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you’ve been so mysterious about?”
    Jak played Sesh’s message.
    “Believe it or not, Uncle Sib, I really would like your opinion.”
    “Now I know the world is ending. I’ll have to watch it again before I
have
an opinion.”
    He listened all the way through a second time. “Well, that
is
interesting. Certainly you’ll be able to get your Dean to take this as the project for your Junior Task. It’s almost too
     perfect. You’ve done the standard authentication checks?”
    “And all the premium ones that I can access and afford,” Jak said. “I did pay some attention to you, growing up.”
    Sib grunted with satisfaction. “Well, we should keep in mind that a really good fake can spoof them. Authenticators are just
     big fast smart AIs, and a singing-on good fake will fool them more often than not, but a bad or average fake won’t, so this
     message is either authentic or a much-better-than-average fake. But that said, I think I know what’s going on.”
    Recognizing a prompt when he heard it from a heet who was always willing to write a check, Jak asked, “What do you think is
     going on, Uncle Sib?”
    His uncle hesitated for a moment. “Er, I know you’re fond of her, so—you’re not a prude, are you? You do realize that aristos
     pretty much go at it like dogs in the park?”
    “Sure,” Jak said. “It’s one of their most attractive qualities. But a sex scandal wouldn’t be a problem for Sesh. A young
     good-looking princess with a hot sex life would just make the porn gossip media more often, and maybe get a few nasty sermons
     preached at her by the Tolerated Faiths. If she were pregnant by the wrong person—” he thought “—no, she’d just get an injection
     like anyone else, before anyone knew. Since as far as anyone knows she agrees with her father about everything, she could
     have just turned over anything political to regular government security.
    “And all the other possibilities seem much more farfetched. She could be secretly married to a commoner and need me for some
     part of the cover-up. She could be secretly pregnant with a child from a rare genetic line—say a purebred gracile or a schiz-free
     leo—and afraid to be charged with criminal gene loss.” He ticked off other possibilities with his thumb against his fingers.
     “Or, addicted to a psychosis or retardation-inducing drug, maybe
xleeth
or dreamballs. Or, so deep in shopping debt or gambling debt that she’s used shares in her kingdom as collateral and a rival
     house bought the IOUs. Or, secretly engaged to Psim Cofinalez—every message from her she talks about what a toktru fine heet
     he is, and half the solar system would go to war to prevent a marriage between them. But she said she didn’t need me to run
     a message to her secret lover. What am I leaving out?”
    “Try not to hate me but it’s ethnographic.”
    “The whole universe seems to be ganging up to make me learn everyone else’s social customs,” Jak grumbled.
    Sib looked thoughtful and pulled at his goatee for a moment. “You know,” he said, “you’re righter than you think you are,
     pizo. The whole universe
is
ganging up to make you do that. Eventually you’ll figure out that you can’t fight them. Anyway, I think she’s a target of
     republicans—perhaps they’ve gotten hold of something
they
regard as a sex scandal—and she needs to do some unofficial suppressing.”
    “Uncle Sib, why do you always say ‘republican’ with that tone of voice? I mean, the Hive is republican—we don’t have an aristocracy.”
    “Jak, there’s republican and then there’s
republican.
The Hive is a republic because it was built as part of the first development of the Wager, and Paj Nakasen designed our society,
     and he thought a republic was a better idea than a monarchy. (Who knows why he thought something stupid like that?)
    “Now, as for me, I moved to the Hive ninety years ago and I’ve never ceased regretting that we don’t have a