The Duke Of Uranium (6 page)

The panth relaxed a moment and then sighed. “But if I don’t, I’ll wonder what she’s up to.”

“She’s finding a bunch of overmuscled, underclothed heets to flirt with,” Sesh said, impatiently. “Now you know. So stick around your toktru toves and relax a little, masen?”

He did, for about ten minutes, until he saw Myx floating in a knot of heets. Then he made the face that meant he knew he was being a gweetz but couldn’t help himself. With a sigh, Dujuv pushed off on a trajectory that would allow him to drift gradually into the crowd that floated steadily around Myx as she slowly circled the room, perhaps twenty meters from the great curving burnished-silver wall. As he joined the crowd, Sesh observed, “It’s sort of like a solar system. There’s Dujuv, orbiting in close, like a planet, and then a flock of heets orbiting further away but trying to get in, like the Kiuper Belt, and then a few girls hanging around at the very outer edges, like the Oort Cloud.”

“Except that when one of the comets gets out of the Kuiper Belt and heads in toward the sun, it’s Duj that goes hyperbolic,” Jak said.

“First one of us that accuses the other of being elliptical gets slapped.”

“Toktru.”

“Seriously, though,” Sesh said, “Myx and Duj. After all this time, I still don’t understand it. They’re so different, I don’t dak how they dak each other.” She pulled herself around so that she could float comfortably face-to-face with Jak, legs and arms gently intertwined.

Jak shrugged. “I know what he sees in her. I just don’t speck how he can keep seeing it.”

“I never get it either.” She looked at the crowd, again, and laughed. “I have to admit that she’s funny and charming and sexy—”

“And singingon beautiful.”

Sesh nodded eagerly. ‘Toktru beautiful. But Duj has this weird throwback loyal-monogamy obsession, and Myx can’t possibly fit into that anywhere. The strange thing is that he could find more than enough attractive girls, who would love to be his demmy, and they’d really dak what he wanted and give it to him.

So I don’t know why he’s obsessed with getting Myxenna Bonxiao, of all people, to behave contrary to her nature. I mean—when you were with her, what, a few times—”

‘Twice.”

“You didn’t try to get her to be anything other than the way she is.”

“The way she is, is what I was interested in,” Jak said.

Sesh beamed at him. “That’s my tove. And you’ve always let me have the same feets. But with Duj

can you imagine what he’s going to be like when he’s touring with his slamball team—and knowing him, he’ll be getting plenty while he’s on the road—and she’s at the PSA, with a lot of smart ambitious heets?”

“My tove will be absolutely completely totally insane, toktru. But he’s used to that.”

Sesh was about to say something, but the great curving walls around them began to move slightly, and a low bass rumble echoed back and forth across Centrifuge; Y4UB was founding their first piece.

Slec, like so many other kinds of contemporary art, was third remove. The first remove had been the solution to problems of technical execution, something that had begun even before spacefaring; today the djeste of the first remove was so complete that only hobbyist-antiquarians bothered to learn to use hand tools like brushes, pencils, or guitars, or to compose sentences or place cameras. The second remove was that of routine creativity: in the last few centuries, AIs had become complex and proficient enough so that if you gave them the outlines of a few “highlight” scenes or a good central image, they could write a Shakespeare play, Kundera novel, or Petrarch sonnet that was singingon like the real thing; given a

photograph, they could paint the scene in a way a human being couldn’t distinguish from Leonardo or Van Gogh; given a sequence of a few pitches, they could compose so like Beethoven that Beethoven himself couldn’t have heard the difference. And once there were AIs that could do that, the process was instantly industrialized, so that nowadays it produced the background noise or the intellectual wallpaper of civilization.

The third remove was the synesthetic remove, developed just in the last couple of generations. For thousands of years creators had relied on an intuitive sense that some music was “blue” or “red,” or that a given curve on a sculpture was “sweet” or that it “sang,” or that high comedy is like a souffle”; sufficient time and processing capability had led to machines for which such metaphors were not merely intelligible, but meaningful and machine-processable.

