thinking, and great burst strength. He was Jak's toktru tove, and had always been, but now he was hurting.
If he lost his temper at Jak… well, an unmodified human against a panth was like a kitten against a bear.
After a minute or so of brooding, Dujuv's naturally energetic disposition won out. "Hey, so what are we
going to do tonight besides celebrate?"
"You need more to do?"
"Well, we'll have a meal and go somewhere for some fun, but it seems like we ought to do more. You
don't get your feets and escape from gen school every day. We could dance, or brawl, or maybe just go
climb something."
"Let's not climb another light shaft, though, eh?"
That particular stunt had gotten them six days' house arrest last year. The light shafts mixed and carried
the bright glow of the sunlight and the actinic blaze of the plasma around the black hole at the heart of the
Hive, distributing it to skylights, sconces, and lamps throughout the gigantic space station. They ran out
radially from the central black hole space to openings on the surface. In the shafts themselves, many
thousands of little catchers—fiber optic-filled pipes with a mirror at the end, like one end of a
periscope—jutted into the bright light, and it had occurred to Dujuv that if they got in through a service
entrance, the catchers might furnish the hand and footholds for a good long climb. Since the sperical shell
forming the Hive from the mirrored face of the black hole enclosure at the center to the outer surface
covered with silvery pipes and domes, was about 1250 km thick, they were never going to be able to
climb the whole way, but "We can sure see some interesting spaces and do some interesting technical
stuff," Dujuv had said. "We can do it up toward the surface, in low gravity, so it's more skill and less
strength. Come on, Jak, it will be fun."
Unfortunately, small bends and forces in an optical tube cause big distortions in the light coming out of it;
furthermore, the boys had forgotten that their shadows would be cast for very long distances along the
tubes. All over one big cone-shaped sector of the Hive, lights bounced and flickered, odd beams swept
out from the sides of sconces and chandeliers, and many lights simply went out. The all-powerful
Maintefice was flooded with complaints within a second or two; by the time, ten minutes later, when the
pokheets caught the two boys, they had probably become the least popular adolescents since people had
begun moving into the Hive a thousand years ago.
Jak and Dujuv sat quietly, enjoying each other's company, as light and dark flashed by the Pertrans car
windows. Some unknown architectural genius in the Hive's construction agency, many centuries before,
had thought to require viewports in the sides of the Pertrans tunnels, so that in nearly every classroom,
shop, corridor, park, gym, or office—any space but a private home—you were forever seeing the flash of
passing Pertrans cars. But since the cars moved at bullet speeds, the passengers only rarely saw anything
other than a flash of light, and people in the spaces tuned out the brief flicker of a passing Pertrans.
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/B...20-%20The%20Duke%20of%20Uranium%20v0.9.html (7 of 154) [10/15/2004 12:44:04 PM]