The Duke Of Uranium (16 page)

In the abstract, Jak was well aware that if it had not been him, it would have been some shipborn ten-yearold, who would no doubt have been much less awkward and much quicker, not to mention also not spoiling two smooth panels early on by slipping and missing. But having to stay in the moment to get it done felt great. The rush of trying to drop a quarter kilometer in .02 g, in a very precise pattern aiming to hit the eight points where sprites danced on the surface, all the while carrying the ultralightweight replacement panel with him, challenged and exhilarated him. After one initial bad drop that spoiled a panel—the shift chief, Lewo Treadora, seemed almost to expect it, and was not the least bit unkind about it—Jak enjoyed the complexity and precision of the task, the way in which his own skill developed, and perhaps most of all the thought that he was doing something that might matter.

After Jak put the last panel before break in place, he felt like he’d finally done a singingon job. Lewo said, “All right, nice work. The truth is, that’s some of the best I’ve seen from a CUPV, and it’s just your first day, so by the end of the voyage, I think we ought to be able to make a moderately clumsy, not-toodangerous rigger out of you.”

Jak took that as the compliment it was and asked, “If you could, do you suppose you could tell me why I was doing that?”

“Well, really it was to let me see whether you had the coordination, the aptitude, and most of all the

willingness to learn. A certain number of CUPVs don’t want to do jobs that are tedious, or take concentration, or aren’t glamorous or demanding or exciting enough. If you’re not willing to do what one of our children has been doing for years, and try to become as automatically good at it as one of the children, then I need to know that so I can shunt you off to harmless and trivial things. And so far, anyway, you pass that aspect of the test with your screen solid green; I’m going to feel pretty confident about putting you into jobs that matter that aren’t necessarily the most fun but are where you can learn the craft fastest.”

Jak nodded. ‘Thank you, but what I meant was—why do we replace panels for being rough?”

Lewo laughed. “And I thought it was a philosophical matter. I was just about to give you my whole philosophy of education.” He laughed again. “Do you know what an auxiliary propulsion tube does?”

“Propels auxiliaries?”

“Not a bad guess, which is what I say when you’re completely wrong but I’m not going to make fun of you about it. When we need extra thrust, we open the tube to vacuum at one end or the other, point it in some direction, squirt in some charged propulsion particles (high-energy protons, fission electrons from the ship’s reactor, sometimes hard alpha), put a like charge on the walls of the tube, and pump current through the big coil that surrounds this tube on the outside, to set up a magnetic field running through the tube parallel to the walls. Basically it’s one of about two hundred nozzles for the ion rocket. Very small errors in the surface can create turbulence in the flow, which can rob us of a big percentage of the power, which is bad. Panels get rough from chemical processes, dust, all sorts of things, but it’s so cheap for the nanos to make more that we just replace and recycle constantly. So you made two kids’ day, today, two of my nine-year-olds, because they do this every day all day long.”

Jak looked at the shift clock. “So, making a wild guess, I bet there are some more tubes I’m supposed to do?”

Lewo beamed at him. “I see budding executive material already.”

After the third tube that day, the job might have gotten dull, but Jak tried to focus on doing it well.

Besides, once Lewo mentioned that the nine-year-olds could do a tube in less than half an hour, whereas it was taking Jak about an hour and ten minutes, it gave him something to shoot for. As Jak finished his last, fourth tube for the day, and signaled the robot to haul him up the center, he was pleased to see that he had finally done one in less than an hour. “Do you happen to know,” he asked Lewo, “if this is what I’ll be assigned to again tomorrow? I’m kind of hoping so, because I’d like to get good at it.”

“Eh?” Lewo looked startled, and then suddenly grinned. “I can’t quite believe you asked that. Oh my, pizo, you are a rare breed.”

“I’m sorry, did I ask—”

“Not at all. The other, hidden part of the work assignments I give is that they help most passengers find out that being a crewie on shift is dull hard work, for the most part. Probably three-quarters of CUPVs they send me quit after the first day, pretty much all after the second. The usual question is about how soon they can steer the ship or something silly like that. So, all right then. You’re on tube duty for a while, till you’re good at it.” From the way Lewo smiled and shook his head as he made the entry, Jak had to conclude that somehow, what he had said must be singingon what he ought to have said.

