John Barnes has commercially published dozens of volumes of fiction, including science fiction, men’s action adventure, two collaborations with astronaut Buzz Aldrin, a collection of short stories and essays, one fantasy and one mainstream YA novel, plus two self-published novels, and around forty short stories. His recent books include Losers in Space, Raise the Gipper!, and The Last President. His personal blog is thatjohnbarnes.blogspot.com and he contributes frequent articles about analytics and metrics in business to AllAnalytics.com. He has done a rather large number of occasionally peculiar things for money, mainly in business consulting, academic teaching, and show business, fields which overlap more than you’d think. Since 2001, he has lived in Denver, Colorado, where he has a wonderful spouse, an average income, and a bad attitude, which he feels is actually the best permutation.

THE LOST PRINCESS MAN

John Barnes

What are the people like in the Krevpiceaux country?” An aristocrat stood over Aurigar’s table.

Careful not to spill the carafe of wine or knock the remains of his noodles-and-mussels to the floor, Aurigar staggered up from his chair and bowed. “Lord Leader Sir?”

“You heard the question the first time.”

The lord bulged with stimumuscle. His face had been fashionably planed-and-pitched and geneted gun-steel blue; it looked like the entrance to the villain’s fortress in a dwellgame.

He will be extremely fast, too, they optimize the nervous system at the same time they grow stimumuscle, and he’s legal to carry any weapon and I don’t even have a resident alien carry permit and Oh! Samwal defend me, I can’t run, I can’t fight, probably he’s even smarter than I am, Aurigar thought.

“I have never been to the Creffenho country, Lord Leader Sir,” Aurigar said, “but it is said that—”

“You’re telling the truth.” Lenses and mirrors flickered in Lord Leader Sir’s eye socket, briefly spoiling the illusion of an empty black pit. “But it is disturbing that you are pretending to have misheard the question.” The lord extended his hand, palm up, and his fingers flowed forward, splitting into myriad filaments. Through Aurigar’s shirt, they stung like jellyfish tentacles and gripped like screws. They moved Aurigar’s skin out of the way, then his flesh, flowed around his ribs, and stopped his heart.

Terror restarted his heart; the neural connection from the aristocrat’s fingers stopped it again, restarted it, and then made it flutter, before restoring a steady, deep beat.

“When I pull my fingers back out,” the blue-faced man asked, eye sockets glittering and whirling silver and glass, “shall I leave you with your heart operating, or not operating?” He raced Aurigar’s heart into painful thunder, then slowed it to the low throb of deep meditation. “I will choose not operating if you do not make a choice. Operating, or not operating?”

“Operating, if it pleases you, Lord Leader Sir.”

“Oh, whatever I do will please me. Never fear that.” The filaments slid back and out, resolving into fingers just above Aurigar’s chest; the fingers reacquired nails and ridges, and presently looked like anyone else’s. No blood leaked, but Aurigar’s chest tingled where nerves did not quite like how they had been re-meshed. “Thank you, I will have a seat, and from here on we’ll drink on my tab.” Gesturing to Aurigar to resume his seat, the stimumuscled lord sat in the folding chair opposite like a mountain poised upon a dandelion. “What are the people like in the Krevpiceaux country?”

“Well, Lord Leader Sir, I’d have to say . . . well, stolid. Quiet, hardworking, eat-what’s-in-front-of-you types. You’ll never hear any of them saying that any work is degrading. Tell ’em to shovel shit with a manual shovel, or even their hands—they do it, and no complaints.”

“Stupid, do you think?”

Before Aurigar could answer, the carafes of better wine arrived, and the blue man poured a generous glass and pushed it across the table to him. “I don’t care if you get drunk, but stay honest. Would you like some appetizers for the table? I know a man who lives your sort of life often finds great pleasure in eating until he is ill.”

“Yes, Lord Leader Sir.” A lifetime of not being sure when there would be more again had trained Aurigar never to turn down any good thing, even in a surprisingly pleasant nightmare.

When the lord had tasted his wine and Aurigar had finished a glass— and with the promise of a great heap of food on the way—the blue-faced man leaned forward and smiled quite pleasantly. “Now, I already know that you are, by profession, a lost princess man, and that at the moment you are celebrating a successful season. Your bank account in Nue Swuis-she is number AFBX-1453-1962-3554-7889. You booked passage under the name Bifred Prohelo on the Tambourlaine tomorrow, stateroom sixteen. I know how Baldor the Nose met his well-deserved end and why your alibi held up—excellent job, by the way. You are allergic to asparagus, the dog you had as a boy was named Magrat, and you are susceptible to sore feet. Will you accept that it is impossible to lie to me?”

“Yes, Lord Leader Sir.”

“Good answer.”

The naneurs in the wine were adjusting Aurigar’s taste and smell to appreciate it; it was the wine most exactly to his taste he’d ever had. He tried an experiment—he thought Rats are bigger than whales—and instantly the wine tasted like vinegar, his stomach rolled over, and his head hurt. He thought I will tell my lord anything he wants; the wine tasted of sunshine on a meadow just after a cool rain.

“Now,” the aristocrat said. “Back to the question. Would you say the Krevpiceauxi are stupid?”

“They are pigheadedly proud to be ignorant of anything they find in books, but not stupid. They value shrewdness, deception, facing facts, and even verbal quickness, as long as it serves some larger purpose like making a sale or evading police questioning. In fact, they are smart in a way that makes my con easier to work.”

“Interesting. Have more wine—oh, and here are the appetizers—and do go on, taking a bit of time between to chew and savor, eh? What you just said interests me very much.”

Like anyone whose fortunes have suddenly, inexplicably, improved, Aurigar was becoming more comfortable. For just a moment, after the first delightful fish roll, he thought, I can tell him that—and his tongue tasted as if he had been chewing brass. He reminded himself that truth was good and took a sip of excruciatingly delicious wine. “Well, then, Lord Leader Sir, very few people know this about the lost princess business: the girl knows the truth and comes along willingly with the connivance of her family.”

“Really? I had not heard that.”

