The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  “And if we throw one of these things into Rhea—”

  “It will eat up the moon.”

  “That would get rid of them,” Rhoda said.

  “That it would. Of course, the Squeem may be useful. We could use them, as they once used us. A galaxy-spanning telepathic network—”

  “We don’t need them in Sol system for that. We have their homeworld.”

  “True.” Kaser eyed Rhoda. “The technology’s in place. The only question remains, do we use it?”

  Rhoda thought it through.

  The Squeem occupation had changed human perceptions of the galaxy, and humanity’s place in it. A historic loss of innocence.

  Now humans were tentatively moving out beyond Sol system once more. And everywhere they went, they found life. Intelligences swarming and squabbling. A kind of galactic society, a ramshackle pecking order based on avarice, theft, and the subjugation of junior races.

  And for humanity, nothing but threat.

  The black holes in Jupiter were clues to a closely guarded secret, which Rhoda hadn’t even shared with Reg Kaser. The Squeem invasion hadn’t been the first hostile alien incursion into Sol system. Some centuries back invaders called something like “Qax,” who would occupy Earth in their turn sometime in the future, had come back in time to secure their victory over mankind. In the course of the battle, miniature black holes had been hurled into Jupiter. During the Squeem occupation, knowledge of this event had mostly been lost, and was only now being pieced back together by the historians. But the mortal wound inflicted on Jupiter was unarguable.

  Some analysts, poring over the historical reconstructions, argued that the Qax invasion might be only decades away, in the future.

  Even beyond the Qax, there was the apparent original source of much of the galaxy’s technology (though nobody knew for sure): the Xeelee. Secretive, xenophobic, indifferent. And so far ahead, they made the rest of the galaxy’s inhabitants look like tree dwellers.

  The future held nothing but peril for mankind. Hierarchies of enemies. And that was the basis on which Rhoda must make her decision.

  Rhoda stared down at the ice landscape of Rhea, imagining the stranded Squeem swarming within. “It won’t be revenge,” she said. “Call it insurance. Look what the Squeem did to us. This will be one danger eliminated.”

  “We’re setting a course for the future, then.”

  “The future leaves us no choice. And if this makes us harder as a species, good. When the weapon’s ready, send Hume up here, would you? He ought to watch this, as the Squeem made Harry Gage watch. Let this act be remembered too.”

  Kaser stood. “I’ll call the weapons crew.”

  THE EMPEROR AND THE MAULA

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. As both writer and editor (he was editor of the original anthology series New Dimensions, perhaps the most acclaimed anthology series of its era), Silverberg was one of the most influential figures of the Post New Wave era of the seventies, and continues to be at the forefront of the field to this very day, having won a total of five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards, plus SFWA’s prestigious Grandmaster Award.

  His novels include the acclaimed Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, Son of Man, Nightwings, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrack in the Furnace, Thorns, Up the Line, The Man in the Maze, Tom O’Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, At Winter’s End, The Face of the Waters, Kingdoms of the Wall, Hot Sky at Morning, The Alien Years, Lord Prestimion, Mountains of Majipoor, and two novel-length expansions of famous Isaac Asimov stories, Nightfall and The Ugly Little Boy. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Beyond the Safe Zone, and a massive retrospective collection: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume One: Secret Sharers. His reprint anthologies are far too numerous to list here, but include The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One and the distinguished Alpha series, among dozens of others. His most recent books are the novel The Long Way Home, the mosaic novel Roma Eterna, and a massive new retrospective collection, Phases of the Moon: Stories from Six Decades. Coming up is a new collection, In the Beginning. He lives with his wife, writer Karen Haber, in Oakland, California.

  Robert Silverberg is the only author in this book with a writing career long enough that he actually produced some of the Old Space Opera, back in the pulp magazines of the fifties, decades before most of the newcomers here even sat down at their first computer keyboard. He’s lost none of his chops in the intervening years, though, as he proves with the lush and gorgeously colored story that follows, in which an intrepid human woman dares to penetrate to the heart of a hostile alien empire and confront the all-powerful Emperor himself, armed only with her brains and wit and heart, and enter a contest of wills with everything that’s important to her—including her own life—at stake.

