Impersonations

by Walter Jon Williams

  A wave of pure blazing paranoia flamed through Sula. Ratnasari was not only voicing subversive ideas a short distance from Earth’s seat of government, but he was also trying to recruit Sula for some kind of political club. Which meant not that he was some kind of evangelist for an alternate political system, but that he was an agent provocateur, someone who intended to compromise Sula with the authorities or get her killed.

  “I’m not very interested in political questions,” she said.

  “Oh.” Ratnasari was surprised. “I must have been unclear. Democracy Club doesn’t advocate democracy—that would of course be absurd for anyone living under the perfection of the Praxis. No, instead we re-create democracy as a method of understanding the past.”

  Sula was still wary. “Perhaps you’d better explain,” she said.

  “Well.” Ratnasari’s fork dug into a pastry. “You’re familiar with re-creationist groups, yes? People who dress up as people from history and reenact the past?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t have them on Zanshaa?” Ratnasari seemed disappointed.

  “Not that I know of. Unless you count costume parties.”

  Ratnasari was thoughtful. “Of course, the Shaa established the Praxis as something eternal and unchanging, so there would be no point in re-creating the past—it would be just like the present, yes? But here on Earth, we have thousands of years of history before the Shaa appeared, so sometimes, groups of people try to re-create aspects of the past in order to better understand them—how life was lived with primitive technology, or how people organized themselves, or how battles were fought—”

  “Battles?” Sula said. “You fight battles?” Ratnasari had swerved from subversion to gang warfare.

  “Well,” Ratnasari said, “no one actually gets killed. They fire blanks or whatever, or fight with dummy swords. But the uniforms and the tactics and so on are authentic.”

  Sula’s military experience had included seeing her commander die in antimatter fire, watching her comrades tortured to death on video, standing by in helpless anguish while her lover died of a wound that the doctor somehow hadn’t managed to locate in time. . . . She couldn’t work out exactly how Ratnasari’s dummy combat was authentic, not without people being hacked or blown to bits, without the blood of children running in the streets, without thousands of the Fleet’s finest annihilated even on the atomic level, and all in the blink of an eye. . . .

  Sula made an effort to unclench her fists. “Without death,” she said, as mildly as she could, “you rather miss the point.” Without real death, she thought, it was all just a costume party.

  “I don’t really know about those groups,” Ratnasari said quickly. “I specialize in government.”

  “Ah. Right.”

  “In fact, Democracy Club is meeting in a few days. Perhaps you would consider attending, if you’re interested.”

  Sula made an effort to be civil. “I don’t think my career would be enhanced by practicing a system forbidden by the Praxis.”

  “Oh! That’s all right!” Ratnasari grinned. “We have permission from Lord Governor Ngeni to perform historical experiments. I even send him abstracts of all our sessions.”

  Sula looked at Ratnasari with increased respect. He seemed to have covered himself rather well.

  Then she noticed, out of the corner of her eye, three Daimong members of the Legion of Diligence enter the cafe, and she stiffened. Despite their chiming talk, the pale expressionless faces floating above the black uniforms looked like an ominous, spectral visitation from a world of ghosts.

  The Legion of Diligence was the dreaded corps charged with investigating crimes against the Praxis, and were known for their rigor, efficiency, and brutality. It was the Legion who had investigated and killed Caro Sula’s parents, and if anyone reported the conversation that Sula and Ratnasari had just had, it was the Legion who would investigate whether or not a capital crime had just been committed.

  Sula finished her tea and placed the cup in its saucer. “Let’s look at Hagia Sofia, shall we?”

  The ruins of the great basilica had a broad-shouldered majesty that hinted at the state power that had created such a vast interior space in an era when the most advanced tools were dividers, squares, and plumb bobs. Sula learned new words like “exonarthex,” viewed more repurposed pagan pillars lying in rows or supporting half-ruined structures, and explored the re-created virtual basilica from the viewing room of a nearby museum. Lord Moncrieff had given permission for her to view the cult art that had once saturated the interior: Christ Pantokrator on the ventral surface of the great dome, gazing down at the congregation with an expression of faint concern; saints and emperors and virgins on nearly every other surface; and eerie cherubim on the pendentives beneath the dome, solemn faces wreathed in sets of multiple wings. Almost all done in mosaic against a background of gold tiles that glowed like a brilliant sunrise in the light of the high windows.

