless he juggles something very dangerous or very precious—a rare glass goblet,
or a jar of nitroglycerin, or a baby. And if you’re juggling a baby, no one cares about any tennis balls or oranges you’ve
also got in the air—just get that baby down unhurt, and the audience thinks you’re the greatest juggler they’ve ever seen.
Have I stretched this metaphor far enough to tear it yet?”

“We’re getting there. So the point is that if some emergency does come up—”

“Solve one big problem, brilliantly, once, and you will look brilliant. And if it’s easier because everything else is all
wrapped up and running on automatic, you can look more brilliant than you really are. Which means you’d be promoted away from
here, which obviously benefits you, and also benefits me politically—since you have talent, it’s better to have you as a protégé
than a rival, masen?

“So if all the accelerated drudgery of the last few weeks pays off, you’ll have a tremendously better chance at the sort of
brilliant success you need to be promoted away from Greasy Rock.”

“Um, I thought—”

“I forbid the term officially because it offends Deimons. For that matter it offends me. But I know perfectly well that to
you, this place is Greasy Rock.”

“I dak. How likely do you really think it is that something like that will come up?”

“Based on all past experience, maybe fifty percent. After all, you and I have had two things that could have become real emergencies—that
almost-war between Yellow Magenta Green Blue and Yellow Amber Cyan Red, and that sewage strike that the Jovian agitator—what
was her name?”

“Vala Brnibov.”

“Yes, right, I remember the software wouldn’t accept her death warrant at first because it wanted there to be one more vowel
in her name. Held her up in the airlock for half an hour—must have been terrible for her, not knowing what was going on and
having to wait for the door to open for that long. Well, anyway, as a very junior vice procurator in charge, if you had coped
with either situation solo, it would have worked wonders for your career.

“By the way, don’t suffer an attack of cleverness and
make
something come up. I say that because, though I know that
you
are smarter and more circumspect than that, your uncle—”

“I’d already thought of that, sir, and messaged him on the subject, very bluntly, and you can depend upon it that I’ll watch
him toktru close while he’s here.”

Jak’s Uncle Sibroillo was coming down from Ceres to Deimos on
Eros’s Torch,
the same ship on which Waxajovna would be departing. He was a leader in Circle Four, a notorious zybot that was tolerated
(barely) in the Hive and hunted zealously everywhere else. All zybots were theoretically illegal everywhere (no one wanted
to let any social engineering conspiracy have a free hand) but most of the great powers tolerated a few zybots as clandestine
auxiliaries to their own covert operations. Even then they had to be watched, for a zybot was a weapon that could turn in
the hand.

Thanks to Uncle Sib, Jak had had his wild adventures on Earth, the Aerie, and Mercury; Sib’s Circle Four involvement had gotten
Jak nearly killed more times than he could easily count; and Sib had implanted, deep in Jak’s liver, a microscopic memory
sliver containing enough information to convict and execute one of the solar system’s most dangerous criminals, Bex Riveroma.
Riveroma wanted that sliver at any cost, and did not regard damage to Jak’s liver as a cost—given his choice, he’d rather
just have the liver without Jak.

But Sibroillo was also the man who had raised Jak, all the family he had. Jak was fond of the old gwont. Besides, Sib was
supposedly not coming here on zybot business; he was celebrating his two hundredth birthday by going out on the Big Circuit,
the trip around the solar system that took a few years to complete if you stopped and visited all the major inhabited places—the
four lower planets, Earth’s moon, the Aerie, Ceres, the moons of the upper planets, and at least a flyby of dark, cold Pluto/Charon
where the Rubahy civilization squatted in its last haven.

“Luckily, sir, Uncle Sibroillo is traveling with Gweshira, his demmy, and she’s pretty good at slowing him down and keeping
a leash on him.”

“But isn’t she—”

“She’s Circle Four herself, sir, yes, but she doesn’t have his compulsion to rush in where angels fear to tread. (Nobody has
a compulsion like his, believe me, sir.) Gweshira and I will sit on him, one way or another. Since he lived on Mars when he
was young, and has toves to visit, I’m hoping he’ll stay down there till I stuff him onto a departing ship; he’s got departures
for Venus, Vesta, or the Uranus system possible within a few months.”

The Big Circuit never went in up-from-the-sun-and-back-down order. Planets move, sunclippers travel in arcs rather than straight
lines, and quarkjets very nearly ignore solar gravity. Weaving among the complex tangle of possible trajectories, tourists
on the Big Circuit bounced up and down the sun’s gravity well on sunclippers, or leapt across it on quarkjets, picking up
a few worlds on each bounce.