The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  Can you understand the horror I felt, Majesty? Staring into those alien yellow eyes, seeing that jutting muzzle, imagining those leathery, sharp-clawed hands against my flesh?

  And then the Ansaar made a rumbling sound deep in its throat, and took a step toward me, arms outstretched and claws spread wide, and another step, and another—

  Abruptly Laylah broke off her tale. “Morning is here, Sire.”

  The Emperor glanced at the jewel on his wrist and said, “So it is.” He frowned. “So our conversation must end. At the first morning hour you have an appointment with the executioner.”

  She regarded him unwaveringly. “I have not forgotten that either. I hope that I have entertained you at least a little, O Lord of All. And if it is not beneath the dignity of an Emperor of the Ansaar to pray for the repose of a maula’s soul, I hope you have a good word for me in your prayers this day, Majesty.”

  “Will you at least finish your tale for me before I go?”

  “The first hour is here already, Majesty,” said Laylah sweetly. “And my time has come.”

  “For an Ansaar soldier to assault a woman of an Annexed species is unlawful. And outrageous besides. If any criminal actions occurred, the man will be identified and punished, I promise you that. Tell me exactly what took place. Your execution”—he seemed to have trouble with the word—“can wait.”

  “Oh, but it is a very long story, Majesty!”

  Again the mixture of amusement and annoyance in his expression: “All your stories are very long stories, is that not so? Well, leave out those circumstantial details that you paint so well. Simply give me the essence. Did he rape you, yes or no?”

  “Majesty—forgive me—it takes time to place the event in its proper context—”

  In exasperation the Emperor said, “How much time? An hour? Two? There is no time, woman! The Debin of Hestagar comes to court at the third hour to discuss this year’s tribute, and before that I have the morning observances to perform, and then—”

  “I could finish the story tonight, then,” Laylah suggested.

  “For you, lady, there will be no tonight.”

  “Ah. How true,” she said.

  7

  From the puzzled expressions of Laylah’s maids that morning and from her scowling neuter chamberlain’s long face it was obvious that they were surprised to find her still here past the hour of execution. Her studies of Ansaar culture indicated that the lower castes took tiihad with the greatest seriousness. Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.

  She waited to hear the knock of the emissaries of death. Once, when she fell into a sound sleep, she dreamed that the knock had come and that at the door, grinning at her, was a gigantic Ansaar with shoulders like a bull’s, holding a gleaming hatchet dripping red with blood.

  The day went by, somehow.

  Then Laylah’s sour-faced chamberlain appeared and announced grandly, “His Majesty the Emperor calls upon you once again!”

  “Wine!” the Emperor said brusquely, striding through the ivory-inlaid door of her suite. He clapped his hands. The maids scurried to obey.

  “A difficult day, Majesty?” Laylah asked.

  He smiled, amused, perhaps, by the intimacy of her tone.

  “The Debin,” he muttered. “The Goishlar of Gozishtandar. The Great Frulzak of Frist! The Gremb! All day long, princes and princelings of the tributary worlds—whole processions of them, prostrating themselves, murmuring hypocritical words of obscenely overstated praise, shoving heaps of gifts toward me. All of them wanting something from me, wanting, wanting, wanting—” The Emperor took a moody gulp of his wine. “I was third in line for the throne, do you know that? I never expected to inherit. It should have been Senpat. But Senpat loved his little hyperyacht too much; and one day he came out of hyper right in the middle of the sun. Well, there was my brother Iason, the second prince; but when he heard Senpat was dead, he enrolled in a stasis monastery, and there he sits to this day, sealed in beyond all reach for the next ten thousand years, neither dead nor alive but as holy as anyone can possibly be. My father summoned me to the throne chamber—why am I telling you this, I wonder?—he summoned me, tears in his eyes, and he said, ‘Ryah, my youngest—Ryah, my dearest—’ I thought the tears were for Senpat and for Iason, but I soon saw that they were for me. And so here I am. The wives! The concubines! The grand palaces! The absolute power over a trillion lives! But also—the Debin, the Goishlar! The Great Frulzak of Frist! The Gremb!”