  Below the great dome were the Ottoman additions: more brilliant tiles in a rainbow of color, the intricate screen of the Sultan’s loge, the giant wheel-like chandeliers, and the great medallions inscribed with the names of Muhammad and his early followers. In the virtual basilica, it was possible to observe the building at different stages, to view Justinian’s original structure, watch in turn subsequent modifications, the various reconstructions, the additions of the Ottomans, the last restoration under the Shaa before the earthquake ruined all their labor. Sula spent half the afternoon looking at the building and found herself thinking about Justinian, who had slaughtered thirty thousand of his own citizens, sent his armies rampaging on campaigns of conquest throughout the Mediterranean, then built this magnificent monument to himself, or his god, or both.

  She’d seen the Great Refuge, where the Shaa conquerors lived out their long lives, and the Couch of Eternity, where their ashes were stored, and though each building was monumental, neither could be described as inspiring—unless, possibly, you were one of the Shaa. They were labyrinths, almost like office buildings, with no great open spaces, no attempt to inspire the imagination, no originality or innovation. The Great Refuge was a place for work. The Couch of Eternity was a place where the Shaa were laid to rest in disciplined, orderly rows.

  To the Shaa, all the great questions had already been answered. It remained only to carry out the plan that had been decided centuries ago, then die.

  It wasn’t until she left the museum and looked up into the sky, where the antimatter ring arched high above the world, and she thought, Well, maybe the Shaa built some impressive things, after all.

  * * *

  Sula spent three days in Constantinople, viewing monuments with Ratnasari, then got back on the ground-effect transport and roared back to Egypt, where she was guided by one of Ratnasari’s colleagues. The Giza pyramids had been restored some centuries in the past by Lady Camille Umri, who had re-sheathed the structures in the brilliant white limestone in which they had first been dressed. She had also re-created some of the associated buildings, and was in the middle of restoring the pyramids of Dahshur when her family’s fortune ran out, and she ended in a hospital ward under the impression she was Hatshepsut.

  Sula thought the pyramids, unlike Hagia Sophia, were very much like something the Shaa might have built, as a monument to the Fundamental Gravity of the Praxis or the Incontrovertible Perfection of Geometry, or something equally dogmatic. Most of the Egyptian monuments seemed as programmatic as anything the Shaa had built, and seeing the pyramids beneath the arch of the antimatter ring didn’t seem a contradiction at all.

  She reported these thoughts to Cousin Goojie, who was still stuck in her long deceleration burn. Caro Sula’s best friend was proving a good sounding board for her ideas, possibly because Goojie had nothing to do on her transport but listen to Sula’s dispatches.

  “You know,” Goojie said in response, “it never occurred to me that even on Earth, there would be anything different from what we see everywhere else in the empir
e.” Her green eyes narrowed. “I don’t remember you being at all interested in history. When did you change?”

  Sula felt a warning finger touch her spine. Caro Sula’s interest in clothes, alcohol, and drugs had left little time for any other hobbies—so perhaps a deep interest in and knowledge of Earth history might seem suspicious to anyone who knew Caro in person.

  But there had been a great many years since Goojie had seen Caro in the flesh.

  “I got interested in history when I left Zanshaa,” Sula said in her return message, “and saw how different everything was from what I’d seen in the capital.”

  If that sounded odd to Goojie, she didn’t mention it in her response.

  Sula returned to Constantinople on the night that Democracy Club was scheduled to meet. She would have begged off if Ratnasari hadn’t shown up in person to take her to the meeting—she decided she owed him for the splendid time she’d had splashing through ancient tunnels beneath the city, and agreed to join him.

