The Duke Of Uranium (14 page)

Pabrino’s potential as the player who would inscribe the Spirit of Singing Port’s name in history was once again confirmed. Jak was certain that Pabrino was better than the best gen school players in the Hive, maybe a great deal better, and said so as they emerged from their vivsuits, damp and acrid with sweat.

Both laughing with relief, they gulped the fruit drinks that Piaro held out to them. The other bachelors crowded around to shake hands, thump backs, and generally celebrate a day when they all did something unusual. “I’d like to play you a few more times,” Jak said, “but I don’t speck anyone will bet on me again.”

“Just having a new opponent is great,” Pabrino said, pushing a damp mess of black hair off his forehead.

“Fewer predictable tricks. Best fight I’ve had in more than a year. It would be great to do this a couple more times.”

Brill handed them each a wet towel, and they mopped their faces and exposed skin with it. ‘This is a good start but I sure hope there’s time for a real shower before dinner,” Jak said.

Piaro nodded. “More time than you’d think. This happens to be one of the scheduled days for families to eat together. And by request of my family—I tried to warn them, really I did, but they wouldn’t listen—you’re eating with mine. That’s in about an hour and a half, so grab your kit, go get showered and presentable, and I’ll come by your stateroom and pick you up.”

“You’ve never even talked about your family,” Jak said.

“Well, a lot of times, on shipboard, you don’t. Most ways your workmates and your messmates have a bigger impact on your life. But family counts for something, and as it happens I’ve got one. The regulation one mother and one father, plus a twin sister who would have murdered me if I hadn’t brought you to dinner. She has this idea that you’re going to be interesting.”

Jak grinned. “What if I am?”

“Then my sister is even dumber than I’ve always thought. This is someone who—well, never mind. If I start telling stories about her, she’ll start telling them about me, and though mine about her are the absolute and completely humiliating truth, hers about me are a tiny grain of truth wrapped in such a thick shroud of exaggeration and fabrication that

oh, well. Best not to start. So, anyway, Phrysaba wants to meet you, and you’re coming, tove. I promise somehow I’ll make it up to you.”

Jak couldn’t imagine what was so interesting about himself, but he went off to the stateroom whistling anyway, and made sure he smelled and looked good. After all, female attention is flattering regardless of the female, he reasoned to himself, and it had been a while since he’d had any, and even though Piaro apparently didn’t get along with his sister, all the same she was probably no worse than a bit on the plain side, or maybe whiny or rude, and Piaro was a good tove and Jak could be charming and pleasant, to help out a friend.

Jak was about as unprepared for Phrysaba as it was possible to be, because it had never occurred to him that a brother might be so biased against his sister, and so he had thought Piaro’s account must be somewhere in the neighborhood of reality, at least. With the wide array of opportunities on the Hive, and the very early opportunities to have one’s own life and explore one’s own interests, sibling rivalry is rare and mild there. But on shipboard, with every position up for grabs and life tightly controlled, jockeying for position within the family is as natural as scratching an itch, and about as hard to learn not to do in public. So Piaro had been anything but an objective reporter.

Later, Jak thought that perhaps he should have guessed anyway. Piaro was a good-looking heet; how terrible could his sister be? Ship’s companies are almost uniformly brainy due to the combination of selfselection, genetic modification, early stimulation, and constant social pressure; Phrysaba was competing, in that smart aggressive pool, for a post as an astrogator. As a future rigging chief, Piaro had the native perfect manners that are a necessity for people who live in close quarters and meet strangers often; Phrysaba added an upper-class, officer’s polish to them.

But although in hindsight Jak realized he should have expected Phrysaba to be a remarkable and interesting person, and quite likely beautiful, in fact the revelation hit him like a dark meteor from a high orbit. About three minutes after politely meeting Dolegan Fears-the-Stars, Piaro’s father, who shook Jak’s hand and said a word or two of welcome before pulling up a ship’s financial records screen at the table, and less than a minute after meeting Laris Fears-the-Stars, Piaro’s mother, who appeared to be bored and was doing something on her screen all through dinner, Jak found himself gazing into Phrysaba’s eyes, feeling what he always did when his heart was grabbed—simultaneously like the luckiest heet alive and like the biggest gweetz the human race had ever produced.

