In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  IN THE COURTS OF THE

  CRIMSON KINGS

  Tor Books by S. M. Stirling

  The Sky People

  In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

  IN THE COURTS OF THE

  CRIMSON KINGS

  S. M. Stirling

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  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  IN THE COURTS OF THE CRIMSON KINGS

  Copyright © 2008 by S. M. Stirling

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stirling, S. M.

  In the courts of the crimson kings / S.M. Stirling.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1489-5

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-1489-4

  1. Mars (Planet)—Fiction. 2. Life on other planets—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.T543I6 2008

  813’.54—dc22

  2007042151

  First Edition: March 2008

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  TO JAN, MY EMERALD-EYED MUSE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Melinda Snodgrass, Daniel Abraham, Sage Walker, Emily Mah, Terry England, George R. R. Martin, Walter Jon Williams, Yvonne Coats, Sally Gwylan, Laura Mixon-Gould and Ian Tregillis of Critical Mass, for constant help and advice as the book was under construction, which enabled me to avoid some of the faults I couldn’t see. A fish can’t see water!

  Thanks to Jerry Pournelle for some inside information on matters fannish . . . but he’s not to blame for the things I got wrong! And to Mike Ralls Jr. for a suggestion about the prologue.

  To the Pulpsters and Golden Age writers, from the author of Phra the Phoenician on down, to the creators of Northwest Smith and John Carter; and to P. J. Farmer. For inspiration!

  All mistakes, infelicities and errors are, of course, my own.

  IN THE COURTS OF THE

  CRIMSON KINGS

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PROLOGUE

  World Science Fiction Convention

  Chicago, Earth

  Labor Day, 1962

  Fred sat in the suite’s bedroom and sipped his beer. A hot, muggy Midwestern early autumn day was dying outside, but he didn’t think he’d gone more than a block from the hotel since he’d arrived. It had been a wild ride of a con: Nobody wanted to talk about anything but the pictures from the Russian probe on Venus, of course. Dinosaurs and Neandertals and beautiful blond cave-princesses in fur bikinis . . . although excitement was building about what the American lander would find on Mars.

  He hadn’t wanted to talk about anything but the Russian probe on Venus—except what the American probe was going to find on Mars. Orbiters and telescopes over the last few years had seen what looked like structures and cities. There had been evidence as far back as Lowell’s investigations in the nineteenth century, and spectroscopes had hinted at free oxygen in the air as far back as the 1920s, but it was all a whole lot more credible after what had been found on Venus. The entire world was holding its breath and waiting, when it wasn’t babbling.

  Nineteen sixty-two: the year everything changed.

  But as his agent had told him, the publishers weren’t going to pay him to burble, and he had his rent to pay and groceries to buy regardless of whether or not Mars turned out to have intelligent life. Plus, fiction of his sort was going to get a lot more difficult; it had already, in fact. Extrasolar stuff, that was the ticket . . . From now on, books set on Mars and Venus were going to be a variety of . . .

  Westerns, he thought. They’ll be like Westerns—like the penny dreadfuls they wrote while the Old West was still going on.

  He’d heard somewhere that Kit Carson had read dime novels about his own supposed adventures while he was really a scout and Indian fighter out in the Rockies. And Buffalo Bill had been taking his Wild West show around Europe before the last Indian wars had been fought.

  And our astronauts—no, our planetary explorers—will be reading about themselves while they do it; probably watching movies and TV about themselves while they do it. Louis L’Amour and James Michener will horn in on our territory. I don’t think the president meant “New Frontier” quite so literally, but that’s the way it’s turning out.

  “Come on, Fred, Carol! They’re about to switch from the talking heads to the real pictures!”

  He picked up his Tuborg—Poul had brought in a case, saying that the occasion required actual beer, rather than Schlitz—and they walked through into the lounge of the suite. It was crowded, but virtually none of the fans were there. Not today, though that young friend of Beam’s was off in a corner, the one doing surveys of the writers for Boeing and the Pentagon.

  Someone kicked over a footstool, and he sank his long, lanky frame down on it; Ted had the seat in the middle, right in front, but then he was Guest of Honor. There was an awesome amount of talent in the room now, all the way from Jack—who’d sold his first story to Gernsback in the ’20s, for God’s sake!—through the Big Bull Gorillas like Bob and Arthur to the postwar crowd of Young Turks like him and Poul and first-timers like young Larry from L.A.

  “Amazing we’ve gone from the first satellite to this in only a little over ten years,” Isaac said, looking like a balding Jewish leprechaun as he grinned and rubbed his hands.

  “We had the incentive, once they proved Mars had an oxygen atmosphere back in ’forty-seven,” Bob replied. “That’s why we had von Braun hard at work from the day we caught him, and the Russkis were slave-driving their Krauts, too. Without that to push us, we might still be waiting for the first manned mission to orbit, or even the first satellite.”

