The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  “And what might that be, my dearest one?”

  “Well,” said Etaag Thuuyal, “this comes from Subsidiary Concubine Hypoepoi, who heard it from the High Eunuch Sambin, who got it from Lady-in-Waiting Sipyar Giyango, whose husband heard it from somebody whose friend is a Justiciar at the starport. It seems that a starship came in today from the Territories, and it was discovered that one of the passengers was—can you imagine it?—well, the passengers came down the ramp, and most were the usual assortment of tourists and pilgrims and such, but then what do you think marched out of the ship, as blithe and bold as could be—?”

  “Tell me,” said the Emperor Ryah VII.

  Etaag Thuuyaal smiled with deep self-satisfaction. Great benefits, she had learned long ago, accrued to those who were capable of keeping the Emperor amused.

  “Well,” she said—

  The Emperor was startled. And fascinated as well.

  A maula on Haraar? Of course, the creature would have to die. But why had it come, knowing the risk involved? Barbarians might be uneducated and coarse and crude, but never blind to their own survival. Surely they burned within with the furious species-need to live and reproduce and maintain their species’ niche in the great chain of being. An animal might gnaw off its own leg in order to escape a trap it had stumbled into, the Emperor thought, but it would hardly stick its leg in the trap in the first place just to find out if the trap really would close on it.

  So why—why—

  The Emperor sprang lithely out of the hammock and called for the eunuch on duty. “There’s a maula at the starport and they haven’t executed it yet. Delay carrying out the sentence. Have this maula brought here first thing in the morning.”

  “I hear and obey, O Lord of the Universe.”

  The Emperor returned to his hammock. Etaag Thuuyaal stretched out her arms to him, amiably, invitingly.

  4

  Laylah Walis was starting to worry. Everything so far had gone according to plan. She was here and she was still alive.

  But it was a wild gamble, a thousand-to-one shot. Sooner or later the port officials might decide that the decree about desecration of the Capital World meant just what it said. And then—

  Sounds in the hall. People approaching.

  One was the stocky little security chief, Dulik. He had seemed intelligent and sensitive, even sympathetic. With him were two brutish-looking low-caste Ansaar in dull green uniforms. Executioners?

  Laylah had studied Ansaar body language well. The posture of these three looked ominous: shoulders up almost to their ears, long arms close to their sides. Eyes retracted, a mark of tension among Ansaar. The vertical slits of their pupils were nearly invisible.

  The cell door swung open. “You are summoned, Laylah Walis,” the security chief said, in a taut and portentous tone.

  “Summoned to what?”

  “Not to what, maula, but whom. The Emperor requests your presence.”

  A quick smile flitted across her face. Success! Success!

  One Ansaar produced a coil of rope and the other yanked her arms roughly behind her back like a beast being trussed for slaughter. They tied her wrists tightly, then her ankles. Seizing her by the elbows, they propelled her across the room and out the door.

  Her legs were dragging as they pulled her clumsily along, and their sharp-clawed seven-fingered hands dug miserably into her flesh. She felt stretched and bruised and cramped by the time they had hauled her in a series of bumps and jolts down a long tunnel and out into the bright golden-green light of the Haraar dawn.

  A sleek teardrop-shaped car waited. “The Palace,” Dulik told the driver. Then, in a muttered undertone: “He delays the maula’s death. Must speak with her first. Well, who are we to question the Emperor’s wishes?”

  The car rose and floated down the track toward Haraar City, the fabled capital of the Ansaar Empire.

  “The rose-red city half as old as time,” a poet had called it—a thousand palaces and five thousand temples, green parks and leafy promenades, shining obelisks and long eye-dazzling colonnades. From here the invincible might of the Ansaar had radiated irresistibly outward over the past ninety thousand years, spreading in ever-widening circles until the Empire’s dominion arched across more than a thousand parsecs of space. For eons the wealth of all that vast domain had poured down upon this city of Haraar, making it the most majestic seat of government that had ever existed.

