In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  Fliers drifted past, lean, crimson patrolcraft, diminutive yachts with fanciful paint, plain, fat-bodied freighters; riders mounted on Paiteng swooped and soared among them. Landships by the hundred waited by the docks, or sailed the ochre-colored turf of the passageways that led through the croplands to the deserts beyond. Behind him rose the Mountain itself, towering near seventy thousand feet above, through layers of garden and forest and glacier, and then on to the thin verges of space.

  If Dvor Il-Adazar was only a city-state now, it was at least the greatest that yet remained in the Real World . . . though from here you could not see how many towers and courts sheltered only dust and silence and fading legends. If the empty ones were fewer than they had been in the year of his accession, then the credit was his, the long struggle against entropy.

  “Attend me,” he said to the guard-commander, and led the way into the Chamber of Memories.

  A flick of a finger brought attendants who left essences and a bowl of smoldering stimulative and then withdrew. Sajir sa-Tomond sat in a lounger that adjusted to his frail length and began to administer warmth and massage. The room was neither very large nor very grand, except for the single block of red crystal shaped into a seat against the far wall; there was only one other like that in all existence, in the Hall of Received Submission.

  He stared moodily at it as he sipped. The essence gave him the semblance of strength, and he closed his eyes for a moment to settle his mind. A game of atanj lay on a board before him, each piece carved from a single thumb-sized jewel or shaped from precious metal: ruby and jet for the Despots, black jade for the Clandestines, tourmaline for the Coercives, gold fretwork and diamond for the Boycotts.

  “Sit,” he said to the Coercive. “Unmask. Refresh yourself. You have not made a move today.”

  The commander did, raising the visor of his parade helm with its faceted eyes and golden mandibles. When the Tollamune opened his own eyes once more, sorrow pierced him to the heart at the sight of the face beneath, the steady golden eyes and the bronze hair in its jeweled war-net. So like, so like . . .

  The Thoughtful Grace moved immediately; a Transport leaping a Boycott to deliver a cargo.

  Ah! Sajir thought, daring, yet clever. I will not win this game in less than twenty-three moves now.

  “I have a task for you, Notaj sa-Soj,” he said softly.

  “Command me, Tollamune,” the man said.

  The voice was different from hers, a little deeper, a little older—Vowin sa-Soj had been only fifty at the beginning of her long and bitter death. Notaj sa-Soj was her sire’s youngest brother by another breeding partner, and at a century young for his post. His eugenic qualifications were impeccable, and his record of action matched it.

  “To recapitulate that which is universally known but rarely expressed: I have no heir,” Sajir said. “None of more than one-eighth consanguinity, and none of sufficient genetic congruity to be accounted of the Lineage or to operate the Devices. With me, the Crimson Dynasty ends, after eighteen thousand years of the Real World, and all hope of restoring Sh’u Maz in its true form.”

  “This is true, Supremacy. With you will perish the significance of our existence and such meaning as sentience has imposed on mere event. There is little consolation in it, but the line of the Kings Beneath the Mountain will at least end with a superior individual.”

  The nicating membranes swept over Notaj’s eyes, leaving them glistening. “I will preserve your life as long as event and randomness permit, your Supremacy,” he added, his voice firm.

  Despite everything, Sajir sa-Tomond felt himself smile at the harmonics that underlay the flat statement. The voice of a Thoughtful Grace purebred could rarely be read for undertone by anyone but a Tollamune.

  “At least, the official perception of matters is that I have no heir of closer than one-eighth consanguinity,” Sajir said, and saw the other’s pupils flare and ears cock forward.

  Their breed had been selected for wit, not merely deadliness. They had been generals and commanders once, as well as matchless Coercives on a personal level. The implications and possibilities needed little restating.

  “Vowin’s offspring survives?”

  “Correct, Captain. Concealed here until relatively recently. When she matured, traces of the Tollamune inheritance became unmistakable.”

  They shared a glance that said: And then she must be hidden and exiled, for what crime is more reprobated than the theft of the Tollamune genome? But now, perhaps, the balance of forces allows . . .

