A Princess of the Aerie (23 page)

Short bursts from the hot jets sent them out of a high equatorial orbit and into a lower one angled to catch the Bigpile loop,
far north of the equator; the cold jets rotated the little vessels and the hot jets fired once again, dropping them into a
lower, faster orbit, and then the cold jets fired once more to reorient them. They approached the loop flying forward, with
their heads pointed toward the planet (not “down” yet, for they were still in free fall).

Jak watched the loop approach at about three kilometers per second. Ahead of him, Shadow’s longshore capsule grabbed and whirled
down toward the surface. Three seconds later, Dujuv followed. Now the two sides of the wicket seemed to drift together to
form a single white line in the window, reaching toward Jak from the lighted cross of Big-pile. At such speeds, human steering
and judgment are useless. Jak saw that everything was green, and with a second to go, pushed the “okay to land.” A moment
later, the cold jets fired a series of highly calibrated bursts, which sounded like clearing a clogged sinus. The longshore
capsule bounced around for a moment, and then the linducer grapple grabbed the loop.

Gravity appeared instantly in the “wrong” direction, away from Mercury, so that the planet seemed to be overhead. Two g’s
pushed Jak down into his seat cushion. In the space of a minute and a half, Mercury seemed to roll from overhead to directly
in front of him to underneath him, drawing closer all the time, and as the centripetal forces from the loop aligned more and
more with the planet’s gravity, he seemed to become steadily heavier, then lighter as the velocity slowed to a few meters
per second. The longshore capsule coasted down to Bigpile Station.

As gravity became comfortable, steady, and footward, and the land below rose up toward him, Jak closed his face-plate and
pressure-checked for arrival. The longshore capsule’s upper inducers released it from the loop, its lower ones grabbed a track,
and Jak was moving slowly over the melted-and-shattered short-horizoned landscape, between the silvery domes, dishes, boxes,
pipes, spheres, and wires, as if in a Pertrans car. They passed through an airlock into the main receiving area. The pressure
safety sign came on, and he unsealed.

His longshore capsule came to a stop between Shadow’s and Dujuv’s, in a docking bay. Jak slung up his jumpie, popped the door,
and got out to join Shadow and Dujuv.

“Hey! Hey! Are you all Jak Jinnaka, Shadow on the Frost, and Dujuv Gonzawara?”

They turned to see a tall, heavy blonde woman in a pressure suit, her helmet slung to one shoulder strap and heavy gauntlets
and boots slung to the other, hurrying down the quay toward them. “I’m Kyffimna Eldothaler,” she said. “I was afraid I was
late.”

“We just got here, ourselves,” Dujuv said.

She had a toothy grin,
Like the ogre’s wife in a fairy tale,
Jak thought. In an age of cheap plastic surgery and metabolic adjustments, when it was well-known that a little tinkering
with the body when a child was young saved all kinds of body-image problems and psychological damage later, she was not only
the ugliest girl Jak had ever seen, she was the first ugly girl Jak had ever seen. Her face was blotchy and oily. Her jaw
was big and square. Her pulpy lips did not quite cover her horsey teeth. Her crooked nose was large, and her blonde hair thin
and stringy. Even in a pressure suit he could tell that her body was bulky with muscle, no stronger than the lean dancer-bodies
he was used to, but far less pleasing.

“We’re glad to see you,” Jak said. “I’m Jak Jinnaka, this is Dujuv Gonzawara, and Shadow on the Frost.”

She shook hands with all of them, starting at Shadow’s double-thumbed hand. “I’ve been begging Mattanga for some help for
most of a year, now, and all I’ve gotten is vague notes. Where do we go to pick up the rest of your unit?”

“Our unit?” Dujuv asked.

“Or does each of you have a unit? Mattanga’s information didn’t come through the decrypt real clear.”

They all glanced at each other. “Perhaps it is because I am an alien,” Shadow said, “but I have no unit.”

“Well, then I hope each of you has a large unit,” Kyffimna said to Jak and Dujuv, “because I don’t speck anything small will
be enough. If it’s big enough there might actually be an intimidation or fear factor, which would help; I can’t tell you how
many nights I’ve laid awake thinking that the right heet with a big enough unit could make everything better overnight.”

