“May I see them?”
“You are not permitted,” it said again, speaking with the precise tone and cadence it had employed mere moments before. I wondered if it was truly intelligent, or if it was only a puppet, force-fed a list of prescribed responses. It clasped its hands before itself like a cantor preparing to sing and added, “You will have your time with the Master.”
“When?”
“When you are sent for,” the machine said. “There are others here whose needs are far more pressing than yours. You will be attended to in time, Lord Marlowe. Do be patient . . . although . . . if you cannot wait, you are welcome to leave.” And with that, it turned, offering its arm again to the Lady Catherine Domitia.
Baron Song whispered, “You shouldn’t have done that. You’ll wait longer now.”
Another week passed. I read all four volumes of Impatian’s History of the Jaddian Wars and half the collected works of the playwright Bastien. Incisive as the old comedian was, I found his old-style comedy too much like farce, and gave it up. There was no datasphere to access, and so I found myself limited to the contents of my terminal. No small library, to be sure, but much of it was review. Not being a trained sailor, there’d been little for me to do on the Mistral, or on the Pharaoh or Balmung before it. I’d read a lot. I reviewed Valka’s notes and holographs on the Quiet ruins at Calagah on Emesh, on Ozymandias, on Sadal Suud.
I caught myself thinking about my vision again. And about the Jari and his words.
I wished I could speak to Valka, wished I could make her believe me. For that matter, I wished I could make myself stop thinking about it at all. I had larger concerns: the Cielcin, the war, my treason, Ghen’s death, the deaths of the three aquilarii I’d left on the Balmung. And that place: that whited city, its haunted guards, the Undying’s pet machine, and the Undying himself.
Kharn Sagara.
It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. He was a myth, a fairy story as surely as were Apollo and the Moon, as Genghis Khan and the Cid Arthur. I knew his story, had told it to Cat a hundred times in Borosevo. If any of it were true, he would be old almost as the Empire. It could not be. And yet the Quiet, too, had been a fairy story—whispers of ancient aliens told by serfs and spacers alike, none too well believed. I had not believed, not until Valka showed me better.
Perhaps that was why I dwelt upon Jari and my vision. The rational foundations of my universe were blown out from under me, and I twisted in a fell wind. As when I’d first learned of the Quiet, this revelation about Vorgossos and its ruler had shaken me, left me without a box with which to frame my universe. And so my mind, frantic, had revisited those older, unincorporated parts of my experience, trying to build a new whole from the pieces.
Light! the seer had said when I’d asked after my future.
I have never forgotten my vision: the image of that black ship descending, plunging dagger-like into a whiteness that drowned the stars. Nor have I forgotten the host of the Cielcin, glittering where they stood arrayed like some great leviathan.
Light . . . How had Jari known? I knew little of his Deeps, but the oracle had said that he—or the things that had consumed him—were not the Quiet. Leopards, he had said, using my own words. Words I had not yet chosen. Leopards, lions, and wolves. The light had been in his vision and mine. A harmony. Did that make it true? There is no future, the seer had said. Everything already is. They have only to choose.
To choose what?
“It is well to see a young person like yourself reading.”
“What?” I looked round, found an elderly woman—the Countess of Somewhere I did not doubt—smiling at me. She was dressed in crushed and ruined velvet, soiled by her long stay here, but her face was kind. She proffered a plastic plate at me. There was a single fruit tart on it. The serving girls had not been for ages. She’d been saving it. Crushing my terminal’s floating holograph to close it, I sat up properly, declining the dish without comment.
“Reading,” the grandmotherly woman repeated. “Most oft these days you only see young people reading printed books. Antiques, you know? Or counterfeit ones. They like to be seen reading more than they like to read. What are you reading?”
Self-conscious, I pulled my sleeve back down over the short terminal gauntlet. “Travelers’ tales.” It had been an account of the first excavations of the tombs on Ozymandias, written by an aide to the scholiast who had led the excavation. How Valka had come by the text I’d no idea. It was the sort of thing the Inquisition would kill one for having, full of references to other xenobite sites on other worlds.
