A Princess of the Aerie (12 page)

“Now,” Sesh went on, “Dujuv can attest that neither he nor Jak had any conditioning. That was Jak’s real, natural response
to me. And if you were all watching closely, you saw that I had a lovely time. Bland, of course, but lovely.” She spoke directly
to the still, pale blonde woman. “So, you see, Seubla, I do know what you mean when you prattle on about gentleness and sweetness
and tender love and all those pretty words, all those things you were saying I didn’t understand—in fact, that’s what
my
first experiences were, too, very much like yours. So I don’t just understand, I really
know
, firsthand, that all this kind of tender-cuddles mush causes very strong bonds! Which is exactly why you and Kawib are not
going to resign and marry.”

Seubla said, “I never doubted you could enjoy any form of sex, Your Utmost Grace.”

“You’re a tough little bitch, and very stubborn, and you never give up, do you?” Sesh said, with an amused smile that seemed
strangely affectionate. “You’re going to say that it’s different if your heart is in it. And I’m sure you’re right, because
I know my heart wasn’t in it this time, but it has been in the past, and it was different. I really do think that, back on
the Hive, when I was Jak’s demmy, my heart
was
in it, quite often, very sincerely. At least I have no memory of having any contradictory thoughts. I was actually very much
in despair once (for almost a week!) about the certainty that I would have to leave the Hive and that Jak could never be more
than my consort, not my husband. Of course I was sixteen and one has many stupid thoughts at that age, doesn’t one?

“Anyway, I toktru could not let you get away with what you said at dinner the other day, Seubla. Nor with your agreeing with
her, Kawib, however laudable your loyalty to a demmy might otherwise be. I
do
know what gentleness and tenderness in bed is, and I know what it is like to have sex with someone who has not been conditioned
to my tastes, and I
have
enjoyed it. Jak, thank you. Don’t dress. Take that seat over there. Sit with your legs apart, that’s what we always do in
this room. Or rather what all of you always do in this room. I always do what I want.”

His feet seemed to lift him from the chaise and carry him to his designated seat. Everyone else’s nakedness did not make him
any more comfortable.

“Now.” Her tone reminded Jak that he was supposed to call her “Princess Shyf.” “Come here, Kawib, and we’ll demonstrate something
for our guests.”

As if being marched to the gallows, Kawib got up and walked stiffly to her; Jak looked down, not wanting to see whatever came
next.

“Please,” Seubla whispered, beside him. Now that he was closer, he could see that she was small, plump, not terribly pretty,
nose a little too large and eyes a little too close together. “Please, she punishes everyone if anyone doesn’t watch.”

“I don’t
punish,
” the Princess said, “you are to watch and learn because that is what your job is. But thank you for clarifying things for
my old friends, Seubla, they
are
new here.” She turned Kawib outward to face them, and again her voice fell into the cadence of lecture. “Jak, Dujuv, tomorrow,
you will report for conditioning. The first time takes a few hours. After that, once or twice a week we refresh the hypnosis,
resensitize to my pheromone mix, and review some special viv, so that eventually—” She smiled, looked at the commander of
her guard, and said “Hard!”

His face showed nothing but loathing, but he was instantly erect. She stretched out on the couch and said, “Now, I expect
everyone’s full attention.”

She smiled at Kawib. Jak had seen Bex Riveroma contemplating removing his liver, and this smile was worse.

“Kawib.” The man got on her as if he were being strapped face down on a bed of nails, did what he was supposed to with an
expression of fury, and kept doing it until she said, “Release.” He convulsed briefly, pushed back, and stood at the end of
the chaise.

“Good boy,” the Princess said. “You may give your
sow
a little peck on the cheek. Report for two hours’ refresher conditioning tomorrow. You’re not as reflexive as you should
be.”

Kawib stood and walked slowly back to the seats. Tears were streaking his face. He bent and brushed Seubla’s cheek with his
lips; the two of them smiled at each other, clinging to each other’s hands.

“He lives for this,” Sesh said, and she, and her two other ladies in waiting, laughed loudly, a harsh sound, like a clique
of children on the playground who have just decided who will be the goat. Myx, Duj, and Jak sat still. Kawib and Seubla remained
entranced by each other’s eyes. After a while, Princess Shyf lost patience and shouted, “That’s enough.”

