The Duke of Uranium

CHAPTER 1

Teacher Fwidya said you couldn't not dak the idea, because it was so central to the way everyone thought about the world, so naturally Jak Jinnaka tried not to even understand the idea. Jak was that way—tell him he couldn't and he'd try. Uncle Sib always said it was a good thing nobody'd ever told him you can't breathe vacuum.

Jak always responded that even if he did precess a little when people said "You can't. . ." he was at least smart enough to do his challenging mostly in situations where that did not matter. And it could hardly have mattered less than it did in this situation. Philosophy and Religion Fundamentals Review was a class that you had to take, but you could be graded only on attendance. Theoretically it could help your application to the Academy but not hurt you. Jak specked it was a sinecure for teachers who really enjoyed hassling younger people with statements of the obvious.

Right now Fwidya was trying hard to get them to see that the Wager was important. Dujuv, sitting next to Jak, objected, "Teacher, isn't this kind of like saying that space travel, or fire, or the wheel, were important? I mean, we know that the whole solar system daks the Wager, it's about the only thing that holds the whole human race together, and we all know that the Hive is the center of the true version of the Wager, masen?"

"Everyone believes that they live in the true center of the Wager," Fwidya said, primly. He paced back and forth. This far up in the Hive, 650km above the black hole, the gravity was at 0.4. Fwidya probably didn't intend to bounce as much as he did, but he was a kobold, and the genies had never specked the singing-on ratio between control muscles and main muscle masses for that breed, so his overpowered, squatty leg muscles were always bouncing him too high in this classroom.

"Everyone, everyone, everyone," he repeated. Teacher Fwidya didn't have that habit of repetition because he was a kobold; he had it because he was pedantic, even if he wasn't a bad old gwont on the personal level. "Everyone thinks that they live at the center of the only true version of the Wager. If they thought elsewise, they'd move. Remember the Wager's very own Nineteenth Principle, the one that Nakasen always stressed as essential to success in life: 'Whenever possible, agree with those in power.' Now, nonetheless, the Wager, despite its many, many interpretations, has allowed unprecedented peace through the simple application of the Two Hundred Thirty-four Principles. By now you surely must at least have learned that—"

They had, so they ignored Fwidya's ten-minute summary of the last thousand years of solar system history, and all the interpolated commentary about the Wager and about what Paj Nakasen had meant by it originally and what it had become. Jak drew a caricature of Fwidya, and showed it to Dujuv, who mimed dying of some horrible disease. The students nearby shifted their balance to make it clear that they had nothing to do with them.

It was their last twenty minutes of gen school.