The Countess of Somewhere set her plate aside, leaned forward. “Really? I used to love such things. What’s it about?”
I was in Vorgossos. I saw no reason to lie about the Quiet. “The colonization of Ozymandias in the Thirteenth Millennium. In particular the excavations beneath the Great Arches at Panormo south of the capital at Merenhor.”
“The Arch-Builders, do you mean?”
“The very same.” I returned her smile. “The author has this notion that the Arch-Builders did no such thing, that they were only inhabiting the constructions of an older, far more advanced civilization.” When she said nothing, I added, “The same has been said of the Judeccan Irchtani, and of the Cavaraad on Sadal Suud.”
The Countess made a face. “Are you talking about the Anunna stories? I haven’t heard those since I was a girl!” I must have made a face, for she pressed on. “I suppose you are a bit . . . young for them. There were a bunch of operas about them. Ancient xenobites out among the stars, greater than us.”
“The Chantry didn’t repress that?”
“They weren’t so stodgy in those days, you know? Weren’t so concerned with propriety or the dreck artists cook up, you know? They were different times.” Her eyes—blue eyes—seemed far away after that peculiar fashion unique to the very aged. “But I suppose the war’s changed things. Stories about fearsome xenobites must have fallen from fashion once we had the real thing.”
With nothing to say to that, I studied my hands, nodded primly.
“You’re not like the rest of us,” the Countess noted. She was only the dozenth since Song to make that determination, and I felt my smile calcify.
Brittle as my smile, I said, “I suppose I’m not.”
“You can’t be here for the same reasons as we.”
“And why not?”
She shifted forward in her seat. “You’re too young to be thinking of dying. Especially for one of the Peerage. Baron Song said you were one of the Star Victoria? The Emperor’s own? You must have . . . centuries. Centuries before you would think of coming to a place like this.”
“That’s why you’re all here, then?” I asked. “Life extension?”
“Life extension!” She showed her teeth. A couple of them were missing. “We have nothing left to extend. The Undying offers us a second life.”
Baron Song had said much the same thing. A new brain. A new body. “But how?”
“He grows them. Raises them. Until they’re ready.”
“Raises them?” I looked her squarely in the face. “You’re talking about children.”
The Countess of Somewhere’s face might have been a graven mask. Whatever else she was, she was Sollan nobile, and had learned long and long ago to control herself. “I am talking of another me.”
“Cloning?” I said, disgusted. Cloning was one of the Chantry’s Twelve Abominations, the most mortal of sins. It was added to the list later on, if memory serves, after clones had been used too often to cheat in matters of succession.
The Countess didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
“The young man bothering you, Countess?” said Baron Song jovially, appearing at my elbow. She was a Countess, after all. Ordinarily, this synchronicity might have amused me, but there was a sucking hole where my stomach ought to be. Gone was the kindly ol
d Mandari with his frilled necktie and pointed beard. Gone too the elderly woman with her grandmotherly smile. The faintly funereal texture of the room with its trace geriatric musk and the smell of old upholstery and oil varnish took on an aspect of brimstone and salt smoke. Static and charge.
There is a chamber in the Peronine Palace on Forum where are kept a great many paintings and artifacts recovered from Old Earth. Among them, kept in a windowless room lighted by glass candles, were nine of a series of fourteen murals. The Pinturas Negras, painted at the end of Earth’s Golden Age by an artist called Goya. The other paintings—and the rest of Goya’s work—are lost. Victims of the Advent that claimed our homeworld, or else lost in the Peregrinations that followed.
The Emperor himself showed me the paintings, and but for three of his Knights Excubitor and a detachment of his own Martian Guard at the door—we were alone. He was shielded . . . the Emperor is always shielded, and the Royse field flickered in the light of the glass candles.
“Saturn Devouring His Son,” the Emperor said, gesturing with one beringed hand.
