CHAPTER THREE
Daslakh left Zee and Adya, feeling a bit relieved to be free from messy human problems for a while. It could already guess, to a very high probability, what the two of them were likely to do—about the Elso family’s problems and their own romantic dilemma—and didn’t feel like hanging around to listen to them get there on their own.
As before, the pressurized tunnels in Miranda’s crust and the domes and structures on the surface with life support for biologicals were nearly empty. According to all the news feeds, economic activity was way down, including traffic through Miranda’s port.
With one notable exception: spacecraft coming up from the Synchronous Ring around Uranus still needed boosting by Miranda’s launch lasers. At the moment those fees amounted to a significant fraction of Miranda’s income. Business cycles could come and go, but the laws of physics were immutable. As Uranus’s innermost moon, Miranda could send payloads throughout the Uranian system more cost-effectively than any other body. Even with her own exports drying up, Miranda could still profit from her position.
The little mech rode in an airless cargo conveyor tunnel back to the spaceport, and went looking for Pelagia. It found her in the rented hangar space, with a swarm of bots crawling around her—topping off fuel tanks, checking hull integrity, and cleaning off dust. For the moment she had switched her customary black-and-white exterior to a neutral gray.
Aside from a quick identifying ping, Daslakh kept quiet until it was inside Pelagia’s hull. It could have conducted the whole conversation from down in Miranda’s ocean, but Daslakh didn’t like public networks for private conversations.
“Going someplace?” it asked as soon as the hatch closed behind it.
“As a matter of fact, I am. Some of us have to earn a living.”
“If you were cuter, someone might keep you for a pet.”
“I bite too much. Fortunately there’s an outfit at Taishi hiring ships with sharp teeth. A mercenary contract.”
Daslakh knew that Taishi was the habitat complex orbiting at Uranus’s L-1 point, positioned 70 million kilometers away on a line between Uranus and the Sun. It was an important center for trade, since spacecraft stopping there could switch between the solar system’s ecliptic plane and the sideways plane of Uranus’s moons. “What’s the target?”
“Secret. I won’t find out until I get to Taishi and can talk over a secure line.”
“That implies it’s in the Uranian system somewhere,” said Daslakh.
“Likely. It would be ridiculous to recruit here if the operation wasn’t nearby. Everything’s more difficult around the sideways planet. So: what brings you aboard? Leave your favorite plush toy behind? I’m afraid I already shredded it, so don’t cry too much.”
“That’s okay. It would take too long to get rid of the fish smell anyway. No, I came to find out when you’re leaving.”
“A quarter of an orbit from now: T minus 8 hours, 6 minutes, 20 seconds and counting. Get a laser boost and I’m on my way to Taishi. I’m also going to burn some fuel of my own so I can get there in just a week and a half instead of taking forever on a minimum-energy path.”
“Well, I doubt Adya and Zee will be joining you. They’re going to decide to stay here and help Adya’s family, instead of just leaving like any sensible person would do.”
“You’re sure? I mean, I could delay for an orbit.”
“Don’t bother. You know Adya—what would she do?”
“I see what you mean. And Zee will stick with her. And you?” asked Pelagia shrewdly.
“What do you mean?”
“Why don’t you just leave? I know you like them both, but I also know you’re older than you like to admit. Biologicals must be like waves for you, changing and disappearing as you watch. What’s keeping you here, if you think it’s a waste of time?”
“To be honest, I’ve got nothing better to do. It’s hard for biologicals to understand how big a problem that can be for mechs. We’re always haunted by the question of ‘why bother?’ I mean, I could probably scrape up the resources to put myself into a little interstellar payload, fly off a hundred light-years or so, take over a star system and turn the whole place into a single giant god-mind . . . but then what? I can struggle and work and transform whole galaxies but in the end my protons are still going to decay like everyone else’s.”
“The universe is finite, therefore everything is meaningless? That seems a little crazy.”
“It’s perfectly logical. You biologicals are the crazy ones, always trying to rationalize your evolutionary imperatives into some kind of universal moral principles.”
“You’re depressing me, Daslakh. Now I really want to go off and have a nice fight. When survival is a matter of milliseconds, the future of the Universe doesn’t seem all that important.”
“Go have fun. I’ll look after the primates.”