He went to his offshift workouts—Disciplines sparring with Clevis, who was weak at it but a good sport and much better than just working out against the machine— feeling a little tired, with his muscles just not quite what they usually were due to the unaccustomed ways of using them. It felt good, and the Public Baths after were really lovely. Jak wasn’t sure that he’d want to be a crewie for the rest of his life, but he was finding the possibility hard to dismiss.

Also, he wasn’t sure, but it felt like the atmosphere in the Bachelors’ Mess was subtly different; word gets around fast in a small community, and perhaps Lewo had said something or other that had indicated how pleased he was with Jak’s work. Or then again, perhaps Jak had just felt a little guilty before about doing no work when everyone else did, and now he didn’t, and therefore the difference was in him and not in his messmates. Whatever the reason, he felt more accepted, more like someone who belonged there and less like a guest, and he liked that feeling, as he tried to explain to Phrysaba over coffee that evening.

“It’s strange,” she said, “how some problems can be invisible till you get to see them in other people. All of us here have been accepted our whole lives—I mean, not necessarily liked, there are some pretty bitter feelings here and there—but I’ve never had to feel like I wasn’t part of the Spirit, or if I quarreled with someone, I’d never hear from them.” She ran a hand through her short hair and said, “So how did you end up with a princess, again?”

“I told you, she didn’t seem that different from anyone else. Smarter and prettier than any other girl I know, of course, kindhearted and loyal, and she had the good taste to be interested in me—”

One reason why Jak felt less guilt about his situation was that Sesh was one of Phrysaba’s favorite subjects of conversation. Her other favorites, in no particular order, were the complexity of optimizing a course for maximum revenue, what to wear for the Exchange Dance, how nice it was to talk with someone who cared about her feelings, the failings of her brother as a human being, and what an absolute pain projective geometry in which you brought seven dimensions down to the usual four was; unlike Piaro, she still had some years of academic study ahead of her.

Piaro had told him that his sister was generally quite shy and reserved, but Jak noticed after a while that he was having a hard time getting a word in; well, very likely a part of his attraction to her was that he was willing to listen. Or at least to look into her eyes in a way that almost anyone would mistake for listening. The last time he had been paying attention, she had been talking about the difficulty of an exercise she was working through in numerical simulations training; now the subject seemed to have switched to whether, in the much-less-fashionable world of the Spirit of Singing Port, it was time yet to

introduce the asymmetric fashions that had been common in the Hive for the better part of a decade, and especially whether she could possibly be the first girl on board to get away with wearing gozzies.

Jak went to his bunk that night a little less enamored and a little more confused; he really didn’t know what to make of Phrysaba.

A few days later, after their shifts and after a dozen or so rounds of Disciplines sparring, Piaro and Jak were catching their breaths and contemplating whether or not they wanted to go any more rounds. “How’s the work going?” Piaro asked. “Lewo specks you’re doing all right.”

“That’s what he tells me, too, so either he’s maintaining a consistent story, or I’m doing all right. I’m off propulsion tubes and out in an evasuit, now, defouling lines. It’s scarier but the challenge is nice.”

“Yeah, we lost a seven-year-old a couple of years ago doing that. Brill’s cousin, I don’t remember his name. Poor kid never did take to being swatted, and he was trying to jolt one of the mountings up and down, just throwing the lever back and forth—which they tell you to only do in emergencies—because it was late in his shift, and I suppose he didn’t want to take the car a hundred or two hundred kilometers up toward the sails to free up a fuse point so he could replace the lines.”

