In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  “Could be some sort of honor code. Maybe Burroughs got that right, too! Gentlemen don’t use a gun if the other guy draws a sword.”

  “Nobody’s that honorable,” Sprague said. “Not in the real world . . . worlds. Not for long; the cheaters win too often. This place the probe’s in could be the equivalent of, oh, nineteenth-century India or Africa, and the weapons are imported from elsewhere—a transitional phase.”

  “Hey, look, the one with the bow doesn’t have a nose—or at least it’s a real stub under that headdress. Look, he’s turning his head again—you can see it when he’s in profile.”

  “They’re not primitive guns,” Beam said flatly; he was an expert, and a crack shot himself. “I can’t make out the mechanisms but the barrels are too slender and too precisely formed for that.”

  Fred peered more closely. The figures cautiously approaching the lander were swathed in clothing. The basic garment seemed to be a loose wide-sleeved and calf-length robe a bit like an Arab burnoose with an attached headdress that hid everything but a slit over the eyes . . . or what were presumably eyes. Beneath that he could see baggy pants and boots, and gloves that covered quite humanlike hands. Broad belts and body harnesses of worked leather carried tools and weapons—long curved knives with carved hilts, swords whose guards were intricately worked cages of some glossy stuff, holsters with slender-barreled pistols and fanciful grips.

  One had a bandolier of rope and a grappling tool looped over one shoulder. All of them had something like a cargo hook clipped to their body harness. Another bore something that looked roughly like a rifle as well, with a long thin barrel, a short bulbous body, and a skeletal stock. The archer had a quiver over the shoulder and a strung bow, a complex-looking recurved thing that reminded him a little of pictures he’d seen of Chinese archery.

  The robe of the figure in the lead was a dusty rose color edged with black, and there were jewels and goldwork on the harness. The ones behind ranged from someone nearly as gorgeous to plain brown patched cloth.

  “The captain and officers and crew,” someone murmured. “Or something like that.”

  They came closer and closer, until eyes showed through the slits in their headdresses—humanlike, but detail was frustratingly absent. All were tall and slim despite the muffling cloth; Fred estimated the leader as most of the way to seven feet. The leader . . . might as well call him the captain . . . drew his sword. Light shimmered off the metal; it was double-edged and looked disconcertingly sharp, but not exactly like steel.

  “Cut-and-thrust blade,” Sprague said. “More thrust than cut. A good deal like some seventeenth-century European types.”

  Everyone caught their breath as the captain turned and spoke to his . . . men? The voice sounded human, perhaps a little high-pitched, but the language was wholly unfamiliar. It sounded ripplingly musical with an occasional staccato burst.

  “Tonal and monosyllabic, I think, like Chinese,” Sprague went on, as two of the robed humanoids turned and trotted back toward the ship. “Maybe. Difficult to learn, if it is. I’ll bet the grammar is analytic, too.”

  The captain turned back and prodded the lander, reaching up; they could all hear the tunk . . . tunk . . . as the point of the blade prodded the light metal hull.

  The television spoke: “We are attempting to communicate. The message shall be, We come in peace for all mankind.”

  “Some advertising man thought that up,” Fred said, and there was a nervous chuckle; everyone knew how he felt about them.

  Minutes passed, and the English words sounded tinny and strange through the pickup in the thin Martian atmosphere. The Martians jumped back; the one with the bow turned and ran. A rifle came up and fired—there was no bang, no flash or smoke, just a slight hsssst sound, but the lander rang under an impact.

  The captain didn’t run. Instead he shouted something in his musical language and waved the long blade at his followers. One hurried back up the ramp and returned with a folded tarpaulin; the Martians threw it over the lander, and then the screen went dark. Creaking noises followed.

  Poul broke the long silence with a guffaw. “They’re putting it on board, by God! They swung a yard over and tied it up in a sack and they’re hoisting it on deck!”

  Walter and Werner came back on, both looking sandbagged and starting to stammer explanations that couldn’t possibly have anything behind them.

  “I knew it!” Leigh shouted, punching her fist into the air. “I told you sons of . . . sons what it would be like years ago!”