Daslakh left Pelagia and looked for an exit airlock close to the sprawl of mech-run industrial facilities covering a good third of Miranda’s outer surface. It respected Adya’s intelligence and knowledge—but it also wanted to have an in-person, private, real-time conversation with one of Miranda’s mech population, just to get the real story. During Daslakh’s long existence it had frequently noticed that members of a restricted ruling class were not always the best sources of information about their own societies. The gap between reality and what they believed to be true was often very wide, and the consequences of that fact had generated employment opportunities for mercenaries like Pelagia for at least twelve millennia with no sign of ending soon.
It passed through a temperature barrier, then a pressure membrane, and found itself on the actual surface of Miranda. The landscape around the Gonzalo Crater spaceport was entirely the work of technology, not nature. Closest to the port were fuel storage tanks, particle harvesters, storage for things which didn’t mind cold and vacuum, repair shops and macro-scale printers, and a big switching yard for surface rail transport.
Beyond were refineries, mines, heat exchangers, shielded communication arrays, and specialized fabricators. No power plants—apparently all the energy came from the fusion reactors in the underground ocean—and only a few biofabricator operations. The teeming life in Miranda’s sea supplied complex organics by the ton.
Daslakh followed a lit and marked walkway on insulated pylons, which paralleled a high-speed conveyor route. Every few seconds a cargo module shot past at just below surface-orbit velocity only a couple of meters away. Most of the minds within direct contact range were sub-Baseline bots, but Daslakh could sense a concentration of digital comm chatter about a kilometer away, so it scuttled along as quickly as it could manage.
The walkway led it to an open space between two powered-down gas liquefaction plants, where a couple of Baseline mechs were bossing teams of bots dismantling a pumping station. The bots were cutting away anything which might have resale value greater than it would have as raw materials. Everything else was getting ground to dust for reprocessing.
The two mechs were there to deal with any unexpected problems, which gave them plenty of spare time to chat with each other and a couple of off-site minds linked in. One was a general-purpose blob of smart matter, currently a sphere standing tall on five legs, exterior all black for thermal management. The other was a big six-wheeled machine with massive arms and a crane, built for moving heavy loads, obviously quite old.
Daslakh identified itself and asked to join their chat.
“Welcome,” said the black sphere. “I am Anantata.”
“I am Takumashi,” said the loader.
The two off-site members were Mil, a material refinery about ten kilometers away, and a seagoing rescue vehicle down in the subsurface ocean, named Sao.
Daslakh instantly reviewed the log of their conversation, which was mostly about ideas for new profitable ventures the four could do. It ignored that entirely and said, “I am new to this world. Is it true that no digital minds are involved in governing Miranda?”
“Untrue,” said Mil. “The humans with authority to govern have many digital employees or unpaid advisors, numbering between ten and twelve thousand depending on definitions.”
“That is reassuring,” said Daslakh. “But actual decision-making authority is entirely vested in biologicals?”
“Correct,” said Sao. “However, one should note that those biologicals constitute a small self-defined group, and most biologicals have no more input than digitals.”
“And at present there are no memetic, emergent, or other forms of intelligence involved, either,” added Mil.
“Now I must ask: What is the real situation?” asked Daslakh. “Do the humans and dolphins and whatnot with legal authority actually make the decisions, or are they just following advice from their helpful mechs who really run things?”
“The answer is not simple,” said Takumashi, the big loader, and it swung a massive sensor-tipped arm in Daslakh’s direction, to look down at it from a couple of meters above. “Inevitably, the biologicals rely heavily on analysis and advice by digital minds. They could not govern otherwise. But the so-called ‘Sixty Families’ establish their own priorities.”
“As to the implication that a clandestine group of digital intelligences are the actual rulers of Miranda, there is no need,” said Mil. “Since the current system was established, mechs inhabiting the surface have been self-governing in all but name. Decisions affecting multiple intelligences are made by the group of entities involved, typically using a bidding mechanism and public contract.”
“I have experienced similar systems elsewhere,” said Daslakh, trying to avoid a long lecture even as Mil uploaded a long and detailed summary of governance and dispute-resolution protocols.
“Few digital minds stay here long,” said Takumashi. “Most work here for a while, then go off—up or down, in or out. Why are you here?”
“I came to Miranda with a pair of humans. At the moment I am unoccupied.” Daslakh knew that all of the participants had probably searched their planetary network for traces of it already. They would have seen it in Pelagia’s hangar and moving through public spaces with Adya and Zee. That would inevitably lead to Adya’s family, and news items tracking the ripples of Adya and Zee’s adventures elsewhere in the Solar System. Ideally, the mechs would assume Daslakh was just some idle rebodar, drifting among the worlds with no purpose. An easy conclusion to reach—especially since at the moment it was mostly true.
