In the Hall of the Martian King (10 page)

Teacher Copermisr was nodding too. “I’ve met him several times, and I’m sure that since he tends to offend nearly everyone,
and Shadow is after all a Rubahy warrior and easily offended—”

Jak did not see any way that he could get the credit for the negotiations to go to a man in jail, and anyway, ideally, that
lifelog ought to be carried back to the Hive by Waynong. He tried to sound both casual and absolutely commanding. “Just meet
him, tell him what’s going on, and bring him to the negotiating session, Shadow, that’s an order.”

The Rubahy’s facial expression never changed—it couldn’t—but he sighed with his whole body. “You have a vital mission, a known
bumbler is going to bumble right into it, and you are worrying about propriety. I have lived among your species for many years
now, and I am still forced to say that you make no sense at all.”

“I know,” Jak said. “And I may be wrong in this. But I want to stay by-the-book, at least officially.”

Shadow sat back. Jak, his oath-friend and mission commander, had made a decision, so Shadow on the Frost would not question
it further.

“Well,” Jak said, “other than a problem I have ordered the most competent person here not to solve”—they all laughed, and
Shadow made the sound of big slow bubbles inside a metal bucket, the Rubahy equivalent of laughter— “what else do we have
to cover? Shall we adjourn?”

There was nothing more. Xlini Copermisr, Gweshira, and Sib departed at once. Jak was trying to think of a delicate way to—

Pikia said, “Let’s see, three old toves, one over-eager subordinate. Let me guess who ought to take a walk.”

Jak said, “If there’s any actual business or anything—”

“Close toktru toves who haven’t talked face-to-face in a year? You won’t talk business.” She smiled and left.

“Jak, you have a better assistant than you deserve,” Dujuv observed.

“I was just noticing that. So, now that we’re in a bugswept room, what do you two think and how’s it all look to you?”

Dujuv held his hand out and wobbled it from thumb to little finger, vigorously, several times. “Might go perfectly, still,”
he said. “But you know, old tove, here on Mars, the Great God Murphy is still alive as a belief, and there are Murphyites
everywhere, even among those who claim to follow the Wager. And there is that old proverb, ‘Murphy rules the universe and
he is a malign thug.’

“After a year here, pizo, I believe in Murphy. We have one of the most valuable objects of all time, protected by nearly senile
ceremonial guards. We have a king who is a nice old gwont but also deeply in love with himself. We have the prince … this
place was bugswept?”

“Bugsweep this entire suite again, give it all you got,” Jak said to his purse.

Another wave of crashing thunder rumbled through the room, dotted with little squeals and screams as the purse hunted for
anything that might be listening. Then, speaking in Jak’s voice, the purse loudly said, “Stolen plutonium fifty tons of
xleeth
coming in tomorrow tunnel under the palace kidnap the prime minister’s daughter concealed Casimir bombs Rubahy mercenaries.”
About ten seconds of silence followed, and the purse said, “All clear. Everything that was found is confirmed destroyed, no
evidence that anything wasn’t. The trigger phrases produced no response at Red Amber Magenta Green’s central intelligence
systems.”

“Now, Dujuv, what’s your candid assessment of Prince Cyx?”

“Well, either putty in our hands, or a thorn in our side,” Dujuv said. “Or any other cliché you like, depending on the day.”

“You’ve pinned it down in pure clear quartz,” the Rubahy warrior said. “I have seen Prince Cyx three times, and I have seen
this Clarbo Waynong too many times, and if it were the religious heritage of
my
species hanging on the slim possibility that the eager, hasty fool will not offend the proud, supercilious fool, I would
tremble for us. One less fool in the picture would brighten everything considerably.”

Jak pretended to think about it; but still he needed to make it appear that Waynong had succeeded. And Mejitarian had already
told him it wouldn’t be easy. “I don’t like the situation much,” Jak admitted. “Maybe if I were older and colder-blooded I’d
merely mutter something about how inconvenient Clarbo Waynong is, and ‘let things happen’ and thereby be able, if they found
out who did it, to claim there was all a cultural misunderstanding. But … I can’t take that step.”

Dujuv sighed. “Old tove, I’m glad to see you have scruples, but what a time to develop them!”

