The Duke Of Uranium (11 page)

Jak knew that his meager bags were supposed to be waiting for him in his compartment on board, and he hadn’t taken anything out of his pockets or his jumpie, so he just slung his jumpie on and swam forward to the hatch, which led to a flextunnel, and from there into the ship’s receiving bay, a big airlock where a DNA reader took a small skin scraping to confirm that he was the person who owned the ticket. With eight terminals and fewer than twenty passengers, the process took less than ten minutes.

Now there was just the matter of seventy-eight days to fill. The two greatest concentrations of human population in the solar system, the Hive and the Aerie, are in the Earth’s orbit, at the stable L4 and L5

Lagrange libration points—the places where the balance of gravitational force between the Earth and the sun on any object is such that if it drifts out of position, it will be pulled back into it—hence the cheapest place to be located, since fuel need not be expended for station-keeping. The L4 and L5 points form equilateral triangles with the planet and sun, so that L4, where the Aerie is, is 149 million kilometers—or just about two months—ahead of the Earth in orbit, and L5, where the Hive is, is the same distance behind.

Though this saves energy and therefore money for the great majority of the human race that just wants to stay where they are, it complicates matters a great deal for the few travelers; there are few cheap or easy trajectories for going between L4, L5, and Earth. The problem would be much worse if it were not for Mercury; almost always, the cheapest way involved making a flyby of one of the libration points, using the solar sails to drop down into a low fast orbit, intercepting Mercury, then using a gravity assist, and the extra force light sails get close to the sun, to send the ship upward on a close pass by either the other libration point or the Earth, with enough momentum to continue on up into the farther reaches of the solar system. On this particular trip, they would be dropping within Mercury’s orbit and overtaking that planet, making a flyby there, before shooting up past the Earth, where Jak would leave on the ferry, seventy-eight days after getting onto the sunclipper, having been all the way round the sun (a fact that was endlessly belabored in travel ads touting the glories of vacations on Earth or the moon or in the Aerie—”and every time you travel, you put another year into your life.”) Sunclippers never stopped except for overhauls or damage; as Jak left her, the Spirit of Singing Port would be upward bound to the Jovian system.

Jak spent ten minutes trying to speck the ship map, and then just spent the util to have a sprite guide him

to his stateroom. The little dot of light, like a stage Tinker-bell, danced down the corridor in front of him.

At the moment this part of the ship was in microgravity, so it was easier to airswim and leap than to try to walk for a while, until they descended into the outer rings.

After several turns and descents in a few hundred meters, Jak found himself walking the main corridor of the heavy or “dirtpig” ring of cabins. It had seemed strange to him at first that whereas the expensive neighborhoods in the Hive were the light ones, the expensive cabins on the ship were heavy. It made sense if you realized that people like one-tenth gravity or so—the lightest available in the Hive, and the heaviest shipboard—and pretty much by definition, rich people are the people who get what everyone would like.

The sprite bounded and looped down the corridor. It settled on a door in front of him, making the mad figure eight that indicated it had reached its destination. The door popped open.

Jak’s first thought was that he had been delivered to a closet or perhaps a toilet. His “stateroom” was a little rectangular box with a built-in seat at the back, big for a coffin, small for a study carrel.

A white placard on the side wall was titled “Directions for Use of Single Stateroom.” On the front of the seat was a handle that he could lift and pull, after bracing himself against the walls with both feet, since otherwise he tended to slip around in the . 1 g. A door opened from under the seat, and a compartment swung open, revealing Jak’s bags. He threw his jumpie in with them, and, following the directions, rotated the compartment farther, so that it carried his bags away under the seat.

Another handle appeared on the new surface he had pulled out, so he pulled on that. The structure underneath extended, taking up almost half the remaining stateroom space. He reached over the new surface, gripped the edge of a cushion, and flipped it forward. Small legs popped out and gripped slots in the floor. Jak faced a bed that left him just room enough for his shins between the edge of the mattress and the door.