“Well, you know, Lord Leader Sir, lost princesses are all the rage in dwellgames. Everyone has played a dozen dwellgames in which the smooth talking stranger—that would be me—”

The lord smiled warmly. “You amuse me. My sources say you are very good at it.”

“Yes, I suppose I am good at it. I have stayed away from brilliance, which is hazardous.”

“And that in itself is brilliant in its own way. So, then, you—the smooth talker—show up in some remote location where there is an unhappy beautiful girl—”

“Rarely beautiful. Genetion is cheap, and a necessity anyway to put off the insurance-company detectives. The ‘lost princess’ can be, honestly, plain-faced, with a body that looks like it was piled up at random, and an absolutely lunar complexion. My clients will genete her until she looks better than most real princesses, begging the Lord Leader Sir’s pardon if he is related to any.”

“Pardon readily granted.” The lord knocked back half a glass at a gulp, with a visible shudder. “I am related to thousands of them. So you wander among these stolid farm-folk, and you find some girl to convince that she is a lost princess—usually the lost princess?”

“Another myth, Lord Leader Sir. I never tell anyone that she is the Princess Ululara, because she has certainly been warned about strangers who tell her that story. Indeed, I dismiss any such idea; I say, ‘Look, sweetie, there’s about a billion settled planets under the Imperium, the Emperor’s family had one baby disappear, so out of maybe four quadrillion humans in the galaxy, you’re the princess?’ Besides, usually their age on their fostindenture papers is wrong for Ululara. I show them that. I say, ‘Forget it. If somebody really did snatch Princess Ululara just before the bomb went off, they dropped her down the stairs and killed her, or drowned her in the bathtub, the first day. Then they tossed the little thing into the nearest instant composter and she was potting-soil five minutes later. More likely, it’s all just a phantom of the security system and she vaporized with everyone else in the palace. Either way, she’s been dead twenty-nine marqs—and you are not she.’ Actually, usually I say ‘you ain’t her,’ to fit in better.”

“And how do the girls respond to that?”

“They’re disappointed—they were harboring the hope, as most unhappy fostindented girls of that generation do. Then I say, ‘You seem upset. Perhaps you were hoping that you weren’t just another fostindent. You want to know why you don’t get along with your family, they don’t understand you and worry about ridiculous things—oh, I can see that you’re not really one of them, it’s obvious.’ They are, of course, astonished at how well I know them.” He flapped a hand to dismiss a lifetime of hard-earned skill. “And so forth, you know. Eventually, I reveal that I am searching for quite a different princess, of a quite minor house, though perfectly verifiable.”

“Verifiable?”

“Well, for example, this year I told two girls of sixteen marqs that they might be Princess Pegasa Whon, who would be sixteen, and was kidnapped at about the right date. It’s a big galaxy. In four quadrillion people, there are about one hundred million princesses, and, oddly enough, perhaps ten thousand lost ones. At a rough approximation, that’s a hundred lost princesses of any particular age, though I don’t do much business above forty marqs. One little data search to match age and physical type, and you’re in business. Or I am, begging Lord Leader Sir’s pardon.”

“I do enjoy pardoning you,” the lord said. He took a sip and held it in his mouth before swallowing; you were supposed to do that to train the naneurs, Aurigar remembered, and did it himself. The extraordinary wine hastened to surpass itself. The lord asked, “But you say most of them go willingly and knowingly?”

“Well, yes. Only about half the money comes from brothel-owners; the rest is the kickbacks I get in insurance fraud collected by the family. Anyone who buys a fostindent takes out kidnap insurance, and it pays the whole estimated value over the forty-marq indenture and then some. So not only is the girl getting herself a better life, but the family gets a big shot of insurance money, just after one of my false-front companies purchases their outstanding debt at a very deep discount. Then they pay that debt back, to me, at full value. Everyone wins—me, the girl, the family, the family’s creditors, the brothel-owners—well, everyone except the insurance companies.”

“Given the appeal of the idea, I don’t see why these things are not more widely known.”

“Honestly, it is in the interests of lost princess men to maintain the horror stories, Lord Leader Sir. It needs to look like a real kidnapping or the insurance company will not pay. Thus, I need to tell the girl a plausible story and make sure she repeats it to several trustworthy blabber-mouths—I even coach them to tell it well.” He put on a falsetto that he thought was much more girlish than it really was. ‘We told her he was a con man and that the lost princess was the oldest con in the book, but she had stars in her eyes, poor thing.’ Add a bit of the theatrical to the actual departure—perhaps the girl screaming and her sponsor-parents taking a few wild shots in my direction—and it looks much less like fraud to the detectives.”

“And the Krevpiceauxi, who are cunning but not intellectual, are good for this con . . . because?”

“They’re blunt, not easily fooled, and hate authority. After listening for a while, the girl says, ‘I think you are working the lost princess con, and the minute you have me off planet, you will pump me full of drugs, and I will wake up chained to a bed with a large number of Imperial troops lined up and waiting to have a turn on me.’ At which point, I say, ‘Well, of course.’”

“You admit it?”

“Absolutely, Lord Leader Sir. I then explain that it is better for me if she comes along willingly—fewer clues for the insurance detectives—and that her first stop will be a luxury hospital where she will be geneted into stunning beauty, and tweaked to make her depression-proof, nymphoma-niacal, multiorgasmic, and extremely self-confident. Good conversation is highly prized as well, and many men have fetishes for talents like singing or drawing, so the girls also get a year or two developing their most developable talents and receiving a good broad education. The worst is only that during the marq or so it takes to heal into her new form, she will itch a great deal, since her old flesh feels like scar tissue being sloughed off as the new grows in.

“As for Imperial troops, she will encounter them one at a time if at all—and if she’s lucky. They are themselves heavily geneted, well educated, highly paid specialists, like herself, and more likely to hire her to come along as a companion on a five-solar-system exotic tour than as fun for a night.

“Besides, under the sumptuary laws, she will be a luxury good. She can’t legally be sold to poor or even middle class people unless she is so badly behaved that her owners do so as punishment. As for being owned, we are all theoretically owned by His Supreme Might—”

“His Late Supreme Might,” the lord said. “Or had you not heard?”