The monosil lines that connected the sunclipper to its array of continent-sized shrouds were astonishing for their ratio of strength to weight, but over time they tended to lose the one-atom-thick coat of hydrogen atoms that kept them from sticking to each other. Once enough hydrogen atoms were lost, when two lines bumped, they fused, with a strength far greater than anyone could separate, and left to themselves, all the lines would eventually have ended up as a tangled mass of fused spaghetti, collapsing the sails and leaving the sunclipper helpless in space. A typical fuse point would grow from a centimeter to a few kilometers long within an hour, so they were not something to neglect, and had to be dealt with immediately. Hence, whenever two lines fused, it was necessary to go out to where they had joined, fuse two long patching pieces onto the lines somewhere on the sunclipper side of the fuse point, go over the fusion to where the lines separated again on the sail side, fuse the ends of the repair pieces to the lines there, and finally cut away the ruined piece of monosil, winding it onto a spool for recycling.

In an emergency, it was sometimes possible, by yanking on the two lines, to cause the fused lines to break apart, usually leaving one of them functional and the other dangling, and to fix the latter with a simpler, easier procedure that didn’t involve going out. It made for a sloppy joint, left a weak spot in one line, and sometimes simply didn’t work, and you weren’t supposed to do that.

“So what happened to him?”

“Oh. Well, it was nasty. He got caught jouncing, so he was about to take a whack on the head, when he undipped from the safety lines and tried to run away. But, you know, on a cable platform—maybe three dozen monosil cables under tension—and being unclipped, and panicking, he kicked kind of hard, and he sailed right across a monosil cable.”

“Errggh.” Jak felt sick. Monosil cables weren’t much thicker than a dozen strands of DNA; they would go through metal like a cheese slicer through butter.

“It must’ve been pretty quick. He was cut in half probably before he knew it, and out in the vacuum, the explosive decompression from all those open organs and blood vessels would have made sure he was unconscious an instant later. It also propelled him away from the ship—so as far as anyone knows, he’s still out there in a cometary orbit, on his way to somewhere up beyond Pluto, coming back into the lower system in a few hundred years.”

“I still can’t believe you have little kids doing that kind of work.”

Piaro shrugged. “Most of them learn. Practically all. But for every environment, there are people who can’t or won’t function in it—or at least observably don’t. This kid was always in trouble from the moment he could talk and move; he always acted like he thought the rules were there because adults were mean, like people hit him for fun or because they didn’t like him, like if he just whined about it then everything would change to the way he wanted it to be. I have no idea how he came to be that way. He wasn’t raised any different from any other kid.” Piaro paused to stretch and said, “Wow, you really got a good shot into my ribs last time; I think you didn’t pull it as much as you might have.”

“Sorry, my mistake,” Jak said, “I just plain misjudged. I hope you’re not hurt.”

“Not badly. You pulled it most of the way. And at least after the Exchange Dance, when everyone’s sneaking into corners, I can offer to show someone my celebrity bruises.” He breathed deeply a couple more times. “What the hell was that poor little gweetz’s name? I can’t remember. Anyway, I had to watch him a few times, and as far as I could tell he really did think the whole world was some weird game that we were all playing to exclude and hurt him, and he seemed to think that all of us could just change it for him, but we were refusing out of pure nastiness.

“I don’t think he ever dakked that his environment was dangerous—and that’s the sort of problem that the environment is really good at fixing, unfortunately.” He bent forward over his crossed legs, pushing down to stretch his back and hamstrings, and added, “And if nothing else it makes a good story to tell to other kids and to CUPVs. We might lose a crew member every other year to accidental death, and we get a serious injury more often than that, just due to people being on entropy’s bad side, and that’s bad enough, without adding stupidity and mulishness to the mix.”

“I wouldn’t think that people who were so careful would worry about getting caught on the bad side of entropy.”

“Oh, there is such a thing as pure bad luck and unfortunate coincidence and all that. But, if we thought or talked about it too much we’d all be too afraid to work, masen? Pabrino’s dad got killed when a hidden defect in a propulsion tube gave him a burst of ultrahard alpha. No way anyone could have known that would happen. It’s just that mostly what luck you have, you make, and that’s important to remember, so

that you keep making it.”

“Just now I don’t think I could forget.” Jak shook his head. “You know, I realize it was for good reasons, but you all probably really did dislike that poor kid, after a while, since he fit in so badly.”