She was slim and taller than average; she had the sort of sharp, clear features that seem to express every passing feeling. Her skin was a slightly deeper brown than Piaro’s, her eyes a little less wideset, but the family jaw and eyebrows were unmistakable, and they graced her as if some wise genie had chosen them specially. She laughed only when things were funny, smiled as if the world were constantly singingon the way she wanted it to be, and asked the sort of question that quickly converted Jak from feeling like a babbling gweetz to the discovery that he was a more interesting fellow than he’d ever thought he could be.

Toward the end of dinner, Phrysaba turned to Piaro and said, “You’re right, he’ll do just fine.”

Piaro sighed. “He’d better, you have him hypnotized by now, Sis.”

Jak was trying to frame the question when Piaro explained, “It’s the time of year for the Exchange Dance.

Basically because there’s so few of us on the ships, people tend to get paired up and stay that way even though they may not be crazy about each other. So at the Exchange Dance you go and dance with everyone except your date—old-style ballroom dancing, so that everyone gets to talk. The idea is that it provides a relatively painless way for people to get out of arrangements that might no longer suit them, but that they’ve been in for years. Well, as it happens, Phrysaba doesn’t have a mekko and never has, and the ship is short of heets her age, so she needs someone to go to a dance with her and not dance with her, so that she can see about stealing someone else’s mekko.”

“That is not the purpose. I just want to go and it’s bad form to go without a date and everyone else in my class has a date and is going and—”

Piaro raised his hands as if being held at gunpoint. “You see what happens. I try to help her social life and she gets violent—”

“The only way you’d ever help my social life would be if you spread the rumor that you were adopted!”

Jak watched the two of them bicker for several minutes; he was starting to dak that this was how the twins were affectionate with each other. Probably anyone who was silly enough to harm one of them would be dead at the hands of the other, almost instantly.

“Uh, by the way, the answer is yes,” Jak said, when he judged that their score was about even; she had

just told Piaro that looking at him made her wonder why Mother hadn’t eaten her young, and he’d indignantly replied that undoubtedly she’d thought about eating Phrysaba, but refrained for fear of being poisoned.

The two of them stopped and stared at Jak.

“The answer is yes,” he said. “You were leading up to the idea of my escorting Phrysaba to the Exchange Dance, masen? So I was saying yes.”

“You’re supposed to ask her, tove,” Piaro said. “And then she has to consider.”

Jak shrugged. Sib had thumped it into him any number of times that customs were not a matter of making or not-making sense; they were a matter of playing the game or not. After all, which “makes more sense”—only touching the ball with your hands in basketball, or never touching the ball with your hands in soccer? “Well, then,” Jak said, “give me some help and guidance here. Is there a formal way to ask?

Anything I have to do while asking?”

Phrysaba got a strange gleam in her eye. “Well, it’s customary to stand on one foot with your hands over your ears and all the pockets on your coverall turned inside out. And the family likes to have a picture of that—”

“Sis!”

“Okay. Okay. Just thinking of the fun we could have. Actually, no, you just ask.”

“Not quite. You also have to pay her one or two really flowery compliments,” Piaro said. She glared at him. “And that’s not a prank.”

“No, but it’s embarrassing. I was hoping to skip it.”

Without looking up from her computer screen or raising her voice, Laris said, “Go all the way around the orbit or don’t even chart it, Phrysaba. If you want to be asked according to custom, then be asked according to custom. If you want to skip over parts, then let the young man make up his own way and don’t hold him to custom. No picking and choosing.”

“Yes, Mother,” Phrysaba looked down as if she’d been bawled out.

After an awkward pause, Jak said, “Well, then, Phrysaba, you are so beautiful that I can barely think at all when I’m looking at you, and you have completely fascinated and charmed me the whole time we’ve been talking, and I would be deeply honored if I could escort you to the Exchange Dance.”

She seemed to choke up—he hoped from the extravagance of the compliment, and not some gaffe he’d

made—and said, “I will have to consider. I’ll have my brother carry word of my decision to you.”

“Did it, Sis, did it! Just like a regular person! Anyone who didn’t know you would never know what a gweetz you are, toktru!” Piaro exclaimed.