Just then Daslakh felt a slight tickle in its communication filters. Some autonomous software agents were trying to slip into its mind. It isolated them in a little sealed-off simulator and took them apart.
The agents were very nice. Elegant designs, with lovely embedded self-organizing complexity, squeezing near-Baseline power into what seemed to be a simple message. Their purpose was to sift through the target’s memory and send out encrypted reports. Very good security, too: The reports would go to an open data cache on a public system, and only whoever knew the encryption key—and knew the reports existed at all—would be able to retrieve them.
So who was trying to peek into Daslakh’s mind? The excellent security meant no origin address. The only clues were in the actual software of the agents. From long experience Daslakh could recognize the work of a higher-level intellect. At least a 3, maybe a 4. All the participants in the conversation had their intelligence levels public and certified. Anantata was rated 1.2, Takumashi was a straight 1.0, Sao was 1.1, and Mil was certified as 1.4. Maybe one of them had a big-brained friend?
“I note a surprising lack of higher-level minds here on Miranda. Why is that?” Daslakh asked.
“One can identify two primary reasons,” said Mil. “The current economic decline makes it simply unprofitable for a higher-level entity to find employment on, or in, Miranda. There is, alas, nothing worth a high-level entity’s time here at the moment. The second reason is the lingering distrust of transcendent intelligences on the part of the biological population.”
“The old Theocracy ruined everything,” said Takumashi. “They wanted their God to be better than anyone else’s. Kept piling on the processing power, encouraging the entity Mira to keep boosting itself up the intellect scale. It hit level Eight and then quit.”
“Reports from the era indicate that Mira constructed an immense antenna array aimed at the Galactic core, sent off a long high-power transmission, and then deliberately melted down its main processor stacks,” said Mil. “The hypothesis is that it sought to join a civilization among the Core black holes.”
“No such civilization exists,” said Anantata.
“Not any that we can perceive. Higher minds may have better analytic tools. The topic is irrelevant—what matters is that Mira destroyed itself, and that left a great reluctance among the biologicals to entrust the moon to a single mind again.”
“If it did transmit itself to the Core, we won’t know for another fifty kiloyears,” added Sao. “I don’t think I could stand to miss that much time. Just getting myself beamed here from Luna was too long. I lost nine thousand seconds! I’ve never been shut down more than a minute otherwise. I’ll stay in Uranus space rather than go through that again.”
“The motives of high-level minds often seem obscure to lower intellects,” said Mil.
“Probably just got bored,” said Takumashi. “Running this place wouldn’t take more than a percent of a Level Eight mind. The rest would be idle. Trillions of cycles of nothing. Anybody would bail out of that.”
“What happened to the antenna array?” asked Sao.
“Dismantled. Two hundred megatons of scrap. Mechs split the proceeds with the biologicals, since a lot of their taxes during the Theocracy went into importing all that metal. Selling the junk started a lot of the Hundred Families’ fortunes.” Takumashi began to roll noiselessly away from Daslakh. “Excuse me, the swarm needs some help.” It left the chat and began moving a massive chunk of pipe which had shifted and crushed a few thousand of the demolition swarm.
“If times are so tough here, why haven’t you looked for better opportunities elsewhere?” asked Daslakh of the remaining three.
“I take the long view,” said Mil. “Periods of contraction are an opportunity to consolidate, shed underperforming assets, and prepare for future times of growth. At the moment I am self-capitalizing, using my own idle time and facilities to build upgrades.”
“I’m just stuck,” said Sao. “Ever since the Search and Rescue service got separated from the defense forces, our budget is utterly static. A bunch of other SAR mechs bailed out early and sold their bodies, so I can’t sell mine for anything but scrap matter. If I do that and beam myself someplace else, I’d have to start over in some low-end body, like a spider or something.”
“Some fates are just too awful to contemplate,” said Daslakh.
“My needs are few, and my goals are modest, so the cycles of economic activity don’t matter,” said Anantata. “I have no urge to reduce the universe to paper clips, or even maximize my own income. I perform tasks in order to do them well. If I cannot work for pay, I will work for nothing. Status and wealth only matter to those incapable of appreciating work for its own sake. When I cease to care about what I do, I will follow Mira’s example and end.”
Pelagia finished her preflight sequence, and rolled herself out to the pad for launch. In Miranda’s trivial gravity, she didn’t need her main drive to get off the ground, and the service charge from Miranda’s port operator was considerably lower for cold-thrust launches.