  “Kings are like stars,” said Laylah. “They rise and set, they have the worship of the world, but no repose.”

  The Emperor looked up. “Well said! You have the gift of words.”

  “Oh,” she said, smiling. “They are very fine words, yes, but not my own. I quote one of our poets, a man named Shelley.”

  “Ah. He understood a great deal, your Shelley. Did you have many poets as good as he?”

  “A great many, yes.”

  “So many worlds—so many poets,” said the Emperor. “I wish I could study them all. You must recite some work of other poets, Laylah, when there is time.”

  “But there is no time, Sire. First I must finish my story; and then—and then—”

  “Your story, yes,” the Emperor said darkly. “And then—then—” He peered into his wine cup. “All day long, between the ambassadors and the potentates and the petitioners, what did I hear from my own people? The maula, they said. The maula, the maula, the maula! Where is she? Why has there been no execution?” He glared, a strange tortured look. “Oh, Laylah, Laylah, why did you ever come here? And why did I not have your head cut from your body the moment I learned that you were here?”

  “My story, Lord of All—may I resume my story?”

  He waved his hand in a fretful, abstracted way. “Yes. Finish your story, yes. And see that you do finish this time!”

  8

  Well, then, O great and glorious Emperor, it is not long after the Annexation. I am alone, and hear the knock, and admit the Ansaar soldier. There I am like one who is frozen, and the soldier is spreading wide his claws and seems about to seize me and do loathsome bestial things to me. But I cannot move.

  How could I know, unfamiliar as I was with Ansaar ways, that his outstretched arms and widespread claws, menacing as they seemed, were only a request for a stranger’s attention?

  “You are Laylah Walis?” He spoke with difficulty in heavily accented English.

  “Yes.”

  He was Procurator-Adjutant Jjai Haunt. He had come here to annex me into the service of the Empire.

  “Annexed?” I gasped. “Me? Why?”

  “Interfacing duties.” Haunt consulted a scrap of paper tucked in his belt. “At your interview you said the ability to learn was your special gift. We need those who can learn. When you have, you will help us to administer the Territory of Earth.”

  So they would train me to be a traitor. But I was too naïve to realize that, then. In any case, I had been annexed. I had five minutes to choose whatever I wanted to take with me and then he led me outside.

  Haunt took me to an Annexation depository on the far side of the mountains. There were at least five hundred humans and about a dozen unarmed Ansaar. The humans all had the same dull, dazed, stunned expression, as though they had been drugged.

  But it was the conquest itself that had stunned them, the suddenness of Earth’s loss of its ancient independence. It was like living among ghosts, Excellency, to live with these annexed people.

  I asked if they knew anything about my mother or my brother or my sister. No one did. For three days I walked the perimeter of the depository and stared at the dark wall of the mountains and counted clouds and tried once more to come to terms with the thing that had happened to our world. On the fourth day Haunt came back for me.

  A loose headcloth hid his birthmark. “I am Haunt,” he said. “Who was with you before. Your instruction will now begin.
”

  He took me to a three-cornered building on the other side of the camp: our classroom. “First our language,” he said, handing me a copper helmet designed for human use, fitting over my head. No Ansaar could have worn it because of the Ansaar crest. I slipped it on and a burst of powerful energy hit me: a sensation like icy daggers plunging into my eardrums, and a wild swirling around me, as if I were in some frightful snowstorm. Choking and gasping, I put my hands to my head to pull the helmet away, but it stuck to me like my own skin.

  Haunt removed it. “Now we can begin to teach you our words.”

  I wondered if the helmet had filled me with your language in one jolt. But no, what I had been given was only the capacity to learn Imperial. Your language is so different in basic assumptions, O Lord of All, that our minds must be adjusted in order to grasp them. Such concepts as the unifying divider, the distributive affiliate, the shifter and the reduplicative and the somatic grammatical phase—we find them altogether alien.

