A Princess of the Aerie (3 page)

“Er, well, none right away sir, but—”

“Then goodbye, and good luck on that exam you have forty minutes from now. If you’re quick, you can probably review all the
ethnographic material just before you go in.” The Dean winked so merrily that Jak might almost have mistaken it for friendly.

Unable to think of anything else to say, Jak got up and airswam through the door, which closed behind him silently. An instant
later he heard bellowing, joyful laughter. Jak resolved not to mention that to anyone. Already, his story would be disbelieved
by every other student, when he got to the part where the Dean smiled.

S
o apparently the first thing I have to do is come up with a project,” Jak said to his best tove Dujuv, as they sat down to
share a platter of Whole Steamed Beefrats in a private booth in the Old China Cafe, their favorite booth in their favorite
place of many years, in Entrepot, a vast shopping area tens of kilometers across, far down in the lower decks of the Hive,
not far above the industrial service decks, so far down that the main floor was on the .76 grav deck. The Old China had a
proletarian-jock tendency to big portions, heavy sauces, and strong flavors, especially to sweet-and-sours.

Since his allowance was generous and his Uncle Sib was rich, Jak was probably among the Old China’s wealthiest customers.
Not the wealthiest, though. That had to be Sesh.

The greatest shock of Jak’s life had occurred two years ago when he had discovered that Sesh Kiroping, the girl who had been
his sweet, amiable, pleasant demmy for his last years in gen school, was in reality Princess Shyf Karrinynya, or more formally,
Her Utmost Grace the Princess Shyf, Eleventh of the Karrinynya Dynasty of the Kingdom of Greenworld, by the Blessed Choice
of Mother Gaia. Greenworld, a vital ally to the Hive, was in the Aerie, the other giant space station in the solar system.

Discovering Sesh’s real identity had led Jak, and later Duj, into wild adventures, caused Sesh to return to the Aerie, and
gotten Jak and Dujuv into the PSA not as Hive citizens, but as special favors to the Duke of Uranium, Psim Cofinalez, one
of the hundred or so most powerful people in the solar system.

Jak thought of that adventure as the best weeks of his life, living like a hero in an intrigue-and-adventure viv: plots, rescues,
counterplots, affairs with beautiful girls, high adventure with good toves. Since then he had mostly spent time in class,
or socializing with Fnina, his current demmy, who had the looks of a model, the clash-splash-and-smash of a viv star, and
the perspicacity of an unusually naive brick. She had been attracted to Jak by Mreek Sinda’s best-selling documentary about
him, a grossly distorted version of his adventures, and Jak really thought that in two years Fnina had not yet noticed that
he was not the heet in Sinda’s show.

He still practiced the Disciplines daily, and was if anything better at them than ever, but there was no one to fight with,
and sparring had lost some of its pleasures; he still consumed intrigue-and-adventure vivs, but couldn’t help noticing how
much less interesting than the real thing they were. For that matter, during his brief period of adventures, aside from his
sex life with a passionate, beautiful, horny princess, he’d also had a tender love affair with a crewie girl on the sunclipper
on which he traveled—her first, and he still dreamed of how sweet and affectionate it had been. Comparatively, Fnina was merely
compliant and proficient, and within a few months, anyway, his fame would have at last worn off and she’d find someone else.

Everything in the last two years was nothing compared to those few weeks. That wild set of adventures had begun with a casual
conversation, right here, in this booth. Jak suddenly hoped that this booth was lucky.

Dujuv’s attention was where it usually was, on his plate. Jak had often heard him say that beefrats were the real triumph
of the genies—without beefrats, there’d be no hamburgers or meat loaf in space; cows were just too big and inefficient. A
beefrat would eat pretty much anything and turn it into so much juicy, tender steak on each tiny body that, when full-grown,
they looked like thick cylinders garnished with a whippy long tail, tiny little head, and four pink hands.

Dujuv was gobbling down beefrats at his usual pace—hands, tails and heads came off in a single blinding motion, into the bone
bowl to his right; then the beefrat torso in his left hand whirled as he stripped off the outer layer of meat with his teeth.
After ripping them apart with his hands to get the sweet hidden bits between the bones, he plopped the skeleton into the bone
bowl at his left even as his right hand grabbed another steamed beefrat and the process began again. Duj had once said, casually,
that he’d never really known how to enjoy beefrat until he’d dakked you needed a bone bowl for each hand.