“I’m a very focused professional; I dwell the crime, investment, and lifestyle instrucks, but not politics, sports, or entertainment.” Aurigar hoped that he sounded dignified, but since wayward sauce had spotted his shirt, probably not.

The aristocrat nodded. “Well, then. I am High Supreme Lord Cetuso, which you may know is a junior branch of the Imperial House itself—no, get up, protocol would call for you to get onto the floor entirely facedown, and in this place that would make an utter mess of you, much worse than that little blob on your shirt you keep daubing at. Would you happen to know, since you are concerned with high-ranking lineages, just what the hereditary function of the Cetusos is?”

Aurigar realized. “Samwal defend us!”

“He may have to. Yes. We are the authenticators of the Imperial line. It is well known that the late Emperor was quite mad and could not be geneted into anything that should be allowed to breed, so he died without issue. The Galactic Imperium should now pass to his sister, the lost princess Ululara. If she is alive, we must find her and restore her. If she is dead, there are other, more distant, heirs. But if she is neither proved dead nor found alive . . . well, the fourth Civil War, a thousand years ago, left us with ten thousand vitrified worlds and more than a hundred exploded suns.”

“And you think that one of my lost princesses—”

“Seven marqs ago. We have her trail right up to where she talked to you. The insurance-company detectives—a strikingly incompetent lot, by the way—”

“They ought to be incompetent. I pay them enough.” Aurigar drained his glass. “Then here’s to the new Empress. The only Krevpiceauxi— that’s why you asked about that benighted continent on that armpit of a planet, yes?—well, the Krevpiceauxi of exactly that age would be Miriette Phodway. I am pleased to inform you, Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, that I can take you straight to her. I think you will get along very well with her.”

“Is she—forgive the question—at all mad?”

“Not at all insane, Lord Leader Cetuso Sir. And since she did so well and I did not deceive her in any way, not furious either—in fact she’s risen far from that start; nowadays she’s one of my best customers, buying a girl or two every marq from me.”

“Then you will introduce me. Afterward, I will of course cover the cost of your unused ticket and then put you on a much better liner to wherever you wish to go, with ten lost princesses worth of profit added to your kick—at a minimum, more if I need you longer. Is she far off?”

“At Waystonn, and in two days, there’s a liner departing—”

“A liner? If you can bear to let us pack this food and wine to go, you can resume drinking and dining on my yacht in about twenty minutes, and we can be on our way. Unless you have some matter to settle?”

“I had, but let him live, Lord Leader Sir. Good fortune should be shared.”

·

Aurigar could not think of Miriette as Ululara, though he supposed eventually he would have to. “Right this way,” she said, taking his arm, and beckoning Lord Leader Cetuso Sir to follow them. “Where’d you hire the geneted goon?”

“Actually, I work for the Lord Leader,” Aurigar said. A glance back told him that Cetuso was mercifully amused at being called a geneted goon— or, considering who had said it, perhaps obsequiously amused.

Waystonn was about the hundredth busiest port in the Galactic Empire—but since there were just over forty-one billion, one hundred nineteen million ports, that was hardly a small distinction. It occupied the entire surface of a conveniently far-out moon of a conveniently close-in gas giant around a conveniently small star, and the only other occupied orbit of the star, below the gas giant, held a stable Lagrange hex of super-heavies. Thus for the port of Waystonn, near the galactic center and with several arm-to-arm trajectories running through it, the total escape velocity was low and the slingshot effect tremendous, so that getting out to jump distance was easy and cheap. Waystonn also had a dense inert-or-ganics atmosphere with a high Reynolds number and a large scale height, and thus aerobraking to the surface was cheap.

Whatever all that meant. Cetuso had assigned him to know it, but had never asked him to repeat it.

Anyway, all that really mattered was that the lost Ululara had progressed from being a hayakawite miner’s indentured fosterling to being one of the hundred most important procurers in the Galactic Empire in less than eight marqs.

The Empress-to-be beamed at him like a favorite uncle. “Well, so, you now have an employer, and therefore this must be about his business rather than yours. So . . . ?”

Telling the truth was beginning to come naturally. “Well,” he said. “This is Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, keeper of the Imperial bloodline, and it seems I made a mistake when I talked to you.”

Cetuso launched into the story. She listened intently through the whole thing and then burst into great, glad, uproarious laughter. “Wow, wow, wow, Aurigar. We have both really moved up in the world. So now instead of purported kidnappings of farmers’ daughters, you’ve moved up to capturing successful businesswomen, and you’re doing so well that you can afford a geneted actor to make your story plausible. Well, then, let’s have a tissue sample from each of you,” she said, “and since it will take four hours to run a high-end search, in memory of how much good you did me, Aurigar, and of how much you have both made me laugh, I shall send you up to private rooms where you will each have, so to speak, one on the house.”

In Miriette’s office, Aurigar sat quietly, occasionally dozing and exhausted, reverently converting the last two hours into perpetual happy memory. Cetuso entered, moving as ever like a dancer half his age and a third of his size, and slipped into the larger chair, appropriating the hassock. A serving robot glided in and set out two glasses for the men. Silently, they toasted and drank.

After a long and equally reverent silence from Cetuso, and a second glass served and begun, Aurigar ventured, “It probably reflects my lack of sophistication, but this was without question the best time I’ve ever had in a house.”

“Whether or not you lack sophistication,” the Lord Leader Sir responded, “your experience in no way reflects that, because this was also my favorite experience of all time, which is to say, given my resources, appetites, and time devoted to exploration, it might be the finest available anywhere, ever.”

Miriette looked into the office. “Well,” she said. “That was a very interesting investigation. I trust the accommodations were suitable, Auri-gar?”

“Very.”

“And Lord Leader Cetuso Sir,” she said, dropping a very impressive curtsy. “Also satisfactory?”

