A Princess of the Aerie (14 page)

Something stung Jak savagely, all over his body, and he collapsed; on the other side of the room, he saw Dujuv hit the floor.
Jak tried to crawl forward, longing to break that ugly half-animal mongrel’s neck, but he couldn’t move.

There was another all-over shock, stronger, more a burn than a tingle.

“Hold it, right now, stay where you are, that’s an order,” Kawib said, climbing in through the hole where the window frame
had been smashed down. “Don’t move, Dujuv, or I’ll keep zapping till you can’t. Are you both going to hold still?”

“I am,” Jak said.

“Me too, I guess,” Dujuv said.

With a soft click and sigh, the door to the corridor dilated. Xabo moved in, stunner leveled and ready.

“Trust you to show up late,” Kawib said.

“You assigned me to come to this door! I came as fast as I could!”

“I was teasing—I shouldn’t have done that when everyone is under so much stress. Myxenna, sorry about having to be so rough
with your friends.”

“It’s all right, I wasn’t going to use either of them for anything else tonight,” she said. “Are they going to be all right?”

“As much as any of us,” Xabo assured her. “Right now they’re regaining control. Then we’ll all go back to the barracks for
sleepy drugs and happy drugs, and be the best of toves again when we wake up. Kawib, you have them covered?”

“I do. Pizos, this is for your own good—we need to check that you can control your rages. Xabo is going to say something that
will trigger another rage. If you control the rage, fine, we know you’re sane enough to work with. If you don’t I stun you
and we try again in a few minutes. Clear?”

“Toktru,” Dujuv agreed. “But it’s not the conditioning; it’s panth imprinting. I’m better now. I can feel that I’ve got control.”

“Oh, good, then I’ll fuck Myx,” Kawib said, conversationally, “it’s high time she had a
human
boyfriend.”

Dujuv froze, then relaxed and sighed. “All right.”

“Jak, you know that Princess Shyf is all mine and you can’t have her and I’m a better fuck than you are, and don’t get any
ideas about Myxenna because I’m taking her too.”

Jak was about to laugh when his field of vision became a narrow red tube, the blood thundered in his ears, and the world seemed
to slow down. He had never felt so ready for a fight before.

He stayed down on the floor anyway, drew three long breaths, and said, “Close, but I think I’m okay.”

“ ‘Close’ is all the better any of us ever do,” Xabo said. “The people who do the conditioning dak their business, singing-on.
All right, get up slowly, keep your hands where we can see them, and let’s all walk out of here just as if we were four good
old toktru toves and nothing in the world could ever be wrong.”

Myxenna said, “One suggestion?”

Kawib nodded. “Of course.”

“Have Jak put his clothes back on. He’ll be less conspicuous.”

It wasn’t the friendliest or most comfortable time they had ever spent together, but Jak and Dujuv made a point of having
breakfast together, when they finally got up, around lunch time. The schedule said they were excused from workout but that
there would be guard duty for a reception. At least they would have the afternoon to recover.

They had gone to a twenty-four-hour breakfast buffet, which meant they could further avoid each other by taking turns going
to the serving area. Even when they sat across from each other, sharing the sweet bread, rice, olives, omelet, and miso, they
didn’t speak much. Jak didn’t know how things felt to Dujuv, but for him, the world seemed cold and gray and vaguely threatening,
with no prospect that anything really good would ever happen again. Away from Sesh, and partially deconditioned, he loathed
himself for the way he had felt the night before, but at the same time, it seemed as if those had been the only hours of his
life worth living. Apart from that longing, all he seemed to be capable of feeling was irritation, like a bad hangover.

“I know we’re excused, but do you want to make work-out anyway?” Jak said. “I know they were trying to give us more rest before
this reception, but I think I’d feel better for the exercise.”

“Toktru, I was already planning to.”

Neither Kawib nor Xabo seemed surprised to see them, and the pleasant no-mind state of just working the resistance handles
over and over soothed Jak like two big glasses of fruit juice after a hangover. He was almost cheerful in the big communal
shower with the other Royal Palace Guards, only glancing occasionally at the viewing windows under each shower head.

As they were dressing, Kawib and Xabo approached and said, “How about having dinner over in New Bethlehem this evening? We
need to eat early because of the guard duty. It’ll be just lunchtime over there and they do a great lunch.” Almost all habitats
maintained twenty-four-hour days—that was what people found most comfortable—but the timing of midnight, and the length of
dark and light, were purely local options.

