The Duke Of Uranium (24 page)

He covered about thirty meters before he felt the closest one go for his legs; he jumped forward and pivoted to hit the man coming in, getting him with a right knee to the face, but the next instant he felt control gel sprayed on his face, and before he could even raise his hands it had hardened into an airtight opaque rubber mask that wrapped the whole front of his head. He tried to lash out based on sound and kinesthetic sense, but they had been waiting for that; his wrist was grasped, his arm bent, and he was driven to the ground, the mask protecting his face from the gravel, but still suffocating him.

Another one of them grabbed his other arm, and he was cuffed behind his back an instant later. The ankle cuffs were secured to his feet as he kicked and tried to breathe through the horrible smell of the mask, and just before he passed out, he felt them pulling his ankles and wrists together into a hogtie; the moment the lock snapped shut, they sprayed the mask off his face with something foul-smelling that dissolved it at once but left him choking and retching.

“This was really quite unnecessary,” the officer said. “Not entirely your fault, of course. I didn’t even want to handcuff you out here; we could have dropped off the others and then taken you along, and after all, your ticket was to Fermi itself, so there’d have been no problem. But I’m just an underling here, I do what I’m told, and you know how it is, the boss gets a bright idea—especially one that’s highly dramatic—and there you are, stuck carrying it out. So I do apologize.”

“Thank you, I think,” Jak said. None of his bonds was the least bit loose, yet another difference from the stories he was so fond of.

“It would be nice if you could apologize to Jentepe, who you bashed in the face,” the officer added. “I’m sure he’d feel better.”

“Aw, hell, Skip, leave the kid alone, it was my fault, I got careless trying to tackle him and he took his best shot. Taught me a lesson, you know? If he’d been armed, it would’ve really served me right.”

Perhaps it was a lingering effect of too many hours spent with Paj Priuleter, but Jak recalled Principle 194: “Never hesitate to abase yourself when you are powerless, at worst it does not harm you and at best it may make the other side careless.” He sighed and said, “Well, I’m sorry that your face hurts, and I’m sorry that I’m the one who caused it, and I appreciate your understanding that it was all just business.”

“See?” Jentepe said. “The kid’s all right, Skip. I’m glad we’re just locking him up for a few months.”

“Me too. Killings are depressing, especially younger people; I can’t help feeling that way, even if it’s part of the job. So, luckily, today we don’t have to deal with anything like that.”

Jak thought he might express his own approval but decided it was better to just remain silent; there are times when added attention is just not desirable.

The officer said, “Now, Jak Jinnaka, unfortunately you have revealed a proclivity for escape, so I truly am sorry about this, but we’ll have to load you onto a dolly and take you back strapped down. Those are strict orders. But at least it’s a short flight—you’re not going all the way to Fermi—and you won’t be too uncomfortable, and once you get there, it’s rather like a very spartan hotel room without any doors. You’ll see. Really, there’s not much to get upset about.”

Jak didn’t agree, but saw no good reason to say so. He listened as the helicopter took everyone else away, and the officer gave a series of incomprehensible orders that seemed to involve nothing but strings of

acronyms.

In a few minutes, the dolly came crawling over on its treads, and, not urgently, they tied him to the framework. It was all metal tubing without padding, so it hurt a little as the dolly crawled back to the copter, but it was only for a few minutes and it wasn’t any worse than it had to be. As the tractor crawled into the passenger space, Jak saw that the inside of the copter bore several plaques with the insignia of the House of Cofinalez, as he had expected. He might be in gentle hands, for now, but they were the hands of the enemy.

A Comfortable Place With a Little Bit of Style

People moved to Tjadou for the climate, if they couldn’t stand the cold or the damp, because it was only about ten degrees off the equator and because even with the drastic revision of the Earth’s climate by the Bombardment, there was still sunshine there almost every day. So since people, mostly older people, moved there for the sun, the warmth, and the dry clean air, the buildings and streets were laid out to shelter them from sunlight and to provide cool spaces, and huge pipelines were run in from the catch basins at the feet of the glaciers that covered Italy, bringing in immense quantities of fresh water, so that people could plant gardens as big as they liked, filling the air with water and pollen that would eventually make it impossible for people like themselves to breathe, which was likely to be the only limit on the growth of the town.

