The Duke Of Uranium (25 page)

“Sure. Do I have to do anything to tell them where I’ve gone?”

“They’ll know. Your purse informs on you constantly, remember?”

“He forgets to blow his nose if I don’t tell him,” the purse volunteered.

“Let me guess. Your purse is feeling its feets for the first time.”

“Yeah.”

“It happens a lot. So, you want to see the rest of the prison? We can include lunch in the tour, and it’ll kill a good part of the afternoon.”

“Toktru, I had no other plans,” Jak said, and closed the door behind him.

Black was of the once-over school of tour-giving; in rapid succession, they passed the free laundry, the free baths, the dispensary, and the “necessities shop.”

“It’s not a bad idea to spend a little cash instead of going here,” Black added. “They have pretty well everything you really need—if you don’t mind toilet paper that you can sand metal with, bars of soap that will take most of your skin off, toothpaste that tastes like it should have been the laundry detergent, and so on, then this is your place. Otherwise, well, the three little shops inside the prison grounds all have ridiculous prices, but they also have the usual brands of things.”

“Thanks for the note,” Jak said.

“It’s really the least I can do,” Black said. “I happen to be the only long-term prisoner here, so I’m the only person who’s had a chance to learn the ropes. I assure you I’m not being held for any evil I’ve done—the Cofinalez courts are perfectly fine for ordinary crimes—but because I’m an inconvenience to the present Duke and his heir, who nonetheless are treating me with surprising decency. At least, knowing them as well as I do, I’m surprised. Really, it’s just the boredom that gets to me. I have access to news channels and viv and all that sort of thing, but somehow just being here with nothing to do does grind me down after a while. I’ve thought of writing memoirs but I’m afraid they would consist of an account of being a spoiled upper-class brat until I was locked up, and then of being a spoiled upper-class brat in a prison afterward. When one day is a great deal like another, describing them all would be masochism for writer and reader alike, masen?”

“I see your point,” Jak said.

“Well, let’s go up the view tower here,” Black said. “It’s one of the nicer features we’ve got—a view of the surrounding countryside.”

Jak had never been much of a fan of scenery, and he was already getting somewhat sleepy after everything that had happened, for he had been awake for about eighteen hours so far. But it was still his first day on a planet new to him—in fact his first day ever on a planet—and Black seemed nice, probably just very talkative because he’d been lonely for a long time, and desperate to enjoy Jak’s company before Jak was moved to an apartment. And he had been very helpful in showing Jak the place. So though his legs rebelled at climbing stairs in the insanely high gravity, his eyelids seemed to want to close, and he couldn’t imagine its being worth the effort, Jak followed Black on up the winding staircase to the open platform on top of the tower.

The moment he stood there, he was glad he had made the effort. It was a wonderfully clear day and the mid-morning sun was at just about the forty-five-degree angle that is perfect for vision. Low blue mountains lay to the east, still partly shaded from the rising sun behind them; farther away, to the west, barren brown rock stood out in sharp relief. Below the mountains there was a broad, scrubby plain, desert but not the dryest of desert, with plenty of low trees and little tufts of grass, broken in four places by the low, crumbling rises of the crater walls, mute and ancient witnesses to the Bombardment. Jak could see into the nearest pock; it was half full of muddy green water, and not at all inviting, either the half that looked black and poisonous in deep shadow or the half that looked like thinnish pea soup in the bright sunlight. Jak judged it might be a couple of kilometers away.

The city itself extended almost halfway to the horizon, but in the hot morning, it was blurred by rising warm air, and less clear than the distant mountains. It formed a pattern like runny graph paper: deep green fuzzy lines that ran straight as lasers and formed the grid itself between lumpy gray-white areas. The straight deep green lines had to be irrigation canals, with trees beside them, and the gray-white squares they marked out must be filled with buildings, but Jak could see little detail through the wavery air, as heat was already rising from the paved, smooth, harsh white area, 150 meters wide, that surrounded the prison.

“Are they raising those trees commercially? What kind are they?”

