A Dream of Sun and Roses

A DREAM OF SUN AND ROSES

Even as she bent to inhale the fragrance of the sunset-colored flower, Soleil knew that she was dreaming and that the memory she was dreaming was not her own.

And yet she was still intoxicated by the flower's perfume, a rich and heavy scent that was so dense and textured she could almost taste it.

And suddenly another sense memory came to her, also borrowed, but equally intense—a memory of drinking an infusion of flower petals that was sharp and slightly citric but with the dark sweetness of honey swirling through it.

Soleil knew what honey was—there were hives in the great domed greenhouses where the colony's food was grown—but she was certain she had never tasted rose petal tea and so knew the memory belonged to her mother, who had been born on Earth but followed Soleil's father into the heart of the galaxy.

His name was Joram, like his father before him, but it had been a long time since anyone had called him that. Those who worked for him addressed him as "Sir" and those who sought him had dubbed him "the Prince," a reference to an obscure and ancient book he was said to admire.

Some dismissed the Prince as an opportunist but if asked to define himself, Joram would have used the label "entrepreneur." One of his favorite quotes from the book that had earned him his nickname was, ""

The Prince had a genius for identifying opportunities and felt they came most often to those who knew where to look for them.

He had informants in every fold and wrinkle of space-time and he was generous with those who brought him useful information.

Sometimes all his sources had to sell were fragments and pieces and slivers of stories they'd heard in their travels, or overheard in crowded taverns and brothels, but the Prince was known to pay well, even for scraps, and no one ever left his presence without a few yuan in his or her pocket.

Over the years, the Prince had developed a keen instinct for knowing which stories had truth at their core and which did not, and when he heard the story about a treasure in a tower on an abandoned colonial world, there was something about the tale that caught his interest.

First, the tale had persisted for half a millennium. The Prince had learned that if a story is told and told again long enough, it turns into something like legend, no matter how mundane it was the first time it was told.

Second, the story often mentioned specific details—the world had been colonized by the Double Fortune Trading Company, so they said, and the treasure was guarded by a sleeping princess. The Prince had worked for the Double Fortune in his youth and knew the Consortium's rapacious colonizing efforts had spread to so many worlds that they'd abandoned those that didn't turn an immediate profit. The Prince had not enjoyed his time with the Double Fortune and liked the idea of finding a prize they'd overlooked and claiming it for his own.

So the Prince continued to collect information of a very particular kind as he went about his business, secure in the knowledge that one day he'd have the last piece of the puzzle so many had tried to solve before him.

And because the Prince was a patient man, eventually a rumor came to him by way of the moon market on Zhanghai, a story told by a drunken bureaucrat hoping to impress a pros-bot he was too drunk to see wasn't a "realie."

Bots have uses for yuan as much as any other species, and the Prince did not discriminate, so as soon as she had concluded her business with the bureaucrat, the bot had contacted the Prince.

For the price of a ticket back to Beixing and a case of Yalubari wine, the bot had sent the Prince the coordinates of a small ball of rock and water that was just barely a planetoid.