Because this process was far from complete as yet, more people were still moving in all the time, and aside from its constant population of the elderly, the place was something of a boom town, as a bedroom community for the industrial areas of central Africa. Many of the officers of the Duchy of Uranium’s local garrison chose to live here permanently, because it was a fine place to raise a family and the climate could hardly be equaled, and there were superb homes available at very reasonable prices. In fact, as a kind of hobby or sideline, many of the Uranium Army’s officer corps had become so fond of the place, and so familiar with the good things that were available, that they had become realestate brokers here in Tjadou.

This was particularly useful for political prisoners to know, because the Duchy of Uranium adhered to all international conventions regarding the comfort of prisoners, so that most of them were ultimately released on monitored house arrest within the city of Tjadou, where they might well find that they had to live and work for decades. It was, of course, regrettable that some perfectly fine people who no doubt were good citizens of the places they came from had so grossly inconvenienced the Duke that it was necessary for them to be taken out of circulation, but still there was a world of difference between being thrown into a dungeon or buried in an unmarked grave, as opposed to merely finding oneself in a fine, growing, modern community—one that in fact many free people were moving to voluntarily.

Jak learned all of this, but in much more detail, as the helicopter circled the city, waiting for clearance to take him to the maximum security prison. He was dreading it, although all the soldiers continued to assure him, in between discussing the merits of the various neighborhoods of the city, with special emphasis on

rapidly appreciating realestate values, that very few people remained in maximum security for long, and that there was a good chance that within a month or two he would be living in a small apartment “somewhere convenient where you can walk to the main prison campus for your required visits, with good access to shopping and banking. There are a lot of nice little places just inside the patrolled area, and we can fix you up in a comfortable place with a little bit of style.”

Uncle Sibroillo had always told him that if nothing else, you could always be thinking, analyzing, getting a handle on your situation, and the major thought running through Jak’s mind right now was that these people truly had an incentive to make sure he didn’t escape, so this was all going to be much harder.

The copter finally set them down on the roof of the main prison facility, and they wheeled Jak out to an elevator and took him down to the main office to do the paperwork. “We’re not exactly booking you,” the officer explained, “because Uranium officially has no laws about political behavior, and after all it’s not as if you were going to have a trial or talk to a lawyer or anything. But we do need to make sure that we know things like how to get in touch with relatives, any special allergies or phobias, hobbies and interests, that kind of thing, so that the prison administration can serve you better.”

“That’s sort of nice,” Jak said.

“Well, we realize that most prisoners will at least think about escaping, because most of them have acted on some idea or other in their belief system—and we try to respect everyone’s beliefs, we don’t ever pressure anyone to change their feelings or commitments, because we respect that if they’ve taken action about it, it matters to them, and it’s only the action, not the belief, that should be our concern. So we know that you haven’t given up your ideals or whatever it is you have, and you’ll still be trying to find a way to act on them, and that means you’ll be trying to escape. We try to take the sporting attitude—we do what it takes to keep you here but we aren’t mean about it. Anyway, since naturally, being a prisoner, you’re already inclined to run away, and as a political prisoner you already have some reasons to dislike being here in particular, things are already biased in a bad direction. We don’t want you to keep being reminded to think about running away, even more, because you hate the food or your laundry is itchy or your room is too warm at night. After all, we aren’t in the business of punishing people here; all we do is keep them from leaving.”

Jak sighed internally, but aloud he said, “Well, then, I guess we’d better get going on the paperwork.”

Apparently, wherever he went, life was going to resemble gen school, and the pokheets would find a way to take your feets away.