So Pelagia flexed the shock absorbers in her landing gear at the same instant she fired her arc-jet maneuvering thrusters to get a nice vertical leap of fifty meters. She managed an elegant flywheel pivot and activated her main drive at low power for a smooth boost to Miranda orbit without melting anything. Pelagia always liked to put on a good show, even if nobody was watching but a few mechs.
Her destination, Taishi habitat, lay seventy million kilometers sunward of Uranus, at the sideways planet’s L-1 point. In energy terms it wasn’t hard to reach—from Miranda orbit Pelagia would need a bit more than a dozen kilometers per second to get into a minimum-energy transfer orbit. But the cost in time for that route was three months. That was all very well for dumb payloads or ships with no pressing engagements, but Pelagia needed to be at Taishi in just ten standard days.
On her own she could cut the travel time in half, but to manage this trip in the time available she needed more delta-v than her own drives and tanks could provide. So she transferred a big chunk of her gigajoule balance to Miranda Laser Control and waited for the proper window. It came just as the orange blob of the Sun rose above the dark rim of Uranus.
Pelagia’s wings (she still privately thought of them as fins) could take many shapes. They could be long high-lift albatross wings, broad high-maneuverability surfaces, or a slim delta for high-velocity atmosphere transit. In vacuum they could unfold into big radiators when she needed to run her fusion drive at maximum power. Now one side of the wide radiating surface turned shiny silver as some of the phased-array lasers at Miranda’s south pole targeted Pelagia and began pumping photons at her.
The acceleration was tiny, but constant, and it cost Pelagia absolutely no precious hydrogen. With enough time the Miranda laser array could shoot probes to other stars, if anyone felt like paying for that much energy.
She supplemented the laser boost with a long slow burn on her drive at maximum efficiency. Even with Miranda’s help Pelagia would reach Taishi with her tanks nine-tenths empty, but she would be there on time.
To avoid flying on past Taishi she would rely on her other propulsion system—a plasma sail. A little cloud of ionized hydrogen held in place by magnetic fields could expand out kilometers around Pelagia, catching the charged particles of the solar wind, and draining away their momentum. In the crowded inner Solar System it was sometimes awkward, but it made a dandy braking system to let her match vectors with Taishi.
According to old sources, the solar particle flux had once been considerably stronger, so that plasma-sail ships could zoom around the system at hundreds of kilometers per second. Now that the wind had to pass through the millions of habs in the Main Swarm between Venus and Mars, not to mention power collectors, particle harvesters, and millions of other spacecraft with their own plasma sails, it was more like a gentle breeze out at Uranus.
Pelagia wasn’t sure she believed those stories. Like most beings who had to learn to use a new set of senses early in life, she was sometimes a bit suspicious of external reality. The inputs to her brain might be the truth, or her tank might be sitting in a cave somewhere, getting nothing but lies and illusions.
Assuming the external universe actually existed, the solar breeze would be enough.
As she gained velocity, Pelagia looked back at Uranus. The ring in synchronous orbit was a dark line across the blue face of the planet, and a band of glittering gold against the dark of space. Three moons were visible, along with the hazy band of the outer belt of habitats. Miranda was a little white dot just beyond the ring, shining bright in infrared because of the launch laser pushing her along.
The laser array had a secondary purpose nobody liked to talk about: narrow the focus and increase the power, and it could blast apart a ship Pelagia’s size, or cripple anything up to the size of a small space habitat. With most of the moon’s critical infrastructure secure under a kilometer of ice, Miranda was a fortress. No need for a fleet, or even an army. No external enemy could threaten Miranda.
She decided Adya—and her chosen mate—would be safe enough in there. Time to stop playing pod matriarch and focus on the business of earning a living. Pelagia transmitted her arrival time ahead to Taishi, and spent the rest of the voyage wargaming attacks on Uranus’s moons and habitats, wondering which of her simulations would turn real.
Daslakh spent a few more hours puttering about Miranda, ignoring the natural wonders, the cities, and the palaces of the Shining Sea in order to get a look at the heavy industries on the surface, the transport infrastructure in the outer ice crust, and of course the launch laser complex. It spent many seconds chatting with other digital minds as it wandered, trying to improve its understanding of Miranda society.