It was an ugly painting, but unforgettable. It showed a naked man with tangled hair and beard, a giant clutching the mutilated corpse of a headless man, his teeth tearing an arm off at the joint. There was self-aware horror in the eyes of the mad Titan. He knew what he was doing was wrong, and yet would not stop himself, so hungry was he for life.
So old was that ancient canvas—rotted through in places—that the bright crimson of the blood covering Saturn’s hapless son had gone to clotted brown. Seeing it, I remembered the eyes of those people in that grim hall. Lord Song and the Countess of Somewhere. The Grand Duke of Milinda and that Norman spice merchant. They knew. They knew what they were.
The very foolish might look upon such creatures and, sneering, say their wealth had corrupted them. It is easy for those without wealth to pretend at morality, as if they would not themselves make depraved choices given the means. There is no morality in poverty. It is only that wealth gives the immoral greater opportunity for abuse. Given the means, how many souls would make pilgrimage to Vorgossos? How many trillions?
“He’s not bothering me at all, Kim!” the Countess said. “Quite the opposite! I’ve interrupted his reading.”
“Not at all!” I said, scrambling to maintain a mask of politeness to quash the screaming in my head. “We were just discussing the, um . . . the procedure.”
Baron Song seated himself in the chair opposite my couch, so that he surveyed me across the empty Druaja board. “I do hope I’ll be taken below soon,” he said idly. “I’ve been here ever so long.” He opened a drawer on the side of the table and began pulling out the worn marble pieces. “Fancy another game, Lord Marlowe?”
CHAPTER 32
SATURN OR DIS
ALL THAT WHITE STONE recalled for me the great caverns of our necropolis. As I followed the golem Yume through that labyrinth of drab corridors, almost I thought I could hear the faint drip of water falling from stalactites into the black pools about the sarcophagi of my ancestors.
There had been outrage when I was taken. Song and his fellow Titans had snarled that I was only a child, that they should be taken instead. Yume had ignored them, and so cowed were they by their unholy desire and their lust for what the Undying alone could give that none raised a hand against the automaton.
I never saw them again, nor learned if they received their inhuman sacrament.
I did not want to learn.
I had found my Virgil, and quiet followed it down windowless halls of blank stone, past sealed metal doors and square columns supporting ceilings lost to clinging shadow. The machine responded to none of my queries, and I soon stopped asking questions. We saw no servants, no guards, no cameras on our descent, not along colonnades or winding stairs, not in empty galleries or the vacuous dining hall through which we passed, its brushed metal tables bare and bolted to the floor. We descended by many hundred steps, round many dozen corners, through uncounted levels. I could not have found my way out if I’d wanted to.
A great metal door barred our path. Three times the height of a man it was, and three times across, being round, and sunken slightly so that the hall floor might pass unbroken through it. Some nameless artist in the deeps of time had taken a plasma torch to its thick surface, and fashioned there in flowing metal the bas-relief image of a boy enthroned atop the shattered ruins of monsters. Machines, I took them to be, the Exalted, and so guessed the seated boy was Kharn Sagara. He clutched something in his hands. A bottle, perhaps?
“It’s true . . .” I breathed, stopping. “He really is Kharn Sagara.”
Yume’s head swiveled full round, though it kept walking forward. “You did not believe?”
“No.”
“None ever do.”
The door rose up and admitted us onto a raised platform where an open monorail cart waited hanging by a rail above our heads. The tram was accessed only by a single stony strand reaching out into absolute blackness like a warning finger. Glowspheres hovering above its length did little and less to illuminate that blackness, and beyond their light I sensed an abyss infinite almost as the black of space.
But here there were no stars.
The tram rattled as it advanced, and the gentle wind of its passage carried the briny stink of salt and alien planktons. “What’s that smell?” I asked.
“We are beneath the original installation,” Yume said, mounting the stairs to the tram car. “The builders placed their city above the underground sea, whose surface is more than five miles below.”