“Umm,” Jak said, desperately trying to clear the horrible images dancing through his mind, “exactly what are you expecting
us to be able to do for you?”

She stared at him. “Oh, no. Did anyone tell you anything about MLB?”

The three friends looked at each other. “No,” Dujuv said, “I have no idea what that is.”

Kyffimna seemed almost to sway, as if for an instant she felt faint. “MLB is the organization that I asked Colonel Mattanga
for at least a battalion of B&Es to attack and put out of action. When I saw that there were three people coming, and I was
supposed to meet you, I thought you three would be the company commanders, or else the commander, second, and senior techny.”

There was a very long, awkward silence.

“Why is it,” Dujuv said, “that no matter how far down the river we get sold, there is always more river to sell us down?”

Shadow emitted a single bubble sound. “If it were happening to anyone else, Dujuv Gonzawara, I would find what you just said
hilarious.”

“Well,” Kyffimna said, visibly trying to brighten, “what are you officially here to do?”

Jak sighed. “Investigate. Whatever that may mean. Mattanga told us that she had no idea what was going on here.”

“But I’ve sent reports every week for the past year!”

“I don’t know whether anyone ever read them, Kyffimna. In fact I speck our real job is just to not be on the Aerie anymore,
because politically we were a problem. If we happen to solve your problem, Greenworld will be happy with us, of course, but
mostly we’re doing our real job just by not being in Greenworld. So first of all, what’s MLB?”

“Safer to discuss that once we’re moving,” Kyffimna said. “Listen, when we get back to the krilj, most people are going to
be pretty disappointed at the fact that you are not arriving with a battalion of troops, which is what we really need. Masen?”

“Toktru. Thanks for the warning.”

“You got anything besides those jumpies to bring along?”

They didn’t, so she just shrugged, gestured toward one of the tunnels, and said, “All right, then, this way. We’re cutting
a corner off Bigpile to the rocket port, then flying out to the Crater Hamner krilj, just a couple of kilometers but it’s
tangley going through town here.”

They blundered and stumbled after her through uncountable corridors, none level, straight, or at right angles, all lined with
shops, shacks, and shanties. In the perpetual room temperature of the sealed city, walls were only for security against theft,
surfaces to hang things from, and modesty.

Kyffimna explained that the older spaces in the city were played out mining tunnels; as Bigpile’s population grew, it gained
density as developers drilled and sold off private tunnels between tenanted spaces. As each new tunnel filled up and became
less fashionable, successively poorer waves of new immigrants took advantage of falling prices to put in successively more
appalling shacks. When there was no more legal room left, the poor waited till no one was paying attention, and filled in
the rest of the space one way or another. The center stayed clear only as long as affluent neighbors were willing to pay the
pokheets to knock apart any building that blocked a traffic path.

“Why are the tunnel walls so many different colors and textures?” Dujuv asked.

“Because slag is always being remelted and repoured,” Kyffimna said. “Say in one year titanium is high priced. We get a bunch
of titanium-bearing rock together, melt it, run it through a separator; along the way maybe we take out the nickel or the
silver, if prices are good on those, as lagniappe. Any oxygen, nitrogen, or valuable bio-stuff like that, we claim for our
own use. Then we have this big load of waste magma—liquid rock, mostly metals, nothing of value in it, white-hot and dangerous.
It gets used for fill in old tunnels, or for paving, or as the heavy stuff in substitution pumping.”

“So how did that turn all the walls all these different colors?” Dujuv asked.

“You
are
a panth, aren’t you?” As if she were explaining things to a not very bright child, she said, “In all those centuries of mining,
a lot of waste magma, with a lot of different composition, goes down a lot of holes, masen? There’s veins of stuff that’s
been melted, pumped, processed, and dumped ten and fifteen times, all over Mercury, depending on what was needed and where
there was stuff. If a field is rich and has a lot of different ores of different grades, there will be a lot of hole-making
and a lot of hole-filling over a few centuries. Then if a city—like Bigpile—grows there, all the tunnels you drill are going
to be punching through all those old deposits of six-times-cooked rock, which will have all kinds of stuff in it, which will
make it all different colors. Masen?”

“I did not speck your point at first, either,” Shadow on the Frost said, “so I do not think that the problem was that my oath-bound
tove Dujuv Gonzawara was a panth. I speck it was that the explanation was needlessly obscure, with too much assumed.”