“I know. I don’t believe it either.” Jak leaned back. “How about telling your toktru tove everything about your life? Your
messages are great, but people always leave a lot out of messages.”

With a billion people, the Hive had more than enough to provide an ambassador to everywhere, and a staff for the embassy,
but that did not mean the diplomatic work got done. Harmless Zone diplomatic posts were magnets for patricians who liked all
the recreational opportunities but objected to doing anything other than attending the more entertaining receptions and playing
outdoor sports with the better class of Chryseans.

Since all embassy slots were allocated to political appointees and their friends and relatives, the Roving Consuls were created
to do the actual work. Theoretically a Roving Consul was not much more than a traveling clerk who arranged everything a Hive
citizen might need: legal representation, medical care, extradition, corpse-transportation, out-of-polity marriage licenses,
intellectual property liens. Roving Consuls also negotiated “boilerplate” treaties as they were expired or canceled or suspended,
and did the endless face-to-face talking for, to, and about the Republic of the Hive to 1200 puny principalities and powers.
Dujuv’s description of the job was “half file clerk, half kindergarten teacher.”

“I can see you’ve got parts of that diplomat job down cold,” Jak said.

“They tell me I’m good at this,” Dujuv said. “Who’d’ve thought I’d turn out to have either the brains or the talent?”

“Uh, me. Your oldest tove. Myxenna wasn’t surprised either, you know.”

“How is she?” Dujuv smiled at the mention of her name, which relieved Jak no end. Panths bonded strongly in midadolescence,
and Dujuv had bonded to Myxenna, who had been his demmy all through gen school; it had taken him years to be able to see her
as just a friend.

“She’s on her way here. Supposed to take over from Clarbo Waynong. I got a short note from her earlier. Same old Myx.” He
was afraid that his toves might ask him for details (strange, now, that with so much at stake, lying and covering up was bothering
him more than it ever had before) so he hurried to change the subject. “I’m afraid I don’t have anything like your stories
to tell, Dujuv. I’ve been keeping track of Forces dependents arrested for shoplifting, and permits for roast hamster stands,
and so on.”

“They seem to think you’ve done a good job of it,” Dujuv pointed out. “You’re the one that they put in command of this mission.”

“Does that bother you?” Jak asked. “Because it does me.”

“Yeah, it bothers me.” Dujuv’s expression was utterly flat. “Like the thing on Mercury, three years ago. You have a gift for
being noticed … and I have a gift for being your sidekick. The heet who was there with Jak Jinnaka.”

Jak nodded, and said, “I speck you might feel that way. You deserved to have this as a solo mission without all the rest of
us horning in. It was not my choice, Duj.”

“Yeah, I know, old tove, but who else am I going to complain to? And honestly, it’s not just your getting the credit; it’s
the fact that I spend all my time doing the actual work for all these people who just picked their families carefully. And
creating credit for my superiors to claim. I feel like a chump and a stooge.” He leaned back and stared into space. “I haven’t
really known what to do with myself since Mercury, Jak.”

Three years before, in a complicated many-sided web of betrayals and exploitations, Jak, Dujuv, and Shadow had been sent to
Mercury to look into the supposed mystery of emerging labor trouble in the vast mines on which the whole solar system’s industry
depended. In fact, they had found Jak’s mortal enemy, Bex Riveroma, the man who most wanted Jak dead. They had also found
a system of brutal oppression, known to everyone in the solar system, discussed by no one.

The three toves had been lucky to escape with their lives. Jak had wronged toves and done things that had shamed him in ways
that he could not have imagined, before, that he was capable of; he had faced Riveroma, who had beaten him once before, and
this time had gotten away with his life and pride, but without his once-secure and once-automatic sense of having his honor;
he might die for some things, but not that. If there was any Principle of the Wager that Jak believed in, it was 116: “The
dead can have honor, but
they
can’t eat it, either.”

But as much as Mercury had changed Jak, it had changed Dujuv more. The happy-go-lucky athlete-adventurer had been shocked
and horrified by what he had seen, and had come back as a painfully serious young man.