Y4UB was not so much a band of musicians as it was a team of engineer-critics, who could sweep through hundreds of cameras to look for the interesting dance move, the worthwhile facial expression, the pose, the clothes, or the bons mots, sample that, feed it to the synthesizer, and turn it into melody, motif, harmony, or rhythm for the jamming AIs that wove the endless music. Each member of Y4UB was also a proficient phraser, tossing ideas^ and words into the mix via their microphones, where they sometimes became parts of the light show, sometimes bits of the music, now and then an overall theme, and even, sometimes, lyrics for any of the thousands of synthesized voices that might break from the speakers at any moment.

Slec was dense, swift, heavy-to-light in a moment, yet sustained through a whole evening. If it wasn’t possible to really record what happened when a group like Y4UB worked in a space like Centrifuge with a toktru singingon crowd, that was part of the charm. You genuinely had to be there.

Things always started simply. When the band was founding the first set, they started with a beat, some colored light, a few sounds, and a random pattern of turn-bling for the room as a whole; everyone would get up and begin to dance in the air, at first tentatively, and the band would look for some interesting moves or appearances from which to grow the first piece. It was widely believed, anyway, that if you moved with confidence, you were much more likely to attract the attention of the band, and if that happened, the piece would be more about you than about most of the crowd—about as deep a compliment as you could hope for.

Jak was good at slec; everyone said he was one of the lightest dancers. But Sesh was in her own class, toktru superb. She danced like an eagle flies, as if she had been shaped to no other purpose. Jak was athletic and gymnastic, and many people had told him he was very graceful—he privately attributed it to all the practice at the Disciplines—but when he danced with Sesh, he always felt just a tiny bit clumsy, by comparison with her unerring grace; her sheer shining style seemed to rebuke the universe for not being as beautiful as it ought to be. Dancing with her, Jak seemed a little awkward to himself, as if he were having to jerk slightly to stay on her beat, and a little colorless, as if even his best moves were faded, and a little heavy, as if he had somehow slipped out of fashion.

On the other hand, Jak consoled himself, hardly anyone else could keep up with Sesh at all.

Dujuv and Myxenna weren’t quite on the same level as dancers that Sesh and Jak were, but they were still a delight to watch; his powerful panth body flowed like a fine martial artist doing katas, and Myx’s confident eroticism seemed to say, “Well, yes, of course, I’m the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen, and of course you want to.”

Jak had given up on dancing with Myx for three reasons; first of all, he tended to take on some of the characteristics of his partner, and it was simply more pleasant to take on Sesh’s joyful finesse and singingon style than it was to take on Myxenna’s aggressive sexiness. Secondly, when he danced with Myx, it always upset Dujuv, who then had to pretend that he was not upset (something at which he was rarely any good), and it wasn’t worth it to Jak to precess his toktru tove. Finally, Jak just hated the jokes Sesh made about “midair optical fucking.”

Tonight the mesh between Y4UB and the four friends was singingon. In the first ten minutes, Y4UB

pulled a melody sample off Sesh and a counterpoint bass line from Jak. Shortly after they pulled a colorwash mix off a close pass between Myx and Duj. Then the sampling cameras flew away to look elsewhere, and the four swung into stunts (when they were sampling you, stunts confused the AIs and made it likely that they would just pass over you).

Jak and Sesh clasped hands as their four feet touched surface, hitting the gravity just as it went perpendicular at perhaps .01 g. As they bounced away, the gravity shifted about sixty degrees and decreased by half. They took advantage of that, shooting into a big swing, orbiting each other joined by outstretched arms, and then releasing into one of their signature moves, the double Immelman.

At least that was what Jak thought they were going to do. He arched into the big arc, belly outward, embracing a circle about five meters in diameter, and came around. When he reached over his head, looking up to catch Sesh in a trapeze-grab, there was no one there.

He tucked and spun, processing, tumbling so that he could look for her. He expected to find that either some oaf had forced Sesh out of her flight path, or some gweetz had tried to cut in (and that Sesh had already given him an educational clop to the chops).

Instead, below and to the side, well away from anywhere Sesh would have gone naturally, he saw her struggling with four men, all of them much too old to be in here. They were dragging her to an emergency exit.