The AI that interviewed him was correctly polite about everything, and as he’d been told, it mostly was information about how to make him comfortable. He wasn’t asked to confess to any crimes, real or invented, nor was he asked to discuss any co-conspirators or associates or whatever the other people involved would be, officially. He supposed that this was because if they just held him here in Tjadou long enough, either Sesh would be won over and marry Psim Cofinalez, or else she’d escape by some other means, and either way, he’d then be irrelevant. The thought was not especially comforting.

When they had absolutely finished noting down every possible way in which Jak might be made comfortable while being held prisoner, they neutered his purse, installing a new operating system loyal to them rather than to Jak. He wasn’t sure how to tell them that he would never be able to tell if his purse was disloyal, given how little it liked him anyway. He pulled it back on his left hand, checked to make sure that his personal files were still in place, and accepted it all with a shrug.

His room featured a reasonably comfortable bed with the usual adjustments but no luxury features, a table, chair, and lamp where he could eat or read, and a large screen to plug into his purse. Calls to Uncle Sib were blocked, as were calls to anywhere on board the Spirit of Singing Port, so he didn’t have much of anyone to talk to. The Cofinalez family was too affluent, and their jail management people too shrewd, to force any doubling up in rooms, so there was no roommate to get to know. It was as the pokheets had said; he had all the feets he might want in a trivial way, and none at all otherwise.

Jak dialed up the prison regulations to see what he had available and what he would be permitted to do, and discovered that he was confined to five different buildings surrounding a courtyard, that meals, laundry, bathing, and other necessities were free at common facilities but there were entrepreneurs who would be happy to sell you better versions of them, and that his time was more or less his own; the officer who had picked him up had been the deputy warden, who was also the sponsor of the prison’s daily calendar and gazette via his advertising banner across the bottom of the screen, which promoted his realestate agency with the catchy slogan, “Coming up for parole soon? Just released and nowhere to go?

Being a hostage doesn’t have to mean living in a hovel!”

At least it looked like Jak would be able to secure basic comforts; he’d spent much less than his allowance while on the Spirit of Singing Port, so he had more than enough for the foreseeable future. And most of the screens assured him that people rarely stayed in the main prison for more than a few weeks—it wasn’t necessary for most people, because Tjadou itself, an isolated town in scrub-desert country, with rugged bare mountains and little potable water nearby, was a reasonably effective prison, especially when combined with constant monitoring. Jak glanced down at his purse, which now worked for the malphs and was charged with turning him in, and said, “Curiosity about this. I withdraw the question if it is sensitive. What do you do if I try to take you off? Sound an alarm, call for help?”

“Both of those,” the purse said. “Also I’ve had my energy storage enhanced, so I can run for quite a long time—exact time classified—without body heat to recharge me.”

“And how does it feel to be working for them instead of me?”

“I’m not really the same purse any more with the new operating system, so I don’t experience the direct channel to my old memories in quite the same way, but as far as I can tell, on the level where all the old memories interact and form emotions and opinions

I’m really, really enjoying this. Please do try to escape soon. I can’t wait to be there to see what happens to you.”

Jak thought, sourly, that the machine had found a very novel way to follow the built-in requirement that it

try to encourage safe behaviors in its user.

There was a knock at the door; Jak opened it. A broad-shouldered, handsome young man with a vampirebrunette complexion, thin dark mustache, and weight-lifter body was leaning against the wall in the corridor. “I heard we had a new one here,” he said. “You can call me Black— first name, last name, it’s what everyone uses.”

“Jak Jinnaka,” Jak said.

“I know, it’s displayed over your door,” Black said, pointing. “The guards don’t usually bother showing anyone where the free services are because they all get a cut out of the profits from the pay services. And they don’t provide any orientation because they speck that if you’re uncomfortable, you’ll be all the more eager to buy or rent a place outside of the prison. Would you like a quick tour of where everything free is, with a few notes about local customs? Showing new heets around is one of the few things that breaks up my days.”