by Kate Elliott
“—there just aren’t many actors who can make the change from the vids to the theater successfully, though I’ll admit you’re right about Gwyn Jones. He was superb. But take their Zenocrate. Just a little overdone all around. I suppose they took her on for the publicity—”
“—did you see Charles Soerensen? No, there, you fool. You didn’t know he’d be at the performance tonight? It was all over the net—”
“—and Rico was in a rare fury, too, when he discovered the two of them kissing backstage. Imagine, he’d been boasting for the last year that he’d bed her, but nothing came of it. And then it turns out that his sister has been sleeping with her all along.”
Diana laughed, and then clapped a hand over her mouth, stifling it. Marco raised one eyebrow and shifted his shoulder so that the two young men—dressed in the gaudy gold-threaded robes that were the most recent fashion at the universities—could not see her past his body.
“It’s all right,” she murmured. “They won’t recognize me without my stage makeup.”
“—and what do you suppose Soerensen is up to now, eh? He got the Chapalii merchant house, and what a coup that was, too. Just like laughing in the faces of those damned chameleons. And now he’s going off to that primitive world—what is it? Rhui, yes, that’s it. Something’s going on, I tell you. A man like Soerensen has deep plans. I’d wager my own children that we’ll see some kind of action soon against the Empire.”
“Is it true?” asked Diana, watching Marco as he tracked this last speaker with his gaze out the balcony exit.
“Is what true?”
“That Soerensen’s sister is alive, and on Rhui.”
His attention snapped back to her. “Where did you hear that?”
“Oh, we all know it. In the Company. Even after the Protocol Office made the official announcement of her death, Soerensen never confirmed it or denied it. And he never adopted a new heir. Isn’t that his right, by Chapalii law? And anyway, why else would Soerensen let us travel to Rhui? He took so much trouble to restrict the planet from all outside contact to begin with. And why would he come along with us? Really, you must give us some credit for intelligence.”
“Infinite credit, fair one. It sits beside your infinite beauty.”
“Can beauty be infinite?”
“Only in Keats. What else have you heard?”
“About the sister? Nothing. About Rhui—well, we’re going to a city called Jeds, first. Soerensen styles himself Prince there, so we’ll be under his protection. Not that any of the natives will know where we’re really from. After some time there, then there’s a chance we’ll be going out into the bush, into the really primitive areas. Owen says that we might be traveling with nomads. Doesn’t that sound romantic?”
Marco looked amused. “You aren’t scared, going off like this to be thrown in among savages? With no modern weaponry to protect yourself?”
“Certainly not. This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. I’ve never had a moment’s danger in my life. I auditioned for the Company because I loved the risks Owen and Ginny were taking with theater, and with the traditions of theater. And this! Well, I suppose Jeds will be much like any city, only dirtier and primitive. But taking the theater out to these barbarian nomads—that’s going to be a real adventure!” She felt flushed, and she knew she was declaiming. But what did it matter? Non-actors always seemed to expect her to talk that way offstage as well as on, and it was true how she felt, and she felt it so deeply.
Marco watched her, looking, perhaps, a little wistful. “I wish I’d known you when Charles and I started all this,” he said softly. “I think you would have come with me, the first of us to set foot on Rhui.”
She stared, entranced by the green of his eyes. “I would have,” she said, sure that at this moment it was true. Though she knew he must be as old as her biological father, he did not look ten years older than her, an attractive man made handsome as much by the suppressed air of wildness about him as by any pretensions to beauty. A man who knew adventure, who knew real danger, who had felt death close at hand and looked it in the face. Her own life had been so—safe.
“Goddess, you’re young,” he said, and broke the spell.
Diana blushed, but she chuckled. “That’s put me in my place.” She laid a hand on the railing, a self-conscious pose, and looked down from this great height onto the stage. “Oh. That’s what you meant, isn’t it? About choosing these plays for our farewell performance. Tamburlaine was a nomad. Do you suppose the nomads we’re going to travel with have a Tamburlaine among them?”
She said it lightly, but Marco’s lips pressed together, and his gaze shifted from her down to the distant figure that was Charles Soerensen. Soerensen was speaking easily with several people that even from this height Diana recognized, the Director of the Royal Academy, the prime minister of the Eurasian States, a respected vid journalist, the assistant stage manager, an usher—he was a university student majoring in xenobotany—who had once made a pass at her, and one of the clerks from the box office who had brought her two children to meet The Great Man. A sudden swirl of movement in the box steadied and stilled to reveal one of the tall, thin alien Chapalii. The creature bowed to Soerensen, offering him the delicate crystal wand in which the Chapalii conveyed important messages from one noble to another.
“I must go,” said Marco. “May I escort you down?” He offered her his elbow, and Diana placed her fingers on his sleeve. The contact overwhelmed her, and she could suddenly think of nothing to say. Walking this close to him, down the carpeted stairwell that led to the lobby, she could not imagine why he should be interested in her at all, except, of course, that she was young, pretty, and blonde. This man had explored a wild and dangerous world, alone most of the time, and he was the confidant and right hand of the most important human alive.
“Shall I introduce you?” Marco asked suddenly, and too late Diana realized she was being steered to the box from which Charles Soerensen had watched the play.
