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"with full private bath." With the bed folded back into the seat, pushing on
the handle caused the seat to slide into the wall and an inverted suction
toilet to emerge from the wall above it. The toilet then rotated down to floor
level. Simultane-ously, a shower head emerged from the ceiling. According to
the directions, one could either use the toilet for its regular purpose
"having particular care to seal the unit before re-storing it," or one could
use it as the drain for the shower, allowing the toilet to suck the water out
of the room, "again having particular care to seal the unit before re-storing
it." Jak thought the repetition was probably warranted considering the
consequences of forgetting to do that.
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John Barnes - The Duke of Uranium
Jak resealed the toilet and folded it back in. The placard had said that there
"might be some noise, due to automatic flushing and cleaning, after re-storing
toilet." The "some noise" sounded very much like sticking one's head in a
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running rocket engine.
With his "stateroom" completely explored, Jak set out to see the rest of the
areas where passengers were permitted in the ship. Each of the six
counterrotating rings of cabins, except the outer "dirtpig" ring where cabin
space was priced too light to waste on common areas, had some attraction or
other, supposedly. He quickly got the hang of using the scoops to get from
ring to ring; the door into the scoop space would not open unless you had at
least a half minute to get into the lift box. Once you did, and the door
closed behind you, the scoop from the next level, a long gradual slide, would
come in under the lift box and carry it up until you matched the next ring for
height and speed. It felt like a combination of a slow elevator with a
particularly sickening amusement ride.
On each level, Jak discovered that the supposed amusements were the same sort
of semantic travesty that
"stateroom" had been. The "four pools" on the level just above him were two
pairs of individual-sized flowpools on opposite sides of a big rotating drum;
you could swim (assuming you didn't become hopelessly disoriented by the
Coriolis and the rush of water from the front to the back of the pool), but
realistically what they were was high-grav power bathtubs. The "casino" on the
next deck was a six-
screen gambling machine arcade. Each of the "eleven 24-hour restaurants" on
the third deck was two tables with a food dispenser whose ethnicity vaguely
matched the painted decorations. The second deck's viv rooms were so small
that signs warned against trying to play any game in other than solo seated
mode; the "24-hour dance club" on the light deck was an ovoid about five
meters on its long axis, with recorded music, a drink dispenser, and some
flashing colored lights. Jak had been in at least one jail cell with better
atmosphere.
After that tour of the "ultimate in luxury facilities," to quote the sales
copy, Jak checked the time and discovered he had used up about forty-five
minutes since his arrival. Only seventy-eight days to go.
The viv is the traditional refuge of the truly entertainment-starved, so Jak
went to the second deck. But he was used to viv games in big rooms with full
contact suits and dozens of people playing, coming and going all the time;
these little solitary games were hardly worthy of the name. After an hour of
shooting it out with bad guys and whipping it out for bad girls, Jak was
tired, irritable, and bored.
He still wasn't hungry and anyway dinner would probably not consume an hour.
For a few dreadful seconds he considered plugging into some eduviv and
studying some subject or other. When he realized he was actually contemplating
voluntarily getting more schooling, he wondered how close you could come to
going mad in just a couple of hours.
Finally he had a thought that made him laugh out loud, startling the morose
man who was eating chow fong at the other table in the Ristorante Italiano,
where Jak had been idly toying with a cup of espresso.
Jak made some gesture of apology, got up, and went down to his stateroom to
change, still chuckling.
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John Barnes - The Duke of Uranium
He had thought that Uncle Sib had been moralizing as usual, along the lines of
"always brush your teeth after meals," when he had said, "You will want to
work through the full Disciplines at least twice per day, maybe more." Now Jak
finally dakked that Sib had merely been making an accurate prediction. That
was
what Jak would want to do, at least until he acquired some shipboard toves.
There was hardly any better way to kill many hours than in the no-time of the
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Disciplines, and he could always use more practice.
After he dressed, he checked the room screen and found that passengers who
wanted a full-g workout could use the centrifuged practice rooms in the crew
gym. He might as well work out there, considering that he was going to the
place that defined full-g; besides, it would help to tire him and make him
more likely to sleep. He booked one of the practice rooms immediately and
called up a sprite to show him the way.
He had just climbed through the hub and down the ladder into the practice
room, and had barely begun to warm up in earnest, when a ping overhead
announced someone at the door. Glad for any source of distraction, Jak pushed
the come-in without checking to see who it was.
THE DUKE OF URANIUM 99
The ladder extended from the door in the ceiling down to the floor. The
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