  The club met in a small lecture room in the supremely ugly Transport Council building, built over what had been the Sultan Ahmet Mosque. Sula counted sixteen people, of whom a dozen were Terran and the rest divided between Lai-own and Torminel. Half seemed to have brought takeout dinner with them, and the scent of grilled proteins wafted through the room. Most of the participants were dressed in anachronistic costumes featuring dull colors and eccentric neckware, presumably appropriate to whatever democracy they were supposed to represent. Ratnasari introduced Sula to his co-enthusiasts, and to her slight embarrassment, they applauded her.

  She took a position to one side while the umpire, a Miss Çetinkaya, explained the night’s exercise. The participants were playing the roles of the city council and the mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States of America. They were meeting to discuss the budget, which had already been passed but which required modification due to a predicted twenty percent shortfall, an economic downturn, a large corporation moving its headquarters to another city, and bad weather resulting in less grain being shipped through the port.

  Ratnasari, taking a seat next to Sula, explained that the United States had been a prosperous democratic republic, in which citizens elected others to represent them on the city council and other civic forums.

  “I thought the United States was some kind of oligarchy based on religion.”

  “That, too.”

  The discussion among the hobbyists was prolonged, embracing a wide variety of solutions, including raising taxes, cutting personnel, issuing bonds, charging more for use of city facilities . . . and by that point, Sula had stopped listening. Democracy, she decided, had to be the most idiotic form of government ever invented.

  Why not just appoint someone to deal with the situation? If he succeeded, he would be rewarded, and if he met with disaster . . . and at that point, her imagination failed because those who failed in the empire were judged not by their actions but by the virtues of their ancestors. Those belonging to important families either continued in office, were promoted, or went on to other endeavors; and those with insufficiently grand connections were disgraced, dismissed, imprisoned, or executed. In any case, lines of responsibility were clear.

  In Milwaukee, no single individual seemed to be in charge of anything, and so they argued interminably about things for which they had no personal responsibility. And most of them seemed to have very little practice at public speaking, so they meandered about the subject without ever quite getting to the point.

  Sula relieved the tedium of the meeting by opening her sleeve display and planning the next stages of her journey, but she was distracted by a Terran woman across the room who was trying to attract her attention.

  The woman was costumed in a severe dark gray skirt-suit, pale blouse, and a floppy dark strip of cloth tied around her neck. Her skin was a dark teak color, and her long hair a bright henna-red. She kept looking at Sula and grinning at her, nodding as if Sula was an old friend and should nod back.

  Sula couldn’t recollect seeing the woman before—that brilliant red hair would be something she’d remember—but then, she’d met a lot of people since she became a celebrity, and she supposed she couldn’t recall them all. And possibly, she thought, the hair hadn’t always been red.

  Sula nodded, gave a little wave, and returned to her sleeve display. The woman’s grin broadened and she returned the wave. Sula ignored her.

  Eventually, the meeting driveled on to a conclusion, and a new budget passed by a narrow majority. Relieved beyond measure, Sula turned off her sleeve display, rose from her chair, and stretched.

  “Did you enjoy that?” Ratnasari said. “Wasn’t it interesting?”

  “I had no idea our ancestors got up to such things,” Sula said. No wonder they got themselves conquered, she thought, if all they did was engage in pointless debate while the Shaa missiles were heading for their cities.

  The henna-haired woman bustled through the crowd and appeared at Sula’s elbow. “It’s good to see you again,” she said.

  “Always a pleasure,” Sula said. “But I’m afraid your name has slipped my mind.”

  “Adele Souka,” the woman said.

  Neither the name nor her appearance triggered any memory in Sula.

  “What are you doing on Terra?” Sula asked.

  Adele Souka was surprised by the question. “The same as when we last spoke. I’m working for Kantari Modulars.”

  Sula didn’t know Kantari Modulars, either. She felt a vague, possibly apologetic smile creep over her face. “Very good,” she said.

  Adele Souka seemed puzzled. “You don’t remember?” she said. “It was only—”

  “Captain Sula! Captain Sula!” The new arrival was a tall, spindly Terran, pale, with a full beard, suede boots, a pinstripe suit that made him seem even taller than he was, and a full grin.

