The Phoenix in Flight

by Sherwood Smith

  All three Kelly burst into a quiet paroxysm of honking and hissing, their headstalks slapping each other’s torsos frantically and twining about each other in a confusing snarl.

  (That ancient vid was the breakthrough that enabled us to develop rituals and symbols that Kelly and humans could share,) commented Ranor, relief audible in his voice. (They are very physical beings in whom the sense of touch is highly developed.) His boswell transmitted the strange sound that indicated a sigh of relief. (You did very well; threy are quite pleased.)

  The mixture of plural and singular forms had merely added to her disorientation, and Leseuer groped for something to say as she tried to recover from the Kelly’s greeting. Her chief emotion was amazement. Her first encounter with these beings, foreshadowed by that old flatvid, brought the insight that what might be silly for one culture could be the most serious for another.

  “Well met indeed, Your Grace,” she finally replied as the snaky writhing of the Kelly subsided. “I am honored.”

  She was saved from the effort of further conversation by the Second Summons, which followed the pattern of the first. The Kelly did not change the position of their torsos; only their headstalks twisted to watch. As the great doors closed the second time, the Laergon strode past her with a look of distraction, even worry, on his face.

  (Has the Krysarch been found?)

  (No.) The short answer carried with it a wave of anxiety. Mho twisted her headstalk back toward Leseuer. “You humans always do important things in threes. That’s what convinced us you are truly civilized.” The other two Kelly moved closer, and throughout the ensuing conversation they softly touched her shoulders and arms in a gentle, patting motion. Despite their strangeness—or perhaps because they did not at all resemble humans, and thus had nothing of deformity about them—she found the contact strangely comforting.

  “Speaking of threes,” continued the Kelly, “wethree congratulate you on your completion.”

  Leseuer kept her face blank as she tried to unravel the meaning of that comment. (Completion?)

  “Wethree have met Ranor, and look forward to greeting your third.”

  (Third?)

  (Our unborn child.) Ranor’s love and delight bathed her nerves in warmth.

  (But we only just found out. But how did they know?)

  (The Kelly have chemical awareness far beyond our range. Some say they also use ultrasound to sense attitudes—muscle reading.)

  She bowed. “We are honored.” She emphasized the pronoun.

  Mho abruptly changed the subject. “Will Ansonia accept a Protectorate?”

  Leseuer hesitated, sensing heightened alertness in the watching aristocrats. There was no comment from Ranor. “That is something my Ambassador would have to answer.”

  The three Kelly blatted; a derisive noise. “He is ribbonless,” said Mho, her tape-like pelt fluffing out. “Sterile, a drone.”

  (The intermittor’s ribbons are the genetic material of a trinity—essential to threir reproduction, and threir racial memory,) said Ranor suddenly.

  “No,” continued Mho, “it is you, and the other artists like you whom the Panarch is guesting, that will answer that question. You are the lips—excuse me, eyes—of your people.” Mho’s headstalk briefly caressed her cheek. “You in particular, Leseuer gen Altamon. Had you been born in the Thousand Suns, wethree have no doubt you would have been one of the Prophetae.” The Kelly fell silent, and all three headstalks bent toward her, bringing nine lambent blue eyes to bear on her with grave regard.

  Leseuer was stunned by the extravagant compliment. The Prophetae were the top level of Archetype and Ritual, gifted artists who explored the noumenal world, emerging with new and reinterpreted archetypes to unify the many cultures of the Thousand Suns. She sensed she was now the focus of attention for many of the Douloi nearby, and realized that the Kelly had, with the indirection typical of Panarchic politics, announced their support for an Ansonian Protectorate, rather than continued Probation and Quarantine.

  “I hope we will,” she finally replied.

  “So do wethree. You have much to offer, and more to gain.”

  An eddy in the crowd around them revealed the stately figure of the High Phanist of Desrien standing to one side, the Digrammaton of Aleph-Null bright upon his chest. Leseuer hoped he wouldn’t approach her. She was an agnostic, and the preposterous religious eclecticism of the Magisterium, the religious authority of the Thousand Suns, both repelled and fascinated her. She didn’t know what she would say to him. But the Kelly rescued her.