  A rebel yell cut loose, and suddenly the room was a babble of voices.

  Several years later, the captain’s words were determined to be in the Tradeship dialect of Demotic Modern, and were tentatively translated:

  “It’s alive! Those fools at the Scholarium will pay a fortune for this!”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Encyclopedia Britannica, 20th edition

  University of Chicago Press, 1998

  MARS—Parameters

  ORBIT: 1.5237 AU

  ORBITAL PERIOD: 668.6 Martian solar days

  ROTATION: 24 hrs. 34 min.

  MASS: 0.1075 × Earth

  AVERAGE DENSITY: 3.93 g/cc

  SURFACE GRAVITY: 0.377 × Earth

  DIAMETER: 4,217 miles (equatorial; 53.3% that of Earth)

  SURFACE: 75% land, 25% water (incl. pack ice)

  ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION:

  NITROGEN 76.51%

  OXYGEN 20.23%

  CARBON DIOXIDE 0.11%

  TRACE ELEMENTS: Argon, neon, krypton

  ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE: 10.7 psi average at northern sea level

  The third life-bearing world of the solar system, Mars is less Earthlike than Venus, although like Earth and unlike Venus its rotation is counterclockwise, and the length of the Martian day is nearly identical to that of Earth’s. The atmosphere is thinner than Earth’s, and is apparently growing thinner still; though it remains easily breathable for Terran humanity at the lower levels, uplands tolerable for Martians require oxygen masks of the type used by mountaineers on Earth. More significant is the fact that Mars has a thick, rigid crust that prevents the plate tectonics characteristic of the other two worlds.

  Average temperatures on Mars are roughly 10 degrees Celsius lower than those on Earth, due to the lower solar energy input. This effect is moderated by the higher percentage of carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere, a phenomenon puzzling to scientists because the planet lacks the plate tectonics needed to recirculate carbon compounds and, presumably, has less vulcanism. The year, twice the Terrestrial, and the greater eccentricity of the Martian orbit render seasonal contrasts greater than the Terran norm even at the equator.

  Temperatures on Earth may have been in a similar range, however, at some periods of geologic time (see “Snowball Earth”). It is believed that the gradual thinning of the Martian atmosphere and hence its reduced ability to hold heat has been offset to some degree by the gradual increase in the Sun’s energy output over time.

  The proportions of land and water on Mars are almost a precise reversal of those on Earth. Mars has seas surrounded by land, rather than land surrounded by oceans, and so the total land area is not dissimilar to that of Earth. The bulk of the water area is concentrated in the Great Northern Sea in the northern polar zone, with a smaller equivalent in the Antarctic Sea. Smaller bodies of water are present in parts of the main equator-girdling land mass . . .

  Mars, City of Zar-tu-Kan

  Tau-il-Zhi (Tower of Truth)

  May 1, 2000 AD

  “How can you work for the vaz-Terranan? They’re rich and they have some curious and powerful tembst, but by the First Principle, they’re ugly!” Jelzhau said, considering the board.

  He moved his Chief Coercive diagonally two squares and threatened her Despot.

  The woman who called herself Teyud za-Zhalt sipped at her flask of essence through the glass straw, savoring the musky tartness of the liquid, and then moved her Flier Transport onto the same square.
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  The mild euphoric was doubly pleasurable since Jelzhau would be buying if she won the game, and he had never toppled her Despot in a bout of atanj yet, unless she lost deliberately.

  I am glad to have found alternate employment, she thought, studying the board. He never grasped that I was occasionally throwing the game, either.

  Guarding the life of someone you’d rather see dead was a means of earning your water too heavily spiced with irony for inner peace. Besides that, he was a cheapskate. Occasionally his atanj play was good enough to be entertaining, but usually . . .

  Ah, yes. Once again, excessive conservatism in his employment of the Coercives and Clandestines. He relies too much on his Blockade and Boycott pieces, as might be expected of a spice merchant.

  If you didn’t exercise your Coercives, you increased the odds of their defection.

  “You deal with the vaz-Terranan, too,” she pointed out, as he threw the dice to determine whose piece would win the battle for the square. “Extensively.”