  Yet—as you see, O Master of the Universe—I speak your language fluently now, thanks to the copper helmet and to Procurator-Adjutant Haunt’s patient and effective instruction.

  When I could speak well enough he taught me some of the Empire’s history: its origins on holy Haraar, its ninety thousand years of constant galactic expansion. He explained the powerful need of your people to introduce order into the turbulence and confusion of the universe; and he showed me the great advantages that have come to the annexed races through their affiliation with the Empire. Even so, I still lamented the loss of our independence, Majesty.

  Haunt took me up in a little gravity-thrust vehicle that carried us into the darkness that surrounded the Earth. We traveled the circumference of the Earth, looking down together on the newest of the Ansaar worlds. I stared in wonder and awe at the blue-green bosom of the Earth, at shining fields of white snow and vast tawny wastelands, and at forests so green they seemed black, and the great dark ocean expanses, which hurled blinding sun-blinks back up at us.

  And I saw, limned like faint ghost-sketches against the distant ground, the outlines of ancient cities, the dim vestiges and shadowy ruins of the crowded, noisy, brawling Earth of the vanished past. “Tell me what those cities were called,” Haunt ordered me. “I want to compile an account of this planet’s history over the past fifty thousand years. We already know that Earth once was covered with large cities. Tell me: which was London? Which was Rome? Which was New York? We know the names, but not the locations.”

  Of course New York and London and Rome were only names to me, vestiges of that troubled era of conflict and irrational hatreds that preceded the tranquility and joy that had been ours. Now, seeing the shadowy outlines of places that had been abandoned for hundreds of years, the stumps of once-majestic buildings, the sketchy hints of what must have been highways and bridges, great amphitheaters and monuments, I could tell him very little.

  I studied our archives and taught myself about the Earth that had been, so that I could teach our history to Procurator-Adjutant Haunt. “That one, that was London. And over there, that was Paris, in a country that was called France. You see the spidery metal tower? And the gray building—the cathedral is what that was. For religious ceremonies.” I showed him Egypt’s Pyramids, rising starkly out of the sands, no more troubled by this latest conqueror than by any earlier ones; I found China’s Great Wall for him, zigzagging across the Asian desert; I took him afterward to the sites of other cities, telling him how many millions of people had lived in each: eight million here, I said, and nine million there, and this one, down there, fifteen million, and twenty million in that one in the valley beneath those two lofty mountains.

  Haunt was silent much of the time. I desperately wanted him to look up and say to me, “I see now that this was no piddling little world, this Earth of yours!”

  I was a naïve child then; and how was I to know that this was Procurator-Adjutant Jjai Haunt’s twentieth planetary assignment, that he had helped to conquer at least a dozen huge glittering worlds whose attainments and achievements made those of Earth seem like the doings of children? Well, Haunt had the goodness not to humble my pride. I learned for myself, later on, when I began my travels through the Empire, what real planetary magnificence was like. But that was later.

  Once Haunt took me right to the edge of our little ship’s range to show me how the Ansaar maintain their power over the worlds they annex. We were deep in the darkness above the Earth. He indicated a shining globe floating in orbit nearby that seemed no bigger than my fist. I could have reached out with a boom and gathered it in.

  “That is the Vax,” said Haunt. “It disrupts all electrical fields not of our own making and severs communications links.”

  I could see the white whorls of Vax power radiating from it, spinning off in writhing knots through the sky. And I thought I could hear the Vax singing with its own immense power, a slow, heavy, infinitely leisurely song of domination.

  “Surely letting me see this is a breach of security,” I said. “We could steal one of these ships and come up here and knock your Vax from the sky.”

  Haunt was amused. “No. Behind this Vax is another, and behind that one a third. They are in—adjacent spaces, well beyond your reach. You could never locate them, or harm them if you did.”

  I knew it was true; and I knew Haunt had taken me here to show me how futile any treachery would be, that the Ansaar dominion on Earth was unshakable.

