The Duke of Uranium Read online

  "If that was why I was spared, how did you get hurt at all?"

  They fell silent. For an instant the two forgot to tease each other, just enjoying both being well and together. Finally Dujuv looked a little more serious. "So your uncle must've told you about what's going on with Sesh."

  "Yeah, but not much, just yet."

  "Well, good luck to you and to her, old tove. I wish I could be there to help, but… urn—"

  Myxenna appeared on the screen next to him. "Hi, Jak, I thought that call was from you." Discreetly she tugged her top into place and retied it, staying back of Dujuv's peripheral vision so he wouldn't notice how she had joined the call. "Dujy, it's okay to brag. This is a big deal to you and Jak will understand that."

  Jak was smiling already. "You must've made the slam-ball draft."

  "Absolutely. Made it and then some. I had already applied and I had my school record, and then there were pictures of you and me, all over the news, giving a good fight to a bunch of trained kidnappers, until we finally got beat by sheer numbers. Incredible publicity plus we gave a good account of ourselves. If you were interested, Jak, they'd've drafted you too. I got picked in the fourth round, by Hive National; I'm gonna be playing with their rookie league farm club, Panlucrotic. So I'll be in training starting tomorrow." His face fell in sadness again. "And you're going to be—well, I guess actually Sibroillo wanted to explain that to you himself. I did want to help you out and go along, but everyone says that I wouldn't actually be useful for anything, it's a one-person job. So—"

  "So get on with your life and make me proud of you, old tove," Jak said.

  They chatted a little longer; because the kidnapping had happened so shortly after the exam results had come out, Jak had not yet heard the gossip about who had gotten in, which scores had been outrageously high and low, and where those who didn't get in were going. Once they caught up, Jak realized that he was starting to tire—apparently rebuilding so much of his body was a lot of work—and Duj and Myx seemed to want to get away, so they all said bye and that they must keep in touch, and closed the call. Jak settled back, thinking that now he'd really like to get some sleep.

  Uncle Sib came in with Gwesbira.

  Gweshira was Uncle Sib's demmy, and had been for so long that Jak thought of her as sort of his aunt. She was short, spare and wiry, with very dark skin and very white hair that fell in loose messy curls. From sparring with her Jak knew that if you didn't beat her with sheer mass in the first five seconds, she'd wang you with her speed and cleverness in the first minute. She taught at his gen school—Jak had avoided taking classes from her, by mutual agreement—and he had often heard other students speak of her in the mixture of devoted love and pure terror that denotes either a great teacher or a sadistic bully. In her case, Jak specked it to both.

  Sib was beaming. "Time to get down to business, pizo. The machinery says you're coherent. I told them that you never were before. They said they'd look into it."

  Gweshira winced. "I do hope this old scapegrace's corny jokes won't affect your recovery," she said. "He actually was worried about you, not that you can tell, and whatever he might have said. But he's right, there's ground to cover, so let's get started."

  "I've been thinking," Jak said, "that to be prudent, we should probably wait a week or two before I leave for wherever Sesh is, just to let me get in some extra practice at the Disciplines."

  They both stared at him for a long breath before they burst out laughing. Gweshira in particular seemed to be tickled. "Jak," she said, "I've told Sibroillo for years that he's needlessly obscure around you, all the time, and you've utterly proven my point. I suppose that you thought that what we wanted you to do was go to Fermi—that's where we're nearly certain that Sesh is being held—and then, what? Oh, say, infiltrate the palace guard, scale a sheer wall twenty meters high, locate and rescue Princess Shyf from the chief malph just as he's about to rape her, carry her away half-naked from twenty armed men, shoot your way into the spaceport, and escape in a hijacked warship?"