  “That is a series of expeditious meetings. You have to associate with the hideous things. Ah, randomness falls out in your favor.”

  The dice showed three threes; that gave the paratroops in her Flier Transport time to emerge and capture his Chief Coercive.

  “Oh, not necessarily so very hideous,” she said, taking the dice. “Some are grotesque—like a squashed-down caricature of humanity—but some are just stocky and perhaps a bit irregular of feature and extremely muscular. The ones I’ve met are all rather clever, too, if naïve.”

  Jelzhau shuddered. “And they ooze. They’re positively slick with water and mucus most of the time. You can feel it on their breath. An extra three on whether my Chief Coercive will defect?”

  “Oozing would be unaesthetic,” Teyud admitted. “Three, agreed.”

  She threw; three ones, a low-probability result. In the game, that meant her paratroopers had bribed or threatened his Chief Coercive to turn against his Despot. She moved the pieces, now both hers, into another square.

  “Your Despot is now confronted,” she said formally. “He must restore Sh’u Maz, or abdicate.”

  Jelzhau sighed and tipped over the tower-shaped piece. “He abdicates; your Despot proves superior fitness to perpetuate his lineage and establish Sustained Harmony. And as for the vaz-Terranan, they have a distinct and unpleasant odor, as well.”

  Her nostrils flared in irony; Jelzhau was given to excessive use of odwa-scent, himself.

  “I can’t detect any untoward odor most of the time. In essential respects, they resemble us. For example, they have their own internal disputes and differences.”

  “They all seem much alike to me.”

  Privately she thought the spice-factor was being a little bigoted, even if there was some truth to the physical description. The travelers from the Wet World couldn’t help their semblance, and the ones from Kennedy Base usually dressed in local garb, and tried to behave in seemly fashion. Which was more than you could say of some of her own race, such as that clutch of deep-chested highlander caravaneers who were singing—they probably thought it was song—over in one corner, and pawing at one of the De’ming servitors.

  If you couldn’t integrate an essence without losing harmony, you shouldn’t partake in public.

  Mind you, the Blue-tinted Time Considered As A Regressing Series was that sort of canal-side dive. It had seen better days, but those had probably been when the Crimson Dynasty still ruled. Someone was neglecting the glow-globes set in the fluid-stone of the ceiling fifteen feet overhead; badly fed, they gave off less light than they should, and it had an unpleasant greenish cast that made the figures of scholars and warriors on the wall look decayed.

  And there was a grease mark on the smooth pearl granite behind her head; the taverner claimed that it had been made by the famous unbound hair of Zowej-ar-Lakrid in the Conqueror’s student days, fifteen hundred years ago, when he was conspiring to overthrow the city’s despot while playing atanj in this very spot, and that it would be sacrilege to remove it. Some deep layer of it might indeed be that old.

  For the rest, the stopping-place looked depressingly like a thousand others she’d seen, from one end of the Real World to another: a circular room on the ground floor of a tower more than half abandoned. In the more-traveled places near the exits the hard green stones of the floor were worn into troughs that menaced the balance of the patrons. Deepest of all were the spots before the entrance to the spiral staircase in the center of the room.

  The floor was set with circular tables of tkem wood that had been polished blackness once and were nicked and dark grey now.

  Hers held a tiny fretted-copper brazier with a stick of cheap incense burning, and a bowl of tart dipping sauce for the small platter that had held raw rooz meat cut into strips. She took the last strip between a mannerly thumb and forefinger, touched it to the sauce and ate.

  Too hot, she thought. Cheap narwak badly ground, or steeped too long.

  The meat at least was decently fresh, pleasant, lightly marbled, deep red, richly salted, and slightly moist; the animal had not lost its flaps in vain.

  Just then the clock over the entrance to the staircase opened its mouth, gave a sad, piercing cry and sang:

  Hours like sand

  On the shores of a bitter sea

  Flow on waves of time;

  Seven hours have passed

  Since last the Sun

  Rose in blind majesty;

  It shall yield heedless to night

  In ten more.

  One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . . seven.

