A Princess of the Aerie (21 page)

She pressed her fingers in deep around the back of his neck. “So how would they get it out?”

“Well, doing it singing-on, Riveroma has directions for a surgeon to follow, because we got as far as exchanging some information.
Doing it crudely, they’d just cut my liver out and gently puree it to find the sliver. Either would work.”

“Scares you to think about it?”

“Unh-hunh. Ever since that fight at the Palace, seeing people killed and mutilated up close, I’m feeling a certain amount
of kinship with everything that’s made out of meat.”

“Even Rubahy?”

He rolled over to face her. “Maybe especially Rubahy. I really was a bigot a couple of years back, wasn’t I?”

“Yeah, too much of a bigot even to speck that I was criticizing you.” Her hand traced over his upper belly. “So where would
that sliver be, here?”

“No idea. I don’t actually know enough about the human body to be able to picture it at all, to tell you the truth.” He turned
toward her and for the first time since boarding the ship, more than a week ago, relaxed all the way. He held her as if he
had suddenly, like a trusting child, decided to be comforted.

“And it’s where the evidence of five crimes is?”

“It’s a list of all the locations where all the evidence can be found. Places like safe-deposit boxes and archives and police
inactive-file cases, and for all I know shallow graves and hollow trees. I gather there’s a lot of evidence and it’s stored
in a lot of places, and from what I know about the five crimes, that makes sense.”

“What are the five crimes?”

“Well, in the words of the message that I was supposed to recite to Riveroma the first time I met him (I did, and it got me
a hell of a beating): ‘The information concerns the location of all the extant, court-admissible evidence regarding the Fat
Man, the Dagger and Daisy, the business about the burning armchair, the disappearance of
Titan’s Dancer,
and KX-126, including all such evidence regarding your involvement.’ You know, when I was first carrying that message, I
didn’t know what any of them were, which gives you an idea how much I followed the news or anything else, since two of them
are famous. Now I know all of them except the burning armchair.

“The one I’d really like to know about is
Titan’s Dancer
. How could anyone have
had
anything to do with that? A ship is missing for two hundred years after, to all appearances, going dead on a routine cargo
voyage and floating out of the solar system because there was nothing nearby to salvage it. Then it comes back at the highest
velocity ever recorded from a crewed vehicle—this from a sunclipper that can maybe get up to a fifteenth of a g—hails us from
outside Pluto’s orbit, comes in to Earth without making any further communications despite all the requests, furls sails,
comes all the way into the docks at Singing Port, there’s even vid of people waving from the windows, and it vanishes—just
totally disappears in an interval too short to register on any instrument—just before it was supposed to dock. What technology
is there that could do such a thing, and how would a petty hood like Riveroma have access to it?”

She shrugged. “Well, I can at least fill in one part of the mystery, it’s a pretty open secret among the spaceborn.
Titan’s Dancer
faked the original accident. There was an experimental star drive, not faster than light or any such miracle, but enough
to get you up to some nines of light-speed so that time would almost stop and you could go anywhere about as fast as a radio
wave could, slow down there, visit, crank it back up to speed, and come back. Of course you’d return a long, long way into
the future, but thanks to time dilation, you could make the voyage, and return without having aged much.

“The Council of Captains meets every now and then in a secret electronic conference, and what they decided to use the drive
for was to send
Titan’s Dancer
out to scout a star system as a candidate for Canaan. Which they found, and returned on schedule, and gave us a report on
encrypted tightbeam as they came into the solar system. That’s how we know that Canaan is out there.”

Jak sank into his bed as she worked harder on his back, and let his mind drift. When he had first heard of Canaan, it had
been an interesting bit of legend; now he knew from his Solar System Ethnography class that “Canaan myths” were supposed to
be “a major sociosemiotic problem for Hive policy,” though all the textbooks were silent as to why, and his tutor had only
replied to Jak’s inquiring message with, “Restricted by Hive Intel, need-to-know basis.”