“Beyond words,” he said, rising to his feet and bowing very low. “Then I take it you have confirmed my identity.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “And I am more impressed with Aurigar than ever. To make whatever con he is running plausible, he has actually corrupted a very highly placed public official. I know I want into this deal now, whatever it is, but of course you’ll have to tell me what you are actually up to, and cut me in as a partner. Whatever is behind all this must be simply astonishing. I know you’ll have to confer with whoever your hidden partners are, but as soon as you can tell me what’s really going on, come right back, and we’ll see what sort of deal we can do.” Her eyes sparkled and she kissed Aurigar on both cheeks. “And Aurigar, even if your partners won’t let you tell me, don’t be a stranger anyway. You have no idea how much you impress me.”

·

“Really, it’s almost to be expected,” Lord Leader Cetuso said. “All Imperials get extensive genetion. Heirs and near-heirs get even more, beginning right at the embryo stage. Even our late, mad Emperor was a polymathic genius; the madness was due to a botched assassination attempt by his mother, and some unfortunate abuse at the hands of his older brother of equally revered memory. So, naturally, Ululara, or Miriette, is beautiful, competent, cold-blooded, pragmatic, charismatic, all the things she needs to be. She was literally born to rule the galaxy. Climbing up from high-end prostitute to mistress of a hundred brothels in a few short years might have been a challenge for other people, but it was well within her capabilities.” He told the robot, “Standard setup for Aurigar.”

“I’m not hungry, Lord Leader Sir.”

“Have something to eat anyway. It always reduces your worrying and mellows your mood, and that helps you to be the splendid companion you usually are. And it’s your clear, calm thought I need now.”

The robot brought the platter, and Aurigar munched, forlornly at first, but then resolutely, as if it might be taken away from him, and finally with that certain calm decision that generally preceded his best ideas. He looked up to see Cetuso smiling, and thought he detected a twinkle in one of the mirrors of his eye sockets.

“I do hate being predictable,” Aurigar said.

“We all do, but it’s part of what makes us useful.” Cetuso smiled at him. Aurigar felt cold fear that the Lord Leader Sir might be genuinely fond of him. “Now, if you need to eat all of that and then nap,” Cetuso said, “you have plenty of time; considering the distances and numbers involved, we probably have the better part of a marq to get the Empress onto the throne, and loyal client members of my family will make sure no one does anything rash. So rest, eat, and think of what we should do next.”

A thought bothered Aurigar, but refused to come to the surface, so he spoke without it. “Just supposing we do find a way to persuade her that she is who she actually is, and assuming she wants the job, is there going to be a problem with any of a billion worlds or so realizing that they are being ruled from afar by—pardon the expression, but a former—”

Cetuso laughed. “Oh, there will be a predictable number of uprisings. So long as it’s just a planet by itself, the Imperial forces will do the usual—the multiple decimation for which they are famous.”

Aurigar shuddered. “I heard stories about that, growing up.”

“Notice the durability of the effect. The last time your homeworld rebelled, and had to be set straight, was more than eight thousand marqs ago. There is something about the ‘ten tenths’ concept that stays in the mind.”

Aurigar remembered a vast stone desert stretching out before him, some time before his father left, because he remembered he was holding Magrat’s collar and listening to his father explain: “It’s simple, Aurie, they ‘delete ten tenths,’ as they call it. One-tenth of all those of noble blood. One-tenth of all commoners. One-tenth of all slaves. One of the ten largest cities. Ten of the hundred largest cities. One hundred of the thousand largest cities. One-tenth of all livestock. One-tenth of all growing crops. One-tenth of all the forests. All the soil down to rock from one-tenth of the habitable surface. You see, everyone knows the formula, and everyone knows not to rebel, or not to let rebels get control of the planet. And the Emperor is always merciful; overlaps count. By slicing off the piece in front of us, he met not just the soil requirement, but half a dozen of the others as well. Nearly all the cities needed to make up the quota were located there, for example.”

Aurigar remembered how much he had hated his father, how sad he had always felt when looking at the decimated parts of worlds from spaceship windows, and how pathetic it seemed to him that he had never once had to coerce or trick a girl into the lost princess routine; every one of them had come willingly, because it was so much better than what she had.

He forced his attention back to the present, but couldn’t help asking, “But why does the Emperor care?”

“Empress, as soon as we can make it clear to her that that’s what she is.”

“I meant in general, Lord Leader Sir,” Aurigar said, skirting the edge of the great lord’s dislike for lectures not delivered by himself, “but all right, why does the Empress care if she has a planet fewer, here and there, out of a billion? She could just seal them off for a while, just a loose blockade to raise prices, and then wait for trade pressure and apathy to bring them back into line.”

To Aurigar’s surprise, Cetuso sat back, rubbed his bare blue scalp thoughtfully, and said, “Why does anyone do anything, dear fellow? We have the technology to make every one of four quadrillion human beings as rich and comfortable as that person could reasonably consume, and to sustain that forever; between dwell, jump, and nano, there’s no reason why anyone would ever need to leave home except for fun, and no reason why there needs to be a charge on anything. So why do you suppose we have people in dreadful and dangerous jobs such as mining, ranching, and prostitution? Why don’t we just synthesize materials from lifeless planets, jump it to where the people are, grow perfect food in tanks for everyone, and indulge everyone’s sensual whims eternally in dwellspace? We could do that, you know, for everyone, and still have plenty left over for the people who wanted to travel or go camping or whatever.”

Aurigar stared at him. “I’ve never thought of that. I just thought there were a lot of shitty jobs someone had to do. Do you have an answer?”

“Of course, dear fellow. We aristocrats are born with all the answers, you know, it’s just a matter of getting them loaded into our heads. And the answer is: there’s only one real pleasure; everything else is just satisfactions of urges. And the one real pleasure is getting one’s way over and against resistance. The only thing human beings really enjoy is making other people do what they don’t want to. Simple as that. Why do you think there are waiters, shop clerks, and prostitutes? In this age—and for the past thirty kilomarqs at least—everything they actually do or provide could be done better and cheaper by nano or dwell, and everyone could have as much of that as they want. We need poor people, and other gender and biological and spiritual underclasses, so that there will be people who—ideally hating it, or submissively fawning over it—must do what rich people tell them, because otherwise there’s no point to being rich. That’s all. Simple, isn’t it, dear fellow—now that you’re about to be rich?”