  “I’m Jack Danitz,” he said. A big baritone voice boomed from his narrow chest. “I was the council member who represented the Hmong neighborhood, you may remember.”

  “Of course,” Sula said. She remembered the big baritone voice and wondered as well what a Hmong might be, but couldn’t recall anything Danitz actually said, or whether it was useful.

  “I belong to another club besides this one,” said Jack Danitz. “We do military simulations.”

  “Ah. Hah,” Sula said. She presumed Danitz probably fought in those bloodless battles that Ratnasari had mentioned.

  “We’ve been meeting recently,” Danitz continued, “and we’ve been refighting Second Magaria—and we can’t seem to get it to come out the way it did in reality.”

  She blinked up at him. “How exactly—”

  “Oh. We use a tactical computer simulation, like those used in Fleet exercises. The same software, actually, because some of our club members are well placed and were able to get ahold of an older version of actual Fleet software. And the armament and capabilities of the various ships are available in the public record, after all, so all the preparation needed was to plug the information into the program.” His toothy grin broadened. “I’ve played you, commanding Light Squadron Seventeen in the van. But I keep getting killed.”

  Sula smiled inwardly. Sacrificing Light Squadron Seventeen had very clearly been part of Fleet Commander Tork’s plan during the battle.

  “We’ve fought the battle over and over,” Danitz said. “Sometimes the loyalists win, sometimes the Naxids, but the one thing that’s constant from one simulation to the next is that the van squadron is always annihilated.” Danitz looked down at Sula in apparent delight. “And yet here you are!”

  Sula threw out her arms, like an actor taking a bow. “Yet here I am,” she agreed.

  “And seven of your ships survived. Every time we refought the battle, the whole group was wiped out!”

  “Sorry you got such a thrashing.”

  “We’ve worked on the problem for months!” Danitz proclaimed. “And we’ve done absolutely ridiculous amounts of research—” He pointed a narrow
finger at her. “I probably know more about you than anyone besides yourself. All about your life, your family, that time you spent on Spannan before you went to the academy . . .”

  Sula’s heart lurched. A wave of heat flooded up her spine. If there was one thing she did not want researched, it was Caro Sula’s time on Spannan.

  “I don’t think—think that sort of thing will help.” She cursed the stammer that made her seem like a guilty idiot.

  Danitz stepped closer, looming over her like one of the pillars of Karnak. Sula caught a whiff of underarm and exasperation. “How did you do it?” he demanded. “How did you preserve your command? We’ve all been cudgeling our brains and—”

  Sula took a step back away from the towering figure, the roaring voice, the threatening finger wagging in her face, but found a desk directly behind her and her line of retreat blocked. Claustrophobia seized her chest with steel talons. She struggled to master her rising terror and strike back at this looming, clamorous nightmare.

  Sula narrowed her eyes. “I’m not going to help you win your next game,” she said. “That would give you an unfair advantage.”

  Danitz spluttered. “That’s not what I meant!” he bellowed. “Look—you can come to our next meeting and take command of your squadron yourself. We could all refight the battle! We’d love to watch you! Learn from you!”

  “If you ever work out how I did it,” she said, “let me know.” She turned to Ratnasari. “Could you possibly take me back to the lord governor’s palace?” she asked. “It’s been a long day.” She looked over her shoulder at the assembled group. “Pleasant to meet you all.” She gave a little wave to Adele Souka on her way out and received a melancholy, baffled look in response.

  In the car, on her way to the hotel, while Ratnasari burbled on the subject of Democracy Club and all the exciting conclusions about Earth’s past that could be drawn from the night’s meeting, Sula’s fear and claustrophobia turned to paranoia.

  A whole club, she thought as she rubbed the pad of scar tissue on her right thumb, a whole club was investigating her. A club that included well-placed individuals with access to Fleet software and Fleet data. A whole club digging into every aspect of her life in hopes it would somehow reveal her tactics at Second Magaria, but could just as easily—could more easily—reveal her tactics on Spannan, when she had stepped into Caro Sula’s identity.