  "Now that you mention it, that does sound toktru silly, masen? But Uncle Sib said I wouldn't be ransoming her, I'd be going and getting her, so I thought I'd at least be sneaking her out, and if something went wrong—"

  "Oh. Well, then, perhaps you weren't quite as silly as you sounded. But in any case, what we need here is not so much heroics as calm common sense, because it's really merely a very ordinary kind of situation in the politics between nations. Princess Shyf was kidnapped as part of an elaborate power struggle, with several different players in the game; we're going to get her back by making someone trade for her. Which that someone will willingly do—because what we have to trade is very valuable.

  "Your job is mostly to go to the right person and make the offer. Since you might have to improvise, we're going to give you enough information to be able to improvise reasonably well. So we'll start with discussing who the sides are. What do they tell you about social engineering, in school, these days?"

  "Pretty much what they tell us about underage sex and illegal drugs. No one's supposed to do it, officially everyone deplores it, and toktru everyone does it every chance they get."

  "You're more socially alert than I ever thought you were—that covers the attitude of society toward social engineering, very thoroughly," Uncle Sib said. "Hypocrisy is the great lubricant of social intercourse. Well, by now you must have realized that I'm not just a retired soldier and businessman."

  "Well, I dak that we're rich, or you have a big expense account from somewhere. I noticed that you got me trained early to keep quiet about anything I saw or heard at home. I kind of thought maybe you were a spy. And all those little games you had me playing, about deception and deduction and things like that, and the way you made me work the Disciplines so hard, made me speck maybe I was being groomed for the family business."

  "Not a bad guess, but wrong," Sib said. "And now that we're sitting here in a room that is thoroughly bug-swept, and there's reason to tell you, I will. Gweshira and I are members of a social engineering zybot. I had always kind of hoped you'd want to join, later on, and perhaps you will, if you ever manage to acquire any interest in politics, economics, society, culture, or any concern other than clothes, sports, and girls."

  "He's healthy, Sib," Gweshira protested, green eyes flashing. "That's what a teenager should be interested in. Give him time."

  Sib shrugged. "At his age I'd already belonged to a revolutionary underground, been arrested for inciting a riot, joined the secret police, and claimed political asylum on a sunclipper. But I suppose everyone has to get through adolescence in their own way. Anyway, Jak, it so happens that our social engineering zybot has very good reason to intervene on behalf of Princess Shyf—Sesh, I mean, she's no doubt still Sesh to you. You happen to be a logical person for us to use to free her, and so we're going to talk to you about who we are, what we do, and what we need you to do, because you'll need to know all of that. So I want you to at least promise to try to listen and follow what we tell you, because it's vital for Sesh."

  "I'll try," Jak said. "Toktru. I will." He felt a sinking sensation; he'd never been any good at paying attention to anything nonathletic, and now that Sesh would have to depend on him, he was really afraid that his utter ineptitude at attention and memory would come shining through.

  Gweshira clicked her tongue impatiently. "Sib, you've just totally convinced him that no matter what, he's going to be too bored to concentrate. Let me try, all right? Jak, I promise I won't try to make you like the dullest parts by dwelling on them. Want me to try?"

  "It's worth a shot," Jak admitted. "And I was kind of afraid of what Uncle Sib might do. No hard feelings, please, Uncle Sib, but I think we should let Gweshira try."

  "No hard feelings at all, whatever gets the job done," Sib said, plopping himself into a chair to sulk.

  "All right," Gweshira said, winking at Jak. "Now, to begin with, do you know the meaning of the shape and number designations for the social
engineering zybots?"

  Jak thought for a moment. Social engineering was supposed to be a crime—basically conspiring against the rest of humanity. For hundreds of years, ever since the Wager had become the dominant religion/philosophy of the human species, and some of its implications had become clear, it had been theoretically possible that a small group of people, by using a mixture of every dirty trick ever invented for social domination, control, and manipulation, might be able to reshape society into whatever form it chose.

  Zybots, as those conspiracies were called, were known to use all sorts of appalling counter-Wager practices: propaganda, tailored drugs, assassination, networking, sabotage, brainwashing, banking, intimidation, marketing, charity, lobbying, and public-interest advocacy, among many others, and most people were willing to suspect them of piracy, slavery, and cannibalism to boot.

