A Princess of the Aerie (29 page)

“Is it going to get sympathy?”

“Hell, no, not at first. The sunclipper crewies will be mad at us, and the industrial companies will hate our guts, and our
own unions aren’t authorizing this—most of their members aren’t here, they’re in factories in the Hive and on Ceres and so
on, and we’ll be throwing a lot of members out of work. But it means they’ll all be paying attention.”

“I see all kinds of risks,” Dujuv said.

Durol shrugged. “There’s risks either way, so you might as well pick the way that leaves the person in the mirror more attractive.
Did you see those two heets this afternoon? No doubt they didn’t want to risk another day without a job, so they took that
one.”

T
he strike would begin at noon, General Solar System Time; coincidentally, it was almost noon by local solar time anyway (and
would be for some days; Mercury’s day is one and one-half times as long as its year).

No one would come back from lunch. Instead, they would all meet in Bigpile that afternoon, to be assigned locations and places
for the picket lines and demonstrations. The objective was to make it impossible for offplaneters to move through any part
of Bigpile without running into protests, to flood the solar system with messages that there was big trouble here.

But to make an impact, it was thought to be better for it to appear suddenly, in the middle of the day. That also gave all
the quaccos a chance to get some last-minute essential work in before they would have to start clearing it through the central
committee.

Jak’s morning job was to move probes. About as tall as his knees, and very light, they looked like chicken wire teepees. The
chicken wire was both the solar collector that powered them and the antenna by which they talked to the base station about
what they found. Each probe gradually pushed a centimeter-wide spherical bit, made of tunable matter, down through the crust
of the planet, sometimes going to a depth of ten kilometers. Inside the bit, NMR probes read the composition of the surrounding
materials. On the face of the bit, pseudoatoms flipped through their phases from fluorine to francium to helium, forming a
pattern without moving like a crowd in a stadium doing the wave.

The pattern was two parallel helixes—a double screw—one of francium and one of fluorine, microscopic in width, separated by
an equally narrow band of helium, turning thousands of times on their way up past the wide part of the sphere. At that wide
point, the fluorine helix ended in a band of helium, which deposited a mixture of metals that formed the electrically conducting
wall of the shaft; the francium helix continued up into the center of the tube, releasing oxidizers (mostly gases) into the
same slender hose that carried down the power lead from the surface. The oxidizing gases rushed up the hose into the vacuum
of space, the metals were deposited in a dense layer on the side of the shaft, and the ball sank steadily into the earth,
needing only its little trickle of power to keep going.

In about forty days of sunlight, each little station could drill down to ten kilometers, mapping everything it encountered
with millimeter accuracy. Since on Mercury the synodic day (the actual time from sunrise to sunrise) is 175 Earth days, this
meant that in each synodic day there was time for each sampler to check two sites. It was close to Mercurial noon, so it was
time to move them all; if they waited till after the strike, precious data might be lost.

Since the machines told Jak, via his purse, what to do, the job was barely more complicated than watching the readouts the
day before had been. Jak drove to each sampler, detached the old hose and bit, and left them in the ground, put the sampler
on the five-wheeler, drove it to its new site, put on another bit and hose, and told it to start. He was certainly learning
how to follow directions on this mission.

He was just placing the last one, running way ahead with more than an hour to go in his shift, when a five-wheeler leapt over
the horizon and headed straight for him. It wasn’t carrying either the MLB or the Eldothaler insignia, so it was odd that
it was in Crater Hamner at all, and it was being driven badly, with lots of unnecessary bounces and spinning out, moving like
a drunken mechanical spider in a hurry, so that Jak realized after a moment that it couldn’t be a Mercurial driving.

The suited figure climbed awkwardly down, falling from the tire before getting up and hurrying toward him. There was something
about it—

“Jak Jinnaka,” a voice said in his earphones, and he realized.

“Mreek Sinda,” he said, “I heard that you were here on Mercury.”