  Then, softly: “But we do have the motive. A whole world.”

  “Two,” his redheaded wife said sharply. “We’re not going to let the Reds have Venus all to themselves, even if they did get the first probe there.”

  “What’s really bloody amazing is that we’re going to watch it on TV. In color, worldwide, no less,” another writer said, in excruciatingly British tones. “Which is like Ferdinand and Isabella watching Columbus land in a newsreel at the cinema.”

  “Hell, Arthur, you predicted it fifteen years ag
o,” Poul replied, and they all chuckled. “Or at least you predicted transmission satellites for TV.”

  “Prediction is becoming less and less attractive, with actual reports from other planets expected daily. I think I’ll stick to writing historicals and time-travel from now on and leave the solar system alone,” one tall distinguished-looking man with a goatee quipped.

  “You lie, Spreggie,” Catherine said crisply. “You won’t be able to resist it.”

  Then all sound died; even breathing seemed hushed. The little crackle as someone sucked on a cigarette and added to the blue haze of smoke under the ceiling sounded loud. Walter Cronkite was pontificating on the screen; for once, his solemnly portentous tones matched the occasion, probably for the first time since D-day. Werner von Braun was beside him, looking like a cat with little yellow feathers stuck to his lips . . . well, a man might, when the U.S. government was giving him ten percent of its budget to play with on a lifetime basis. It might be twenty percent, after this, or more.

  Fighting over Berlin is starting to look a lot less important. To both sides.

  Behind him, a model of the Mars Viking Lander dropped down a hypothetical trajectory and settled on long spidery legs. Half the fans at this convention were wearing Viking helmets with horns. Poul grumbled that the horns weren’t historical. A lot of them had added little propellers on top, too.

  Bob began: “You know, I had this idea for another Mars book a couple of years ago, about an orphan adopted by Martians, but then the preliminary orbital telescope reports came in and I didn’t dare—”

  “Now!” someone else said. “Everyone shut up!”

  The color screen flickered, showed snow. A groan started, then cut off abruptly as the picture cleared save for a few rastor lines; smoke faded away, blown by a stiff wind. Someone swore softly. The ground in front of the lander was a plain covered in low-growing reddish-green plants.

  “Mars, Commie-Colored Cabbage Planet,” someone said.

  That brought a brief nervous chuckle. The ground cover did look a little like splayed-open cabbages with thick waxy leaves the color of dirty rust. Here and there was a reddish-gray shrub covered in white flowers. Neither seemed to want to burn; the circular fire set by the rockets died quickly.

  The vegetation rippled in the wind, and there was a haze like dust on a horizon that shaded up to a sky that was pink as much as blue. Low rocky hills showed in the distance. Between the lander and them was . . .

  “It’s a canal! If only Edgar could be here!”

  “Hell with Burroughs, if only Lowell—”

  “Shut up!”

  It was a canal; about fifteen yards wide, sweeping from left to right and then turning so that it dwindled out of sight like in a perspective drawing, curving to follow the contour of the land, for all the world like a canal in California or Arizona, except that it was covered in an arched roof of some transparent stuff so clear it was barely visible at all. The banks were reddish, man-high stone or concrete, sloping away from the interior and covered in abstract figures something like hieroglyphics, ancient and crumbling and faded.

  A low black shape like a flattened turtle, about the size of a Volkswagen, crawled over the crystal roof without visible means of support, unless there was something like a snail’s foot beneath the carapace.

  “Guess that settles the question of whether those structures we saw from orbit were the product of intelligence or not,” Isaac said dryly.

  “That . . . turtle, beetle, whatever it is . . . could be something like a giant social insect,” Frank said stubbornly. “Beavers build dams. That . . . whatever it is could be doing it.”

  “Beavers don’t carve hieroglyphs on them and neither do ants. The hominids—well, some of them—on Venus looked awfully damned human, which means we’re not reasoning from a sample of one any more. Panspermia and parallel evolution—”

  “Shut up!”

  The audio pickups were transmitting a soft whistling of wind, accompanied by a murmur of commentary from the technicians at Cape Canaveral. There was something in the sky, distant and moving slowly—but too quick for the pickup to track it, given the time-lag factor, so they didn’t try. They waited, and not much happened. A shout went up as a small and fuzzy animal hopped by, but it was gone too quickly to see details except that it precisely matched the color of the leafy ground cover and jumped on its hind legs.

  “Camouflage,” Beam noted; he’d come into the field in the ’50s, but looked older than he must be. “When you’re small and at the bottom of the food chain, you want to be invisible.”