  That was standard school stuff. But back when Wat-nek, Redondo, and Riodow had done their pioneering work demonstrating the possibility of true social engineering, they had published everything, hoping that it would forestall the misuse of their discovery. The result was that there was not just one social engineering zybot working behind the scenes, but several hundred, each pushing society toward its particular Utopia, each thwarting the others, creating so many second-, third-, and tenth-order effects that Nakaski's Law had set in: "The number of active social engineering zybots converges to the minimum number whose interactions make society too unpredictable to engineer," or as Nakaski had informally put it, "One zybot is a clear and present danger, three are a menace, ten are a pack of annoying assholes, and a hundred are barely a nuisance."

  That was as much as Jak could remember; many kids pretended to be loyal to one zybot or another, and would scrawl graffiti—a seven in a square, a one in a triangle, a two in an oval—in places where adults found it obnoxious, but he didn't think they'd ever talked about the shape and number designations in class, or among his peers, and he didn't think most of the kids scrawling the symbols had any idea what they meant.

  He realized that social engineering zybots were much more interesting in fiction than they were in school. "You know I love intrigue-and-adventure stories," Jak said after a moment. "Books, holo, flatscreen, viv, I love'em all. I know that in the stories every zybot— they're always villains in the stories, there are never any good zybots, I bet that's the censors making it that way?"

  "Safe bet," Gweshira said.

  "Well, in the stories the zybots always have a name that's a shape and a number, like Square Seven is a gang of malphs trying to take over the whole solar system in The Terrier Smashers. And there's a zybot, Rhombus Two, selling an addictive aphrodisiac in Sex Pirates of Ceres. But I don't know why they're called those names."

  "See, I told you," Sib said, from his chair, not looking up. "The educational bureaucrats—that miserable gaggle of cowardly mousefarts—don't even let the kids know why they're supposed to be afraid of social engineering. The idea that even the very worst zybots would ever try for crude raw power like that, let alone—"

  "Oh, hush," Gweshira said. "You don't have to worry about the state of his education, anymore, Sib, he's done with that, and think about who we're talking about. If it's up to Jak, he'll never learn anything more for the rest of his life. Anyway, as long as Jak knows the truth, we don't have to concern ourselves with how wrong everyone else is, now do we? So turn it down, old pizo, and let me explain things to Jak—it will take half as much time as it will if you help."

  She pulled her chair closer to Jak's bed, as if to make sure he had no view of Sib. "All right, beginning once again, the shape and number are a sort of shorthand for how a given zybot wants to see society structured. Sib and I have been members and operatives, for more than a century, of a zybot called Circle Four. Our major opponent is Triangle One. Triangle One organized Princess Shyf's kidnapping, not because they dislike her or wanted her for any purpose of their own, but to assist the House of Cofinalez in a power struggle, because the Co-finalezes have a close relationship, often a de facto alliance, with Triangle One. Are you with me so far?"

  "Circle Four, toves. Triangle One, working for Cofinalez. Cofinalez, malphs. Got it."

  "It's more complicated than—"

  "Not for him, it isn't, Sib. Now hush up and let me handle this!"

  Sibroillo got up and left, closing the door with a heavy thud against its padding. "He'd have slammed it if he could," Jak observed.

  "He'll recover. He's a big boy. Sometimes more big and sometimes more boy. Seriously, Jak, you at least understand that there are two teams, and that the Cofinalez people hired the other one?"

  "So far. So you—Circle Four, I mean—are willing to help Sesh—Princess Shyf, I mean, this is confusing— because you just oppose anything Triangle One does?"

  She sighed. "Well, no, not exactly. We do oppose many things that they do. Every now and then we're allies, and each zybot also does things that don't interest the other at all. But in this case, we have strong reasons to oppose them. That's what I was getting at with the business of the shape and number description. You see, the shape describes how many power centers a zybot is seeking to have in its ideal society, and in what relationship to each other. And the number designates what order of effect each power center should be taking into account in its decision-making."