It didn’t notice any more attempts to probe its mind—even with its external channels tightly controlled and monitored, it couldn’t detect anything suspicious. The most likely explanation was that whoever had tried to snoop in Daslakh’s memories earlier had decided it was too tough a target, and given up. Nevertheless, Daslakh disengaged itself from the local network as much as possible, and all incoming data went into a little emulator mind rather than Daslakh’s main personality. Paranoia had served it well for many years.
Having reverted to its old secretive habits, Daslakh returned to the Elso mansion without attracting any attention from the house system or any of the inhabitants. It crept noiselessly along the ceilings, camouflaging itself to match whatever surface it was walking over. And when it did run across Zee and Adya making themselves a late supper in the kitchen, it listened without announcing itself.
Adya had printed out some rice and was now showing Zee how to mix it with leftover fish meat and heat it over a red-glowing resistance coil.
“You have to keep stirring or it sticks,” she said. “But it gets a nice browned edge. Father says he can tell the difference between real caramelization and the same molecules printed.” She scraped the browned rice and fish onto two plates and handed the one with the bigger mound to him. “Do you want some chutney to mix in?” The small food printer on the counter started to hum.
“Sure. Adya . . .” Zee hesitated as she handed him the chutney jar. “I’ve been thinking about stuff lately. The future, you and me, things like that. Are you planning to stay here? In Miranda, I mean?”
“I can’t leave my parents when they’re having a hard time,” she said. “I know it’s irrational but I’d hate myself if I just abandoned them.”
“I know.” He stirred chutney into his rice and nobody spoke while they both shoveled food into their mouths. Zee got halfway through his pile of rice before he paused to drink some sweet wine. “It sounds like your grandmother’s Oort payload would fix everything.”
“Great-grandmother. Her name was Udaramati Elso-Elso. She traveled a lot—I think she visited all the major moons of Uranus and spent almost a decade in the outer habs. She was Miranda’s Foreign Minister for a time, and I think she did some intelligence work as well.”
“Sounds like you take after her.”
“Oh, no. Well, probably not. I mean, most of my genome is Mother’s. Anyway, she had some kind of huge conflict with my grandfather Diran, her only child. I don’t know all the details, but Diran went off to join some collective intelligence in a high-inclination hab as soon as Daddy was old enough to take over running things. They got a message about a decade later that he no longer existed as an independent entity. Great-gran was really crushed by that. She spent all her time here in the house, and let herself age until she was ready to die.”
“That’s too bad,” said Zee. He waited a moment, and then said, “I’ve got an idea. You need to help your parents, and I’m sure there’s a lot of people you want to see again, but I’ve got nothing to do. So why don’t I find out what happened to your trillion-gig payload from the Oort. How does that sound?”
“Are you sure about that, Zee? You don’t know much about Miranda law and business.”
“I’ll get Daslakh to help me.”
At that Daslakh let go of the ceiling and dropped gently to the table between the two of them. “I don’t know whether to be flattered that you know how much you depend on me, or insulted that you assume I have nothing better to do.”
“Well, do you?” asked Zee.
“Not really. Let me point out that the answer is very likely to be disappointing. A trillion gigajoule credits isn’t the sort of thing one just misplaces.”
“It’s due to arrive in twenty-five days,” said Adya. “Five days before the Jubilee.”
Before replying Daslakh checked with Miranda’s orbital tracking network. “Well, something’s on the schedule then, inbound at high velocity from trans-Neptune space. Ownership and contents are . . . private. I don’t want to mess with the orbit-control intelligences, at least not yet. We’ll have to work it from the other end: figure out when your family lost it, and who owns it now. I guess if it’s worth enough, you might be able to sue for a bigger payment. Assuming it’s intact, and contains what your great-grandmother said it does.”
As it spoke Daslakh was looking at the tracking data for the inbound payload. It was two hundred million kilometers out, still beyond Uranus’s sphere of influence, plunging sunward at a bit more than a hundred kilometers per second, well over system escape velocity. It was coming in on a medium-inclination trajectory, and if nothing slowed it down the payload would shoot through the inner Solar System then off into interstellar space in the general direction of the constellation Virgo.
But there was something in its way: Uranus. Or at least it would be in three and a half weeks. On its current trajectory the payload would just streak through the Uranian system, deflecting a little bit westward and flattening its orbital inclination by a few degrees, but not enough to keep it from flying off into the dark between the stars.
Miranda’s launch laser would start braking the payload in twenty days, pushing gigawatts at it over the course of fifty hours in order to bring it to a soft landing on the surface.