“It’s one of the best pieces of genie-work in the solar system,” Black said. “Each tree puts out a dozen different fruits. Some of them are old standards like apples and pears. Others are special flavors like a pineapple-lemon hard-shelled fruit that looks sort of like a honey-dew, and the main crop looks like a blue rubber coconut and is a nearly pure saturated solution of fructose inside, which they sell for industrial use, as a sweetener and as a feedstock for grain alcohol. The genies have set it up so that everything grows only on the side that overhangs the water, and the tree drops them when they’re ripe, but only when it gets a particular ultrasound frequency through its roots.

“Robot boats sail up and down the canals, with an ultrasound generator on their undersides. They carry big catcher nets spread out between poles to form sort of a funnel down to the hold. Whenever the fruit is ripe, it drops into the nets of the next passing boat; when a boat has a hold-f, it turns off its noisemaker and heads back to the center to be unloaded.

“Along those canals, walkways and Pertrans routes connect all those whitewashed houses and shops that make up the town, so that you travel everywhere in the shade, and on a sunny day like this, the canal will be lying in deep shadow, dappled with sunlight, tilapia rising to the surface now and then, and lots of people out just walking and enjoying it; now and then a boat goes by, and you watch the fruit fall into it.

If there’s a nicer place to walk in the solar system, I’d be surprised.”

Jak thought it would be ungracious to suggest how much it could all be improved by just taking the gravity down by about seventy percent. “It sounds very beautiful,” he said. “And you sound very familiar with it”

“I grew up in Tjadou. Or as much as I ever actually grew up, I grew up in Tjadou. My family had a place here and it was where I preferred to be, and I was the sort of child who always got his way, eventually.”

Black grinned, and Jak couldn’t help liking him very much just then—there was such pleasure in his selfdeprecation.

“Of course, toktru some people might say I still am the sort of child who always gets his way, eventually. But ‘eventually’ is coming rather slowly these days.”

“Is there any chance that you’ll ever get to live outside the prison, so you can at least live in a town you love?” Jak asked. He was bothered by the thought that Black was such a short distance from his beloved canals, trees, and town.

“Not if the ducal family knows what they’re doing, and alas, I do not believe that there are many fools in that family; there are fools in every family, masen? But no great abundance of them in the Cofinalezes. I am afraid that I’m right where I should be, looking at it through the lenses of the people currently ruling Uranium.”

“You’re very forgiving.”

“‘Principle 118: Forgiveness costs nothing and saves energy.’ But, to tell you the truth, I’d be doing exactly the same thing if our situations were reversed, and so it’s hard to work up much rancor.”

Jak watched the face of his new friend closely, and saw nothing but honesty; though some might have found the chalk-white skin framed by dark black hair and deep red lips to be eerie, Jak rather liked it, and it made the pale blue eyes all the more dramatic.

“Well, then,” Black said, “I know you’re tired and would like to rest, but let me at least suggest that we go get some lunch before you lie down; as busy and stressful as things have been for you—the guards were saying you survived that launch crash?”

“Yeah. It was pretty damned scary, actually.”

“Well, so you’ve had an immense number of shocks and scares since you slept last. That drains blood sugar from the brain, or so they tell me, and if you want to wake up at all cheerful, and without a headache, you’ll have to eat, so come on down and do it with me, and then after that I’ll leave you alone, I promise, and you can get your nap.”

“It’s a deal,” Jak said.

The public free cafeteria was all the way down the stairs and diagonally across from the view tower. It faced south into the courtyard, toward the building that held Jak’s—room? cell?—neither seemed quite the singingon word

Shadows were long enough to put a few outdoor tables in shade, and they sat down there. “Let me use my purse, since yours is a bit hostile and still reveling in the chance to get back at you,” Black suggested. “Sit anywhere.” He talked to the fingerless glove on his left hand. “What’s on the menu today?”

“Nominally split pea soup, peasant oat bread, and a cheese and fruit tray,” the purse replied, “but actually a massive power failure.” At once the lighted display of the food dispenser went blank and dead, and the background hum of the hundreds of unobtrusive machines, always present wherever there were people, ceased. In the abrupt silence, guards could be heard running and shouting to each other. Black stared at his purse. “The whole system has been virused. It’s an attack.”

