The Duke Of Uranium (2 page)

She kept it in her bed,

And everyone that Mary—”

“Verified.” The canopy closed. The car rose, the door to the Pertans passage opened in front of them, and they accelerated onto the line; they would be at Entrepot in less than five minutes or the trip would be free.

“Amazing how it always stops you at that point,” Dujuv said. “I mean, right at that syllable. Singingon.”

“Machines are very judgmental, is all. So it listens to as much as it can and then it stops me before I offend its sensibilities,” Jak explained ‘It’s the same way that we sneaked into the school that time, by showing the camera those pictures—it was so offended it closed its eyes. As soon as we’re legally adults—which is what, now?”

“About two hours. They have to verify that we went to Fwidya’s last class.”

“In two hours, then, we won’t be children and the machines won’t be offended by our bad behavior, and won’t send complaints to our folks. I’m going to miss that. You should have seen Uncle Sib’s face the time that Myx and I got caught—uh, I mean Sesh and I got caught—”

“Never mind, we’re almost there,” Dujuv said. “I think I heard this story already.”

Jak thought, That was toktru stupid. Dujuv had had a crush halfway to forever on Myxenna Bonxiao, and would have gladly spent all his time gazing into her eyes and adoring her. Myxenna, for her part, was happy to have Dujuv’s attention; the trouble was that she was also happy to have the attention of most of the heets she knew, and generally got it Dujuv was loyal and generous except when he was insane, and Jak had just pushed the insane button.

Dujuv was a panth, and the genies had given the panths singingon fast reflexes, intense attention, quick

thinking, and great burst strength. He was Jak’s toktru tove, and had always been, but now he was hurting.

If he lost his temper at Jak

well, an unmodified human against a panth was like a kitten against a bear.

After a minute or so of brooding, Dujuv’s naturally energetic disposition won out. “Hey, so what are we going to do tonight besides celebrate?”

“You need more to do?”

“Well, we’ll have a meal and go somewhere for some fun, but it seems like we ought to do more. You don’t get your feets and escape from gen school every day. We could dance, or brawl, or maybe just go climb something.”

“Let’s not climb another light shaft, though, eh?”

That particular stunt had gotten them six days’ house arrest last year. The light shafts mixed and carried the bright glow of the sunlight and the actinic blaze of the plasma around the black hole at the heart of the Hive, distributing it to skylights, sconces, and lamps throughout the gigantic space station. They ran out radially from the central black hole space to openings on the surface. In the shafts themselves, many thousands of little catchers—fiber optic-filled pipes with a mirror at the end, like one end of a periscope—jutted into the bright light, and it had occurred to Dujuv that if they got in through a service entrance, the catchers might furnish the hand and footholds for a good long climb. Since the sperical shell forming the Hive from the mirrored face of the black hole enclosure at the center to the outer surface covered with silvery pipes and domes, was about 1250 km thick, they were never going to be able to climb the whole way, but “We can sure see some interesting spaces and do some interesting technical stuff,” Dujuv had said. “We can do it up toward the surface, in low gravity, so it’s more skill and less strength. Come on, Jak, it will be fun.”

Unfortunately, small bends and forces in an optical tube cause big distortions in the light coming out of it; furthermore, the boys had forgotten that their shadows would be cast for very long distances along the tubes. All over one big cone-shaped sector of the Hive, lights bounced and flickered, odd beams swept out from the sides of sconces and chandeliers, and many lights simply went out. The all-powerful Maintefice was flooded with complaints within a second or two; by the time, ten minutes later, when the pokheets caught the two boys, they had probably become the least popular adolescents since people had begun moving into the Hive a thousand years ago.

Jak and Dujuv sat quietly, enjoying each other’s company, as light and dark flashed by the Pertrans car windows. Some unknown architectural genius in the Hive’s construction agency, many centuries before, had thought to require viewports in the sides of the Pertrans tunnels, so that in nearly every classroom, shop, corridor, park, gym, or office—any space but a private home—you were forever seeing the flash of passing Pertrans cars. But since the cars moved at bullet speeds, the passengers only rarely saw anything other than a flash of light, and people in the spaces tuned out the brief flicker of a passing Pertrans.