  “The knowledge is no longer so closely held as would best suit my purposes,” Sajir went on. “You will understand that multiple factions wish the official and perceived reality to be made objective truth, lest the pleasantly empty field left after my long-anticipated departure should prove not so empty after all.”

  “But you do not so wish, Supremacy?” the guard captain said, his voice neutral as the cool water in the fountain.

  “I never did.” Sajir’s eyes closed again, this time against remembered pain. “As evidence, she lives.”

  “But Vowin does not—interrogative-hypothetical?”

  “Certain courses of action were . . . necessary. If she had waited longer to make herself receptive to fertilization, as I instructed . . . But you of the Thoughtful Grace are headlong. And there was doubt as to my own survival at the time. The arrival of the vas-Terranan machines disturbed a most delicate balance.”

  Notaj blinked, integrating the information. “She must have been willing to undertake death by infestation in order to secure the Lineage,” he said; there was a hard pride in his tone. “She was, as you say, youthful and headlong, but a fine strategic analyst, and ruthless. And genetically ambitious. To bear the first outcross of the Tollamune line in ten millennia . . .”

  Sajir sa-Tomond let his shoulders and head fall into a pose of acceptance. “So she said. Such pride was worthy of eugenic elevation. We of the Dynasty have hugged our seed too close, to the detriment of Sh’u Maz.”

  The guardsman gestured agreement-with-reservations; unspoken was the reason for that—the tools of power responded to the genome, not the individual. Too many Emperors had died at the hands of their own close kin for any to forget it. So their numbers had dwindled across the millennia and their own long life spans.

  As have the water and atmosphere of the Real World itself, Sajir thought. This is a congruity far too apt for comfort.

  “There are many factors to be considered,” Notaj said. “Your demise would, with a high degree of probability, be expedited if an heir were anticipated, but not yet in place and aligned with effective power. Those disaffected elements content to wait now for their chance would act precipitately in that hypothesis.”

  “True. Therefore the heir must be found, brought to Dvor Il-Adazar, and put in an unassailable position. Those who wish to kill or capture her—”

  “Capture her?”

  Both words were separately in Interrogative; the guardsman raised two fingers to his brow in apology. Sajir sa-Tomond moved a hand in a gentle curve that covered his words in a glow of affection:

  “The offspring was female. And there is the vas-Terranan to be considered. There are implications of possession of the Tollamune genome that you do not know; suffice it to say that the Terran requires access to the genome. Prince Heltaw sa-Veynau, for example, wishing to rule through a puppet and gain access to the Tollamune genome. Possibly others, but certainly him.”

  “The Terran?”

  “Him. Unfortunately, he is necessary to my purposes. And I very much depreciate the high-probability consequences of his no longer needing me.”

  “I will begin contingency planning immediately,” Notaj said. “The necessary information, Supremacy—identity and location?”

  He gave the data—keys to the files, rather—and watched the brisk efficiency of the commander’s stride out of the entrance with wry amusement.

  Then the man halted and turned in the doorway, his eyes going to the
atanj board.

  “Twenty-five moves, Supremacy.”

  That also reminded him of a woman dead many years.

  His loyalty is absolute, though intelligent and independent, the Tollamune thought. And now I have activated his own Lineage ambitions. He will operate at maximum efficiency. To promote this is to sustain harmony.

  With a sigh he rose from the recliner and walked to the crystal throne. Eddies moved within the dense redness of it, like wings of gauze. He gave a complex shiver as he sat, resting his head against the recess behind it and feeling the featherlight pressure against the scar on his neck, then a slight sting. Exterior reality vanished. A murmur as of distant hive insects seemed to fill his skull, but it was no mere vibration of the air. An inexpressible sensation of draining, as his recent memories joined those of all his life, and of the Lineage of the Crimson Dynasty and their consorts since the beginning.