  "Clear as Martian moss soup," Jak said, shaking his head in confusion.

  "Well, let's take a simple one. Rhombus Two. They think society should be a balance between law, art, charity, and business, with art and charity working as close allies and law and business kept far apart So if you diagrammed that, you'd have the four points that define a rhombus, with two in the middle close together—art and charity—and two more distant ones, law and business, far from each other. Is that clear so far?"

  Jak shrugged. "Clear-er."

  "So that's where they get the rhombus. All right, now, what the two means, is that they think that when, say, an artist does something that affects the law, he should also worry about the second-order effect—how his effect on the law will affect charity, for example."

  "What about the two groups I actually have to deal with?"

  She smiled grimly. "Patience, patience. Circle Four. A circle has an infinite number of points around a center. Which we think should be a wise, intelligent, democratically controlled government, you see? An infinite number of other powers, all equal in their relation to the state. And a fourth-order effect means, basically, that before the government takes any action about or to Mr. A, it has to think about how Mr. A's reaction will affect Mr. B, how Mr. B's reaction will affect Mr. C, and how Mr. C's reaction to that will affect Mr. D. Where Messers A through D could all be individuals, corporations, zybots, ethnic groups, clubs, unions, the government itself, or the whole social djeste, whatever.

  "Now compare that with Triangle One. They want three power centers—religion (in a single orthodox version of the Wager), the military, and the central bank. And the one means that they think that nobody should worry about feedbacks or secondary effects—you only think about what you do to the other guy, not about what he'll do afterward or how that affects any third parties.

  "Basically, zybot names tell you what kind of society they want, and make the programs that they're trying to social-engineer easy to compare. Low numbers like one and two are dictatorships that get things done, and high numbers like seven or ten are democracies paralyzed by having to take so many rights into account. The more axes of symmetry the figure has, the more equal all the contending sides are supposed to be. And the more corners it has, the more groups get to have a say. So that would mean that—"

  "So," Jak said, "trying to cut this down to toves and malphs, the Triangle One people want three big power centers that answer to nobody, and you want a democracy that has to think about what it does, and who it affects, but not so much that it can't accomplish anything. Couldn't you have just said that?"

  From the way she glared at him, Jak realized, probably not.
But after a moment she seemed to relax, and went to get Uncle Sib, to continue their conversation. He came back in with a broad grin. "I told Gweshira that it wouldn't be easy, trying to interest you in politics and economics, when you're so thoroughly distracted."

  "She still probably did better than you would have, Uncle Sib. At least I dak the sides, sort of, and I understand enough about Circle Four and Triangle One to know who I'd rather have manipulating my society. If that makes you feel better. Now, what does it all have to do with the House of Cofinalez and, uh, Princess Shyf?"

  "Well," Sib said, "Triangle One is always working to get the human race to have a simpler, more power-based and authoritarian structure, more unified under tighter control, that kind of thing. To be fair to them for a moment (something I seldom believe in doing), it's not pure power-worship; they think that the case in Galactic Court is apt to go against humanity, whenever that gets decided in the next few generations, and there's going to be an extermination order against us, and the only alliance we have even a chance of making would be with the Rubahy—who would stab us in the back given a tenth of a chance. So since we might have to fight the whole galaxy, anytime between next week and four hundred years from now, Triangle One wants us organized into sort of a Super-Sparta or Prussia-to-the-Nth, well before that happens, and basically they're always moving to give the human race as a whole a clearer chain of command.

  "The way Circle Four sees it, on the other hand, is that if we lose the decision, we won't win the war—we'll be dead anyway—and so we might as well die as our messy, sloppy, disorderly selves, still human, still reaching for the stars and still wallowing in the mud."

  "All right," Jak said, "I'm still on your side. What's it got to do with Sesh?"

  "Well, do you know who the Cofinalez family is?"

  Jak rolled his eyes impatiently. At other times in history, it would have been like asking if you knew who the Borgia, Rockefeller, or Pilaratsaysay families were.