“Well, yes, I am. Still pursuing the story that happens to have you in it. Much to my regret because you’re not cooperative
and animation is expensive. And before you check, no, that didn’t go out on general frequency. I’m here to present you with
an opportunity. MLB has just opened an office in Bigpile to recruit ‘security people.’ Which some people might call ‘goons.’
Looks like they’re getting ready to play rough.”

“Thanks, I’ll pass that on to the strike leaders.” Jak didn’t know why she had driven out to tell him this.

“I
said
an opportunity.” Sinda was petite and her pressure suit carried no extra supplies or rescue pack—another thing no Mercurial
would have done—so she looked preternaturally tiny. But she stood up very straight, hands on her hips, as if prepared to defy
him to the death if need be. Whatever argument she thought she had, she thought it was a good one.

Jak sighed. He had to know. “All right, what is it?”

She put her helmet against his so that he could hear by conduction, the almost-unbuggable way to talk. “MLB doesn’t know you
from anyone and you haven’t yet put Eldothaler markings on your pressure suit.”

“Yes, and?”

“So pretend to be a stranded crewie (that happens all the time if a longshore capsule isn’t fit to fly back just as the ship
is moving out of range) and go to the new MLB office in Bigpile and see what happens if you try to enlist in their goon squad.
I’ll wire you with so many cameras and mikes that someone could open the Jinnaka channel. See what MLB’s pitch is to the hired
thugs. If you’re actor enough, maybe suggest that you’d like to rape a prisoner or interrogate young children in front of
their parents, your standard evil-tyrant’s-henchman behavior, and see if they start nodding and promising that you’ll have
a chance to beat up old people or batter orphans or whatever. Anything like that you can get them to say will be terrific
for both of us.”

“Suppose you explain that part.”

“Well, when they strike, the miners are going to be everyone’s whipping boy. The media are owned by the same people that own
the factories, masen? And the miners aren’t exactly photogenic. But if you can provoke MLB into saying some really outrageous
things,
they
get some bad coverage and they’ll have to cut back on goons. That’s good for your friends. Plus this will tie the story of
the miners and all that esoteric stuff about mineral prices and working conditions and people getting hurt and all that boring,
boring, boring stuff into a story about a beautiful young princess and her man of mystery. You see? No one gives a shit if
MLB burns a miner alive every day before breakfast, Jak. That’s not news. But if
you’re
involved, dragging along the Princess Shyf story, then it’s interesting. Suddenly my little backwater oppressed-miner story
is an important public issue, which is good for me
and
the miners.”

“Hunh. You’re right, I think. I’m going to call back to the krilj. If they say okay, I’ll do it.”

“Jak, the krilj is bugged so heavily that MLB probably knows which side you sleep on. My own smart bugs walked in there—how
do you suppose I knew so much about the strike?—and found at least two MLB bugs in every room. I don’t speck anyone will place
you, but if they have a voice-print file with a quick-access search, you might get caught. I guess I shouldn’t have concealed
that from you. But if you call home to tell them what you’re doing, you
will
get caught.”

Unfortunately, it sounded like she was telling the truth. He could explain things to his toves afterward, easily enough, and
he wasn’t due anywhere until thirteen thirty; there would be plenty of time. “All right, let’s go,” he said.

As he drove toward the point where Sinda’s rocket had landed, he watched her five-wheeler ahead of him bounce all over the
broad, switchbacking ledge cut into the crater wall at a low spot, perhaps by the Eldothalers, possibly by anyone in the last
twelve hundred years, for without rain or wind, every surface stayed the same forever, and it all looked as if it had been
done ten minutes ago. The burned and melted floor of Crater Hamner spread out before him in sharp-edged contour lines marking
where past magma floods had spread out or been dumped. As Jak reached the top, the central pinnacle looked more like a necromancer’s
tower than ever.

During the long climb up the side of the crater, Jak touched the communication spot on his purse so often that it finally
asked him if he was thinking of sending a message; a little curtly, he told it to mind its own business, and then a moment
later realized that he might be alienating it, and ended up spending most of the rest of the drive trying to explain to it
how to tell when he was thinking about talking but toktru didn’t want to.