Entrepot was about two hundred kilometers northeast of their gen school, and more than three hundred kilometers deeper within the Hive, so the Pertrans would have to take most of its permitted five minutes.

After ninety seconds of near weightlessness, weight increased briefly to almost a full g. As the car slowed to make its turn, for an instant Jak and Dujuv looked through a viewport into a big public gymnasium, then into the amusement park under it, and finally into a warehouse below that. Then the g of weight became diagonal, feeling as if the car were climbing a slope, and then each viewport glimpse came faster and briefer, till it was all flashing lights again.

Just after it felt like they were on a steep downslope, the lights flashed more slowly and became glances through windows again, and the Pertrans glided to a halt at Entrepot. Jak opened the door and stepped into the annoying heavy; Entrepot was at .76 grav.

Dujuv planted his feet on the walkway beside Jak. As the canopy folded back he had grabbed its upper lip, swung out and up, done a handstand grasping the top edge of the door, switched hands, and dismounted in a somersault.

“Do you have to do that?”

“No, but I can. Decision time. Where are we going? Where’s a good place to find out if we got into the PSA?”

Jak shrugged. “We need a place where we can both celebrate, or where we can both commiserate, or where one of us can pretend to be happy for the other one.”

“Well, when I celebrate, I like to do it at a place with lots of food. When I’m depressed, I just want to eat.

And anytime I have to conceal my feelings, I get nervous, which always makes me really hungry.” Dujuv raised his left hand to his face, palm inward. His purse—the fingerless glove into which his computer was built—activated, casting a faint glow on Dujuv’s face. “Where would we go for a lot of food cheap?”

“The same place you go four times a week, the Old China Cafe,” the purse said. “Jak will have sweet and sour beefrat, and you’ll have a triple portion of oyster fried rice and an order of fishloaf with Chinese vegeta-bles. Authorize to pre-order? Or are you going to pretend you’re having something else until you get there?”

“Pre-order,” Dujuv said, laughing.

“Done.” The glow vanished from Dujuv’s face and he dropped his hand to his side.

“Toktru, you ought to do something about your purse’s attitude, Duj,” Jak said.

Dujuv shrugged. “I like some spirit in my purse, even if it’s a little snotty. It’s a good way to check and see if I’m an idiot.”

“You could just ask your friends.”

“They’re all idiots.” Dujuv grinned. “And besides, if your purse can have an attitude, it can be your friend, and it won’t turn you in if you do something like climb a light shaft.”

That poked Jak in a sore spot; his purse had gleefully informed on him as soon as the pokheets had called it, whereas Dujuv’s had done its best to hide him.

“I just don’t like the idea of them being able to back-talk to people,” Jak said. “Before you know it they’ll start to think that they are people.”

“Well, they are smart. And they talk, and they have feelings—”

“Only so they’ll have judgment!”

“Isn’t that supposed to be why evolution gave humans feelings?”

“That’s just my point. Humans got feelings from evolution, and we’re free and wild and have our feets.

Any feelings a purse has, it got from its designer, just to make it useful, and any feets it has are just trouble.”

Dujuv stopped, his weight settling as if he might strike. “Aren’t you forgetting you’re talking to a designed breed?”

Jak had, and he felt like a complete gweetz. He drew a deep breath, asking the calm of the Disciplines to run through his mind. “Why is it,” he asked, keeping his voice low and neutral, “that whenever we’re both toktru scared and nervous about something, I keep picking a fight by saying stupid things? This makes the second time in less than twenty minutes. And you tolerate it!”

Dujuv smiled, his mouth tight and flattened, his eyes still hard. “Oh, no, I don’t just tolerate it, I enjoy it. It helps me relax. I find it soothing to think about breaking your neck.”

“I bet. Why do I do that?”

“Because you’re an idiot. If you’d treat your purse decently, it would tell you.” Jak started to laugh, and Dujuv’s shoulders relaxed and his bare scalp smoothed like a tugged sheet. “We need to get to the Old China Cafe. Our food is probably ready by now.”