  “But wethree have taken enough of your time,” said Mho. “You must observe and interpret.” The trinity made a complex motion that took in the whole hall. “Wethree depend on you.”

  “Not at all, Your Grace. I would gladly continue.”

  The Kelly pitched its voice for her ears only. “As would wethree, but there is the High Phanist, and wethree smell your unease. Wethree will distract him while you make your escape.”

  So the almost preternatural sensitivity of the Douloi to body language extended even to non-human members of the aristocracy. Leseuer fought to suppress the worst attack of the giggles she’d ever had as the Kelly withdrew with a full formal bow, performed with an impeccable snaky grace. Despite their alien conformation, and the triple echo of their motions, she could read perfectly the mode: superior to inferior modified by acknowledgment of primacy of function. It was precisely the mode that would have been appropriate to a Prophetae, and she heard a murmur of comment from the people nearby as she returned the deference.

  (Do you still think that Ansonia represents that much of a challenge?) Ranor’s tone held cool amusement mingled with affection. (Compared to the Kelly, integrating your people into the Panarchy will be child’s play.)

  (I hope so,) she replied, (but you may have misjudged the depth of our prejudice.)

  (We’ve dealt with rationalist democracies countless times—it’s a developmental stage all cultures go through. The principle is always the same: those who deny the role of ritual and symbolism in their lives are helpless against it.)

  A swirl of motion at the entrance indicated that another group of people had entered, at their center a tall man she didn’t recognize. He wore a severe black tunic with the blason de soleil its only decoration. She framed him with the ajna and triggered an interrogative.

  (That’s Myrradin, Demarch Cloud Achilenga,) said Ranor. (Perhaps the most powerful Highdweller in the Panarchy, with almost a thousand oneills under him.)

  She was struck again by the contrast between Arthelion and Narbon. Here the blason de soleil was a common sight, there it was rare. Here there was a mix of Highdwellers and Downsiders mingling in harmony, there a predominance of Downsiders, close-mouthed and even more close-minded.

  Now the Douloi were slowly forming a double line centered on the Throne Room doors as the time of the Third Summons approached. As she was carried along by the motion of the assembly, she noticed a hesitation to the movements of the people around her that was foreign to the usual nature of Douloi ceremony. The sound of the crowd had changed too: harsher, somehow, on a note that made her neck hairs lift.

  (What’s going on?) she subvocalized.

  When Ranor answered, she could sense the tension in him. (Enough of them, like you, have boswell contacts outside the room and the word is spreading. No one knows where the Krysarch nyr-Arkad is.)

  The Laergon entered the Hall of Ivory, followed as before by the representative of the Polloi. His face was composed, but his gaze darted about, his eyes reminding her unsettlingly of trapped fireflies.

  (Then why are they continuing? Why don’t they delay the third Summoning?)

  Ranor’s voice was resonant with helplessness. (There’s no precedent for this. If his delay or absence is his own choice, it’s unforgivable: the entire top level of government is here tonight, except for the Privy Council. If it’s not...) She could hear the noise that indicated him swallowing. (If it’s not, if it’s related to th
e absence of the Aerenarch-Consort, it could be the first blow of a Family coup.)

  (Vannis—and Krysarch Brandon?) she queried in total disbelief, trying to pair the diamond-cold Aerenarch-Consort and the handsome, blue-eyed third son who always seemed half-asleep. In her year at Court, though she’d seen the two of them at several functions, she could not recall ever having seen them speak to one another.

  The Laergon stopped before the vast doors now slightly ajar, the Mace held overhead, his posture somehow radiating hopelessness. Once again he bent from side to side, silencing the increasing buzz of comment in the Hall with the strange music of the Mace.

  The Laergon straightened up and grounded the Mace. “His Royal Highness, the Krysarch Brandon Takari Burgess Njoye Willam su Gelasaar y Ilara nyr Arkad d’Mandala!”