  Visions: death, birth, love, hate, accomplishment and cruelty, glory and despair. The bowed heads of ancient kings kneeling before the First Emperor; the feel of his own blood pouring out over the crystal, and the knives in the hands of kin. The temptation to lose himself in that endless sea was strong and bitter, as strong as the taste of tokmar; he knew that, for a memory of it was here—not his, many generations removed, but as real as the weary weight of his own bones.

  “For a moment,” he whispered. “Only for a moment I will see you again, my Vowin, so beautiful and so fierce. Then I will fight for the child of our union, until we are united once more.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Encyclopedia Britannica, 20th Edition

  University of Chicago Press, 1998

  MARS—History of Observation

  The lack of the consistent layer of high cloud which rendered Earth-based telescopic investigation of Venus so difficult was partially offset by the smaller size of Mars and the rarity of close approaches. By the early nineteenth century, astronomers such as Herschel and Schroeter had determined the size, axial inclination, and seasons of the red planet. The presence of polar icecaps and the distinct yearly changes in their dimensions argued for a basically Earthlike world. However, the small size and poor definition of available refractors long delayed further definitive conclusions as to the surface features of Mars, although in the 1830s Beer and Mädler accurately located the Sinus Meridiani and determined a rotational period close to the true one.

  Over the next two generations, several other features were discovered, among them the Hourglass Sea, and the seasonal fluctuations in ice cover on the North Polar Sea. The Jesuit scholar Angelo Secchi, director of the observatory of the Collegio Romano in Rome, conclusively proved the existence of continents and seas during the opposition of 1858, a result confirmed by the British astronomer William Rutter Davies in 1864. The investigations of Giovanni Schiaparelli in the next thirty years discovered and began the mapping of the Martian canals.

  These were extended and refined by the American Percival Lowell, beginning with his Arizona expedition for the opposition of 1894, and confirmed by E. M. Antoniadi in the same period. Lowell also made the first relatively accurate calculation of the density of the Martian atmosphere; the first positive though still ambiguous and disputed evidence of oxygen and water vapor was discovered by Walter S. Adams and Theodore Dunham, who attached a spectroscope to the 100-inch reflector at Mt. Wilson Observatory in the 1930s.

  Conclusive proof that Mars had an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere similar to Earth’s, though somewhat less massive, was produced by Gerard Peter Kuiper at the McDonald Observatory in Texas in 1947. Since it was now widely appreciated that free oxygen can only be a by-product of biological action, this evidence removed the last serious objections to Lowell’s theory that the canals were a product of intelligent design, and created intense worldwide interest . . .

  Mars, City of Zar-tu-Kan

  May 1, 2000 AD

  Jeremy Wainman grinned to himself as they followed the two Martians toward the Alliance consulate. Most people his age knew what a Martian city looked like, but . . .

  Or they think they do. They haven’t lived it. I hadn’t, until now. They haven’t felt it or smelled it.

  He’d been born near Los Alamos, New Mexico, and raised there and points south before being selected for the Academy in Colorado Springs. Zar-tu-Kan reminded him of Sedona, down in Arizona—if you could imagine the colored buttes and cliffs as made by hands and minds, rather than by eroding wind and sand. Those forces had smoothed and rounded here too, until every sharp edge had blurred; the streets of Zar-tu-Kan felt like random alleyways laid out by the wanderings of ancient Martian burros through a maze of low cliffs stippled in a faded rainbow of colors.

  They weren’t; computer analysis had shown subtle planning, something like the deep patterns you got in a fractal . . . or it might be the result of constant minor adjustments over inconceivable lengths of time. The tall, blank walls of melted-looking stone on either side were mostly close, but they waved and curved like frozen water, usually giving you a place to step aside when a caravan of tall, spindly, hairy beasts laden with huge packsaddles went by, or a rider mounted on a rakza, an animal that might have been a big ostrich, except for the thick neck and massive hooked beak.