  But Laylah sat hunched down between the two Ansaar guards, her long legs sprawling far forward and her head uncomfortably buried in a plush cushion; and all she could see was a glimpse of a golden dome here, a pink minaret there, a great gleaming white obelisk jutting into the sky over yonder.

  The car floated to a halt. Ungently they pulled her out.

  She had a brief glimpse of the courtyard of an incredible palace, high gleaming porphyry walls inlaid with onyx medallions, delicate many-windowed towers, long boulevards lined by strips of immaculately tended shrubbery, crystalline reflecting pools narrow as daggers. Then a thick furry hood came down over her head and she saw nothing further.

  “This is the maula that the Emperor asked to see,” Dulik said. Her hood was lifted for a moment and yellow Ansaar eyes peered briefly into her own, and then she was swept off her feet. After a time came the sound of a great door being swung back, and the bruising impact of being dropped onto a stone floor.

  An intense silence roared in her ears.

  She lay bound and hooded on a cold slab of stone. The ropes circling her wrists and ankles chafed and cut cruelly into her skin, and she felt stifled and nauseated by the stale, moist air.

  Hours passed. She grew stiff and sore.

  Footsteps, finally. People approaching. The hood was lifted. Laylah blinked, gasped eagerly for breath, scratched her chin against her shoulder to gratify the itch that had begun to plague her half a million years before.

  It was a bleak, bare, windowless chamber. Around her were armed guards in crimson pantaloons, great green sashes, loose purple tunics with flaring shoulder pads. Like most Ansaar they were short and stocky, with thick chests, long apelike arms, stubby bow legs.

  But standing apart from the rest, studying her like some rare zoological specimen, was an Ansaar of such noble mien and grandeur that she knew she was in the presence of the Emperor Ryah VII.

  He might almost have been of a different species: tall, well over two meters, perhaps two and a half. His arms reached only as far as his thighs, as a human’s arms would. The sagittal crest on his hairless head was the most impressive she had ever seen. Its contours were steep, rising to needle-sharp prominence.

  From throat to ankles he was swathed in a brocaded robe of heavy crimson fabric shot through with threads of silver. His face and hands were the color of richest mahogany, with a fiery scarlet undertone. Out of that mask of a face came the gleam of penetrating green eyes—not yellow, like other Ansaar eyes, but green, the lustrous heavy green of pure emerald.

  Surely this was someone bred for a thousand generations for the Sapphire Throne of the Ansaar Empire. Despite herself, despite the profound and fierce loathing for all things Ansaar that burned within every human, Laylah felt a powerful throb of awe—and an unmistakable, astonishing shiver of immediate physical attraction.

  “Lift it up.” The Emperor’s voice rumbled with authority and sonorous force. “Let me see what this maula looks like.”

  The guards raised her to a standing position. Her eyes met his directly, the upper-caste style of Ansaar social usage, her head inclined at precisely the correct angle to indicate deference to his majestic person while retaining her own personal dignity.

  “A she-maula, I’d guess. But look at her!” the Emperor cried. “Is that a maula expression on her face? Is that the way a maula would stand? She holds herself like a countess! She looks right into my eyes as a high-caste woman would!” He smiled a jagged Ansaar smile. “You are a female, aren’t you, maula?”

  “That is correct, Majesty,” said Laylah
coolly.

  “And speaks Universal like a lady of the court!” The Emperor’s vertical pupils became slits. His brilliant green eyes gleamed brightly with the insatiable curiosity for which he was famed. “How strange you are. Where did you learn such good Universal, maula?”

  “A long story, O Supreme Omniscience.”

  “Ah. Ah. A long story.” He seemed tremendously amused by her. “Tell me, then. But in shorter form. Three ambassadors wait to see me today, and the Goishlaar of Gozishtandar also. He wants favors from me, as usual, and that always makes him very impatient.”

  She was silent.

  “Go on,” he said. “Tell me about yourself. Who are you? Why have you come here? How do you know so much about Ansaar ways?”

  Laylah glanced down at her tethered hands. “Telling stories is quite difficult, Majesty, when one is in discomfort. These ropes around me—they bind, they chafe—”

  “You’re a prisoner, maula! Prisoners must be bound!”