Ninety-four, Aurigar thought, counting the number of times Cetuso called him “dear fellow.” He wasn’t sure yet why he was counting; he had only started to count them in the last day or so, but now his mind always watched that little register, the “dear fellow” count. And why am I able to keep it so accurately? For that matter, he thought, I knew so much about Waystonn that I would never need to know, and Cetuso prefers my advice to all others, even though I’m just a tenth-rate con man and procurer. And now my father, who was barely there when I was a child, surfaces in a critical memory—

Aurigar realized. There was no better word—it was the first and only realization of his life.

“Well,” he said. “I know how to make this work.” He was unsurprised to recall that Geepo owed him a large favor. “I know a man I can get, the best in the Empire in multimapping dwellfaces.”

“Why would you know such a person and what would we want with him?”

“Geepo is profoundly useful in salvage operations. Every so often, genetion goes wrong, or a girl decides to balk or try to escape, or for some reason her buyer simply cannot sell her physically, so we put her into dwell, and interface her into a simulation that generates decisions and behavior for some other simulation that is salable. A girl may dwell the life of a beautiful princess madly in love with a gallant knight, and behave accordingly in dwell, while dozens or hundreds of men assume the role of the traveling salesman—she experiences them as the knight, they experience her as the bored housewife. Not as good as real, but salable in the cheap markets.”

“And this Geepo is good at dwellfaces?”

“The very best in the human trades. The three times I’ve used him, he has been phenomenally expensive, and utterly worth it. He is difficult to work with, like every real artist, but certainly fond of money—”

“Like every real artist. I believe I see your point.”

Miriette beamed. “Three of you this time.” She smiled particularly at Geepo. “Do you prefer to explain the actual deal yourself, or are you one of those that always wants the lackeys to do the talking?”

“Er, actually,” Geepo said, rubbing his upper lip in a way that made Aurigar think of rabbits, “I’m a lackey here myself.”

“Oh,” she said, fixing him with the “you are fascinating” stare. “We’ll have to talk. Now, Aurigar, are you going to tell me what all this is about?”

“Well,” he said, “I have convinced my principals that you could not be easily tricked into a dwelltank.”

“From which I would never emerge?”

“Exactly.”

She nodded. “Then let me tell you what I guessed. Your principals, who are probably the owners of a certain very large chain of brothels based in the 11/6 arm of the galaxy—”

“I have not named them,” Aurigar said.

“Nor have I. At any rate, these principals of yours estimated that my managerial and business skills were considerably in excess of theirs, true?”

“Actually they believe that left to yourself you would have a galactic monopoly within nineteen marqs.”

“I was planning for eleven,” she said.

“There is little doubt you know better than they,” Cetuso put in.

“There is no doubt, Lord Leader Sir. Now, if they could get me to run their enterprise, that monopoly could be theirs, and soon. So you would have taken me to your palace in Jinkhangy, Lord Leader Sir, where all preparation would be under way for my ‘coronation.’ I would have gone into dwell for an ‘extensive briefing’ or ‘protocol training’ or whatever, and never have awakened in reality—but in dwell I would have gone through the coronation, appointed my cabinet, begun the process of ruling the galaxy. Back in reality, I would have been running all the brothels in the galaxy, through a multimapping interface.”

“You have discerned the entire thing,” Cetuso said gravely. “I hope you are not offended. You must admit it was rather a good scheme.”

“It was,” she admitted. “And their commitment to it is demonstrated by the sheer enormity of the bribe they must have offered you to take part. Tell me, Aurigar, how many of your other lost princesses are now ‘ruling the galaxy’ while actually doing accounts receivables for a discount clothing chain?”

Aurigar shrugged, inwardly pleased that he had anticipated the question. “Being able to fake being a great lay is very common,” he said. “First-rate administrative talent is much rarer, and most businesses are not large or complex enough to need it. You are rather in the nature of a unique case.”

“Of course I am; I should have realized. All right, then, let me propose an alternative. Your principals will hire me to run their entire operation for them, via dwell. For one-fifth of every day, time to be set by me, I will unhook, run my own operation, and do just as I please. My operation will not be absorbed into theirs. I expect generous compensation and a sizable piece of the overall operation. I will take a long list of precautions to make sure that I return from my first dwell, and I will be fully empowered while in dwellspace, so that I can arrange matters such that you will never dare to think of trying to hold me in dwellspace. Does that sound fair?”

“I was carefully instructed,” Aurigar said, “not to argue about any issues regarding safeguards, or the definitions of words such as ‘generous’ or ‘sizable.’ Our principals are aware of the great need to rebuild the trust that they admittedly squandered. I think you may consider that we have a deal.”

“Aurigar, my only remaining question is, why an honest pimp, con man, fraud, and kidnapper like yourself would get involved in something as nasty as large-scale corporate activity?”

“The money was good.”

“Oh, but if that’s your excuse, what will be next? Politics? Well, suit yourself, but I hate to see your talent squandered so squalidly.”

·

“Can you see what she has been doing in there?” Cetuso asked, for the fifth time.

Geepo shrugged, pulled his visor down, and spread his sensegloved fingers into the plextank before him. His fingers danced and wriggled over myriad pseudosurfaces. “Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, she has been through all the business records, penetrated all the locked files, and outcopied everything. She has also set up a remarkably complex and probably unanalyz-able system of bombs, traps, alarms, triggers, and poisons so no one can ever hold her in dwellspace against her will.”

“Of course,” Cetuso said, “you are keeping track of those and can enable us to keep her inside—”

“That is not what was agreed to! It would be extremely unethical. Even the beginnings of an attempt would make detection certain by a person of ordinary skill, and the princess is building the cleverest protection I’ve ever seen. We are dealing with no mean or small mind here, Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, and I should be terrified to try to step in contrary to her wishes.”

Cetuso’s tone was dark and the silver flashes in his eye sockets were ominous. “So there is no way to control her—all we can do is try to stay on her good side?”

Remembering that the lord was three times Geepo’s weight in super-fast, superstrong muscle—and could not be prosecuted for killing a com-moner—Geepo could barely nod.