Xabo, Jak, Kawib, and Dujuv emerged from the gripliner station into bright sunlight. Fields of grain stretched down to a lake.
A heet in a tall hat, wearing heavy, awkward clothes, rode by on horseback, looking bored. “It’s this way,” Xabo said.

They walked by the side of a dirt road that seemed remarkably realistic to Jak; except for the black sky beyond the transparent
dome overhead, and the bright ellipses of other habitats in the sky, and the two occasions when an alarm sounded and they
had to squat down and wait out changes in the gravity, it might have been “farm country in Africa,” Jak said to Dujuv.

“Toktru, I was thinking that.”

The inn was a copy of a clapboarded farmhouse on the outside, but it was comfortably clean and modern on the inside.

At first they just ordered, and ate, and made small talk. Then Dujuv said, “I don’t really want to talk about any of the things
we ought to talk about.”

Kawib said, “Toktru. Nobody likes to. Talk anyway. It’s how we get through it.”

Dujuv nodded. “I was telling Jak that at least, thanks to his being conditioned, he gets an idea of what panth loyalty feels
like.” He ate a last bite of pancake, and held his plate out to the side. The waitron put his third stack onto it. “I mean,
if I dak it all toktru, you’re all feeling, about the Princess, what I’ve felt about Myxenna for years. So believe it or not
I sympathize. Even though, now that I also feel the same bond toward Princess Shyf, I want to kill you all. At least I dak
why it seems like everyone in the Royal Palace Guard is crazy, and—forgive me for saying this—Kawib, why you’re eating your
heart out.” He finished smearing jam on his pancakes and began methodically folding and swallowing them.

Kawib looked across his long-abandoned plate and said, “Dujuv, you don’t even speck me. At all. Your bonding to Myxenna, and
now to Shyf, just makes you miserable, masen?”

“Gnokgnu,” Dujuv agreed, nodding and chewing.

“Well,” Kawib said, “the feelings I have for Seubla are the only good reason I’ve got for continuing to exist. Our gen school
years together were not only the best of my life, they were my life. The hope of being able to continue it—even when she’s
dying of old age—gets me through every day.”

“How long since you’ve been able to just sit and talk with her?” Jak asked.

“Two years. Since Shyf returned. King Scaboron had been tolerant; some people say he’s republican at heart. Then the Princess
came back and refounded the Royal Palace Guard and the ladies-in-waiting program. She grabbed Seubla and me in the first week
she was back.”

While Sesh had been doing that, she had been sending Jak very long, passionate, I-love-you-I-miss-you-I-want-you-forever messages,
two and three times a day. He imagined her compelling Seubla and Kawib to do those things … and then getting into a warm bath
to tell Jak how much she loved him and missed him. His conditioned mind worked hard to find a way to love her for it.

“What will happen to you?” Dujuv asked.

Kawib looked at the wall. “Well, I don’t know, really, what Seubla thinks or feels anymore; how would I? I suppose she doesn’t
know any more about me. Our time together now seems like just an old story. I suppose if we’d been left undisturbed it might
have all been over by now, anyway. But, still, anyway, Dujuv, though I feel sorry—”

A tiny, elegant woman, very petite but built like a lanky model, strode in, her hair in the traditional journalist’s platinum
blonde helmet cut, her olive skin tanpatterned in fine-grained Fractal Leopard. Her clothing was singing-on this week’s clash-splash-and-smash:
a pseudoskirt with ultra-brief flaps emphasizing her several pairs of hip-hugging gozzies, with a smooth, clinging, self-lighting
top. A swarm of drone cameras zipped and hovered around her like voyeuristic hummingbirds.

She sat down on their table, braced a hand between Jak and his plate, leaned back, and twisted to prop one long leg into the
view of the active, green-lighted drone. “Hi, I’m Mreek Sinda and I’m here with Jak Jinnaka, whom you’ll recall from my award-winning
series ‘Kidnapped by the Duke of Uranium’ as the brave young rescuer of Princess Shyf Karrinynya. Also his faithful panth
sidekick and toktru tove, Dujuv Gonzawara—”

A drone buzzed in for a close-up of Duj. Without looking up from his pancakes, he snatched the drone out of the air by its
lens barrel and hammered it against the table, shattering it in three quick whacks.