  “Nevertheless, Sire—if I am to speak of the matters about which you ask—ah, this pain is hard to bear, and the humiliation, besides! I beg you, High One—have my bonds removed from me.”

  The Emperor’s eyes flickered momentarily. But she kept her gaze on him steadily in the deferent-but-not-abased mode, and gradually he seemed to relent.

  “Cut the ropes,” he ordered.

  They were cut away. Laylah rubbed her hands together and shifted her weight from foot to foot.

  “Now,” the Emperor said. “If you would, my lady—a word or two of explanation from you—”

  “In this cold bare room? And without having had anything to eat in almost an entire day?”

  Maybe that was going too far. But once again the Emperor let himself be charmed by her impertinence. “Yes,” he said, with a flourish. “Certainly, my lady. Some meat and a flask of wine, perhaps? A warm bath?” He seemed not to be speaking sarcastically. “Very well. But then you must tell me what you’re all about, agreed? Why you are here—what you thought you could accomplish. Everything. I’ll come to you late this afternoon, after I’ve dealt with the Goishlaar and some of those ambassadors, and you’ll answer all my questions, and no more of these little requests of yours. Eh, maula?” And once more there was the tone of authority.

  “I hear and obey, O Lord of Worlds.”

  “Good. Good.” He stared at her strangely. “How different you are from the other humans I have met. They were in a fury all the time. All they did was shout and rant. And then the other kind, those who cringed and whined and bowed and scraped, crawling in front of me, agreeing with every word I said. They were even worse. But you treat me almost as though we were equals! I see neither defiance nor obsequiousness in your manner. You are very unusual, maula. You are extraordinarily unusual.”

  Laylah said nothing.

  The Emperor began to walk away. Then he spun around and said, “Is there a name by which I can call you, maula?”

  “Laylah. Laylah Walis.”

  “Which of those is the soul-name, and which the face-name?”

  “The face-name is Laylah, Sire. Walis is the soul-name.”

  “Will it be all right, if I call you Laylah? May the Lord of the Ansaar Empire call a maula by her face-name?” Again the wry chuckle. But Laylah knew she was in the hands of a lion toying with his prey. His expression changed once more, turning dark and grim. “You have to die tomorrow, maula, and there’s no way around that. You know that, don’t you? Yes, you do. That’s interesting about you, that you know it and you don’t seem to care. I want to know more about that. Tonight we talk; and tomorrow morning you die. It is the law, and not even the Most Holy Defender of the Race may trifle with the law.” He waved his hand imperiously. “I will speak again with you later, Laylah Walis.” And he strode from the room.

  5

  They took her to what probably was one of the suites of the royal harem. It was said the Emperor had thousands of wives and concubines; and that might not be far from the truth. She was in a separate wing of the palace, set apart by high walls of black brick. Radiating clusters of spokelike hallways jutted in all directions and a maze of brightly lit chambers was visible in the distance. Women and eunuchs in elegant robes glided about softly, dozens of them, scores, not one of them ever meeting Laylah’s eye.

  “Yours,” said the guard who accompanied her, indicating a faintly aromatic door inlaid with strips of ivory.

  There were five spacious rooms: a bedroom, a richly curtained sitting room, a bath with a crystal tub, a dining chamber with a table cut from a block of black stone, and a tiring-room for the use of her servants, of whom there were three, two maids and a silent, glum-faced figure with the neuter-sign on his forehead.

  They stripped her and bathed her and anointed her body with oils. They would have anointed her hair too, but she stopped them. They gave her robes of a filmy fabric that shifted polarity with every movement of her body, so her nakedness glinted through in quick flashes and then vanished again. They brought her a platter of meat and a bowl of angular purple fruits, and a flask of golden wine shot through with startling red highlights, as if powdered rubies had been mixed into it.

