The Armies of Memory

by John Barnes

  “What’s the airship for?” I asked.

  “Patrol; we’re an illegal colony and we have to look out for any sign of invasion. The same reason that you’ll notice, sooner or later, that there are fifteen pens for high-speed submarines over there.” He pointed. “We have a whole planet, all to ourselves, to guard with the equivalent of about ten CSP companies. And most of what there is to guard is water, and very stormy water at that. Satellites watch the oceans from above, submarines scout it constantly, and still sometimes you need to get closer than a satellite gets, faster than a submarine does. These airships can go to Mach 4, or hover over a site for weeks. They make a good compromise. But they’re also rather like the tall ships you see down there—just beautiful to see them come and go, you know.”

  I saw that the tall towers on the big, central palace were capped with mooring masts. “Are we going to tie up?”

  He seemed startled, and then glanced and saw what I had seen. “Oh, no, we only use the mooring masts on very calm days for ceremonies—the airship looks good in the background of a vu, you know, and we’re still Occitan, we like things that look good, especially if they are a nuisance. But this is a windy, stormy planet, and mooring to a mast is something we don’t do for long; it would be much too dangerous except on very calm days.”

  “But this thing will make Mach 4?”

  “When it does it leaves a trail half a kilometer long of whitehot plasma; it takes a big engine to push something this size, with such a low density, so fast, and the aintellects seem to be very proud of themselves for figuring out how to make it take the stress. Moored to a mast surrounded by people, yes, it could keep from hitting the ground in a big gust of wind, but at the expense of charring whoever was on the ground. Which some of us would think an unwarranted expense.” His com pinged, and he talked briefly with whoever or whatever was driving the ship. “We’re going to take one circuit of the city, and then spring you down to the ground.”

  “That’s fine, I’m enjoying the ride,” Raimbaut said. “How many airships do you have, since you didn’t mind telling us the number of sub pens?”

  Ebles shrugged. “There’s no point in concealing our military strength from a power that could overwhelm us overnight, is there? We have twenty-two of these airships, with six more to be added soon.”

  “And fifteen submarines—”

  “Two other ports have fleets of submarines. You see? I will even volunteer the information. Military security is not an issue here.” He was clearly impatient and irritated at the questions—not any reaction I could have expected.

  “But you only have ten companies—not more than two battalions if you raise your whole militia—”

  “Our defense machines are robots, almost entirely, just as yours are. If there are CSPs on the ground in Masselha, we will have lost. So the militia is more a formality than anything else; the actual defense of the planet is carried out by the machines. Most of the craft, most of the time, have no human crews. Now, are we quite done with this, or shall I take you around for the traditional photography of our fortifications and secret weapons?” It was phrased to tease, but there was an angry edge under it.

  “Oh, look!” Laprada cried, pointing. “What’s that palace?”

  “It’s the college of music where Giraut will be teaching,” Ebles said, “and it’s also one of the buildings we are proudest of.” He launched into an account of the big, gaudy mess, which I would have described as a celebration of Occitan excess, I think even when I was younger. But Laprada’s little cry had served its purpose; it had distracted Ebles from the confrontation that was building, and it had drawn my attention to something else in the same direction: an enormous cemetery in the part of the city where all the buildings were blank of ornament or advertisement.

  The white domes and vaults, the spires and squares, and the glorious little parks linked by chains of waterfalls and canals crept by below. Beyond them, the strangely blank and sealed buildings showed us flat, blank faces, and at the heart of it all, zenzar like an emerald in an ivory setting, lay that gigantic burial ground.

  4

  “It does feel odd,” I admitted to Raimbaut, as we sat in a café that evening. “The Ix Cycle, at least to me, seems like the thing that is most apt to be my major work, artistically, and during its first release I’m literally nowhere to be found. But at least it gives me a pleasantly unfocused anxiety so that I always have something to attribute nameless fears to.”

  “Just out of curiosity,” Laprada said, “if these people think they are purifying your traditional culture, why is there a place to have coffee on every other block?”

  “Well, because they’re purifying it artistically,” Raimbaut said, grinning. “And if you spend any length of time with any artist, you know they live on coffee. That’s the real secret of the Dark Ages in the Euro culture. We think we lost all these ancient works for which we only have titles or fragments. The fact is they didn’t have coffee, so nobody got around to making most of them. Sophocles really meant to write a hundred plays, which is why we have a list of them, but he only got seven done, because he didn’t have coffee, and also there wasn’t anywhere to meet Euripides over coffee and complain about how the whole playwriting business wasn’t what it used to be and nobody was getting any respect, or deserving it, anymore.”

  “If we don’t stop him now,” I said, “he will keep going all night. I had him in my head for four stanyears, you know.”

  “Well,” Laprada said, “I’m going to invoke Rule One.” Rule One was a team agreement: because there was no sure-to-besecret method of communication, and none of us knew anything that the Noucathars couldn’t learn hundreds of other ways, we would just talk. “So far they have chosen to tell us a large number of things we can’t be expected to believe. First of all, they might have grown the city in a few days, of course, with enough nanos, but why? Why not just grow the major landmarks and public buildings, and then a little bit of living space for the few people you have, and then add bits as you need them? Secondly, terraforming this world took some effort. With a young dim star, and all that water, this place should be in whiteover, frozen right to the bottom everywhere. I mean, look at how fast Nansen re-froze after predecessor terraformation stopped. This place should have re-frozen even faster. So somebody thawed it—and even with the best modern technology, nanos, and self-replication, that takes some time and effort.