  The rakza screeched and shook its head as a wagon blocked its path for a moment, flicking up the crest of green-gold feathers on its long skull, until the rider gave a sharp tug on the reins. A pair of patrollers paused at the sound; they rode on self-propelled unicycles, with dart-rifles slung over their backs and helmets with eyes on stalks peering rearward, ready to warn their masters of attack. When they saw the incident would die of its own accord, they leaned forward, swaying and turning to weave through the traffic.

  Now and then they passed a doorway, which might be blank or elaborately carved wood with the sinuous glyphs the Crimson Dynasty had made the planet’s standard script, or cast with designs in imperishable frosted crystal, sometimes in styles so old that the Martians themselves had forgotten what they meant. Zar-tu-Kan had been a city before the Kings Beneath the Mountains began their rise half a world away. Fine lines showed against the sky, where anti-bird nets strung between the upper stories made sure no migrating predators would drop in for a snack.

  Most of the passers-by were natives of the city or its dependent territories, with their hair in elaborate coils to denote occupation and status, and vertical stripes on their robes—farmer, smith, artisan, soldier, clerk, or occupations that had no precise Terran equivalent.

  A scattering were from much farther away: Highlanders even more eerily elongated than the standard Martians and barrel-chested, goggles over their eyes, Wai Zang mercenaries in glittering black armor and visors with the faceted eyes of insects, and students in carved masks abstract or whimsical or bestial, come to study at the Scholarium.

  Sometimes the alleys opened out into an oblong space surrounded by shops and service trades, their clear glassine windows showing their wares. Atanj players looked up from their boards and spheres of essence as the Terrans walked by—and it wasn’t easy to pry a Martian loose from their equivalent of chess. Shoppers looked up, too.

  And I wouldn’t mind shopping here, Jeremy thought. Usually he was bored stiff by it, but that was in the hypermarkets back home.

  Flaps of artfully arranged rooz meat looked a little like beef; red-purple canal shrimp swam in globular bowls and huddled back in tight knots when a storekeeper dipped a net in their tank; there were piles of mysterious vegetables and others of breads like fluffy pancakes. And there were other merchants with fabrics, weapons, tools, jewelry, animals of scores of specialized uses, the Martian books with their narrow pages bound at the tops . . .

  Fliers passed by overhead; towers reared impossible heights into the pink-blue sky like skyscrapers in Manhattan, and above it all, the two small moons passed like rapid stars. It was nearly twenty years since the first Terrans had come out of the desert to the city, but they still attracted a fair bit of attention, though only the children showed
it openly. They ranged from knee-high to almost grown, and the younger ones gaped and pointed and gave peals of shrill laughter.

  “Cute little tykes,” Jeremy said as they passed a knot of them where two of the narrow streets intersected.

  They were playing a game much like atanj, but with themselves for pieces. When the commander of one team maneuvered two of his pieces onto a single one of the other side, they gleefully pummeled each other. Atanj was supposed to be an analogue of war, like chess, but they took that more literally here.

  “Don’t let the big eyes fool you,” Sally said, and then shouted in Martian, “Don’t even think about it!” as one of a slightly older group bent to pick up something unpleasant.

  He—probably he, it was hard to tell when everyone was muffled up, and anyway Martians were less sexually dimorphic than Terrans—continued to bend for ammunition. Teyud wheeled to face him and flicked her right hand. Something like a small disk with curled spikes along its edge appeared between finger and thumb, and her hand cocked back with lazy grace. The atanj teams dove out of the way, squealing.

  Whoa! Jeremy thought. Let’s not let things get out of hand!

  He tensed his leg muscles and jumped. The results sent the little almost-mob of near adolescents scattering, as he soared through the air as if launched by a hydraulic catapult. Twisting, he landed in front of the fleeing would-be dung-thrower, forcing him to backpedal furiously and nearly drop on his butt to stop. The boy’s eyes were bulging with surprise through the slit in his headdress. Jeremy didn’t give him any time to recover, or to go for any of the various unpleasant devices undoubtedly concealed under his ragged robe. One hand gripped the back of his neck, the other at his belt, and the Terran pivoted and threw.