How could she refuse? She calmed her suddenly erratic breathing by force of habit and let him lead her there.
A cluster of people walked toward them down the corridor. A moment later they were swept into the retinue.
“There you are, Marco,” said Soerensen. He held the crystal wand in his left hand. It shimmered and glinted under the hall lights.
“Charles, I’ve brought one of the actors to meet you. This is Diana Brooke-Holt, of the repertory company.”
“Ah.” Soerensen stopped. “M. Brooke-Holt. I’m honored to meet you.” He looked ordinary enough, but his stare was intense: Diana felt as if she were being recorded, measured, and filed away against future need.
However much she wanted to collapse into a gibbering heap, she knew how to present a collected exterior. She extended her right hand, and he shook it. “The honor is mine,” she said, careful to give the words no earth-shattering sentiment, only simple politeness.
“You played Zabina, did you not?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“She comes to a rather bloody end.”
Diana chuckled. “Yes, she does, poor thing. But I suppose that I’ve always felt more sorry for Zenocrate.”
He looked suddenly and acutely interested. “Why is that?”
“Because once Tamburlaine had marked her out as his, she didn’t really have much choice but to fall in love with him, did she? Not that he coerced her as much as—” She shrugged, and was abruptly aware that both Soerensen and Marco regarded her intently, as if she were revealing some long-sought-after secret to them. She faltered, realizing that the entire retinue had stopped to listen, some with polite interest, some with no interest at all, but none with the piercing attention of the two men. With an effort, she gathered together the shredding fabric of her self-confidence and drew herself up. “A man like that would be hard to resist,” she finished, with dramatic flourish.
“Bravo,” said Marco, sotto voce.
Soerensen smiled. “But I
particularly enjoyed your performance as Grusha in the Brecht play. I look forward to seeing what Owen and Ginny come up with for their next experiment. If you’ll excuse me.” He nodded, collected the attention of his retinue with unconscious ease, and went on his way.
Marco lingered. “I must go,” he said again, although he made no move to follow the others.
“I must, too,” she replied. “Really.”
“I’ll see you on the ship, perhaps.”
“Oh, we’ll be rehearsing the whole way out. Owen and Ginny are rather dragons about that, when they’re developing new material.”
“Then in Jeds.”
She smiled and finally disengaged her fingers from his elbow. “If there’s time.”
“In Jeds? Believe me, you’ll have plenty of time in Jeds.”
“For what? Sight-seeing, I suppose. I’m bringing a journal with me, real paper, bound, and pen and ink, to write down what I see.”
“Pen and ink?”
“Rhui is an interdicted world. What isn’t there already, we aren’t to bring.”
“Golden fair, you astonish me.” He took her hand in his and bent to kiss it, his lips lingering longer on her skin than was, perhaps, warranted by the briefness of their acquaintance.
Diana withdrew her hand from his grasp and blew him a kiss as she retreated through one of the double doors that led into the house. “‘And if thou lovest me, think no more of it.’”
Marco laughed, delighted. “Do all actors quote?” he called after her.
But she let the door swing and click shut behind her without answering him.
“Di! There you are.” From the stage, Yomi called out to her. “Double time, girl. No loitering. Where’ve you been?”
Diana walked swiftly down the aisle and up the steps onto the stage.
“Ah hah!” said Yomi, coming to meet her. “Isn’t that Marco Burckhardt standing up there in the VIP box? Watch your step, Di. He’s a notorious womanizer, that one is. So they say. Don’t dive into water if you can’t swim.”
“I can swim,” retorted Diana, affronted.
“Certainly, my dear. Come on. The meeting’s ready to start. Anahita is howling about the lighting for the curtain call. And she was furious that Gwyn got called out alone. As for Hal—”
Diana followed Yomi out stage right. She risked one final look back, to see Marco standing in the box that Soerensen and his party had inhabited. He leaned with his hands on the railing, watching her go.
CHAPTER TWO
UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, ANY human might have forgiven Charles Soerensen for taking a private aircar rather than using public lanes like everyone else. Any human except Charles himself. On Earth, in human space—what had once been human space—Charles never took advantage of the privileges granted him by his rank as a duke in the Chapalii Empire, as the only human elevated above subject status in the convoluted hierarchy by which the alien Chapalii governed the races and stellar systems they had absorbed into their empire. They never used the word conquered.
“Chattel,” said David ben Unbutu to Marco Burckhardt. They took up stations on either side of Charles on the levitated train that in three hours would take them across the Atlantic Ocean from Portsmouth to North America. David braced himself for the shift as the train jolted forward. Marco, of course, seemed not to notice the transition at all. Charles was sitting down, crystal message wand laid across his knees, still talking with the prime minister of the Eurasian states. She was headed to Quito Spaceport in South America, and Charles had taken the opportunity to ask her to travel with him for part of the journey.
“Who’s chattel?” Marco asked. “Shall we sit down?”
“I’m too nervous to sit,” said David, although he was not surprised when Marco sat anyway, across from Charles. Four benches ran the length of the car, arranged in two pairs facing in toward each other, split by a central aisle. David stood where the inner bench gapped to allow access to the aisle. Charles and the prime minister sat with their backs to the windows, windows which, on this side of the car, showed programming, not ocean.
