A Princess of the Aerie by John Barnes

Author:John Barnes [BARNES, JOHN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446560139
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

Mary had a little duck,

She kept it in her bed,

And everyone—

Sinda made an annoyed noise; the drones flitted back into her bag as she demanded that someone show her the way to her stateroom.

“Nobody appreciates art anymore,” Jak said, and Dujuv smiled at that and said, “Toktru.” Jak was happy just to be where he was, for the first time in a long time.

CHAPTER 10

About Fourth-Level Famous, for Free

Jak, Shadow, and Dujuv had all CUPVed on a sunclipper before, Shadow most of all. Dujuv started off replacing panels in the auxiliary propulsion tubes, grumbling amiably that it was just like being back in the Spatial, but after three days he was rotated to the reactor room to broaden his experience. Jak started outside in the rigging, doing the never-ending untangling, separating, and mending of lines; it was challenging work, moderately dangerous because monosil cables were so fine that they could sever a limb with very little force. Shadow, with much more experience—he was a proficient astrogator, and he always traveled as a CUPV on his many voyages—worked in the worryball.

In between CUPV duties, there were the endless amusements of shipboard social life: games and sports plus all the passionate little clubs that followed opera, or flatscreen film, or poetry, or anything that could be something to talk about. Dujuv, with few people around who could really give him a workout at any sport, was in danger of boredom for a day or two until Phrysaba invited him into the Ancient Languages Club, which was just starting a project of reading Late Medieval and early space-era Mexican poetry; soon he was constantly practicing his Spanish, murmuring back and forth to his purse.

Shadow was fond of chess, poker, and go. The Rubahy approach was different from the human, which made it more interesting to play each other, the Rubahy trying to grasp why humans disliked purely ground-taking go, or emphasized bluffing, the humans trying to dak why the Rubahy so valued knights, and what they meant by the “rhythmic backflow” of a hand.

When he wasn’t with Phrysaba, who seemed to want to spend all of their time together just chatting and making love, Jak spent as much time as he could at Disciplines katas, performed while interacting with viv. The Disciplines were the climax of a story at least two thousand years long, the story of how humans became fighters, through a progress from necessity to raw sport to refined art to interactive game and finally to a True Way (in the sense of Principle 158: “Respect every True Way, but not because it is a True Way; distrust every True Way but keep in mind that it may be a True Way”). They were endlessly time-consuming and fascinating, and Jak had been introduced to them young enough to have no memory of having resisted them.

Each blow, stroke, shot, throw, block, or burn was executed seven times on each side; for each, your fist, foot, blade, elbow, knee, forehead, pistol, or other

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