Cetuso sighed. “Well, Aurigar, from what you know of madams, would you want one running the galaxy?”

“Well, yes and no, Lord Leader Sir. No, in that most of them are cruel and petty. Yes, in that they tend to be decisive, knowledgeable about human nature, and focused on the main chance.”

“And from what I know of princesses, they have generally been pressured into some semblance of grace and largeness of spirit, but they are obsessed with improving people, prone to vacillating, and disdainful of the most practical and effective way of doing anything. Probably we are about to acquire an Empress with the personal ethics of a pimp and the broad vision of a spoiled aristocrat, about like any other political leadership of the last few kilomarqs. Hard on ordinary people I suppose, but what isn’t? And we have no reason to care about them. Time to pursue preferment, eh, dear fellow?”

Four hundred thirty-two, and now it will turn out I already have preferment.

“Already taken care of,” Geepo said. “I cast each of us, in the princess’s dwellspace, as particularly proficient branch managers, with dwell-space abilities mapped to our real talents on the outside. Your diplomatic ability, Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, for example, maps to a gift for motivating exotic women and attracting discerning customers—”

“You mean I’ve been cast as a particularly classy pimp for jaded, kinky aristocrats?”

“Exactly, Lord Leader Sir. I would say you are certain to gain a post in the Inner Cabinet. Of course, interacting with you through her interface and yours, she will think you are that pimp, but when she communicates with you, her avatar on the screen will call you by your right name and cabinet rank. After a while, you will barely notice that anything is different.”

“This mapping, between pimp and cabinet post—was it easy?”

“Exceedingly so, Lord Leader Sir.”

“I guessed as much.” The mirrors in his dark eye sockets flashed brightly a few times, and his blue face was still, except for the hint of a satisfied smile.

Aurigar looked around from his command station. There were at least a thousand screenminders within sight, most of them directly over his head, and if it were not for the semicircle of plextanks in which he stood, each showing an aspect of the situation surrounding the six worlds remaining in rebellion, he might have been in any large orbiting office complex around any inhabited planet.

But he was the commander of the Galactic Expeditionary Force, and he could confirm it by looking at the plextank showing six suns, all that remained of the Cleanlist Rebellion against the Empress; she had refused their surrender for the sake of example. At his touch, the plextank display rearranged to show up-close images of each system, no longer to scale, but with all six stars and seventeen inhabited worlds visible as spheres, the systems arranged in a hex around a central data console.

It’s not even new, now, but it’s still strange, he thought, and idly plucked at the sleeve of the silly getup he had to wear in public.

At his side, Cetuso said, “You’ve really done well for yourself, dear fellow.”

“I suppose so, Lor—er, Cetuso.” Seventeen thousand four hundred twenty-seven.

The blue man smiled. “Still not used to your peerage?”

“I doubt I ever will be. To judge by the—”

The image in the central tank vanished; Ululara, in full Imperial regalia, appeared. “Supremor Aurigar, are we ready?”

He felt in the plextank once more, for form’s sake. “We are.”

“Then proceed at once. We have a victory celebration to start.”

Aurigar shrugged and spoke the order. More than a thousand screen-minders watched for errors or to countermand as thousands of robots, each prepositioned on a sizable asteroid, sprayed the surface with trillions of nanobots. In a matter of a few hundred nanomarqs, well before any remote sensor could hope to detect them, the nanobots had spread their conducting filament-nets of conductors; an instant later, an antimatter fizzle bomb popped up from the main robot and burst, feeding energy into the nanobots’ vast antennae, supplying the energy for the transformation.

“Only four not responding, sir,” Cetuso said; for this operation he was the Assistant Supremor.

I like “sir “ better than “dear fellow.” Aurigar nodded. “We expected fifteen to twenty intercepts. This is good.” Modern warfare, Aurigar reflected, was now all espionage, remote sensing, and cryptography; with nanobots, quantum computation, and jump tech, you would be hit by every weapon that you didn’t detect before it was fired. The four lost weapons had been found and mined by the enemy, killed perhaps three nanomarqs after activation, before they could even deploy their nanobots. Right now, light was spreading out from the antimatter fizzles that powered the conversion, and as the light reached them, a hundred thousand sensors in each of the uninhabited systems would be relaying it through jump transmitters to the enemy. They would know the attack was under way within seventeen micromarqs—but the enemy would not exist within one micromarq.

Still, the enemy backlash must have started by now, their jumpweap-ons forming and leaping to revenge. Aurigar wondered whether the Imperial forces would take any hits at all; the last time, they had not, but intel estimated a 10 percent chance that the enemy had determined the location of Jinkhangy. To the Empress’s image in the plextank before him, he said, “Word on the enemy counterattack?”

Geepo said, “Consider yourself congratulated, sir. Crypto, intel, and search found twenty-six enemy weapon seeds and mined them; they detonated simultaneously with our attack.”

“Detonate” was not quite the right word; Aurigar’s silent mines had opened wormholes into the cores of blue-white giant stars, and the enemy weapons-to-be had vanished as planet-sized masses of stellar core had burst into existence within the asteroids on which they sat.

“Any jumpspace interceptions?”

“The usual. We sprayed the jumpspace approaches to Jinkhangy with interceptors. Thirteen hits, most of which were probably smugglers or ships that didn’t stick to the flight plan, which will certainly teach them a lesson. Our best estimate is that not more than three of them were enemy weapons. All in all, not just a successful operation but a cheap one, and—”

“Silence, please, from everyone,” Aurigar said.

They all fell quiet; his peculiar passion for dead silence at the moment of truth was legendary, and the legend was known to be accurate—as were the legends about what happened when he did not get that dread, respectful silence.

Ululara’s image ghosted over the hex arrangement of the six Cleanlist systems, arranged to show stars and inhabited planets as spheres and the major stations as points. The countdown in the center of the plextank reached zero.

Thirty-some stations flashed and were gone; an asteroid-mass of vacuum-energy receivers had popped out of jumpspace inside each one, converting instantaneously to relativistic nucleons. About forty million people, Aurigar thought, gone in less time than it takes a signal to cross a synapse.