  Then they left her alone. She went from room to room. In the storage chambers were robes and diadems, a month’s wardrobe for a princess royal who never wore the same thing twice. There was a collection of perfumes and cosmetics and a closet full of liqueurs. Did every member of the royal harem have a suite like this? Say, three hundred concubines and a hundred wives—

  The cost was incalculable. Was it for this that the Ansaar had conquered the galaxy, so that their Emperor could squander a planet’s ransom on the women who were his toys? Fury coursed through her. But then she grew calm again. What did it matter how the Ansaar chose to waste the profits of their conquests?

  She lay down and slept, and dreamed of worlds colliding and smashing asunder, and of blazing stars plummeting through the skies, and of fiery comets with the faces of dragons.

  Then she heard a sound and opened her eyes, and saw an Ansaar of immense presence and authority standing over her, a formidably tall and astonishingly handsome Ansaar whom her sleep-fogged mind recognized only after a moment or two as His Majesty Ryah VII.

  He took a seat facing her. “Everything is to your liking?”

  “Magnificent, Your Highness.”

  “I told them to give you one of the best available apartments.”

  “Even though I must die tomorrow?”

  He flashed his warmest smile, and then, as before, the smile abruptly turned without any perceptible transition to a grimace of fury. “It is nothing to joke about, my lady.”

  “You really do intend to put me to death, then?”

  “The law is the law. This planet is not only the seat of the Imperial Government, it is sacred as well.” His tone was implacable. “There’s muttering aplenty already because I’ve allowed you to live this long. By tomorrow you’ll be dead.” He leaned toward her. His eyes drilled into her like high-intensity beams. “How could you have been so stupid? You’re obviously a woman of intelligence and education, as humans go. Why bring certain death down upon yourself? Tell me that! Tell me!”

  “It is, as I said, a long story, Majesty.”

  “Make it no longer than you must, then.” He glanced at a pale green jewel on his wrist. “It is the eighth hour of night. At the first hour of morning I must deliver you to the executioner. Between now and then I want to hear all that you have to tell.”

  “Listen, then, O wise and happy Emperor.”

  And she leaned back on the divan and commenced her tale.

  6

  I was born on Earth, in Green River province, one of our most fertile provinces, in our year A.D. 2697—the year Klath 4 of the 82nd Ansaar Imperial Cycle. So I am thirty-four years old by our reckoning; in Ansaar years I am twenty-three. My father was a physician and my mother a scryer, that is, one who studies the nature of the universe. At the time of the conquest I was a girl just ent
ering womanhood. I had a younger brother who intended to be a healer like my father, and an older sister in training for the scrying arts. I myself had not yet chosen a path to follow.

  You should understand, O Supreme Omniscience, that Earth at the time of the Ansaar conquest was a world among worlds, a jewel of the stars, a planet to be envied and admired.

  Do you know any of our history? No, of course not, Majesty. The universe is very wide and our world is far away; and the Lord of the Ansaar has much to occupy his mind besides the study of distant and unimportant maula planets. But I assure you, Sire, that Earth was no trivial world. To us our little world was the center of the universe, a place of wonder and beauty and nobility.

  I tell you that, Omniscience, so that you may see that though to you we are barbarians, we had high regard for our world’s civilization. Perhaps some barbarians are content to think of themselves as barbarians, but that was not true of us. Our history went back more than ten thousand of our years. We had surmounted obstacles, transcended our limitations, had built ourselves a society that seemed to us very near perfect.

  You smile, O Lord of the Galaxy, at our mere ten thousand years! But consider: at first we were stammering nomads, living on roots and seeds and the beasts of the field; and we rose from that level to conquest not only over the sea and the sky and the darkness of space, but the most difficult of all, triumph over our own selves. We put aside our brutishness and built a great civilization. Has ever a race risen more swiftly from savagery to civilization?

  Be aware, O Master of the Ansaar, that we were once a warlike, brutal race, which showed no mercy. I could tell you of great slaughter, the burning of villages and the killing of children, unending cruelties, mindless destruction. A myth of ours tells of the first people, mother, father, two sons, and how one son lifted his hand against his brother and slew him; and that was in the beginning.