Even their parents laughed. Somehow that broke the ice. Within a few minutes, Jak was once again completely enthralled by Phrysaba.

Afterward he knew that he must have eaten the rest of dinner only because he was full, that Piaro was there only because the two of them went to one of the canteens for coffee and conversation after, that he had said good night to Phrysaba because he remembered her warm sad smile. And he knew he had a problem. He was supposed to be rescuing Sesh, not falling in love with another girl.

Two days later, he was playing dodec handball with Piaro, a game at which they were very evenly matched, and both of them were beginning to pant and to shake off sweat that hung in the air for many seconds thanks to the microgravity. “I feel like I’m breathing liquid me,” Piaro said. “Like to take a break, or better yet just quit?”

“Toktru, yeah, one or the other, and I’m starting to like quitting.” Jak pulled up his shirt to wipe his drenched face; when he dropped the shirt back it was soaking. “If nothing else this trip is getting me into the best shape of my life, which is going to be handy if I end up spending months under house arrest on Earth.”

“Yeah. Given what a full gravity feels like, and what it does to your joints and muscles, no wonder people moved off the Earth as soon as they could.” Piaro stretched and said, “I’d say a warm soak and some cold juice?”

Jak nodded. “Sounds good.”

Passengers rarely used the ship’s Public Baths. Those from the Hive, the richer parts of the Aerie, and the mining colonies generally had strong privacy taboos, and people from planets and larger moons got seasick in the sloshing of the warm low-gravity tanks. Jak had discovered, the first time Brill and Clevis had invited him, that his psyche was apparently missing the modesty component of his home culture, and the slow, gentle rocking of the big warm tank of water worked miracles on tired, sore muscles. Now he preferred the Public Baths to the awkward shower in his stateroom.

The two toves left their clothes on a bench and wandered among the dwarf trees that surrounded the bathing pool; generations of developing the perfect graft host had brought about tree trunks straight as a post, on which grew branches of a dozen fruits. After picking and paying for an apple, a peach, and a mango, Jak tossed them into the juicer, selected the temperature, and threw the switch. After a brief shriek of machinery, his pitcher of ice-cold juice emerged.

As he settled into the bathing pool beside Piaro, he said, “You live a fine life on the ships. I’m starting to wish I had the mathap to join the Spatial; this has to be better than push-ups and rifle cleaning.”

Piaro shrugged. “Spatial ships are tighter, more rules and more enforcement and all, than free merchants like us, but supposedly they have better amenities. As long as you don’t count not getting blown up as amenity.”

He took a sip of his own banana-orange mix and said, “And actually, in kind of a roundabout way, we might be able to help you with getting into the Spatial, along with resolving an awkward social problem.”

He stretched again and said, “Oh, that’s good on the shoulders.”

For a long while, the two stretched and scrubbed, till at last Piaro said, “It so happens that my sister found three separate occasions to talk to me yesterday.”

“That’s unusual?”

“Three in a month would be unusual. This was bizarre. We’re better friends than we let on but we’re headed for different roles in life and we don’t have much to talk about. Furthermore, all three conversations were about trivial matters. Further-furthermore, each trivial matter then led around to a single topic, which was you, old pizo. Don’t ask me why, there’s no accounting for taste, but I think Phrysaba toktru likes you. And she seems to also really like the fact that you’re off to heroically rescue that princess, too—she won’t let me make jokes about ‘heroic house arrest’ or you being a ‘heroic errand boy’ anymore—and to me, anyway, it makes no sense, because if she has a crush on you, that’s more than problem enough, and if you add in that you’re obligated to this other girl, it makes everything completely impossible. But somehow you’ve made a big impression, and Phrysaba’s never been really strongly interested in any particular heet before. And I bet you know that that’s going to be trouble if anyone older than us notices it.”

Jak didn’t quite know what to do or say. His friend dakked it singingon that this was going to be trouble.

And he had no business getting involved with a girl on this trip, especially not when the whole point of it was to rescue Sesh, who was probably languishing in a prison cell right now, or at least being forced to hang around in a garden with a heet she didn’t like, which, for Sesh, was practically the same thing. So the entire situation was a disaster, and he had to hope Piaro had thought of a way out.