“Look.” Marco pointed to one of the flat screens. “There’s that interview with Owen Zerentous again.” He took on an affected accent. “‘Ginny and I have been interested for some time in theater as the universal medium, in theater’s use of ritual and ceremony as a way to access the common essence of humanity.’ You know, I think Zerentous believes what he’s talking about.”
“Maybe he’s even right. But you’ve never been interested in theater, Marco. Or at least, only in the ornamentation thereof.”
Marco grinned. “A man can’t help looking, especially at women who are as pretty as Diana Brooke-Holt. What did you mean by chattel?”
David glanced at the Chapalii steward standing four seats down from him, on the other side of Charles. Of course, a steward would not sit—could not—in the presence of nobility. All along the car passengers sat at their ease, watching the screens, reading from flat screens, dozing, knitting; an adolescent drew a light sculpture in the air with a pen, erased it with an exasperated wave of a hand, and began again. Human passengers. They had noted Charles’s presence. How could they fail to? They all knew who he was; they all recognized him. Many had acknowledged him, with a terse word, with a nod, to which he had replied in like measure. Now they left him his privacy, except for one very young child who wandered over and sat in a seat two down from the prime minister, small chin cupped in small hands, watching their intent conversation with a concerned expression.
“I don’t know what I meant,” said David, “except that sometimes I think we’re just chattel to them—to the Chapalii.”
“I don’t think they think in such economic terms. I think their hierarchy is more like a caste system than a class system, but how do we know if human theory explains it, anyway? Why are you nervous?”
David sat down. The bench shifted beneath him, molding itself to his contours. “Why should Duke Naroshi send Charles a summons wand? What authority does Naroshi have to summon Charles? He doesn’t outrank him.”
“As far as we know he doesn’t. Maybe the length of time you’ve been duke matters, in which case Naroshi would outrank Charles. But Naroshi is in fealty to the princely house which has nominal control of human space. Of Earth.”
“That’s true. And it was Naroshi’s agent who was on Rhui, with Tess.”
“David.”
David looked around, suddenly sure that everyone was looking at him, but, of course, no one was. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “But wouldn’t that imply that Naroshi is seeking some kind of information with which to discredit Charles? Especially now that Charles has pulled off a rather major coup within the Chapalii political scene, by taking over the Keinaba merchant house?”
“Not yet finalized, I might add.”
“Not yet? Lady’s Tits, Marco, Charles spent long enough at the Imperial palace. Almost two standard years, he spent there. I thought it was finalized, all legal, with the emperor’s approval.”
“The emperor approved it, but he didn’t—oh, what is that phrase? Tess translated it so neatly. ‘Seal the braid of fealty.’”
David sighed and sagged back against the seat. “It’s all too convoluted for me. I’m just an engineer.” Marco chuckled. They had known each other for so long now, he and Marco and Charles, that they spoke as much with what they didn’t say as with what they did. David levered out an armrest, tilted his head back, and shut his eyes. The conversation between Charles and the prime minister continued across from him like a murmuring counterpoint. They were talking about Rhui.
The whole thing was far too convoluted for David’s taste. He liked something he could get his hands on, something concrete, malleable, something that had answers that were correct based on fixed laws. Not something that was mutable. David hated politics. He’d never liked history much, either. That’s why he had gone into classical engineering—the design and construction of three-dimensional, utilitarian structures
like buildings and bridges and transport facilities.
Everything he knew about the Chapalii made him anxious. They didn’t follow the rules. Humanity had discovered spaceflight and then discovered cousin humans on neighboring worlds. Earth and their cousin humans on Ophiuchi-Sei-ah-nai had formed the League, a kind of parliament of space-faring humanity. Then, human exploration ships had run into Chapalii protocol agents, representatives of the Chapalii Empire; soon after, the emperor had simply co-opted League space as part of his dominion. But their rule was benign; some people even called it enlightened, and certainly the Chapalii did not begrudge sharing some—if not all—of their technological expertise with their subject races.
But were humans ever content with being ruled? Not really. Charles Soerensen led a rebellion against the Empire that failed. But instead of arresting him and executing him, the Chapalii ennobled him. They made him a duke. The emperor granted him two stellar systems as his fief, one of them the newly-discovered system Delta Pavonis—discovered, that is, to possess two habitable worlds. The planet Odys was ravaged by Chapalii modernization; Rhui was interdicted by Charles’s order, an order that the emperor agreed to despite the fact that the interdiction closed off access to Rhui’s abundant natural resources. Just as it closed off access to Rhui’s native population.
And that was the other thing that bothered David. That’s what Tess Soerensen had found out; she had discovered ancient Chapalii buildings on Rhui. The half-mythical Chapalii duke, the Tai-en Mushai, had built a palace on Rhui. He had seeded the planet with humans from Earth. It must all have happened long, long ago, millennia ago in the human span of years, or so Charles and his experts guessed, though they knew nothing for certain. Even so, how could the Chapalii have lost track of these buildings? How could they have lost track of an entire planet?