They paid the extra for a closed booth so that they would not be interrupted. The waitron delivered the food almost as soon as they had settled in, so now there was nothing to delay getting their results, except their nerves. They used up another five minutes arguing about who should go first, settling on sending in

the request simultaneously. “Let’s just go ahead and be childish about it,” Jak said. “Set up the request on your purse but don’t send it yet

I’ll set it up on mine

okay, on three. One, two, three.”

The result popped up instantly and Jak stared at it. Everyone knew what it meant when the message began “We regret to inform you

” but Jak read and reread the whole message.

He had missed admission to the PSA by sixty-five points out of ten thousand possible. Assured admission for an unmodified-stock human had been 8529, and his score had been 8464. A few people with lower scores than Jak’s had gotten in, but those were people from urgently needed specialty breeds.

“Rat turds,” Dujuv said, quietly, looking down at his hand. He looked the way Jak felt.

“You too?”

“Missed it by eleven points. 8166 for a panth to get in and I got 8155.”

Jak refrained from considering that with his score, Dujuv would have gotten in; if you went in as a panth, they expected things that were physically impossible for Jak. “I missed by sixty-five,” he said.

They sighed, together, loudly. “Well,” Jak added, “at least neither of us has to do any pretending.”

“Yeah.” Duj slammed the table with his hand, making their plates bounce alarmingly. “Weehu. I wonder what we’ll end up doing? I thought about it, of course, and I had an in-case plan, but it all seemed very unreal till just this moment. What are you planning to do? Sign on with a general labor brigade?”

Jak shook his head. “Naw. I don’t have to go that heavy. I’ll try the Army. A smart heet like me could make sergeant pretty quick, and from there if you’re a good enough sergeant, you can get into one of the officer programs and eventually it’s just as if you went to the PSA in the first place. And the next time one of the human settlements gets into something with the Rubahy, or if Triton tries to secede again, or if we get into another argument about who owns Ceres, we can be out in the dark bouncing around in cryojammies, shooting up the landscape. It’s a busy violent world out there, and we can get into all the violence we could ever want. You can’t beat that for amusement. Better than a simulation game!”

“You can’t get killed in the simulation games. Not literally, anyway. You’re not really thinking of going into the Army, are you, Jak? I mean, you just did a great job of describing why not to go in. And you have to be a sergeant for six years to be eligible for officer school. That’s like an average of

shit, Jak, that’s going to be at least two wars. As a sergeant. Which you won’t make right away, anyway. Probably three wars before you’re a lieutenant.”

“Oh, I agree the PSA would have been a better way to go—five years and walk out the door and into the commission. But I’m on entropy’s bad side. I didn’t get in. I’d still like to be a full citizen and I’d still like

to get a good job. The Army looks like the way. And besides, I kind of like the idea of the adventure and the travel.”

“Weehu. Fine idea. Adventures like digging foxholes in high gravity, close to absolute zero. And the very first thing you get to do is travel clear to the other side of the Hive. Must be what, two hours on the Pertrans?”

“But after Basic—”

“Oh, toktru, masen? the chance to be a guard on a mining asteroid. Or a ship’s B&E on an orbicruiser—

four years of cleaning and polishing your stuff and staying in shape, in case they need you for ten minutes of getting killed. Are you totally crazy, or have you just gotten way too far into those intrigue-andadventure stories you like, or what? At least go into the Spatial, where you can get to fly the ship.”

“There’s no way for me to do that, Duj, toktra, I’ve thought about it, and there isn’t. The Spatial gets to pick first and there are going to be lots of people ahead of me. I barely have the physap for the Spatial, and I sure don’t have the mathap.”

“But aren’t your mechap and spatiap singingon? They always need riggers and optimizers.”

“They want heets who are top-rate across the board. I looked into this, Duj, toktru, because for some reason after I took that test I specked some bad feelings about the whole thing—pretty well dakked I’d gotten wanged, even before I got the scores. My math scores just toktru kill my chances for the Spatial.

No, if I want into the Forces, it’s the Army. And I’m not going to go through all the hassles of Basic just to hold down a desk or fix a machine, so if I enlist, I’m enlisting to be a dirtkick.” The emphasis in his own voice surprised Jak.

Apparently it made an impression on Dujuv too, because he dropped the subject. After the silence had stretched too long, Jak asked, “So what did you have in mind for yourself?”