Jak had only passed briefly through one small corner of Bigpile before; this time they had grounded at a rocket port on the
periphery, on the westernmost of the outer corners of the rough, lumpy Maltese cross that formed the shape of the city as
it spilled around the intersection of a wrinkle ridge and a fracture fault. It would be about a three-kilometer walk to the
central area where the Bigpile Marriott was. Unfortunately, one of Bigpile’s several distinctions was that it was the largest
human city without Pertrans service.

“Is it always like this?” Jak asked.

“Usually only in the central shopping areas or around a shift change at a factory,” Sinda said. She whispered to her purse
for an instant. “Thought so. About twenty percent more people than usual in the city, this morning. Mostly in from the kriljs.
So it looks like your side is doing all right for mobilization.” She raised her left hand to her face and spoke into the purse.
“What’s the difference between a cheap sprite and an expensive one?”

“They’re all expensive,” her purse said, in its resonant baritone.

“Are there differences?”

“None, really.”

“Get me one from the middle of the alphabet.”

A moment later a sprite appeared, and she turned to follow it. Jak asked, “This place has different sprites?”

“Competing sprite companies. No public utilities here, remember?” She turned and plunged into the crowd.

Jak simply couldn’t go through the thick, milling, buzzing crowds in the rock-blasted corridors as quickly as the tiny woman.
Her sprite had to pause every two hundred meters or so and dance around, waiting for Jak to work his way through a knot of
people or out of a blind corner. The closer they came to the center of the city, the tighter people packed, and the more a
tense electric connection seemed to fuse the crowds together. Miners in pressure suits, workers in coveralls, gamblers and
hookers dressed up in their best clash-splash-and-smash, mercs in the uniforms of half a dozen units employed by the corporations,
children in school uniforms, and drunks in whatever they’d slept in, all pushed and tried to ease themselves through the city
in one direction or another, all apparently feeling that if they could only get to somewhere else they could be where something
was just about to happen. The air was dense; the CO
₂
and water scrubbers must be having a hard time with the extra load.

The thicker, more contentious crowd near the Marriott slowed them, but they made their way through the big doors into the
lobby, among a mob of people pouring in, apparently hoping to be safely behind the Marriott’s security perimeter if trouble
started, pushing through a lobby crowded with people wandering in little circles around their piles of luggage, talking to
their purses, scrambling to find passage on any outgoing sunclipper.

“Travelers,” Sinda said, shaking her head. “As soon as anybody mentions that some politics might happen and there might not
be ice for the drinks, they fill a suitcase and go stand around in the least comfortable area they can find, asking questions
nobody can answer and demanding that somebody do something. Three-quarters of them not in a pressure suit, so if any real
trouble started, they’d be dead anyway. This way up to my room.”

Sinda had done this many times before, and it only took her a few minutes to put microcameras and concealed microphones onto
Jak’s pressure suit and cap them with metal to make them look like rivets.

At the downtown offices of MLB, ropes were up to bend a long line of applicants back and forth in the front lobby, several
times. The line seemed to be moving, so he got into it; within minutes, there were many people behind him. From halfway up
the line, Jak looked around.
Either this job has fabulous pay and benefits, or else there just aren’t too many other positions open for big thugs.

Jak put in an earpiece so he could listen and keyed a question to his purse, his fingers dancing over the little spots of
the keyboard.

“Yes,” the purse said in his ear. “The unemployment rate on Mercury is high, it’s higher in Bigpile, and seventeen percent
of Bigpile’s new immigrants are convicted violent felons from somewhere else, traveling on an exile ticket. In fact four percent
of the total population arrived in the max security brigs of military vessels.”

Jak keyed “Done,” and touched the reward spot; the purse cheebled in his ear and added, “Be careful.” As Jak retracted the
earphone into the suit collar, he felt oddly touched by that; he’d never had any machine reach the point of feeling any concern
for him before.