  In the long pause that followed, the tension in the room increased so sharply that at first Leseuer thought the faint whine she heard was the blood singing in her ears. Then she noticed a blue glow slithering around the edges of the doors to the Throne Room as they swung shut. Overhead, the immense chandeliers, not yet lit in deference to the late-summer light, began to flicker with an eerie fluorescence.

  Now the complex lineaments of the Ars Irruptus blazed with lurid glimmers of livid blue light, running along the inlaid metal strips of the mural with fervent energy. The double line of Douloi disintegrated as they began to back away from the strange display of energy; and as they moved a strange piping chatter spread among them. For a moment Leseuer puzzled at the sound, and then her boswell joined the chorus. She looked down with momentary incomprehension at the device glowing an angry red, and realization hit her simultaneous with Ranor’s anguished cry.

  (Leseuer, my love! Get out of there!)

  But it was too late. The boswell dispassionately announced her fate in the privacy of her inner ear: PLEASE SEEK MEDICAL ATTENTION IMMEDIATELY. LETHAL RADIATION LEVELS PRESENT; and still the light from the deadly doors intensified.

  She read the same resignation on the faces of the people around her that she knew must be on her own. Her skin prickled like the first warning of a sunburn. A smashing sound twisted her around as the nuller’s bubble punched through a stained-glass window, fleeing the deathtrap of the Hall of Ivory.

  Then a triple, anguished howl erupted from the Kelly trinity in the throes of agony. The two larger Kelly were tearing great clumps of ribbon off of Mho, assisted by the smaller Kelly in a savage act of self-mutilation, throwing them into the air, where they fluttered frantically away in every direction. Gouts of yellow blood erupted from the Intermittor as the motions of her head stalk gradually lost coordination and she slumped unmoving, supported only by her companions as they continued flaying her.

  At the point of death, from sorrow and shock as much as from the energy now flooding the room, amidst panic and rage, Leseuer’s talent, which the Kelly had rightly ranked with the Prophetae, asserted itself. Without awareness of her actions she faithfully recorded the death throes of the Douloi, both those who clawed their way toward unattainable escape regardless of those they trampled, and those attempting to shield their loved ones from the penetrating rays with futile heroism.

  (It’s too late, Ranor beloved,) she replied. (Let this be my final gift to you, and to your wonderful, complicated, elegant, doomed world.)

  So it was that all her experience of the Thousand Suns and its people flooded her inner being, and she saw with the single eye for the last time. In the agony of her own dissolution, she pronounced the epitaph of the Panarchy as it had been. And since her art was visual, not verbal, she borrowed the words of a man long dead before the Vortex swallowed the Exiles of ancient Earth and delivered them to the loneliness of the Thousand Suns.

  (The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned...)

  A flare of light filled her vision, followed by the briefest possible sensation of heat, and then there was nothing but a man’s anguished weeping transmitted to a ruined boswell.

  PART TWO

  ONE

  CHARVANN

  Sebastian Omilov, Doctor of Xenoarchaeology, Gnostor of Xenology, Chival of the Phoenix Gate, and Praerogate Prime (Occult) to His Majesty Gelasaar III, lifted his brandy snifter from the table next to his chair. As he stared through it at the huge reddish-gold sun hanging at the horizon, the light reflected and refracted through the amber liquid within, washing his hand with flares of golden light.

  He lowered the crystal to take a long and savoring sip, gazing out over the flower-specked lawn beyond the verandah and the lengthening fingers of shadow reaching across it from the forest verge.

  “Why did you not to go Arthelion for the Krysarch’s Enkainion?” Osri repeated.

  ‘The Krysarch.’ As if he hasn’t known Brandon all his life. Omilov turned to his son. “Are you disappointed at finding me home?” he asked, though he knew it would be useless to attempt a deflection through a joke.

  Osri said painstakingly, “I am never disappointed at finding you here when I arrive on leave. In fact, I had prepared for the disappointment of being alone. But I had thought I would be seeing you at the Enkainion when the vids reach us. So why did you not go, Father?”

  “That should be sufficiently obvious,” Omilov said. “I was not invited.”

  The frown on Osri’s face deepened. Omilov, looking dispassionately at his son sitting stiffly in his naval uniform, wondered if he ever wore civilian garb anymore.