The shouting and the thumping of boots could be heard for barely a few seconds; then there were a few more seconds when it competed with a growing low rumble, whose pitch seemed to climb from subsonic to bass to baritone in mere moments. The roar stabilized somewhere in the upper part of the baritone range, and Jak realized it was coming from above. The shadows around him disappeared.

He looked up to see a bright light, like looking at the sun, which grew rapidly. Jak looked down, blinking, trying to get the red afterimage out of his vision, and so he only saw the fins of the big rocket touch down in the courtyard, and heard the whakka-whakka-whak as its automated guns cleared the guards from the

walls.

He looked up, his vision clearing, to see a ramp drop from the side, and two men ran out, one bounding down the ramp and leaping over its side to position, the other hurrying but apparently unused to the high gravity. They carried beam pistols and immediately assumed firing position, as if expecting an attack from any door. A moment later, a slender boy—no, it was a young woman, in a fighting coverall—ran down the ramp, and shouted, “All right, I’m going to check this building first, you toves just—well, dip me in shit and paint me blue. He’s standing right here.”

She raised her visor. It was Myxenna Bonxiao, Dujuv’s demmy, whom he’d last seen back on the Hive.

“Come on, Jak, no time to waste, we’re breaking you out, tove. Don’t bother to pack, run to me.”

Jak ran forward, and he could feel Black at his heels. As they came onto the ramp, Myx asked, “Who’s this?”

“His name is Black. I think he’s a friend. Anyway he’s some kind of enemy of the Cofinalezes.”

“Not their enemy, but they don’t much like me, and I would like to escape if I could,” he said. “And I can assure you that if I escape, they will look for me much more eagerly than they will for Jak.”

“Great, you’re a diversion,” Myx said. “Come on aboard, both of you.”

“Company, Myx,” one of the combat-helmeted figures shouted, and began blazing away at the doorways on his side of the courtyard. Unarmed as they were, Jak and Black scuttled into the door of the rocket, Myx right with them, and a moment later they were squashing along on the padded flooring of the bottom cargo room.

Jak started to ask “How—” but at that moment the two men, combat-helmeted, spinning to fire last shots behind them, came backward through the door, and one of them hit the emergency door release, causing the metal door to slam closed with a great ringing boom. He shouted, “We’re all in, Sis, jettison the ramp and get us out of here. Everybody lie down on your back now!”

Jak dropped backward, slapping to break his fall, and stretched flat on his back just an instant before the rocket roared to life, a sound like being inside a drum that someone is belt-sanding. They boosted at max.

It was like being run over by a huge wheel, but not as comfortable, and like being kicked in the gut and face simultaneously, but not as much fun. It went on for the better part of two minutes, before a familiar voice, amplified to the point of distortion in order to be heard over the terrible howl of the engines, said, “Shutting down. We’re going to coast over to a landing field in Australia. We’ll have about half an hour of free fall.”

The dreadful thunder shut off, and the weight vanished with it. At once Jak was in normal, healthy, ordinary free fall, floating off the padded deck easily and comfortably. It was hard to believe that he had

only missed this for a day; his joints and muscles seemed to rejoice in one great symphony of creaks and pops.

Black grabbed Jak’s left hand and, before Jak knew what he was doing, stripped off the purse. Then he pulled off his own, airswam to the emergency station, threw its cover open, and stuffed both purses into the biowaste disposal. After a few brief, piping screams, the two purses were autoclaved into black sash.

“That will make us harder to trace,” Black said. “Hope you didn’t have any un-backed-up data that was essential.”

“Naw, and anyway I never liked that purse’s attitude.” Jak looked around; Myx had pulled her helmet off and was breathing hard. The helmets came off the two men, and Jak saw why they had seemed familiar. It was Dujuv Gonzawara and Piaro Fears-the-Stars. He looked from one to the other, trying to speck what to say to his toves, and finally he said, “Let me guess. Phrysaba is flying the ship? And probably Pabrino is navigating?”

Piaro shook his head. “Phrysaba’s handling both,” he said. “Pabrino wanted to come along but his folks wouldn’t let him. But he’s helping us with logistics and strategy for the operation, and he’s monitoring everything from the Spirit.”