He folded the bed back and continued to follow the directions; this was amusing, in a horrifying sort of way.

The surprising height of the little room—enough for a tall man to stand upright—was explained by the fact that this was a premier-class stateroom, “with full private bath.” With the bed folded back into the seat, pushing on the handle caused the seat to slide into the wall and an inverted suction toilet to emerge from the wall above it. The toilet then rotated down to floor level. Simultaneously, a shower head emerged from the ceiling. According to the directions, one could either use the toilet for its regular purpose “having particular care to seal the unit before re-storing it,” or one could use it as the drain for the shower, allowing the toilet to suck the water out of the room, “again having particular care to seal the unit before re-storing it.” Jak thought the repetition was probably warranted considering the consequences of forgetting to do that.

Jak resealed the toilet and folded it back in. The placard had said that there “might be some noise, due to automatic flushing and cleaning, after re-storing toilet.” The “some noise” sounded very much like sticking one’s head in a running rocket engine.

With his “stateroom” completely explored, Jak set out to see the rest of the areas where passengers were permitted in the ship. Each of the six counterrotating rings of cabins, except the outer “dirtpig” ring where cabin space was priced too light to waste on common areas, had some attraction or other, supposedly. He quickly got the hang of using the scoops to get from ring to ring; the door into the scoop space would not open unless you had at least a half minute to get into the lift box. Once you did, and the door closed behind you, the scoop from the next level, a long gradual slide, would come in under the lift box and carry it up until you matched the next ring for height and speed. It felt like a combination of a slow elevator with a particularly sickening amusement ride.

On each level, Jak discovered that the supposed amusements were the same sort of semantic travesty that “stateroom” had been. The “four pools” on the level just above him were two pairs of individual-sized flowpools on opposite sides of a big rotating drum; you could swim (assuming you didn’t become hopelessly disoriented by the Coriolis and the rush of water from the front to the back of the pool), but realistically what they were was high-grav power bathtubs. The “casino” on the next deck was a sixscreen gambling machine arcade. Each of the “eleven 24-hour restaurants” on the third deck was two tables with a food dispenser whose ethnicity vaguely matched the painted decorations. The second deck’s viv rooms were so small that signs warned against trying to play any game in other than solo seated mode; the “24-hour dance club” on the light deck was an ovoid about five meters on its long axis, with recorded music, a drink dispenser, and some flashing colored lights. Jak had been in at least one jail cell with better atmosphere.

After that tour of the “ultimate in luxury facilities,” to quote the sales copy, Jak checked the time and discovered he had used up about forty-five minutes since his arrival. Only seventy-eight days to go.

The viv is the traditional refuge of the truly entertainment-starved, so Jak went to the second deck. But he was used to viv games in big rooms with full contact suits and dozens of people playing, coming and going all the time; these little solitary games were hardly worthy of the name. After an hour of shooting it out with bad guys and whipping it out for bad girls, Jak was tired, irritable, and bored.

He still wasn’t hungry and anyway dinner would probably not consume an hour. For a few dreadful seconds he considered plugging into some eduviv and studying some subject or other. When he realized he was actually contemplating voluntarily getting more schooling, he wondered how close you could come to going mad in just a couple of hours.

Finally he had a thought that made him laugh out loud, startling the morose man who was eating chow fong at the other table in the Ristorante Italiano, where Jak had been idly toying with a cup of espresso.

Jak made some gesture of apology, got up, and went down to his stateroom to change, still chuckling.

He had thought that Uncle Sib had been moralizing as usual, along the lines of “always brush your teeth after meals,” when he had said, “You will want to work through the full Disciplines at least twice per day, maybe more.” Now Jak finally dakked that Sib had merely been making an accurate prediction. That was what Jak would want to do, at least until he acquired some shipboard toves. There was hardly any better way to kill many hours than in the no-time of the Disciplines, and he could always use more practice.