  I came to like Procurator-Adjutant Haunt very much. How unlikely, a girl of Earth developing warm feelings for one of the invaders. Perhaps it is an overstatement, Majesty, to say that I liked Haunt, that my feelings for him were warm; but he did come to seem like a friend to me, as much as any Ansaar could have been.

  He taught me much. And he was my protector too.

  Let me explain, Sire. I have said several times that I was naïve, then, and one mark of my naïveté was that I allowed myself to be turned into a traitor to my people without realizing it.

  I know it is difficult for you to see service to the Empire as any kind of treason. But I am a member of an annexed race; and we of Earth are particularly proud and stubborn; and though we had no choice but to accept Annexation, we always resented it. Yet there I was, serving our conquerors.

  Without helpers like me they would have had little access to the data that could help them understand this latest conquest. Our language is as alien to the Ansaar as theirs is to us, and as language goes, so goes conceptualization itself. So it was necessary for the Ansaar to turn to guides who could explain human ways.

  Though I was inexperienced even in the ways of my own world, I was, as I said, skilled at learning things; and also I am good at explaining what I have learned. So members of the Ansaar high command came to me to ask about Earth and I would answer, and if I did not know the answers, I would find them.

  It took me a great deal of time to see that this was treason in the eyes of many of my fellow citizens.

  I lived now in New Haraar, the newly built administrative capital, and here I worked at my task of finding answers to Ansaar questions. I had difficulty making friends there. At first I thought it was because I was from a village that they did not know. Then I saw they were deliberately avoiding me.

  I was cooperating willingly with our overlords, you see. And my relations with an officer of the occupying force were openly friendly. Most humans at the capital viewed themselves as prisoners of war, serving the Ansaar grudgingly, with hatred in their hearts.

  I learned the truth one day when I was walking between my lodging and the Ansaar data repository. I was supposed to meet Haunt and report to him on research I had done on the different racial forms of the human species and the problems that those differences had caused in ancient times. Suddenly a group of people—five, eight, maybe ten—came rushing out of an opening between two buildings and began shouting and shaking their fists at me.

  “Ansaar whore!” they cried. “Alien-lover! Traitor!” One sp
at at me. One pulled my hair. I thought they would kill me.

  “Ansaar whore!” they kept yelling. “Whore! Whore! Where’s your Ansaar lover, whore?”

  I had never fought in my life; but I fought now, trying to hold them off as they punched me, slapped me, tossed me around. “Wait—” I called. “Stop!” They only hit me harder. My lip was split now. Blood ran down my cheek. One of my eyes felt puffed and swollen.

  And then Haunt was there.

  He came out of nowhere into the middle of the whirlwind. His claws flashed brightly in the sun and he caught one of my attackers and touched him lightly along the side of his face, and the man fell to the ground. Haunt touched another, and he fell too. Another.

  The others stepped back, glaring at Haunt and me with such loathing that it made me tremble.

  “You must not harm her,” Haunt said. “If you do, you will suffer. Now go. Go.” And to me: “Are you all right?”

  “Shaken up. Some cuts and bruises. Oh, Haunt, Haunt—were they insane? Why did they jump on me like that?”

  “They dislike our—friendship. We are friends, you and I, are we not?”

  “Of course.”

  “They are not pleased by that.”

  All that day I could hear their angry shouts in my mind. Traitor! Ansaar whore! Where’s your Ansaar lover, whore?

  Did they think that Haunt and I were—

  Yes. A few days later, as I was eating lunch in the commissary, a woman sat down next to me and said in a low voice, “Are you really sleeping with him, girl?”

  “What?”

  “The Ansaar. Do you and he do it or don’t you?”

  The image leaped into my mind of Haunt’s body pressed against mine, Haunt’s clawed hands wandering across my breasts, my thighs, my belly. His jutting muzzle seeking my lips. But of course there had never been any kind of physical contact between us. “How could you imagine such a thing?” I asked her.