Ahead through the gloom I discerned a shape, hanging from the cavern above like the stalactites in my memory. Only as we approached did I see it more clearly, not a stalactite at all. A pyramid. A great, square pyramid done all in white stone. Two sentry towers decorated with golden cartouches hung to either side of the track. Their glowing faces showed sculptures in the same style as those on the massive door. What they depicted, I could not say.
The tram ground to a halt, and Yume led the way down from the tram onto a white marble platform. Light shone from hidden sconces high above, illuminating a vault decorated with an image of the heavens. We descended a steep stair, Yume careful to check its pace that I did not stumble or fall. I sensed we must be approaching the base of that terrible structure, though how I knew that I could not say. The air grew colder. Dry. At the base of the stair was a short hallway, perhaps ten yards long. I could almost taste the silence.
Yume seized the great bronze ring in the doors and knocked. Once. Twice. Three times. They creaked as they swung inward, though there was none to open them. I pressed on, aware only after I had done so that I was alone. That Yume had left me.
And the doors were closed.
No stir of air was there, and but for the sound of water the place was quiet as a temple. As a tomb. Not speaking, not knowing what to say, I stepped forward. The place was all in shadow, and dimly I was aware of great pillars of pale stone rising like ghosts about me and of the statues that filled the space between.
One such pillar rose ahead of me, greater than the rest. At its base—upon a dais of many steps in the very middle of the chamber—stood a massive chair. A great tangle of cables flowed toward it, gathered from every dark corner and falling from the ceiling above like garlands. A great horror was on me, and a sense of awe and of terror unlike any I had known. The fear of the shepherd before Pharaoh, of the merchant before Caesar. Of man before god. Still not speaking, I approached to within five paces of the lowest step, turning my face upward to look upon the man seated there.
The Undying’s face was ageless, neither old nor young, though his dark and wild hair was touched with gray at temple and forelock. A heavy cloth-of-gold robe lay upon his shoulders, tiny dragons picked out in black against that shimmering garment. It stood open, and beneath he was bare-chested, and I could see the hoses and sensor tape wired to sockets in
his flesh. What trousers he wore seemed to me part of a spacesuit’s underlayment, black and padded. His feet were bare, calloused almost as much as my own.
He did not speak, and for a time I honored his silence, standing placid at the foot of that mighty seat. His eyes—black as coals—were far away, nor did they seem to see me.
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone.
Thus he seems to me in memory: King of the Titans in all his ruinous glory, couched in numb contemplation of the Dark. How long he’d been seated in that awful chair I could not imagine, nor imagine the well and depth of years in his experience.
“Lord,” I said when minutes had passed, “I am Hadrian Marlowe, grandson of the Vicereine of Delos and a cousin of His Radiance, the Emperor William XXIII. I am come on a mission of special significance, to the Imperium and to all Mankind.”
Nothing.
Not even the eyes moved. My words died in darkness, and the silence which followed was total and absolute.
“Lord,” I said again, “I come at the behest of an Ichakta of the Cielcin Itani Otiolo, and on behalf of a baetan of the same.”
Nothing.
He did not seem to breathe, and I would have thought him dead but for his reputation. All that chamber was still, the fixed center of an unfixed universe, dead as the dead sun about which that frigid world turned.
“Lord,” I said a third time, “you brought me here in your own time, of your own will. I’ve been waiting the better part of a month.”
Again, nothing.
Frustrated, I turned, looking round, half-expecting Yume to appear behind me and take me away. From my vantage near the throne I saw the statues were not alone in decorating that dim chamber. There were paintings. Some ancient and others less so, paintings of the sort my father or any great lord of the Imperium might slaughter to keep. Some, I think, were artifacts from Old Earth, so faded were they and time-stained. I approached the nearest statue where it stood on a plinth at the base of another column, aware of how the ceiling seemed not to exist above me. It was of a woman in a great cloak, and beneath that cloak she opened on hinges to shelter and reveal a bearded man who himself comforted a broken figure. The statue’s hinged doors opened to form a kind of triptych, and on the left the same woman cradled an infant, and on the right the broken man stood renewed, as if whatever torment was in the central frame was undone and forgotten.
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