The Duke Of Uranium Read Online Free PDF Page A

anymore, I’ll probably travel much more.”
    All of them stared at Sesh; none of them had any idea what to say. “Look,” she said, “it’s not a big deal.
    I’m not evil. The Wager makes perfect sense if you’re smart and ambitious and need to make money because your trust fund isn’t big enough. But I’m glib more than smart, my main ambition is nice things and lots of time off, and I can afford all that without any job. And it makes sense to teach the Wager to people so that they’re more predictable and easier to get what you want from, but I don’t care whether I’m predictable or whether anyone gets what they want from me. The Wager is a great set of values to channel people trying to make it into useful pathways, but I was born with it made, and I have no intention of being useful, which is the first step on the road to being used. I’m not going to wear a skirt that doesn’t suit my long legs or go out with a heet that doesn’t suit my sarcastic taste in humor, so why should I have values that don’t suit my real position?” She sighed. “It’s nice to just tell you all this. I’m tired of having to tell you that I won an advertising contest or a sweepstakes or something whenever I want to take you somewhere pricey.”
    “Oh, no,” Myx said. “So you were just—”
     
    “Toktru masen! And I’m doing it again. After all, there’s so much money, toktru it doesn’t mean anything to me, but my friends mean a lot to me, and fun means a lot to me. I can afford the lightest, usually many times over, and I like taking you all to places that are light. So—no arguments!—I’m financing some fun with my friends, tonight.”
    “Sesh, no—” Dujuv began.
    “I just happen to have four tickets for the closing performance of Y4UB.”
    There was a dead silence. Those had been sold out for months; if Sesh had gotten four of them legitimately, she had spent a small fortune, and if she’d gotten them from a scalper, it hadn’t been small.
    It was also the kind of event you fantasized about going to.
    “Well,” Jak said, ‘“Principle 11: Break any principle except this one and a few others, but expect the consequences.’ I hope you two will come along to make sure I don’t fall any further into”—he slipped into his best Teacher Fwidya impression—”the dark swamp of that hideous contemporary affliction, that cancer in the engine of society, that endless font of mixed metaphors, moral relativism!”
    The girls laughed; Dujuv said, “You’ll sound more like him if you use more emphasis.”
    “Everyone’s a critic. But are we going to do this?”
    “Oh, sure,” Myxenna said. She stretched in a way that seemed to be sort of an anatomy lesson. “It’s not like I’ve always been extra extremely careful about my principles, if you dak me, masen?”

Chapter 2
    It’s Not the Spread, It’s the Score, and You Lost
    Jak had summoned Rover, the family private Pertrans car, as soon as he’d gotten up to leave the Old China Cafe, and by the time he had crossed the hundred-meter-wide courtyard between the restaurant and the private-car Pertrans stop, Rover was gliding into a berth there. Rover was a nice-looking car, with the Crosshatch in a purple-yellow Mardi Gras retro that was very clash-splash-andsmash; Jak was grateful that Uncle Sib had let him program the car’s surface colors, so that the thing didn’t embarrass him when he was out with his toves.
    As he crossed the courtyard, he glanced up at the high ceiling, seventy meters overhead; Entrepot was located on a series of ring balconies, so that you could always see everything. It wasn’t the biggest shopping area in the Hive, and certainly not the trendiest or most expensive, but for Jak and his friends it had been home for a long time, and would be forever—shopping areas paced their demographics, so just as Entrepot catered to teenagers now, in about 180 years, it would be catering to two-hundred-yearolds.
     
    Sesh’s revelations