  BOGAN 17, 82ND DYNASTIC CYCLE

  (AUGUST 3, A.D. 3001)

  The gongs have sounded throughout the ship. We have crossed the invisible line that separates Territorial Space from Imperial Space and now my life is officially forfeit.

  And I have chosen to break the code of tiihad that demands my life. We will see what happens when we land on Capital World.

  Meanwhile here I am—an Earthborn woman, a mere barbaric maula, getting deeper into Imperial Space with each passing light-second. I should be trembling with fear, I suppose.

  No. Let the Emperor tremble. Laylah is here!

  —From the Diaries of Laylah Walis

  1

  It was an unusual case. No one at Capital World Starport had ever seen anything like it, which is how it reached the attention, finally, of no one less than the Emperor Ryah VII himself, the High Ansaar, the Supreme Omniscience, the Most Holy Defender of the Race.

  The chain that led to the Emperor began with Loompan Chilidor, an arbiter of passenger manifests. He was a short-crested, pale-skinned low-caste person whose job was to check the identity circuits of passengers of newly arrived starships. Routine stuff. But this time, when he ran the transit check on the travelers coming from Seppuldidorior on the starship Velipok, jagged incandescent green streaks burst forth on the purple surface of the field.

  Tiihad violation!

  The highest of the six levels of irregularity—higher even than vribor, the carrying of infectious disease, and gulimil, the smuggling of dangerous weapons, and shhtek, the wearing of medallions of the extinct and proscribed Simgoin Dynasty. Violation of tiihad was an assault on the structure of the Empire itself.

  Loompan Chilidor’s long dangling arms jerked in shock. His small yellow eyes turned orange with surprise. He pressed the red button that sealed the luminance field and summoned his immediate superior, Domtel Tribuso, Manager of Passenger Flow.

  Domtel Tribuso, stocky and slow, appeared in due course. The purple luminance field was now a rubbery purple cage. A few dozen travelers were trapped inside.

  Domtel Tribuso stared in puzzlement at the green streaks criss-crossing the field. “Green? Tiihad violation?”

  Most of those in the cage were Ansaar. There were a few Liigachi and some Vrulvruls and a cluster of agitated-looking Zmachs. All those races had held full citizenship in the Imperium for centuries, and surely understood the law.

  But one was a creature Domtel Tribuso could not identify at all: a non-Imperial alien, a barbaric life-form from the Territories, a trespasser and transgressor here on this hallowed world. A maula. Domtel Tribuso felt amazement and disgust and anger.

  The maula was thin to the point of gauntness, and its face was as flat as a platter, the features close together, eyes practically next to each other, nose a tiny button just below, its mouth—was that its mouth?—a mere slit near its chin. Its legs were much too long and its arms grotesquely short. The c
reature had no crest, only a short crop of unpleasant dark fur sprouting from its skull. There were two strange round swellings on its chest.

  The Manager of Passenger Flow summoned his aides. “Get that maula out of there and bring it to Examination Chamber Three.”

  That was the holding cell for unauthorized life-forms, normally used for unfamiliar pets or trophy animals that a citizen of the Imperium had brought back and that needed to be checked by an Imperial veterinarian before being released from quarantine.

  But this was no pet, no trophy, this maula. Plainly it was an intelligent life-form—a ticketed passenger in its own right. It stood quite calmly among the passengers of Citizen rank as though it regarded itself as one of them. It was even carrying several pieces of expensive-looking luggage.

  How could a maula have been able to buy a ticket to Haraar, and why had it been allowed to board the Velipok, and why hadn’t the Velipok’s captain called ahead to say that a maula was on board? An investigation was needed. Domtel Tribuso summoned his superior, Graligal Dren, and turned the maula over to her.

  Graligal Dren, a mid-caste woman of a rich olive hue with a high-peaked sagittal crest of admirable narrowness and delicacy, glowered through the thick glass wall and said, “Are you able to understand Universal Imperial, creature?”