When Xabo dropped into the gym early the next morning, Jak and Dujuv were going through the formal part of the Disciplines,
having just moved into slug-throwers. Xabo coughed and pushed the override; the vivid illusion of a black-clad attacker with
a pistol disappeared, and Jak found he was holding the virtual, a little cylinder that simulated all the different weapons
in the Disciplines, matching its apparent weight, feel, and appearance to each part of the process. Jak was almost relieved—his
arm had been glowing dim turquoise, off and on, through all the katas, indicating that he had been fractionally slow and pulled
too far low and left. Uncle Sib had often said that it was better not to practice on a day when you were only able to do the
Disciplines badly.

Xabo stood still for a long moment. “Report for conditioning at the infirmary.”

Jak had been hypnotized before—it was standard practice to teach every small child to “go under” easily. So the machine flashed
the light and played the tones, and sent him under, and when he awoke two hours later, his arm felt funny from multiple pressure
injections, and he had had an experience that felt very much like (when he was much younger) falling asleep in the middle
of a pornographic viv, to awaken with his head a confused whirl of erotic images. It wasn’t terrible, but he didn’t like it.

Xabo was waiting for them when they had finished the conditioning; he handed them each a large cup of orange juice, and as
they drank greedily, he said, “Someone messed up and we have a note that says bags belonging to you two are still sitting
at the docking body, and they insist that you come and claim them personally. There’s just time to claim them before Jak is
due to start his night watch. Please come with me.”

Jak was about to say that he had had only one bag, and it had come through just fine, but he glanced sideways at Dujuv; the
panth nodded at him, and his left hand flashed
Play along
at Jak.

In their private compartment on the express gripliner, Xabo pulled out a sensor, scanned all three of them, sighed, and said,
“All right, now we can speak freely. Well, now you know what the Royal Palace Guards are for.”

“You’re all her harem?” Jak asked.

“Her rivals,” Dujuv corrected.

Xabo nodded. “Singing-on. We’re all the heirs to the patrician families of the Republic, or descendants of any of three lines
of pretenders, or of the last Regent General.

“Kawib and Seubla are a special case. He’s the son of two of the great houses and she’s the great-great-granddaughter of the
last pretender on one side and a lineal descendant of the Regent General on the other. The only reason they weren’t aborted
was because King Scaboron is pretty liberal and open-minded. Shyf is not. What she’s doing is brutal but effective, and it
will work until the issue goes away.”

“Goes away?” Dujuv asked.

Xabo sighed. “Seubla’s family are Old Faith. They belong to the traditional Greenworld religion and don’t adhere to the Wager.
They won’t accept genetic remodification after birth, which means no longevity treatments after the third one. Seubla will
enter menopause at around age sixty, looking like most people do at two hundred, and Kawib won’t look terribly different from
what he does today. Have I said ‘brutal but effective’ yet? I think I did.”

“And you?” Dujuv asked.

“Eldest male in a great family of the Republic. I’ll be out of the RPG pretty soon, I think. After exhaustive testing, they’ve
determined I’m telling the truth—I’m gay, and I’ve had myself sterilized, with an intrinsic spermaticide; I can produce clones
and in vitro babies, but all the evidence is that I don’t want kids. Which happens to be true. I’m not going to bring anybody
into this kind of situation if I can help it. But Seubla’s religion thinks reproduction is sacred; there’s all kinds of things
she isn’t allowed to do, including marry a sterilized heet.”

“So—uh, with everyone in the Royal Palace Guard, does the Princess, er—” Jack asked.

“Yeah. She even makes
me
‘er’ with her every so often. Once you’re conditioned, all it takes is one rude demand from the Princess and you’re painfully
capable till she says, ‘Release.’ Mind you, conditioning takes a lot of maintenance—if Seubla and Kawib fled to asylum somewhere,
with decent psychiatric treatment, in a year, or at most two, they’d be able to manage with each other.”

“Why don’t they?” Dujuv said.