  “I don’t think they paid for a planetary engineering job on that scale out of the living stipends of two hundred people, or the mustering-out pay of a hundred noncoms with dishonorable discharges. Yet the Lost Legion started dropping out of parole and vanishing to this place less than four stanmonths after their sentencing.”

  I shrugged. “Even if the money could be made to work, the energy couldn’t. They didn’t find this place and melt a whole huge extra-deep world-ocean in four stanmonths! You can’t even get a springship out of a solar system in four stanmonths. So this place was already here, and already terraformed—I would bet that Masselha was mostly built and ready to move into—and someone gave it, or maybe sold it, to the Lost Legion, who customized it with nanos. Right so far?” She sat back in her chair. Her braids and freckles made her look so young that it wasn’t always easy to remember that she had decades of experience in politics and intelligence; visually Heidi, psychologically Machiavelli, as she liked to say of herself.

  Raimbaut added, “And it doesn’t work militarily. Those are not defenses against any believable invasion by the Council of Humanity. The satellites, airships, and submarines might just barely allow you to intercept a ship trying to bring a springer onto the planet, and to search for springer emissions everywhere, and so forth, so I buy that it’s a precaution against invaders with springers. So they expect an invasion but not by us. That’s interesting.”

  We got up and walked; Ebles had warned us that because the city was a small town in population, everyone would feel very free to approach us and talk to us, but in our aim
less wandering, our feet happened to take us first toward a not-yet-occupied quarter of the city, and then into a vast, shadowy dark park. “Plenty of other evidence that this place has been here for a long time and was grown for other purposes,” Raimbaut commented. “You still can’t get a finished result in less than fifty percent of the original growth time without massive cancers all through it. Even if the oaks and the chestnuts grow at bamboospeed, some of these have to be many stanyears old—and I don’t think they grow that fast. I feel it in my bones that this park has been here for centuries.”

  We walked a while longer without saying anything, until we came, at the end of one street, to a carved-stone balustrade looking down across a great swath of deep green lawn, sloping down to a pool-and-waterfall cascade that then continued down into some dense, thick woods. “What a difference a moon makes,” Raimbaut commented.

  Across the park the multiple high spires of the Museum of Weaving stuck up above the trees. The dark shape against the star-spattered sky, in a city so supernaturally quiet, was a marvel.

  “Someone cared very much what kind of place to live this would be,” I said. “We must come back here in the daytime.”

  “You will want to make sure you’re in your diplomatic garb,” Ebles said, joining us. He wore a light tapi, though the night was not at all cold. “I thought I would take the liberty of joining you.”

  “Why would we want to be in diplomatic clothing in a public park?” Laprada asked.

  “Well,” Ebles said, “ask either of our two Occitans to see with their jovent eyes—”

  “Ah,” I said. “And I suppose it’s well away from other sites so it’s safer.”

  “Safer for what?” Laprada asked.

  “For dueling,” Raimbaut said. “That level lawn at the bottom would have perfect footing, and lots of room with nothing to run into, especially because once swords are drawn, everyone clears a big space. Yes, I see what you mean, Ebles. If we don’t wear diplomatic attire, we’ll look like those pathetic tostemz-toszet-types that are always looking to prove that they are not old.”

  Ebles sighed. “It’s more of a problem than that. Can you imagine an Occitan city where dueling is outlawed? But we had to.”

  I was startled. “Why? Can’t you repair neuroducer injuries?”

  He stepped forward to put his face in the shadow of a tree and said, without looking at me, “We can’t confine people to neuroducers. Too many real weapons around. Most people have one or two in every room, and one to carry. And our people are Occitan, so there are a couple of real killings here every year, before the police break them up.”

  “Why would you have so many real swords around?” I asked.

  “Not swords. Guns. You’ll see.”

  The moon rose higher, and shadows crept back toward their objects. Ebles stayed in the shadow but none of us spoke again that night, till we walked back to our rooms and said goodnight.

  Arnaut Vertzic, the Minister for Purity, explained, “The problem is that theoretically the Council of Humanity claims all human beings as subjects of its sovereignty, and all humaninhabited space as its territory. Since the invention of the springer, the title ‘ambassador’ has come to mean ‘proconsul’; the Council’s ambassador to a culture is not someone who represents the Council to them, it’s the person who stands over them and makes sure they stay within Council policy. So we would be delighted if you described yourself as a cultural exchange envoy or representative for the Council, but—since it would therefore imply that we exist apart from the Council, that is exactly what you are not allowed to do.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’m visiting this area for the Council, but I am not representing the Council of Humanity to your government because if I did that would imply that the Council of Humanity was allowing itself to be aware that you have a government. Approximately. My boss could cover this in detail, with diagrams. On things like this, I usually just follow her orders.”