  “I speak it quite well, thank you.” The maula’s voice was clear and high-pitched with a slight West Quadrant accent.

  “And do you have a name?”

  “My name is Laylah Walis.”

  An incomprehensible gargling noise, mere sounds. Well, one would expect barbarians to have barbaric names. There it was on the passenger manifest: LAYLAH WALIS. The emigration people who had let it board a Haraar-bound ship must have been out of their minds.

  “You embarked from Hathpoin in the Seppuldidorior system?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And where did you come from before that?”

  “Mingtha, in the Ghair system. Which I reached by way of Zemblano, which is in Briff. And before that—”

  “Don’t give me your whole itinerary, creature. Just tell me where you are from originally.”

  “Earth,” the maula said. “A small world in what you’d call the Northwest Arm. Part of the Empire about twenty years now.”

  The Northwest Arm was a zone of scruffy worlds inhabited by bestial creatures—frontier worlds, barely civilized, dismal primitive outposts of the Empire. It amazed her that a creature from a world like that spoke Universal Imperial with such precision and force; and with such haughtiness too. You would think that this maula had twenty generations of Dynastic blood in its veins.

  But it had made no attempt to assume a posture of respect. It simply stared at her in its ugly flat-faced way. Arrogance! Foolishness! But only an arrogant fool of a maula would have attempted to come to Haraar. “Tell me, Laylah Walis,” said Graligal Dren, “are you aware of where you are now?”

  “This is Haraar, the Capital World.”

  “Yes. The heart and soul of the Empire. And you came knowing that Territorials may not enter any part of Imperial Space?”

  “Yes.”

  Madness. “How did you get a ticket?” Graligal Dren asked.

  “A long story,” said the maula. “I told someone who could get one for me that I wanted to visit Haraar, and it was arranged.”

  The maula had a kind of lunatic self-confidence. “This world is sacred,” Graligal Dren said slowly. “The fount and origin of our race. We revere the very dust that blows through its humblest alleyways. We can never let this holy world be desecrated by creatures who are—whom we regard as—who can be defined as—”

  “Maulas,” said Laylah Walis. “Barbarians. Inferior beings.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And any maula who dares set foot here is put to death.”

  “You knew that before you came? And you came anyway?”

  “It does seem that way,” said Laylah Walis.

  2

  If what this creature wanted was to commit suicide, it had to do it without the help of Graligal Dren. She passed it to the Director of Immigration Facilities, who sent it on to Starport Security. Commissioner Twimat Dulik of Security interrogated the prisoner and confirmed it was a Territorial, native to a conquered world in the West Quadrant. It seemed intelligent enough, for a maula, but a maula was what it was: subcivilized, contemptible, and unclean by definition. And for desecrating the Capital World it had to die.

  The damnable thing was that the maula seemed to understand all that, and didn’t appear to care.

  “Since the maula knew the penalty for violating tiihad, and chose to trespass anyway, it’s obviously insane,” said Commissioner Twimat Dulik to his own superior, Justiciar Hwillinin Ma of the Department of Criminal Affairs. “We are civilized beings. Can we put an insane person to death?”

  Justiciar Hwillinin Ma, a mid-upper-caste neuter with dusky yellow skin and a lengthy crest, said, “A maula isn’t a person, Dulik. A maula is little more than a brute animal. Point two: our legal definitions of insanity can’t be applied to subcivilized beings, any more than to insects or birds or trees. Point three—”

  “This isn’t an insect or a bird or a tree, Justiciar Ma. This is an alert, intelligent creature that—”

  “Point three,” said Justiciar Hwillinin Ma sternly, “is that the desecration law is explicit. There’s no footnote covering sanity. We must protect the purity of the homeworld and the traditional act of purification is the slaying of the desecrator.”

  Commissioner Twimat Dulik nodded. “Very well, then, Justiciar Ma. I herewith turn the prisoner over to you for execution.” And saluted and went out.