Xabo shrugged. “I’m not sure, really. Possibly Colonel Mattanga serves as a hostage. She’s Seubla’s mother. That’s part of
the general Karrinynya strategy for holding on to power; make every family that might pose a threat complicit, watch them
like hawks, and execute traitors frequently. It’s a lot harder to plot against the government when you’re a closely watched
security chief than it is as an ordinary worker out in the city. Anyone who’s a threat to the dynasty, if they’re young, is
part of Princess Shyf’s sex circus, and if they’re older, is working in her father’s pokheets.”

Jak looked out the window as they rose toward the little, yellow-lighted hole in the wide black circle overhead; the circle
spread out to cover the sky, and the hole became vast, and they shot up past broad terraced gardens and oddly un-rectangular
ziggurats, and past the sheen of the glass dome, back into the space between the worlds, in less time than it took for one
long breath.

He wondered if Sesh would call him to her bedroom tonight. He hated himself for wondering.

Beside him, Dujuv had uncurled into complete relaxation, and was applying what the Solar System Ethnography text said was
the unofficial motto of panths everywhere: “When action is impossible, take a nap.”

At the docking body, Xabo said, “Oh, well. Weehu. Looks like you have no baggage here. I’ve got two casinos to visit; there
are slec clubs, dueling parlors, and some other ways to amuse yourselves around here. See you back here, Station Eight, in
two hours.” He airswam away.

They airswam past countless shops selling things they didn’t want to buy before they finally settled into a booth in a centrifuged
autocafe. The waitron brought coffee and trays of snacks; Jak watched Dujuv eat. It was about as familiar as any activity
in a long time.

After a while, Dujuv said, “Jak, this is bad.”

Jak nodded and said, “At least, I dak your, uh, Myx-problem better than I ever have. I keep wondering where
Sesh
went. I wonder if I was just so naive that I didn’t see what kind of person she is when we were together—”

Dujuv was shaking his head. “Pizo, you’re getting the full experience, toktru. Do you know how often I wonder where Myx went?
And have to remind myself that she was never the girl I thought she was, that I just made her up?”

“You made her up?”

“Jak, this is the first time I can tell you this because it’s the first time I’m sure you won’t laugh at me. Because I can
see in your eyes what you’re feeling about Sesh now. You’re imprinted, as much as any panth ever was. I know people say that
it’s borrowed genes from animals, but it’s not—it’s something that can happen to most people, it’s just that it rarely happens
naturally in unmodifieds. Let me just show you. True or false—when you were mekko and demmy, Sesh used to forget your birthday.”

“Fal—well, it’s true but so what? I mean, she’s a princess, she had more important things—”

“True or false, it hurt your feelings—”

“Fal—true. That’s true, Duj, but it doesn’t feel true anymore. It feels like the whole memory should be false.”

“Unh-hunh. True or false, you and Sesh often talked about your hopes and dreams, and her hopes and dreams, and what was important
to both of you.”

“Oh, now that’s true. I know that’s true. We did that thousands of times.”

“Right. Tell me what the two of you said in any one conversation you definitely remember.”

Jak stared into space; beside him, the unclosed viewport in the side of the centrifuge showed the coffee shop whirling by
four times before he spoke. “I must have amnesia or something.”

“No, you remember it happening because it’s what you’d expect for two people in love. And you can’t remember any specific
time because it never actually happened, old tove.” Dujuv stretched and yawned. “You going to finish your food?”

“Have it all, I’m toktru not hungry at all.”

“See?” Dujuv asked, between bites of another pastry. “See?”

“Maybe. Explain it to me, please.”

“Well, there’s part of me that still believes that Myxenna was devoted to me, loyal and faithful as if she were a panth herself,
and that remembers all the different ways that she was loyal and how completely I could trust her—don’t laugh. I’m only telling
you this now because I thought, with what’s happening to you, you wouldn’t laugh.”

Jak tried to hold down his smile. “I see what you mean about you making Myx up.”

“Yeah, and the funny thing is, I can know that the truth is more complicated—but I can’t forget the parts I made up. Well,
what did you and Sesh do for all that time in gen school? Stop grinning, I mean besides that. You hung around and were popular,
wore nice clothes, went to expensive places because you were both rich kids, masen? Most of your conversations were probably
about how much you liked each other. So you didn’t know each other, did you? And you’re as surprised to find out that she’s
cruel as I was to find out Myx is slutty.”