Mreek Sinda observed him with the mild interest usually given to ten-year-olds who have stuffed straws up their noses and
are making strange noises. “So what we have here is—”

“A private conversation,” Jak said, “and I haven’t consented to an interview, and anyway—”

“You’re in a nation that absolutely gives all media their feets,” Sinda informed him, putting on what he specked as the “coolly
elegant face of steely resolve” mentioned in her service’s ads. “I have a right to an interview if you’re in a public place
and not on duty, and since you are technically armed forces of another nation, you can’t be on duty while you’re here.”

“Dujuv, if you’re done with the pancakes, we should probably go,” Jak said.

“Let me finish this plate, just a second or two.” Another drone crept close. This time Dujuv caught it by the tail and decapitated
it with a hard rap against the table edge.

Mreek Sinda turned back toward Jak; her self-lighting top took out shadows on her neck and enhanced them under her bust. She
wet her lips. “I’m going to try to find out if Jak is on some secret mission on behalf of his beloved Princess Shyf. Jak,
what can you tell me about your reasons for coming to Greenworld?”

“Rogga bogga erf ganoo,” Jak said firmly. “How are the pancakes coming, Duj? I hate to rush your eating, but—”

Duj swallowed hard, taking in all the remainder. “Understood, old tove.”

“Then you’ll neither confirm nor deny that this may involve matters at the highest level for Greenworld’s ruling dynasty,
as well as your own connection to Bex Riveroma, possibly the most wanted criminal in the solar system?”

“Ergle argle farf, skweedong pretzels,” Jak said. “Wanna race back to the hopper?”

“Sure,” Dujuv said, and all four guards charged out the door and back up the dirt road.

Camera drones are built for stability, not speed, and Sinda was wearing extremely tall heels. They were boarding the gripliner
by the time the first drones flew into the station, and Sinda was nowhere in sight.

“She produced a really long silly documentary about my ‘daring rescue’ of the Princess,” Jak explained, as the gripliner pulled
out of the station. “I guess it was popular in the Hive.”

“Here too,” Xabo said, “but I didn’t follow the series because I was busy being drafted into the RPG. To tell you the truth
I only just now connected you with Princess Shyf’s rescue.”

Jak nodded. “Well, anyway, it was Sinda’s big moment. Her only really popular work in any medium. Every few months she turns
up, as if she’s hoping I’ll do something interesting in front of her again. The fact is, she was a minor fashion reporter
who got lucky enough to be the only one with a camera when the Princess was kidnapped. That got her the assignment. Then she
slapped together a show that people bought because of who was involved, not because of her work. It was all lies anyway.”

Xabo said, “I don’t know about that, but I did hear that the rescue was pretty impressive.”

Jak made a rude noise. “I was practically set up with a script and more or less followed directions, and more people were
on my side—”

“It was still impressive,” Dujuv said. “You always underrate yourself. Your uncle thinks you did well, and we got into the
PSA based on how well we did, and the Duke of Uranium practically buried us in medals.”

“You know him?” Kawib asked.

“We met during that adventure. I did him some favors. Entirely by accident, but he didn’t seem to quibble about that.”

“Well, you’ll see him again,” Xabo said. “The reception we’ll be pretending to guard tonight is for him.”

“Psim Cofinalez is coming here? But he only just made duke, three months ago, when his father died,” Jak said.

“Well,” Xabo said, “the official story is that he’s doing the Big Circuit for the next two years, to celebrate his having
succeeded to the duchy, I guess, and probably also so that he’s conveniently out of reach of suspicion when various long-term
enemies happen to suffer dreadful accidents or to commit suicide. Plus some officials will have done things that were necessary
but unpopular, and he will come back and fire them (into some cushy retirement), thus becoming very popular.”

“But is it smart to be away from Fermi right now? He has an older brother with a claim to the title and a nasty, treacherous
disposition,” Jak pointed out.

“Not anymore. Two days after Duke Psim Cofinalez started the Big Circuit, Pukh Cofinalez, who was living in the penthouse
of his brother’s palace, was assaulted by persons unknown who somehow penetrated three layers of defenses to reach him in
the roof garden. He heroically resisted them but was driven back until, already mortally wounded, he fell over the parapet,
dropped twenty meters or so, landed on his head (four times), and was run over by the arriving ambulance.”