  But the Haraar City Department of Criminal Justice, Justiciar Ma learned ten minutes later, would not accept the prisoner.

  “Oh, no,” said the chief aide to the Prefect of Capital Police. “You can’t ship any maulas into town, fellow! Don’t you realize that that only compounds the desecration?”

  “But Justiciar Ma says—”

  “Justiciar Ma can gedoy his gevasht,” the aide to the Prefect replied calmly. “Bad enough that this maula of yours is polluting the starport, but you think we’d let it be brought into the capital city itself? To have it within a hundred glezzans of the High Temple precincts, let alone anywhere near the Imperial Palace? Oh, no, no, no. You keep your maula in your own jurisdiction, please.”

  “But the execution—”

  “Take it behind a fuel dump somewhere back of the terminal and blow its head off. Just remember to point your blaster the right way. The long end faces the prisoner.”

  “The police won’t accept the maula,” the subaltern glumly reported to Justiciar Ma. “They say we have to do the execution.”

  “All right, then. Take care of it.”

  “Execute the maula myself, sir?”

  Justiciar Ma stared stonily in the subaltern’s direction and said nothing.

  “Sir? Sir? Sir?”

  3

  It was one thing, Justiciar Ma soon discovered, to issue an execution order, and another entirely to get it carried out. No one at the starport could be induced to put the maula to death.

  “The law clearly states that a maula caught anywhere on Haraar must be killed immediately,” Justiciar Ma said. He was speaking to his old university classmate Thrippel Vree, a Third Chamberlain to His Imperial Majesty. “We’ve already held it for something like fourteen hours. Everyone refuses to do the job, and I don’t seem to have the legal right to compel anyone. Meanwhile we’re all becoming accessories to the desecration.”

  “You could always kill it yourself,” Thrippel Vree suggested. “Ultimately it’s your responsibility, right? If you can’t find anyone else who—”

  “I can’t kill someone, Thrippel! Even a maula!”

  “And if it becomes known that you failed to take the appropriate measures—?”

  “Be reasonable,” Justiciar Ma moaned.

  “One quick shot with a blaster would do
it. Deep breath, steady hand, ready, aim, fire. File your report. Justice is done.”

  Justiciar Ma knew that his old friend was merely being playful. Surely Vree couldn’t be serious. Surely.

  And yet—why not do it himself?

  No. No. It wasn’t that Justiciar Ma was notably merciful, or greatly softhearted. The Ansaar hadn’t come to control three fifths of the galaxy by being extraordinarily merciful or tender. But conquering entire solar systems for the greater glory of the Empire was one thing and shooting some hapless subcivilized creature in cold blood was another. Especially when you happened to be a middle-aged bureaucrat of high caste and sedentary nature.

  Over the next twelve hours Justiciar Ma grew steadily more convinced that he would pay with his career for the impertinence of this confounded maula. A couple of times during those dreary twelve hours he came close to carrying out the execution personally, despite his hesitations, purely to save his own neck.

  But meanwhile Third Chamberlain Thrippel Vree managed to save it for him.

  The Third Chamberlain chanced to mention the starport episode later that evening to another Third Chamberlain, Danol Giyango. “Perplexing,” said Danol Giyango. “It must have known it would have to die for its audacity. Yet it came here anyway. Why, I wonder?”

  That was so intriguing that Danol Giyango spoke of it to his wife, a Lady-in-Waiting, who made mention of it to a High Eunuch of the Innermost Chamber, who told a Subsidiary Concubine, who happened to be in attendance later on one of the five Cherished Major Wives, Etaag Thuuyaal. It was her turn that night to be with His Majesty the Emperor Ryah VII, the High Ansaar, the Supreme Omniscience, the Most Holy Defender of the Race.

  “I heard the most extraordinary story a little while ago,” said Etaag Thuuyaal to the Emperor, as they lay amiably entwined in the Imperial hammock. The Emperor, she knew—as who did not?—was a connoisseur of extraordinary stories, with a voracious appetite for the unlikely and the divertingly strange, a man of intense curiosities and powerful whims.