One of them, his back turned toward Jak, had her head locked in his armpit. One was fighting to get her wrists together to bind them, one was just in process of tying her ankles, and the fourth was airswimrning a tow line toward the emergency exit.

Jak didn’t hesitate; he felt his mind become cool, blank, and alert as it did in the Disciplines, and he tucked and dove, taking advantage of another shift of the great tumbling ball that was Centrifuge. He

airswam as fast as he could, building up as much momentum as twenty meters would allow.

They were paying no attention to him, so he went after the one holding Sesh’s head. Jak came in on his back, as fast as he could, hitting with the classic sucker block, the way that a defensive back in slamball does when the offside slammer loses track of the defense.

Jak’s shoulder rammed against the backs of the man’s thighs. He grabbed the back of the man’s shirt and spun. The man flipped backward abruptly, and as Jak released him, his face swung into place to be a perfect target for a two-footed kick. With all his strength, Jak drove his heels into the man’s cheeks.

The reaction shot Jak out of the fight and into a return loop, while hurling his opponent away in a backward end-for-end spin, probably unconscious. One malph out of the melee, anyway.

As Jak swung around in his return loop, his hands biting air as hard as he could, something bright-colored streaked through his peripheral vision, screaming like a cat on fire. Dujuv was getting into the fight.

Jak finished his loop and closed in on the heet who had been airswimming the line; Duj swooped down on the man tying Sesh’s ankles, snagging a grip on his coat to carry the man along, putting him on the outside of a recurved turn, and hurling him away with the split-reed throw, all but instantly. The man was probably not out of the fracas for good but it would take some seconds for him to get back to it.

In the background, Jak could hear someone shouting, “All in now’t Panth! They have a panth!” Now he was a bare two meters from his opponent. He coiled to attack.

The back of Jak’s head seemed to cave in and he started to tumble. The pain was horrible and he could barley focus his eyes. He caught a glimpse of Dujuv tangled in a net, two men holding the lines, a third one whaling away at the bagged panth with a jointed bat. Duj was screaming with rage and thrashing fiercely, but he was helpless.

Jak’s tumbling arc brought him up against the outer surface, awkwardly, making his back sting and his head ring even more. He saw Sesh, again, and sprang off the wall, trying to get back into the brawl.

There were now six of them surrounding her. Jak’s back was still numb from impact. His head wasn’t what it should be after the blow he had taken there. As he closed in, the men airswimming to meet him seemed to move faster than anyone should be able to in microgravity, and there was a wavering about them that he didn’t like.

Sesh was tied completely and gagged, and the line was towing her toward the emergency exit, faster than Jak could swim to her. Their eyes met for just a moment; he could see her terror pleading for rescue, in that bare instant before the rotation shifted again, and he lost his orientation as the netting flew around him, grabbed him in a fierce hug, and spun him in a dizzy whirl.

Her final scream, smothered by the gag, felt to Jak like a kick in the stomach. Sesh was dragged out of his field of view. The net yanked brutally, taking Jak, wrapped in it, up against the outer surface just as the gravity shifted that way. He saw boots touching down all around him. Then there was a flurry of fists, feet, and clubs, fading rapidly into terrible pain and utter darkness.

You at Least Understand That There Are Two Teams

Jak had enjoyed so many intrigueand-adventure stories whose second or third chapter began with some sentence, image, or experience like “He awoke in a white room” that his first thought, when he awoke in the white room, was that he must be dreaming one of those stories. It seemed likely that he was, actually.

Assuming the rules for that type of story were being followed, almost always, the white room would turn out, on further investigation, to be a hospital room. As Jak adjusted to being awake, he specked that he was in a hospital room.

On the other hand, he couldn’t even remember being in pain at all in a dream, and he was in considerable pain right now. But in the stories, he should have been in pain

He drifted back into dreams that he was sure were dreams.

When his eyes opened again, he saw the same hospital room. At a minimum, this was a recurring dream.

In a story, this is where someone would come by to explain what’s going on, so any moment someone should show up to tell me what happened