In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  A scattering of objects lay about each of the chairs, where they’d fallen when the crew’s leather harness disintegrated. Some were merely rust smears on the floor, where the steel of weapons and tools had disintegrated. Others remained.

  Sally bent to touch a pile of bloodred sheets beside the central chair; a faint discoloration around them was probably the remains of a box.

  “Careful!” Jeremy said hastily. “That looks like writing and they could disintegrate.”

  He had his minicam going as he stooped closer. “It is writing!”

  Teyud knelt on the other side of the documents, drew her dagger and pointed, then used the tip to delicately tease apart the stack. The individual pieces were about the size of legal paper back on Earth, and were made of something that had the consistency of slightly stiff parchment stained a reddish color, overprinted in black and gold and blood crimson. It couldn’t be paper of any sort, of course, not after the span of years.

  The Thoughtful Grace said, “It is a Vermillion Rescript, swaying the Real World. Instructions from the Emperor of the day . . . yes, there is his name: Timrud sa-Rogol, who reigned in the beginnings of the Age of Dissonance. A Vermillion Rescript was . . . is . . . always written on imperishable material for future storage and reference. This will not disintegrate; the conditions here have been as stable as the Vaults of Remembrance beneath the Mountain. It could have lain here waiting until the Real World died and the sun swallowed it.”

  They carefully moved the sheets until they lay side by side; Jeremy recorded every step of the process. Fortunately, they were only inscribed on one side. He tried to decipher them and then shrugged and looked at Teyud. “Got any idea what they say?”

  She frowned slightly; he could see the little crease between her eyes in the slit of her headdress, and then she pulled it back suddenly for better vision.

  “Yes, but the glyphs are in the High Speech, and a somewhat strange form at that, when it was a spoken language, before it became sharply distinguished from the ancestral form of Demotic. This is the Rescript proper, the original instruction.”

  She looked at it for a long moment. “It is an order to the Designated Successor to seek out this city and remove the Imperial tembst to Dvor Il-Adazar. More than a dozen devices are listed; that is more than in most cities, even in the High Imperial period. But—”

  “But?”

  He thought he saw what she meant; the devices were listed, and then an entirely separate glyph was touched by the modifier that meant “maximum importance”. . . or something like it.

  Teyud added slowly, “And one in particular is encircled by ‘numinous-significance,’ qualified with ‘treacherous-departure.’ We speak here of secrets which were always very closely held. Evidently this city was founded to be a center for—”

  She used a word neither of the Terrans knew; it was an archaic term, she explained, meaning something like “research.”

  “Yes, research into the Deep Beyond and possible ways of controlling its spread. See, here is the glyph-element ‘Tollamune beginning,’ with the paired helix symbol encased in a constellation. That is the original Imperial designator, which fell out of use a few thousand years thereafter. According to this, several bearers of the Tollamune genome—”

  The Imperial family, Jeremy translated to himself.

  “—including the reigning Emperor and his Successor, visited here regularly. Then . . . it gives no specifics. It refers to the ‘unfortunate event’ or ‘failure to Sustain Harmony.’ That might be any event, including a usurpation or assassination, or other failure of propriety.”

  Sally stiffened slightly; Teyud flicked an ear at her and went on, “These surrounds modify the central glyph; the helix interrupted by wedges is tembst-origin, or ‘source,’ which is the Ruby Throne. And this qualifier is ‘returning-to-beginnings’ . . . return to the Mountain, combined with ‘commanded-required’; that is equivalent to the imperative tense of the modern tongue.”

  She looked at the other sheets. “This is simpler: It is the authority of the bearer to commandeer and command in pursuit of the Rescript. Here is a list of the equipment and personnel.”

  Teyud frowned. “This last is the Successor’s Statement of Apology, written even as the warcraft was destroyed by those attempting to commandeer it for evacuation.”

  “You read the High Speech very well,” Sally said neutrally.