Jak himself had been shaken by the conditions on Mercury. Even with longevity treatments, most people there lived only a bit
past age one hundred, as opposed to the common 350 on the Hive, the Aerie, or in the clean parts of Earth and Mars. Mercurials
had a word for it—
razdundslag
—the mix of high radiation and background toxicity that aged them prematurely. Mercury had the nearest thing to real poverty
to be found anywhere in the eighth century AW, hereditary peonage, uncontrolled corporations, and the last actual banks in
the solar system. After having been there and lived among Mercurial miners, Jak knew that they had nearly every other ancient
evil, no matter how long it had been eradicated in the rest of human space. He had heard tales of torture and meat-puppetry,
and would not have been shocked to hear of cannibalism. The Mercurials’ worn and stressed faces, unmodified by even the simplest
cosmetic work, looked like bags of old leather hanging clumsily on the front of a skull, broken by rows of crooked teeth and
surrounding eyes blank except for mistrustful sadness. This on people not much past fifty. It still haunted Jak’s dreams at
times.

Jak had come back to the Hive angry and half-willing to join the Reform Party, but Sib, and Gweshira, and Dean Caccitepe had
straightened him out with a few short lectures. The free, peaceful societies of the Hive, the Aerie, Earth, Mars, and all
the upper-planet satellites depended on cheap raw materials to keep people quiet, contented, and un-rebellious. One substantial
revolution would cost generations to pay for, even if it was defeated, and would unleash violence and terrorism throughout
the solar system, as other malcontents tried to imitate it. The peace and safety of every free, affluent citizen, of all the
people Jak had grown up among, depended on Mercurial metal staying cheap.

Resources from Mercury were cheap because it had no government to impose taxes or regulate production; every mine and quacco
on Mercury bid against every other, with the banks against all. Four thousand years of well-recorded history showed that people
didn’t rise up until conditions improved; misery meant no revolution on Mercury, no revolution meant no government, no government
meant that the solar system would continue to be the pleasant place it was for most of its eleven billion citizens.

Compared to that, the unhappiness of a mere seventy million Mercurials was nothing. Besides, Mercury was where the human race
dumped its chronic criminals, debtors, wastrels, and all the other sludge off the bottom of the genetic pool. Mercurials were
a small minority of worthless people who suffered, so that the great majority of the solar system could live in a garden.
No doubt it was bad for the few, but who could demand that the great majority sacrifice the best standard of living ever achieved?

It had taken Jak only a few days to dak that.

Dujuv, however, was incapable of realism. He had bonded to the Mercurials as only a panth could bond, and stayed on for two
more oppositions—230 days—after Jak and Shadow had left, helping the Mercurials to deal with all sorts of legal repercussions
from Bex Riveroma’s brief coup and to collect what the insurance companies owed to them. He had lived and worked among them
for a long time, coached their children in slamball, attended group sings in dozens of kriljs, visited mines and processing
plants everywhere, and he identified utterly with that impoverished mob of irradiated and poisoned convict-spawn.

Tonight, when they were visiting for the first time, face-to-face, in more than a year, Jak didn’t want to hear about kids
with dental caries or young women sterile before they were thirty or any of Dujuv’s favorite horror stories. “Are you still
getting calls from slamball recruiters?” Jak asked, in a complete non sequitur.

“Yeah. On days when being a Roving Consul really, really stinks, I think about taking them up on it. I was a higher draft
pick for slamball than I was for the bureaucracy, after all, and I know, deep down, I could be one of the great goalies of
all time. Call me crazy but sometimes I would rather get rich playing a kid’s game that I love than listen to a petty king
explain that five generations ago the king over the next hill stole the sacred water buffalo statue and that that’s why they
have to go to war and kill fifty young men.”

The evening went late, with much to remember, much to laugh at, many absent friends to salute, many gossipy stories to share.
As Jak finally said good-bye to Dujuv and Shadow at the door, he knew he would be a bit short on sleep tomorrow, but at least
the first day of the negotiations would be mostly ceremonies.

“Get me Mejitarian,” he told his purse as soon as the door contracted after his toves.

Hive Intel’s doctor actually looked as if he might really be sympathetic this time. “Well, that was quite a message she aimed
at you. Your purse tells me you functioned through the whole meeting afterward just fine, though.”