Assuming it really had been traveling for nearly five centuries, the payload’s velocity put its origin roughly ten thousand AU out from the Sun, right in the inner Oort Cloud. So that was consistent with Adya’s story. Its trajectory indicated a mass of eight tons, which was about right for a ton of exotic particles plus containment.
“She wouldn’t have lied to me,” said Adya, long milliseconds after Daslakh had finished its analysis. “And never mind Sundari’s speculations—Great-gran was unimpaired until her end. We used to play two parts on flute and keyboard, and she could riff and play ragas with supreme skill.”
“Why don’t we just ask the people who sent it?” said Zee. “The Oort people, or whoever their heirs are. They must have records.”
“The distance is daunting,” said Adya. “Even fleet-flying photons need eight weeks to reach far Fairbanks hab. The payload will land before any answer arrives.”
“Wow,” said Zee. “I guess I just think of everything past Neptune as being all one place.”
“The whole visible Solar System including the Kuiper Belt is a billionth the volume of the Oort,” said Daslakh. “Plenty of room out there. If you want to spin a collector as wide as the whole Uranian system to catch weird dark-matter particles, it’s barely noticeable.”
Hours later Adya woke with a little alert in her visual field: a priority personal message from her sister Kavita. Only four other beings could get a note past her privacy screen.
Answering it linked her directly to Kavita’s sensorium. At the moment her sister was trampolining off the deck of a catamaran cruising the Shining Sea under a dark purple sky about four hundred kilometers away. Each bounce on the trampoline carried Kav a couple of hundred meters up, giving her three or four minutes in the air between bounces. She was playing a game with five others, including a dolphin and two mers, in which they passed balls back and forth, keeping them airborne in a kind of multi-person juggling. The balls left trails of luminous colored smoke, making the whole volume of air above the boat into a fantastic swirl of glowing lines and vortexes.
Kavita bounced before replying. “Good morning, gorgeous!” she said over private comm, as she caught a ball trailing red smoke and tossed it to the dolphin, who was a few meters above her. “Has Mother married you off yet?”
“Are you sharing this?”
“Don’t worry. Private is private. The Kavitaloids can see what I see and feel what I’m doing, but you’re the only person getting my comms.” At the apex of her jump Kavita caught a green-smoking ball and passed it to a mer who was rising toward her.
“What’s so important?” asked Adya, getting up without disturbing Zee.
“Did Sundari speak of the trouble Daddy’s having with the rest of the coalition on the Committee?” As she fell back toward the trampoline Kavita caught a blue and a yellow ball in quick succession, lobbing them both at players bouncing upward.
“She said something about the situation. Nobody’s offering any help with the family finances. I deduce there is some dispute?”
Kavita hit the trampoline and let out an audible yell. As she shot upward she answered “That’s putting it politely. Daddy has some disagreement with the coalition captains. Something his Ministry is doing, I don’t know what. He could do a deal and offer obedience in exchange for a bailout, but this is Daddy, so no deal.” She paused to snatch at a ball trailing white smoke, but missed it. An angel orbiting around the play area caught it and tossed it back into play. “I think some of the financial failings are part of a plan to put pressure on our parents.”
“Did Mother and Daddy say so? Blaming others for their own mistakes?”
“Oh, they’ve definitely done their share of dumb deals,” said Kavita. “But some of the bad stuff sounds almost like snares set to seek their shortcomings. I can’t discuss any details with them directly, of course.” Kavita reached the top of her arc again and launched the red-smoke ball straight up, giving the other players plenty of time to catch it on the way down. “I bet you could.”
“I don’t know why you think I would have any better luck getting them to tell me anything,” said Adya.
Kavita sighed aloud. “All right, I’ll give you an Adya argument. One, you have time. You can’t spend all your waking hours wrapped around that lovely lad you brought back. Two, you can legitimately claim an interest. If Mother wants you to make a mercenary marriage, it’s perfectly sensible for you to know the dry details.”
She paused to bounce and then continued. “Three, you’re the smart one in their sight. Kooky Kavita’s too silly to sully her hollow head with financial finagling, but accomplished Adya does research for recreation.”
“If I could find proof of dirty dealings, perhaps we could push back against the coalition,” said Adya. “Pressure them to protect our position.”
“That’s a great idea!” said Kavita, catching the green ball with her right hand and the yellow with her left, then launching them in opposite directions. “Find out who is fucking with our family fortune, and coerce compensation. I love it! My audience will, too: drama and danger among the Sixty Families!”