Kyffimna stopped walking and stood still. “I think you are trying to tell me that I was rude to your friend.”

“Singing-on,” Shadow said gravely. “Do you need any further explanation?”

She winced. “Dujuv, did I offend you?”

“Somewhat. When you’re a panth you get used to being treated like an idiot.”

“Then I’m very sorry,” Kyffimna said. She extended her hand, and Dujuv shook it.

“Now,” Kyffimna said, “we’re far enough out of our way, so maybe nobody’s listening. The malphs are MLB, the Mercury Labor
Brigade, which is set up as a vested corporation but is actually a protection mob moving in on about a dozen mining sites,
and taking control of maybe sixty quaccos, so far. MLB has juice everywhere. Corporations won’t try to do anything about them,
the union tells us to cooperate with them, we contacted a couple of zybots and they wouldn’t talk to us. Even stringers for
spy agencies say that their home offices aren’t interested.

“So whoever MLB are, they’re richer than God and with more guns. Their headquarters is in Crater Hamner, which my quacco has
been working for a generation—and they just showed up, started drilling in the central pinnacle, we went out to talk to them,
and they shot two of the quacco dead, beat the shit out of our leader, and told us from now on they were our sole customer
and that they would take care of supplying all our old ones. They’re recruiting young dumb muscle right now, taking over more
sites and more quaccos, building up strength—at the rate they’re going, they’ll own Bigpile in a month, and Mercury in a year.

“That would be fine if all they were doing was taking over. Every Mercurial knows what this place needs is a good strong tyrant
to organize things and make the off-planet companies stop the competitive plundering, pay for some public works—you know there’s
not a public school or waterworks, or one kilometer of nonprivate pipe or wire, on this planet?—and put down the cutthroat
way we all steal each other’s business. If these heets were just vicious tyrants, half of us would be on their side, just
to get out from under the Invisible Thumb.”

“The Invisible Thumb? Is that what their organization is called, like the Black Hand?”

She snorted derisively. “It’s a nasty joke. Like everything on Mercury. The only free education available on this planet is
the accesscast stuff with all the advertising, and to get your certificate from that, you have to learn a lot of free-market
economics. The first-year class, for seven-year-olds, introduces Uncle Adam Smith, this weird-looking heet in knee britches
that I guess was the pope or the president or something back on Earth a long time ago, and he teaches the first economics
class, which is called ‘The Wonderful Invisible Hand.’ When a miner discovers that the price of something changed between
taking out the loan and getting it out of the ground, and the buyer can walk away from the contract but the bank can seize
the miner’s gear, and the explanation is ‘the free market’—the miner feels that Invisible Thumb going in deep.

“A lot of us would throw in with anybody who promised to take over and give us some order, just to get a gentler, more predictable
Invisible Thumb, but these MLB heets are actually worse than what we had before. They set prices too low to live on, force
us to take out loans, and take advantage of the fact that the Freedom for Mercury Treaty authorizes peonage.”

“Peeing on what?” Dujuv asked.

“Peonage,” Shadow on the Frost said. “Hereditary and heritable, no doubt.”

“That’s right.”

Jak looked at Kyffimna and didn’t want her to jump on Dujuv for not knowing again, so he said, “All right, obviously Shadow
knows what peonage is, but I don’t.”

“Debt slavery. Get behind enough payments and the bank owns you—and your kids—till you work it off.”

“Nakasen’s bulging bag,” Dujuv said, “you’re talking about bank banks. Real banks. I didn’t even know those still existed.”

“They do here,” Kyffimna said. “Mercury really is the place where everything is for sale, and where the buyers are the kings.
Want to set up a bank? They’re legal, because everything is legal here. Want to sell
xleeth,
and start all your customers down the road to being severely retarded but with the biggest, happiest smiles you’ve ever seen?
Nobody would stop you from setting up your booth on a playground, unless you weren’t giving the owner a cut. Want to cook
and eat a kid? If you can find a seller for a five-year-old peon, and cover all the liens, hey, you can start chopping the
parsley and preheat the oven. And no pokheet will come around to bother you. We have our feets here; the vid is always reminding
us how we’re completely free.”