Out here, though, Canaan seemed to be no myth at all, but about as real as any other place Jak hadn’t visited yet. No one
knew when or how the Galactic Court now sitting in the Hive would arrive at its verdict on the war crimes trials arising from
the First Rubahy War—the age of the Bombardment and the grand invasion, three hundred years before Nakasen’s time—but both
humans and Rubahy had committed acts which might be counted as major offenses against the Galactic State, and not having known
that there even was a Galactic State was in no way an excuse or even a mitigating factor.

Human and Rubahy analysts alike believed that probably in a few centuries the court would issue an Extermination Order—a death
sentence for both species. The two species would be each other’s only allies in trying to fight off the exterminators, whose
power and numbers were unknowable.

But if that day came, because the merchant sunclippers were utterly unsuited to war, all of them planned to furl sails, run
black, drift out of the solar system, and set sail for Canaan, a marginally habitable world rumored to be more or less forty
light-years or so from Earth. Presumably the humans and the Rubahy would find a way to share that world peaceably. “What was
Titan’s Dancer
going to do when they got to Singing Port?”

“Publish the details of the fast star drive, for one thing. It was a cheap gadget; the solar system is full of dissidents
and rebels of all kinds, and with a cheap enough drive, a lot of them would have been leaving. Human and Rubahy could have
scattered all over this arm of the galaxy, and then see if the Galactic State could wipe us out. Also, scoutships could have
gone out and found out how big the Galactic State really is, whether it has any other enemies, things that might make a big
difference if the day ever comes.”

“But surely the only copy of the directions for making the fast star drive wasn’t on
Titan’s Dancer
.”

“
Titan’s Dancer
was the one that disappeared with a lot of publicity, but the other copies disappeared too, some of them in pretty nasty
ways. But every adult crewie knows what it was—it was a way to make a Casimir volume laser directly, so that instead of having
to capture heat and run a generator, you could use the whole output as propulsion photons. But the reason we know what it
was, was that a warning came back to the Council of Captains. And if you check, you will discover that all research on lasable
Casimir volumes ceased a few decades ago, and the older papers are all missing. Most people think the Galactic State caught
the project and quietly put an end to it. But that makes it all the more puzzling what Bex Riveroma had to do with it. If
he was some kind of operative for the Galactic State, and a traitor to our species, why bother to keep that secret? Wouldn’t
they be able to protect him?”

“Not if he wanted to live among his own kind,” Jak pointed out, “to have someone to talk to, or for sex, or just to have someone
sleep next to him. It’s a pretty basic impulse, you know.”

She snuggled against him. “Never heard of it.”

Jak had only fifteen minutes left in his shift when, through a moment’s inattention, he let a couple of lines fuse on one
mainsail. Forty-five minutes to repair it, at least—no one would blame him if he left it for the next shift—but it was his
fault. He rigged up the line car and let it take him sixty kilometers up the cable.

From the open car, vaults and curves of the sails covered the sky, as if he were approaching the surface of a planet covered
with clean metallic laundry, with a distinct horizon far out in space. A dozen or more reflected suns shone from the sails,
and of course the big real one lay behind. The
Spirit
’s habitat behind him alternately eclipsed and revealed the sun; its shadow lay on the sails in front of him. At each eclipse,
the stars appeared, as if turned on by a switch. Presently he could see his own car’s shadow dancing back and forth on the
sails, sometimes ducking into the shadow of the habitat.

Near the point where the fusion had started, Jak used the manipulator arms to weld a new piece of monosil onto the cable that
lay outside his car, just a kilometer short of the fusion point. Monosil rolled out from the spool as he gingerly advanced
toward the fusion. If he went too far too fast, the nearby cable could slice into the car, or into Jak.

As he drew near to the point where the cables would converge, he cut the outside cable, and the mechanical arm flung it out
to the side; the free end would be sucked through the car’s central column backward and fuse onto the already fused monosil
there.