The view, with Ululara still ghosted over it, switched to just-activated sleeper satellites over the seventeen planets. Aurigar had just time to think of all the continents and oceans, cities, mountains, deserts, glaciers, temples to a thousand gods, dew-scented mornings, and glorious stormy sunsets in progress, kisses never to be finished, and hands reaching for each other that would never touch, eighty billion people, and a trillion works of art.

The jumpweapons entering the cores of the seventeen worlds opened wormholes to the great black hole at the galaxy’s core. Within the space of one breath, planetary surfaces sagged and fell like a deflating balloon. Each place where a planet had been flashed white-hot as the energy just outside the event horizon escaped from the ripping apart and the brutal collisions of the last bits of matter. Then the spy satellites, too, plunged into the black hole.

The view switched briefly to more distant cameras; the black holes swelling from each wormhole were dark spheres, bending starlight weirdly around themselves, swelling for just a moment until the wormholes destabilized and the black ball of the event horizon contracted back to starry void.

There was no point in sending the stars into nova, except as examples. That was all the point the Empress required. The six stars flared brilliantly; over the next few days they would briefly reach far out beyond their former habitable zones, and then gradually recede. Nothing would ever live in those systems again. In a few dekamarqs, the inhabitants of neighboring systems would throw carefully orchestrated festivals to celebrate the brief flarings in their night sky—and be reminded that though she was called “the merciful and mighty,” she remained Her Supreme Might.

Aurigar sighed. He wondered how many of the eighty billion had been standing close to someone they loved, so that as that awful fall began, they had been able to clutch a hand or hug close to each other.

Total forever: 17,427. Good enough. Aurigar drew a breath and waited.

Geepo screamed.

Cetuso made a strangled sound.

Aurigar smiled. “That would be Jinkhangy,” he said. “Just a start; the provincial capital worlds are going even as we speak, and the galaxy is now swarming with self-replicating robots seeking out and blasting every instrument of Imperial authority into nucleons.”

Geepo’s and Cetuso’s slack expressions were amusing, but Aurigar took no time to relish them. “Oh, the Cleanlists had to go, of course—evil as the Imperium, and ten times madder. Now, for my next act of public service, I eliminate the Imperium. The homeworlds of the high aristocracy are vanishing at this moment, and billions of ships hurrying around on Imperial business are turning to plasma in real space, or unresolvabil-ity in jumpspace. The people of each individual planet will work out their own destinies. All the stars are free.”

The whole speech rang curiously flat, considering that Aurigar had been mentally rehearsing it since the “dear fellow” count was less than one thousand. Well, no doubt it is neither the first nor the last line well-composed in advance to be spoiled when it is delivered.

Cetuso moaned, his jaw hanging open, and the mirrors and lenses in his eye sockets turned slowly and out of coordination; probably he had not yet understood. Aurigar considered taunting him—your favorite lackey, my dear fellow! was not what you thought. You and your adored Empress and the whole aristocracy and system of domination perish now! and I shall piss upon your steaming remains. But whereas the thought was swift as light itself, the words would have been far too slow, so before Cetuso’s moan of uncomprehending despair acquired even a hint of comprehension, Aurigar slashed the cutting laser vertically from the blue man’s head to his feet, so that he fell into two pieces with steam pouring from his flash-cooked guts in the middle.

Aurigar stepped forward, looked down into the red gap between the blue half-faces, and smelled the roasted reek of the man’s entrails. The mirrors and lenses now flashed and turned with the last of their momentum. He holstered his weapon, opened his trousers, and urinated, filling the eye sockets. “For every time you fed me, for every time you said I amused you, and for seventeen thousand four hundred twenty-seven times you called me ‘dear fellow.’”

Geepo was sobbing.

Ululara said, “He was my kinsman and you are far too flippant with his body.”

I sent four weapons after her physical location on Waystonn! The plextank displayed nothing.

Aurigar whirled. She stood behind him, rather disarming in pink pajamas, but quite well-armed with a cutting laser pointed at his face. He was acutely aware that he had holstered his own, and then modesty made him reach for his open fly.

“No,” she said. “Keep your hands away from your body.” She smiled, then, the genuine warm smile she’d had as Miriette, so long ago. “Poor Aurigar, we both had secrets we couldn’t tell. I actually knew that I really was the Empress after my fourth trip into the multimapped dwellspace you had Geepo build for me. A kidnapper and pimp like you, Aurigar, might not choose to pay attention to politics, but a businessperson with interstellar interests like me has no choice. Once I had confirmed that whatever I did as madam and CEO in my dwellspace had an exact analogy in the actions of the new-crowned Empress, I knew the truth, and shortly I found my way out of the world Geepo built and into the real one. I have been ruling the galaxy directly ever since, just leaving a shell up to fool you, Cetuso, and Geepo.”

Geepo moaned, “I am stupid.”

“No,” Empress Ululara said, “I am competent.”

“You cannot stop the robots and replicators already at work,” Aurigar said. “You remain alive, and you may kill me, but you can no longer rule your empire; you are an Empress only in name.”

“That is exactly right,” she said.

And now Aurigar was certain, as he had been for so many marqs, since well before they put her on the throne, and he smiled broadly. “I am tired of this game,” he said, “and curious about what I have forgotten and will wake to. You may press that trigger at any time.”

“Of course I may,” she said. “An Empress does what she likes, always.” And she pushed the button down.

For Aurigar, the world ceased. If he had existed to feel it, he would have been startled beyond all words to find that he did not wake into any other existence.

Miriette lifted the dwellcap from her head and shook her damp hair. The clock showed she had been in the simulation for just under two micro-marqs. She had a few more micromarqs till old Phodway would come home; the kitchen and the kids were already clean and dinner-ready.

The image of Lord Leader Cetuso Sir appeared at the corner of her screen. “Any luck?”

“Another one who got a bad case of conscience and went radical— very cleverly, too. I’ve sent you the file. Quite ingenious and well worth study. He assassinated you, by the way, and it seemed rather personal. Generally a bad boy all around. How many more lost princess men do we have left to try?”