  “And the problem from my side,” Vertzic said, making a small sour face to indicate that he too thought this was very silly and bureaucratic, “is that every title you could accept—cultural legate, delegate for artistic matters, and so forth—carries with it an implication that we are in some way merely an irregular territory which rightfully belongs under the control of the Council. That is of course unacceptable to us. So are we stymied as to what to call you, before we can even begin to discuss what you might do here?”

  I smiled very warmly, making it clear that Arnaut Vertzic and I just might be the best of friends, near-companho, really, and it was us two friends and our reasonableness against our strict and senseless superiors. (Despite the fact that he was a lumpy porcine man with sticky white skin like a fallen cake and an obsequiousness that seemed only to lack a tail to wag.) An ancient game in diplomacy: try to establish an interpersonal bond, complain about your boss, get the other fellow to complain about his, and see if he’s dumb enough to give the store away to his so-sympathetic friend.

  We had established that neither of us was that dumb, but of course now we could hardly admit that we’d been feeling each other out for gullibility, so we had to continue the pretense that we liked each other and that our bosses were the problem. I was getting tired of that game, so it was time to pull out the solution I preferred. “Well,” I said, “just before I left, they did hammer out a compromise that I was approved to offer. The Council of Humanity will simply declare me and my assistants to be ‘Council Personnel on Paid Detached Duty,’ and you will refer to me as a visiting teacher, visiting scholar, something of the sort, without mentioning where I’m visiting from. That way they admit that I am here working for them, you admit that I am from somewhere else, and nobody talks about who is sovereign relative to whom.”

  He paged an aintellect and watched his screen for a few minutes. For all I knew he was playing solitaire.

  When he had made me wait the minimum time to make it look good, he said, “Well, several hundred aintellects can’t see anything wrong with that solution. So as of this moment you are our Visiting Artist, and you are the Council’s Employee Etcetera. You already have your schedule for your two concerts, and we have set up your recording sessions and your workshop on the schedule you requested. Do you have any questions?”

  “Two,” I said. “Both possibly offensive.”

  “Good, that’s the kind I am paid to deal with.”

  Arnaut Vertzic said that so cheerfully and brightly that I was forced to consider the possibility that he meant it; worse yet, I might like him.

  “Well, then, why were problems of this kind in the jurisdiction of the Ministry for Purity?”

  Vertzic grinned. “What a reasonable question. I know my title sounds as if I were either a censor or in charge of religious instruction. But it’s purity in the sense that ‘Cathar’ means pure; the original Cathars were trying to be religiously pure, but we are trying to be culturally pure. My jurisdiction is over anything that might have an impact on how we define ‘purely Occitan.’ So one part of our definition is our relation to the Council of Humanity—specifically that we don’t accept any authority by them over us—and my job was to make sure that we didn’t accidentally accept it. And your second offensive question?”

  “You have satellites, submarines, and airships patrolling the whole surface area of Aurenga. Now, if the Council of Humanity finds out where you are, and invades, they will send more CSPs than your whole population. And those patrol craft of yours won’t last five minutes. I regret that all this sounds so much as if I were making threats, which I assure you I don’t want to do. I’m just outlining what will happen if the Council grabs this world, and I do not think it could come as a surprise to you.”

  “It does not. But if you aren’t making threats, then why are you bringing this up? As you say, we are well aware of it.”

  “Well, I don’t believe you’re crazy, and much as we Occitans love a futile gesture, I don’t believe you are making one at the scale and expense of
your whole planet.”

  “Perhaps we are merely being very pure, and relishing a particularly futile gesture.”

  “It’s always possible that I’m deluded. Based on my record, I’d say it’s probable. But all the same I don’t believe that it is the Council forces that worry you. Of course I can imagine such a large investment in hardware just for symbolic purposes; cultures do sillier things all the time; but I don’t believe it.”

  “You have a great deal of trouble believing some things, Donz Leones.”

  “I do.”

  “Would you like to go somewhere for coffee, and perhaps just sit and talk? We are done with all the official parts, now.” Diplomatic speech for “let’s go talk about the real stuff.”

  “That might be pleasant.” Diplomatic for “Yes.”

  Anyway, it was pleasant. Vertzic and I turned out to have some acquaintances in common, and eventually I realized he had attended Rimbaud’s Academy, the main rival of my old school, St. Baudelaire’s. “Raimbaut had a terrible year there,” I said, “before he transferred and became one of us.”

  “Oh, deu! He’s that Raimbaut Bovalhor! I noticed it originally but you know, it’s such a common name—well! I must shake his hand. And first yours.”

  Though I had no idea about what, we shook hands very solemnly.

  “We were classmates, and I was the class goat after he was the class goat,” Arnaut explained. “There was a group of really nasty bullies, musician-athletes who were always winning prizes. The school was very proud of them, so no one would do anything about their habit of abusing smaller boys, since after all—you remember the old days—real enseingnamen was supposed to include a little dash of cruelty. Anyway, after Raimbaut was their target, I was. Except for one wonderful week when they were all expelled for losing a big fight in the street with Raimbaut and his new St. Bo’s companho—”

  “Losing? They beat us purple!”