  Teyud shrugged. “I am Thoughtful Grace. For ten thousand years and more we were bred to guard the Ruby Throne. Even scattered among the caravan towns and the Wai Zang cities, even today, we remember.”

  “So they didn’t get the materials they came for,” Jeremy said. “Especially the numinously-significant whatever. Wait—this is a map, is it not?”

  He pointed the minicam toward the last page. It had schematic drawings as well as glyphs; not precisely in the style of modern Martian maps, but it had something of their look, more like a circuit diagram than the bird’s-eye-view style of their Terran equivalents. Or perhaps more like a flow-diagram, of the sort you got as guides in the London Underground. It had the advantage of giving relationships precisely, but you needed to know the key, and the distances weren’t proportional.

  “It is a map. Of the underground ways between the principal buildings. And these mark the locations of the Imperial tembst.”

  She picked it up; his cautious archaeologist’s soul cried out in protest, but the tough flexible material seemed to suffer no harm.

  “The key would be the location of this”—she pointed to an elongated symbol—“which would represent the centrum of Imperial power in this city. I estimate that the most efficient approach would be—”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Encyclopedia Britannica, 20th Edition

  University of Chicago Press, 1998

  THE SPACE RACE: The Second Phase, 1988–

  Knowledge that the solar system contained two more life-bearing planets besides Earth, and that they had intelligent humanoid inhabitants, was enough to fuel the first two decades of the space race. Both the great blocs devoted enormous resources to establish bases on Mars and Venus, and to the huge infrastructure of space stations, orbital power and manufacturing plant, and lunar bases and mines necessary to support the expeditions to our sister planets.

  However, by the 1980s it was becoming apparent that while Venus and Mars were treasure houses of scientific knowledge, they were not economic frontiers. There would be no equivalent of the sugar and tobacco, the silk and gold and silver, which had rewarded the pioneers who sailed Earth’s oceans during the Renaissance. Virtually nothing could bear the costs of interplanetary travel at a profit; the whole enterprise was dependent on vast and continuous subsidies. Voices were heard arguing that to devote a fifth of the gross national product to merely scientific ventures, despite the many valuable spin-offs of space-based enterprises, was a waste of resources that could be better used on Earth.

  However, research on Venus and Mars had already begun to raise disturbing questions as to the origins of life on those worlds. Paleontology and geology conducted at the U.S. and Eastbloc bases increasingly indicated that prior to approximately 200 mya, both globes had been sterile: Venus a hell of sulphuric acid and superdense atmosphere, Mars a cold frozen globe with only a wisp of carbon dioxide. Something had happened to turn both into passable analogues of Earth, and it had happened in a geological eye blink of no more than a few million years, possibly as little as a few thousand. Only intelligent action could account for it—and action on a scale and level of technological prowess that made Earth’s vaunted sciences seem like tools of chipped flint.

  Advances in the life sciences reinforced the conclusions of the planetologists. Naïvely, the first explorers had been unsurprised at the exceedingly Earthlike forms life on Venus and Mars took, which fitted in with generations of imaginative extrapolations (see science fiction). But detailed examination showed that many species on both planets were not just similar to their Terran counterparts, b
ut similar in ways that made common origins almost certain. Molecular biology and DNA analysis, then entering their period of rapid growth and practical application, showed the same. The clinching proof was the discovery on Venus in the late 1980s of groups speaking an Indo-European language, and possessing an artifact—albeit nonfunctioning and extremely enigmatic—that they insisted had been given to their ancestors by “gods” who brought them to their new home.

  The shock of discovering that the ancients—sometimes more colorfully called the Lords of Creation—had been modifying the solar system, and continuing their actions into the era of recorded history, was fully as great as that of finding humanoid life on other planets. In the 1970s, the first large space telescopes had confirmed the existence of life-bearing planets with oxygen atmospheres orbiting other suns. Now humanity had conclusive proof that at least one alien species was vastly more advanced than ourselves, and that it had been intervening in our history for its own enigmatic purposes since the time of the dinosaurs.