Then Jak let the little car, resembling a metal garden gazebo, climb four kilometers of fused monosil, until it was just below
the Y where the fused cable again bifurcated. The sails seemed close enough to touch, but it was an illusion; in fact they
would have been many days’ walk away, if anyone could have rope-walked the lines. Now Jak used the mechanical arm to pick
up the spool and hold it far away from the car, up beyond the gazebo-roof; he welded the new length onto the free cable, and
then snipped it free of the spool. At once, the monosil line moved away from the other line that had trapped it, and swung
back out toward its proper place, four hundred meters away. Jak rode up his line to finish fusing the old surplus on, and
it was done.

He looked back toward the ship, which was about as big as Earth seen from the Moon, a big dark metal ball, and it seemed very
welcoming; back there, a whole small town of people were born, lived, and died, and got up every morning with something to
do. Jak considered the possibility of turning crewie permanently, as he often did when life was difficult, and as always,
he had no real objections, just the feeling that his destiny was elsewhere.

He set the car to return to the tending platform on automatic. The ship grew from a ball in the sky to a world, the platform
braked, vacuum-silent, to the deck, and Jak grabbed the pull-rail and went inside.

He had had a late shift that day; after his post-shift shower, it was too late for the Bachelor’s Mess, and it was too late
to com Phrysaba and see if she wanted to eat in one of the cafes—she’d be at mess, probably, with her astrogation class. For
the first time, ever, Jak was going to have to dine at Passenger’s Mess.

The food was the same, but the noise level was a small fraction of what he was used to. In Passenger’s Mess the tables were
small and isolated, and people huddled murmuring over them, except for the table where a large, loud heet with a Hive accent
(fast, flat, and slurred) was explaining everything about Venus to three bored women. The conversation, or lecture, really,
was interrupted now and then by laughter, giggles, and squeals as they all revealed that although they had been on the sunclipper
for at least three months, they hadn’t really mastered eating in low grav yet. Jak sat at a table by himself, as far as possible
from them.

He had no more than touched his meal when Mreek Sinda slid into the seat opposite him. “Hello, I thought I’d see you before
now, I suppose CUPVs usually eat with the crewies, can’t imagine why they do that, they’re visiting people who never visit
anyone, that can’t be lively, but that seems to be what all the CUPVs do, or at least what you and Dujuv Gonzawara and Shadow
on the Frost do. Anyway, this won’t take long but I do have some further questions.”

Jak took a very large bite of his suddenly flavorless meat loaf and bolted it; he had consumed about half the piece before
she tried speaking to him again.

“Well,” she said, “I can understand that you have a lot to think about. You know, there are some people who might say that
what you really need to do is to give up this obsession with Princess Shyf, who after all is so far above you socially, and
I was wondering if you might have a comment on that.”

A drone buzzed between Jak’s plate and his face; he got a blob of smashed potatoes on it by flipping his fork hard. It moved
to a more respectful distance.

“Well, then,” Sinda added, “what about the rumors that Bex Riveroma has put a price on your head, or rather on your liver,
and that anyone who brings it in gets a megautil of untraceable credit?”

“Liver? I don’t
like
liver. I’m having meat loaf,” Jak said, “and he could have my meat loaf for fifty utils, no problem. Or I’d trade him liver
for two apples and a snack cake.”

“I suppose you think that’s funny. You’ve consistently tried to make my interviews with you impossible. Why is that?” She
tossed her head; it overstepped the intended “magnificent rage” and ventured into “mild spasm.”

“You have publicly humiliated me, and forged all kinds of things I never said or did, and damaged many of my friendships,”
Jak said. “And no matter what I do, you’re going to compose an animation of me saying and doing whatever you want, and nobody
will be able to tell the difference without tearing the signal apart on a good-sized computer. So since you can just script
what you need, why do you need me to play along? You can have me saying whatever you want for decades to come. So what is
all this about?”

“You’re important to me,” she said, and it was the first time he’d ever heard her voice not in broadcast mode. She had a slight
lisp that suggested one of the big Martian cities, or perhaps Ceres. “You’re very important to me. A few years ago I was nobody,
I was covering dance trends, not even fashionable ones, I was doing the story on slec so that the old gwonts who didn’t follow
anything current at all would finally know what slec was because it was about to be over, masen? Then I got good shots of
a brawl and followed up and found the most amazing story about a young man going off to rescue a princess—”