  Omilov saluted Osri with his crystal. “So we will watch it together tomorrow. Will you drink, my boy?” He nodded at the empty snifter.

  Osri jerked his head in negation. “There must be a reason. Your position as friend to the Panarch, as tutor to the Krysarchs—it’s an insult.”

  It’s a warning, Omilov thought, but he said nothing. He’d tried to stand against Semion in the L’Ranja affair ten years ago, and had lost. The retreat to Charvann was to spare his family; Osri’s best protection was his ignorance.

  Not that he would have confided in his only son if he’d had the chance. Looking at Osri’s angry face, he thought a little sadly, You’ve too much of the Ghettierus love for the sound of rules, and too little of the Omilov savor of their sense.

  A flock of jezeels winged their way raucously over head: dipping, deceptively clumsy flyers, like clowns tumbling headlong into the center ring. Osri was distracted by them, rubbing his hands down the arms of his chair as he watched their flight. The evening breeze stirred his short hair, the lowering sun glowing in his dark eyes.

  Omilov was old friends with the birds; his attention stayed on his son’s unsmiling countenance. It was a well-made face, despite the long Omilov earlobes, but one rarely graced by a smile. Burdened with my ears and your mother’s lack of humor.

  “Even a space as large as the Ivory Hall would not hold all those whose positions would seem to require that they ‘should’ have been there,” Omilov said, trying to deflect his son from brooding. “To the luckless compiler of the guest list the importance of an old tutor who has officially retired—”

  Omilov paused as a bell toned.

  “What is that?” Osri asked. “Why do you have these comsignals? Why not wear your boswell?”

  “It seems we’ve a visitor arriving,” Omilov said, sidestepping the last two questions. “Someone who has the passcode to the estate.”

  “Whom were you expecting?” Osri frowned again. “Father, you ought to wear your boswell.”

  Omilov laughed as he scanned the azure horizon. “One of the benefits of official retirement is freedom from immediate access,” he said. “Ah. Here we are.” He stood up and moved to the edge of the verandah, followed by his son.

  A golden egg-shape moved with deliberate grace over the forest treetops, arcing down across the lawn. A wide swath rippled through the grasses as the phaeton hovered; then it moved sideways toward the verandah. Omilov stepped back as the breeze kicked up by the geeplane fanned his face.

  Almost as if
the unknown person inside read Omilov’s mind, the pilot moved the taxi back again a few meters. Then it settled on the grass, releasing the pungent smell of crushed blossoms.

  The curved door slid up and two male figures sprang down from the taxi, the first just above medium height and slender, the second big and burly. The big one carried luggage; the other looked up at the verandah, walking swiftly toward them as the phaeton lifted off and slid away, disappearing around the side of the manse.

  Omilov stared in amazement as his brain registered the familiar planes of Arkadic bone structure. He recognized Brandon nyr-Arkad just before Brandon vaulted the low railing and advanced, smiling, both hands held out. So soon after the Enkainion? Too soon.

  “Sebastian! I thought I might find you back here.”

  Omilov hesitated, then bowed with formal deliberation, extending his hands palms-out for the formal touch.

  “Sebastian,” Brandon said softly. “I thought this was the one house where precedence is teacher-before-student, and titles have no place?”

  “That was when you were a boy, and for a reason,” Omilov said, searching the opaque blue eyes. “I don’t think you’ve been here to The Hollows since...” Since your disgrace at the Academy, and mine before the Douloi.

  “I haven’t,” Brandon said. “Though not through design. Can we go back to the old rules?”

  “We can,” Omilov said. “Welcome, Brandon.” Omilov clasped Brandon’s right hand in both of his.

  Then Brandon turned to Osri, his face polite and unreadable. “Osri. A surprise.”

  “Your Highness,” Osri said, performing a faultless salute.

  His formality was deliberate; Omilov was saddened, but not surprised. Even as boys they were too different to ever be friends, and ten years after the fact Osri is still shocked and offended over his perception of the Markham vlith-L’Ranja affair at the Academy.