  More of the whatevers hopped around, and turned out to look like desert rats with tufted tails and squashed-in faces; some of them had miniature versions of themselves clinging to their backs. A reading of temperature and atmospheric density came up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

  “So at Martian sea level the air’s a little thinner than Denver,” Poul commented, taking a pull on his beer. “The interior highlands must be like Tibet or the Bolivian Altiplano.”

  “Yeah, but with lower gravity—”

  “The dropoff will be slower, yes. Where Viking came down it’s chilly and very dry, but you or I could be comfortable there with a good warm coat.”

  “So much for wearing oxygen masks and skating on the canals,” Bob said, and chuckled ruefully.

  That was probably because of the Mars book he had written back in the early ’50s.

  “It’s northern-hemisphere summer there now, though. Betcha winter is a sockeldanger,” Ray put in. “And twice as long as ours, don’t forget.”

  “Wait, what’s that?”

  People jostled toward the screen, then sat back with self-conscious control. A dot was coming up the long stretch beside the canal, growing until details could be seen . . .

  A landyacht, he thought as a wordless cheer rang out, then corrected himself when the scale snapped into his perception. No, a landship.

  Six long outriggers with giant wheels supported it; they dipped and returned as they rode over irregularities in the terrain, keeping the boxy hull nearly level.

  “Good suspension system,” Sprague said. “Pneumatic? Or efficient springs. Even in one-third gravity. The sails look transparent. I’d love to know what they’re made of; it doesn’t really look like cloth.”

  Two masts and yards supported huge gossamer sails that looked like lanteens but weren’t. Galleries and windows ran around the hull; if the builders were sized anything like human beings, that meant the landship was at least a hundred and fifty feet long. As it grew closer they saw a figurehead at the front below the bowsprit, some sort of gruesomely fanged beast . . .

  “Now we know something about the local wildlife. Something bad,” Jack quipped.

  “Either that, or they’ve been reading Clark Ashton Smith, Jack.”

  It might be mythological, Fred thought, over the hammering of his heart. Don’t jump to conclusions.

  Closer still, and there was writing behind the figurehead—symbols at least, with a generic family resemblance to the ones on the canal banks. Figures moved on the decks, bending to incomprehensible tasks.

  “It’s heading toward the lander!”

  It did, the front pair of outriggers turning, then the hull fore-shortening as the prow swung toward the camera. The sails twisted and did something; Poul liked messing about in boats, and he murmured about pointing into the wind.

  “Beat-up old . . . whatever-it-is,” Fred heard himself say.

  Closer to, they could see that most of the structure was made out of some dense close-grained reddish wood, intricately carved but worn and patched and replaced in places. But other sections like the outriggers were strange, glossy and looking like metal or crystal or some unearthly—Watch it! he told himself—alloy.

  The sails came down neatly as the craft coasted to a halt. They couldn’t see all of it, for it was too close now; they could observe how the big wheel at the end of one of the outriggers effortlessly climbed
over a boulder, the tire deforming and springing back as it did so.

  “That wheel looks as if it were spun somehow, out of resilient crystalline wire,” Bob commented. “Nice engineering. It must grip like fingers. Do we have anything that could do that? They may be ahead of us in some fields.”

  “But they’re using sails for propulsion,” the editor of Astounding said.

  His head pushed forward pugnaciously, and he crushed out a cigarette. “I refuse to believe we’re not the most advanced species in the solar system. We’re going to them, after all, not them to us.”

  “Mars is smaller than Earth,” Bob replied. “There may not be any fossil fuels or fissionables. Our rockets burn hydrogen cracked with power from burning coal, or oil, or more and more from nuclear power. We’re testing atomic-powered rockets for deep-space work, for the manned missions, to get us out there in person—” he nodded at the screen—“but lack of power sources would push Martian development into other paths.”

  Beam drew thoughtfully on his pipe, a minor affectation. “Or they may have come to us first . . . but a very long time ago, and then they had a Dark Age or two. And to Venus. That would account for—”

  “Lookatthat!” Larry cried joyfully.

  A ramp dropped from under the snarling figurehead, and a dozen figures descended.

  “Martians,” someone said reverently. “Men from Mars.”

  “Humanoids from Mars, at least,” someone else murmured with the abstracted air of a man taking mental notes. “Bilaterally symmetrical bipeds . . . hard to tell more with the way they’re muffled up. There might be tails under those robes . . . their joints bend the same way as ours . . . look, four fingers and a thumb on the inside! Definitely hominid, like the ones on Venus!”

  “And those are weapons,” Beam said. “Rifles, pistols . . .”

  “And they’re all wearing swords,” Sprague commented. “And one of them has a bow. Unless they’re very primitive firearms, muzzle-loaders, you’d expect edged weapons to go out of use fairly quickly.”