  As space-based telescopes and other sensors grew in power and refinement in the 1980s and 1990s, disturbing hints of engineering on a stellar scale were observed in the heavens, a scale that made the terraforming and seeding of two planets minor by comparison. These discoveries unleashed an ever-growing scientific, philosophical, and religious turmoil. They also provided the impetus for maintaining and expanding the scope of human activity in space. If the universe contained aliens of such inscrutable power, humanity had no choice but to expand its own knowledge and capacities as rapidly as possible.

  Mars, The Lost City of Rema-Dza

  May 15, 2000 AD

  Outside, the windstorm had brought visibility down to nothing and was doing its best to rearrange the landscape; at this time of year, it might be covering half the northern hemisphere. The Martians had rigged cables to connect the Traveler’s hiding place with the nearest buildings, and you had to slog through the sandy dust with an elbow around the line, blind as a bat.

  Every time Jeremy Wainman did it, he remembered that the dhwar had headed this way and that their lair might well be in the square miles of abandoned tower and building and tunnel around them. The memory of those saw-edged beaks was uncomfortably vivid. At least the wind would keep the aerial predators pinned to their rookeries.

  “I don’t see why the hell they sent an archaeologist here,” he said cheerfully to Yamashita as he rolled a door shut behind him and stamped and shook his robes to get as much of the dust out as possible. “I mean, you’re a troubleshooter and you know more about the tech stuff, so why didn’t they just send you?”

  “It’s a ruined lost city, isn’t it?” she replied sourly, looking up from her portable computer. “With a goddamned lost treasure in it somewhere. All that’s lacking are pygmy natives with blowguns. Classic archaeological stuff, like those movies back in the seventies with the temples and the big rolling stone balls and giant snakes and the idols with emeralds in their eyes. We need you to find the stuff and me to keep you alive and working and possibly to figure out what the stuff you find does.”

  “You’re showing your age, and those movies were set on Venus anyway. And real archaeologists don’t do ruined cities and treasures. That’s for tomb robbers, not archaeologists. Archaeologists spend years excavating antique latrines and rubbish dumps with toothbrushes and whisk brooms, like when I worked on Anasazi digs. And didn’t you notice? I’m completely bullwhip-free.”

  She smiled, which was good to see again; she’d been a bit glum since they had their last little chat.

  “You do have a sword and a pistol,” she pointed out.

  He cleared his throat. “Anyway, what have you got?”

  The chamber they were in had once been the entranceway to a block of living quarters; akin to an apartment building’s vestibule, though it might just as easily have been a palace, or a block of offices, or something with no exact Terran equivalent. It had a knee-high bench all around the oval interior, and it was lined with polished hematite, green and blue and red. He sat down on the bench beside her; they’d padded it with silks and furs from the landship, spare bedding, glow-globes and boxes and sacks of supplies. The light vanished in the smooth curves of the vaulting above; you didn’t need much to imagine lost banners stirring in the drafts.

  They’d put the portapotty in another room. Even now it took a certain amount of willpower for Jeremy to use it. The damned thing was alive . . .

  “Here’s the latest on the tunnels,” Sally said. “Teyud’s been sending reports by runner as they find stuff.”

  A spider web sprang into existence on the screen, with sections color-coded in blue, red, and gray.

  “These are clear; those are filled; these are collapsed; and these are partially choked but clearable.”

  “Why on Earth . . . well, you know what I mean . . . do Martians burrow like ants? Every place they’ve been around for a while, you find these warrens underneath.”

  “Storage and insulation. And they just seem to like it. At least they build tunnels big enough to get around in without knocking your head, mostly; and it’s convenient during weather like this.”

  “Plus, you’re safe from flocks of giant flesh-eating birds.”

  “That, too.” Her voice lost its bantering tone. “You have any luck getting through to base, or Zar-tu-Kan?”

  “None. But this crappy weather is bad enough that that might be natural, now.”