Jak watched the process in some awe, as always. A plate of Whole Steamed Beefrats was twelve of them; Jak had accounted for
three, probably a quarter kilogram of meat. But then Jak, unmodified as he was, didn’t have the speeded-up metabolism of a
panth.

Dujuv at last came up for air. “So did Dean Caccitepe give you any ideas for where to find a project?”

“Not even a hint. So what’s
your
Junior Task? Score four knockbacks the next time we play Nakasen University?”

“Four knockbacks is one more than the school record.” Dujuv dragged a foreleg through his teeth, getting the last succulent
bits. “I could eat these fat little bastards all day. Hmm. Well. The Junior Task for me is actually harder than getting four
knockbacks against Nakasen, I think. I have to go along on
your
project, and help you out, which is not necessarily hard at all, except that I’m also supposed to keep you out of trouble,
and I ask you,
can
anyone? Is that a fair assignment?”

Jak gaped. “So your project is to be my pizo?”

“Singing-on, tove. I’m to be your
responsible
pizo. Dean Caccitepe’s exact words. It’s that little adjective, ‘responsible,’ that makes the whole job so tough, masen?
So, you go save the universe; I come along and help. Any idea what I should pack?”

“No idea at all. But it’s only been a few hours. I’m still recovering from that test—which might as well have been an ethnography
exam. I can’t believe that he did that to us. Every question had some condition like, ‘Bearing in mind the implications for
the Fertility Festival of the Booga Booga Nation’ or ‘Without reviving historical memories of the Second Civil War in Beriberistan’
or ‘assume that
machismo, gimu,
and bloody-mindedness are all relevant.’ I mean, it’s supposed to be a negotiation class, and that test wasn’t about negotiating
anything
—it was all about respecting some rule that you can’t pick your nose with your pinkie on Tuesday. It’s as if they gave you
a test on how to be a goalie and all the questions were about fast and slow surfaces and which team had the most left-handed
power slingers, and none of them were about stopping the ball or whipping out.”

Dujuv looked thoughtful as he plucked the head, hands, and tail of the next beefrat. “You know, stops and whipouts are the
things you practice all the time, of course, I mean, they’re basically what they hire a goalie to do, but to do them at the
right time, in the right way, so that your team scores and theirs doesn’t—and to set you up to score on a knockback … hunh.
Well, for that, you really do need to know things like the speed of the surface and how many lefties they have.”

“It was just an example.”

“But see, that’s what’s interesting, that you picked that example. Because those things
would
be relevant in a goalie class. And look, I’m never going to take any negotiating class, or anything else academic that isn’t
required—nobody wants me for my brain—but what kind of deal are you going to get if you don’t dak the other heet?”

“Anyway,” Jak said, sick of the entire subject, “I’m going to talk with Uncle Sibroillo about coming up with some kind of
project. I’m having dinner with him tonight.” Jak had never known his parents, and had been discouraged from asking questions
about them; Sibroillo was the only relative he knew. Jak had moved out of Sibroillo’s home after graduating from gen school,
but they still saw each other a couple of times a week. “He’s a silly old gwont but he does have ideas, sometimes good ones.”

Dujuv shrugged. “You’ll think of something, Jak. How long have we been friends?”

“Since the second day of gen school, so I guess about ten years.”

“Well, then, in ten years, I’ve never known you to actually fail to think of something.”

Jak raised his left hand and spoke into his purse. “Time check.”

The purse replied, “Fifteen twenty, standard. Sibroillo will pick you up in one hour ten. He’s going to surprise you with
a pricier, fancier place than usual, and he hopes to catch you not dressed for it and thereby make you feel like a gweetz.
If you want to get a shower and change into something nicer beforehand, we should leave in the next five minutes.”

“Thanks. Pay the bill here. Leave a tip thirty percent over average.”

“Done.” The little lighted square in his palm went out.

“Well, you heard the gadget,” Jak said. “Guess I’d better run, tove.”

“Yeah. You want to take a beefrat with you?”