After he dressed, he checked the room screen and found that passengers who wanted a full-g workout could use the centrifuged practice rooms in the crew gym. He might as well work out there, considering that he was going to the place that defined full-g; besides, it would help to tire him and make him more likely to sleep. He booked one of the practice rooms immediately and called up a sprite to show him the way.

He had just climbed through the hub and down the ladder into the practice room, and had barely begun to warm up in earnest, when a ping overhead announced someone at the door. Glad for any source of distraction, Jak pushed the come-in without checking to see who it was.

THE DUKE OF URANIUM 99

The ladder extended from the door in the ceiling down to the floor. The shutters slid open. The heet who climbed down was about Jak’s age and wearing a baby-blue crew coverall. “I was watching you through the viewer,” he said. “When you do Stroke the High Table, do you always do it with your middle finger split from your ring finger?”

“You had to drop in to check my form?”

“I had to come up with some way to open a conversation.” The heet dropped the last few rungs to touch down gracefully on the padded floor. His skin was deep, warm brown, his eyes set wide with long epicanthal folds. He was squat, built like a wrestler, half a head shorter than Jak, probably heavier, with no fat. “I’m Piaro Fears-the-Stars. Astrogator Clade, but studying to be a master rigger.”

“I’m Jak Jinnaka.”

“Do you want to work out together? You were about to start the Disciplines when I interrupted you—do you have anything scheduled that you have to do soon?”

“Not a thing, till dinner, which is four hours from now for my seating,” Jak said.

“Well, I have three hours till my mess call. Why don’t we do the Disciplines together? Then we can have at least an hour and a half to spar. There’s only ten or so other crewies who do the Disciplines that are even close to my age and level, so I know everyone’s tricks and they know all of mine. I love it when a passenger who does the Disciplines comes along—it’s a chance for some variety, maybe to get surprised, to try things out in a situation that isn’t predictable.”

“Sure, let’s.”

They set up in opposite corners of the centrifuged workout room, more or less admitting that they would be studying each other’s style while working through the first, formal part of the Disciplines. In the quiet back of his mind, as Jak flowed from strike to strike against one dark attacker after another, he took his notes.

Piaro did almost every possible move with a closed hand, rarely dividing or extending fingers. That made sense—blows were better than grips if you spent most of your time in microgravity, with nothing to amplify the force of a throw or a grapple. On the other hand, there seemed to be no reason at all for Piaro to favor inside foot sweeps more than outside—Jak’s style was the reverse—except taste. Blade forms were very different, with edge and point, forehand and backhand, used in very different mixtures and contexts. Projectile hand weapon forms were nearly identical—using a slug thrower is mostly a matter of pointing it in the right direction and holding it steady. With beam weapons, the difference again seemed to be in environment—Jak had been taught the more reliable burn-and-seek technique, Piaro the more precise aim-and-flash, which made sense if you considered what was apt to be behind or around the target in their respective expected environments.

When they finished the Disciplines, Piaro said, “Well, I saw plenty of differences.”

“Me too. Of course, since we’re going to spar, the question is, does the winner win because he’s innately better or because his system is better?”

Piaro stood, stretched, and grinned. “Why don’t we thrash that out?”

“By finding out who gets thrashed? Sure. Freestyle, catch-as-can?”

“Sure. Ship rules are all weapons simulated, tap out, monitors work on probable.”

“Makes sense. They probably can’t afford to have you laid up very often.”

“No armor, except your cup, though.”

“Good. I mean, good, it’ll be faster, and good, I feel a lot better with the cup! Point a round, dub to escalate, trip to stick?”

“Yeah.”

Freestyle, or “catch-as-can,” is intended to train people for real fighting, and so it is fought until one opponent or the other, in a real fight, would be dead or disabled. How close “would be” gets to “actual” is determined by local custom; the ship’s rules were gentle, with the expectation that if the other person got a

clear advantage, you would double tap to acknowledge it, and that the artificial intelligences monitoring the fight would be relatively liberal with decisions, declaring whoever gained the first clear irreversible advantage to be the winner of the round.