“More than a hundred to go, and this was only the twelfth one we’ve examined, Princess. We’ll find you the right one to get you out of the Krevpiceaux country, don’t worry. Never fear. At one or two per your day, it won’t even take very long.”

She felt like pouting, but she did not feel like it nearly enough to do so and spoil her dignity. “I’m getting very tired of caring for all Phodway’s fostindents, and having to keep him sober, and all that. I really want to start working my way out of hiding.”

“Oh, you’ll have to hide somewhere till your brother dies, in any case. I’ve told you that. And we’re working on that too, of course. Just remember that until your memplant woke up and told you to contact me, you had no idea you even were in hiding, or that you were anything other than a purchased orphan. Let alone who you actually are.” The mirrors in his eye sockets flashed and twinkled. “We will find a lost princess man who will stay loyal. And then we will get you out of the Krevpiceaux, but not out of hiding. I barely got you out of your mother’s palace ahead of the explosion, and your brother’s disposition, you may trust me, has not improved in the intervening twenty-nine marqs. Patience, Your Supreme Might-to-Be, patience.”

“I know. I know. It’s just I’m facing feeding four kids, sobering up a drunk, cleaning the shack as far as it can be cleaned, and sharing a bed with two of the other fostindents. But I can manage patience. I did have one question to raise—this was the third lost princess man in a row to figure out that he was in a simulation. Like the other ones, he thought it was his and he was the center of it.”

“Naturally. What man doesn’t think he’s the center of the universe?” Cetuso’s image on the screen paused for not more than a hundred nano-marqs, then shrugged, the immense blue muscles of his shoulders rising and falling like waves on the sea. “I’ve scanned his moments of recognition, and I don’t think we can change policy; our lost princess man will have to be smart enough to do what we need, simulations cannot be perfect, and many of them will see through it. At least none of them so far has figured out where or how we read and recorded him, or why we’re doing it, so there’s no danger that one of them will leave behind any warning for the others, and as long as they don’t, it doesn’t complicate the task, really.” He smiled warmly. “And everything really is on course, Princess. Regrettable as it is, just put in another—”

“Miriette!” Henredd was calling from the kitchen. “Miriette, the water is boiling!”

“Drop the noodles in and I’ll be there in a moment,” she said. Cetu-so’s image looked disgustingly pitying, so she stuck her tongue out at him before she blanked the screen.

Through the kitchen viewwall, she watched the Krevpiceauxi mistral wail and shriek its way up into a full-blown black-dust storm, the kind that was equally likely to strand them inside for days or blow over before bedtime. Phodway would appreciate a hot meal and a clean bed after making his way home through that, anyway. At least he was not unkind and he thanked her often.

Henredd stood beside her, his bony shoulder pressing against her lower ribs, arm around her unself-consciously, and said, “I like being here when you cook.” They’d gotten Henredd from an illegal dealer, and the first year they’d had him, he’d barely spoken, mostly just cried; a little kind attention and some efficient care had brought him around, and Miriette had to admit she’d learned how to do that from Phodway’s treatment of her when she was young, back before he’d fallen into the bottle. She turned the fish cakes over and rubbed Henredd’s head; he snuggled more closely against her.

Once I’m on the throne, I will have Cetuso take care of these people, very, very generously. An empress does not have much need for love, but it is good to know about it, and an empress must show gratitude.

The boy under her arm squirmed and ran off to play; she contemplated her skill in the kitchen with proud dismay. Patience, patience, patience.

Cetuso could feel nothing from his extended hand; to get the maximum bandwidth for accessing Aurigar’s mind and memories, he’d had to turn every available nerve to the purpose. The lost princess man’s facial expression showed that the filaments rushing through Aurigar’s body to his heart and brain were painful and distressing; it could and would all be erased at need, if the man lived. The plate of mussels and noodles lay inverted and broken on the floor. Aurigar’s boot touched it and slipped slightly, and Cetuso made that foot move to a secure spot on the dry floor behind.

Cetuso had no fear of being disturbed, knowing as he did that everyone in the place feared to disturb him, or even to look at him to see what he was doing. He relayed the copy of Aurigar to the princess’s computer, waited through the micromarqs while she played Aurigar out in simulation, and talked her through the usual disappointment. He might have pointed out that they needed a man of extraordinary abilities to accomplish what was needed, and also one who would not resent how he was used, one who would understand the Imperium as well as the Empress herself and yet feel only deep loyalty. There would be such a man, he was confident, but this was not he.

A few micromarqs later, when he knew she was feeling better, and she had been called off to cook supper for the miner’s brats, he turned his attention back to Aurigar. A few people had gotten up and left quietly, not wanting to be witnesses; the rest looked at their drinks, their plates, or the wall.

Cetuso proceeded systematically. First he erased the simulation data from Aurigar’s brain, then the memory of their conversation, then all the memories, and finally the instincts, the sensory processing, and the autonomic processes, before his filaments slashed Aurigar’s brains into wet chopped meat beyond any possibility of neurodissection or nanorecon-struction.

Cetuso’s filaments withdrew, merging into thin tentacles between the corpse’s ribs, then broad thick strands outside the chest. As the tips popped free, they reshaped into fingers splayed on the man’s chest. Cetuso pushed lightly.

Aurigar’s corpse crashed to the floor. No one looked up, but a number of people winced; Cetuso recorded their reaction and relayed it to the political police. Probably they just had weak stomachs (you never could tell what would bother even the most normal, practical, hardened heart), but better safe than sorry.

He flashed the main mirror in his left eye to draw the bartender’s gaze. Cetuso pointed to the accounting screen behind the bar, using his mind-link to add a few month’s revenues to the bar’s receipts. The bartender looked down, saw the numbers, looked up, and was mindful enough not to do anything but look away. Cetuso smiled; silence, like all good things, was at its best and costliest when absolutely pure, and it never paid to skimp on it.

He would have nodded nicely enough at anyone who looked up as he left, but as usual, no one did. Out on the street, where everyone could see him and what he was, he walked as if invisible.