There were two left of the plate. “Naw, have ’em all.”

“You paid for ’em.”

“Well, I have the money, you have the appetite. It’s a specialization of labor. Gotta move, tove.”

Dujuv nodded, his face already down in another beefrat.

Jak spoke to his purse. “Get Pongo to the nearest station.”

“Done, off.”

With a final nod to Dujuv, whose mouth was still much too full to talk, Jak pushed the button to slide the private booth door
open, and walked out past all the mostly-closed booths, through the front door and across the courtyard to the little spur
of track between the walls of an alcove. After a short wait, both walls dilated into doors, and Pongo emerged from the left
and grounded.

“Right here,” Jak said to his Pertrans car, which, recognizing his voice, turned on a green okay light and popped open its
canopy. Jak jumped in, fastened his belt, and said, “Okay, close up and get me there.”

The canopy closed, the inducers lifted Pongo half a centimeter off the tracks, and they shot off in a series of high-acceleration
lurches and bobs. They couldn’t go as fast back to Jak’s place as Pongo had come by itself—Jak couldn’t take forty g—but Jak
had set up a standing funds authorization for extra energy, shortcuts through the high-priced tunnels, automatic payment of
misdemeanor tickets—all the costs of speed. To go through the Hive in a hurry, Pongo had to bounce from one space between
Pertrans cars to another, jinking in and out of tubes, speeding or slowing to match speeds with each successive hole, calculating
a hundred dips and bobs ahead as traffic entered and left the tube system. Jak loved it; Uncle Sib called it “being shaken
like a rat,” though just why anyone would shake rats was beyond Jak.

At ten minutes till arrival, Jak had his purse call ahead to have his house start drawing a bath. Since Pongo docked inside
his living quarters, Jak undressed in the Pertrans car. When the car grounded and popped its canopy, Jak walked straight to
his bath, dropping his purse onto the recharger on the bathroom counter.

As he settled into the warm sudsy water, the purse said, “Mail from Princess Shyf.”

“Bring it up, on the screen I can see from the tub.”

The purse said, “I am requested to point out that this message came in through the purely personal channel, one of your encrypted
back doors, and she used a back door that hadn’t been used before. So this arrives in the highest confidence.”

“Interesting,” Jak said, meaning he was fascinated. “Put it up.” He settled back into the suds to see what Sesh had to say
to him. Two years ago; when he had just performed a daring rescue, and with so much conspiracy and counter-conspiracy in the
air, setting up the back channels had seemed like a good thing to do just in case. Now, she’d activated one.

The screen swirled for a half second as the decrypter worked. Sesh’s image appeared. She was almost as tall as Jak, and thin.
Her ancestry owed much to the gracile breed, and her blazing red hair, deep blue eyes, coffee-with-cream skin, and fine bone
structure still mesmerized Jak. There was something sad and wary in those fascinating eyes.

“Hey, Jak, weehu, it’s been a long time since I messaged you.” Her smile deepened, suggesting that he ought to forgive her;
he did, of course, instantly. “I guess I’m doing all right at this stupid princess job, I mean I speck I’m at least an average
princess, maybe a little better than that, and I’m sure I can be way above average by the time I make queen. Get queened,
queenify, queen out? What
do
you call it, and why hasn’t anyone ever told me? Anyway, you know what I mean.”

She leaned forward, close to the camera. The view down her cleavage brought back fond memories, so Jak tried to focus on her
face, but then he was lost in those eyes again. “Jak, I’m finding that more and more I need services that I can’t get officially.
The whole Royal Palace is one big snake pit and I need at least one snake on my side. I can’t tell you what it is that I need
in this message—it will be decrypted and read here, and in the Hive, and probably twenty other places too, soon. I need some
things done quietly and unofficially. I think your Uncle Sib will guess what kind of things, so you should show him this message.

“Anyway, it’s nothing terrible—I don’t need you to kill a man or carry a secret message to my lover or anything like that.
But I need a good friend that I can trust to do it, and I know from that time you rescued me, you’re good at the kind of stuff
I need done, and you’ve had all that training from your uncle, and I know your Long Break is coming up, so I have arranged
a fast passage over to the Aerie.