  “Yeah,” she said flatly. “It could be. But it isn’t.”

  He shrugged uneasily and took a swig from his canteen; Sally reached out a hand, took a drink herself, poured a little into a mask, and clipped it across her face.

  Being pursued by Boris and Natasha who want to steal the treasure of the lost city really isn’t what an archaeologist is trained for, Jeremy thought.

  Granted, he was an Olympic-level fencer and a rock-climber of note; you didn’t get to go off planet unless you had physical and academic qualifications. Intrigue and possible violence, though . . . not his style. He would have thought it had gone out of fashion even for the Eastblockers, now that they were ravenously successful capitalists. At least the eastern part of the Eastbloc were, and they ran the show nowadays.

  Pardon me, now that they’re employing “socialism with special characteristics.” Which mostly means exporting areaphones and videoplayers and thinscreens and replacing beautiful old pagodas with the butt-ugliest skyscrapers outside Chicago—only twice as big—and building mansions outfitted with gold-plated bathtubs and squads of big-titted blond Russian housemaids in skimpy uniforms. But I guess when the stakes are high enough, atavistic instincts come to the fore.

  Luckily, if there were Eastbloc agents out there shadowing them, they’d have to use locals for transport, probably those ones Teyud had spotted. And this weather would ground local aircraft and send landships into buttoned-down mode, bare poles and noses anchored into the wind and everyone waiting it out belowdecks. Martians didn’t try to fight a sandstorm. There weren’t that many in a season—this planet had fewer active weather systems than Earth—but a bad one could strip the flesh off your bones and then grind your bones to meal. They were the cutting edge of the Deep Beyond, claiming a little more of the Real World each year.

  “I’d better go have a look in person,” he said.

  He was smiling as he left. Teyud seemed to have caught some of his passion for ancient relics; or at least she was very enthusiastic about this set of them.

  He could see the glow-sticks that illuminated the Thoughtful Grace’s improvised command post long before he got there. The oval walls of the ancient tunnel were slick enough to reflect light, still held by the chemical saliva-mortar of the beast that had drilled them. Mica glittered in the glassy rock; at closer range, he could see the light shining in the Martians’ great eyes, as luminous as those of cats.

  Teyud looked up at him with a slight, enigmatic smile, made a gesture of greeting-acknowledgment, and then went on to her second in command as s
he made a mark with her ink-stick on the wall of the junction. “Anything of significance?”

  They were in a Y-fork of what had been the waste recirculation system that was linked to all the larger buildings and lined with reconfigured rock. A foot-deep layer of surface dust had accumulated here; the problem was that in some places it had filled the tunnels completely, and in a few, the fall of the towers above them had ruptured the passageways. Approaching their goal in the former centrum of power would not simply be a matter of following the airship’s map. They would have to draw a map of their own, testing which ways were open.

  “We have cleared a passage to the large chamber here,” Baid said. “There are promising exits which may lead to that which we seek, as of yet still blocked by accumulated sand. There are also many cockroaches and a large variety of small, burrowing insects in these areas, particularly the large chamber.”

  She indicated them with a finger. “Once or twice there is a brief glimpse of very fast mammalian vermin, possibly rodents of unusual size.”

  “Interesting,” Teyud replied, and the engineer nodded. “Very interesting.”

  “Why is that interesting?” Jeremy asked as he came up. “It is what I would anticipate in such an environment.”

  Baid looked at him and took a pose of comically exaggerated surprise, which meant widening her eyes slightly and touching the fingers of one hand to her chin.

  “Incredulous disbelief,” she said.

  Teyud realized the problem. “Life requires water,” she explained. “We are in the Deep Beyond, and this city has been abandoned for a considerable period.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  Yeah, the Deep Beyond isn’t a place, really, it’s a condition. The deadest spots on a dying planet, where even evolution can’t keep up with the freeze-drying process anymore. This makes the Sahara look like the Everglades.