  That meant the flier would be arriving soon. Teyud packed her board and set, folding them into a palm-sized rectangle and slipping it into its pouch at her belt as they rose; Jelzhau would have taken the lead if Teyud had not adopted a hipshot pose of astonished sorrow. He flushed darkly and made his bow excessive.

  “True, you are no longer in my employ, Most Refined of Breeding,” he said.

  “Indeed,” she replied tranquilly, neglecting to add an honorific.

  I wonder what the Wet Worlders truly think of us she wondered idly, as they began to trot upward.

  It was still hard to have a conversation with them beyond the obvious, and they were less than frank about some things. That was probably wise of them—everyone loved flattery, and criticism was rarely popular—but a pity nonetheless. They were the first new things to come into the Real World for a very long time.

  Even as her father’s lineage reckoned such things. And they had ruled this world for twice ten thousand years.

  But they do so no longer; now they hide in ruins and brood, she reminded herself. Do not waste life span in reverie on things past, as your father did . . . does. For each being, the time from birth to death is as that of the universe itself. You are not in the Tollamune Emperor’s court at Dvor Il-Adazar now . . . and if you were within sight of the Tower of Harmonic Unity, you would die slowly.

  “This trip is the first time I’ve seen this many Martian faces uncovered,” Jeremy Wainman said as the Zhoming Dael slowed on its approach to the tall slimness of the tower. “Here on Zho’da, that is, not in videos back Earthside.”

  Martians called their planet Zho’da; that meant “The Real World,” or possibly “The Only Significant Place.” It was all a matter of perspective, he supposed.

  “It makes sense to muffle up outside on this planet,” said Captain Sally Yamashita of the United States Aerospace Force Astronaut Corps. “Dry, cold, windy, lots of acrid dust. Plus—”

  The Martian airship had made several stops on its way from Kennedy Base, but those had been at caravanserais and isolated trading posts. He and his superior were the only Earthlings—vaz-Terranan in demotic Martian—in the curved forward lounge with its transparent outward-sloping wall. The dozen or so locals mostly remained seated in their nests of cushions and traveling silks and furs, many with a board between them and the eternal Martian atanj game under way; it was
routine for them. Jeremy leaned eagerly over the railing, looking as the long bright line of the canal opened out into the glittering shapes of the half-ruined city ahead.

  “Plus, it’s the custom,” he said, grinning and quoting the most common phrase in the orientation lectures that had started back on Earth right after the summons he’d dreamed of but not seriously expected, and had continued at short intervals while the Brackett made its long passage out and then at Kennedy Base too.

  “I am an anthropologist, you know,” Jeremy added. “With a secondary degree in archaeology, to boot, and one in Martian history.”

  Sally nodded. She was tall by Terran standards—everyone assigned to Mars was, though like her, most were below the Martian average. But even at five-eleven, she gave an impression of close-coupled energy, and her slanted hazel eyes were very keen. Her father had been California-Japanese, richer than God and a marine biologist with a hobby in martial arts; her mother was from a long line of Napa Valley winemakers but had broken the mold by going into modern dance. Sally’s own specialty was the study of Martian technology; she had degrees in molecular biology and paleontology. But she was also a general fixer and contact person, helping Kennedy Base interface with the Martians. And, at thirty, she was several years older than Jeremy, with the weathered skin of an Old Mars Hand.

  And . . . I think she’s a spook. Not all the time, we’re all multitasking here, but I think that’s what she is if you dig down through all the layers. Why are they sending a spook on an archaeological scouting mission? Granted, this can be a very hairy planet, and she looks like she can clip hair with the best of them, but . . .

  “You’re an anthropologist . . . a very inexperienced anthropologist,” she said.

  It was his first trip outside Kennedy Base. He’d seen pictures of these towers with their time-faded colors and the lacy crystalline bridges that joined them, the transparent domes below full of an astonishing flowering lushness, the narrow serpentine streets between blank-faced buildings of rose-red stone . . . but now he could see them for himself. They reminded him a little of Indian Mughal architecture done by someone on opium and freed from the limits of stone and the constraints of gravity, but there was a soft-edged quality to them unlike anything his world had ever bred, as if they had grown here.