In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  He nodded slightly to the glum-faced rank of Eastbloc diplomats. They were probably still adjusting to the fact that they’d been parasite-ridden puppets for years, something they’d realized only after the vile things had been removed . . . and he was very glad that Teyud had ordered the entire stock destroyed and the records of how to make them trashed and lethal excruciation decreed for anyone who tried to re-create them. A lot of the Martians had thought the decree unreasonable and hasty . . .

  And I just don’t care, he thought happily.

  “Yes,” Dolores said. “But their toys are staying.”

  Which was the reason the Despot of Zar-tu-Kan was here to offer submission, as well as many others—that, and the presence of the Invisible Crown. One good thing about the Martian reasonableness that could be so annoying was that when they saw the game was up they shrugged and made the best of it.

  “We’ll have a much better friend in a Mars that’s united and on the way up again,” Jeremy said firmly. “Just remember to bargain in good faith from now on. The bad guys didn’t, and look what it got them.”

  The heraldic birds stooped from their perches in an aerial dance and cried out, in voices melodious but stunningly loud even in a space that dwarfed St. Paul’s:

  “Take knee before the Emperor who holds and sways the Real World! The Tollamune comes! Bearer of That Which Compels! Wearer of the Invisible Crown of the Crimson Dynasty! The King Beneath the Mountain! The Crimson King! The Lord of earth and sky! Ruler of all who live! Take knee and bow your heads to the Tollamune will!”

  A vast rustling followed as the last echoes died and the multitude knelt. All but the Holmegards; they were, after all, the representatives of the Republic, and just bowed or curtsied.

  Jeremy took knee with the rest. What’s good enough for the rest of the folks is good enough for you, old son, he thought, looking down at the white marble set with semiprecious stones in High Tongue glyphs that recorded glories vanished before the ice came down from the north on Earth. Besides, you get a special role.

  Up the living carpet of red fur that covered the pathway came the pad-pad-pad of many feet. The platform on which Teyud stood was platinum, burnished and set with intricate patterns in ruby and gold; the birds circled above it in a spiral that reached up into the light-haze along the arch of the roof far above, singing “Tollamune! Tollamune! Tollamune!”

  Jeremy’s throat went dry as the platform halted. Teyud stood like an image; then her right hand came out, palm uppermost, the only motion save for the imperceptible rise and fall of her chest beneath the crimson robe.

  He came to his feet gracefully—and, Jesus, but this would be a time to trip over the hem of the robe! He stepped up onto the platform and laid his hand on hers; she closed her fingers around it and the platform paced its stately way up the strip of red.

  It sank to the ground before the Ruby Throne; there was a recess in the stone, so that it sank flush with the pavement. There was another chair, much more ornate than the monumental plainness of the Ruby Throne but smaller and three steps down on the dais. Jeremy stopped before it and turned; he kept his eyes firmly above the heads below. Having that many eyes staring at you—and knowing how many were alive with envy and/or hatred—was a bit disconcerting.

  “The bitterness of thrones” was a saying around here. He suspected there were similar ones back on Earth.

  Teyud stood for a moment facing the throng. “Teyud shall rule,” she said clearly, proclaiming her throne-name.

  A vast murmur went through the throng. That was the first time any Tollamune had used it; a strong signal that precedent wasn’t going to dominate this Emperor’s reign.

  A great rippling chant replied, Martian voices beneath the birds: “Tollamune! Tollamune! Tollamune!”

  Then she sat and leaned backward. Jeremy licked his lips, waited the prescribed thirty seconds—the protocol-masters had casually informed him it would kill him if he didn’t—and did the same. He didn’t like the prospect of contact with another Martian nerve-interface machine-animal, but there wasn’t any choice. And Teyud had to do it, too; you couldn’t really be Emperor unless the devices accepted you.

  At first there was simply a sting in the back of his neck. Then he was . . .

  Here and not here. This is amazing. I can see and feel and smell just like always, and I could disengage and stand up if I had to, but . . .

  It was as if he had an extra set of eyes—thousands of them, in fact. Seeing thousands of worlds, created ones . . . while the one he usually lived in was immobile, like a freeze-frame.

  The face of Sajir sa-Tomond smiled at him as he strolled up to the garden bench where Jeremy sat beside Teyud. The woman on his arm had a look of her; perhaps a little harsher and more eaglelike, but she was smiling, with a small bird sitting on one finger and preening itself. And Sajir was young, his sleek slim body clad only in a soft kilt. The gardens of a younger Mars spread about them, with a view over a balustrade down to a lake.

  “I feel to a degree as if I were taking another’s credit,” Teyud’s father said. “My own personal memories only run to a few moments before I left the Tower to rescue you from the consequences of your haste.”

  Teyud nodded. “I will share those memories, Father,” she said. “Though they were somewhat disorganized.” A smile quirked her lips. “One might say my mind was not my own just then.”

  The dead Emperor laughed with the living. “And Mother,” Teyud added to the woman.

  “Strange to meet one’s offspring so long after one’s death,” the woman said, and lifted her hand; the bird flew off, whistling. “But . . . Sajir says the vaz-Terranan have a saying: ‘Better late than never.’ ”

  To Jeremy: “It is even stranger to realize that you are merely memories yourself, fellow consort. Enjoy even the least pleasant aspects of your real existence! But the company here is good, and the environment as pleasant as we can imagine . . . exactly as pleasant.”

  Jeremy nodded. I am seriously weirded out, he thought.

  The people in front of him didn’t exist, really. They thought they existed, and they had all the subjective experience of being alive; but all they really were was, as she’d said, memories—stored in the vast protein computers that were part of the Ruby Throne. One day he’d be nothing but memories here himself—or he’d be immortal, depending on whether you thought a perfect copy of something was the something or wasn’t. He supposed it depended on the soul and that sort of thing. Most Emperors apparently died in communion with the Throne, and didn’t experience any discontinuity; they went unconscious there and “woke up” here, wherever here really was . . .

  Too complicated for a country boy from New Mexico, he decided. Jesus, though, what a way to do research! The whole of Martian history is stored in here—and I can get it from the Emperors who made it happen, and their consorts!

  Sajir nodded to Teyud. “You are the working member of our lineage now,” he said. “We can advise you—all but a few who are somewhat sullen—but my first warning is that tokmar itself is by comparison a benign addiction. The world in which you must operate is the Real World. This secondary one that we . . . figments . . . inhabit is more appealing in many ways because it responds to our will; but it is secondary, and derivative.”

  “I comprehend the temptation,” Teyud said gravely. “But I have far too much interesting work before me to feel any desire to linger overlong through despair or boredom. I will . . . visit.”

  “Excellent,” Sajir said. “And now we must proceed to the integration. It has been a very long time since that could be done with full efficiency, since the Invisible Crown was lost.”

  A brow raised. “And never before with a vaz-Terranan as consort.”

  Both his brows went up. “Oh, remarkable!” he breathed.

  Jeremy started to his feet. If that meant anything here; he could tell his body was simply sitting, on the consort’s throne back in the Hall of Received Submission. The gardens around him were suddenly
. . . gone. Instead he stood in a gray nothing, with a gray surface under his feet which seemed to be crawling somehow, as if each individual nano-scale piece of it were blinking in and out of existence. Teyud’s mother and father were gone, but she was beside him, and—

  “Binkis!” she said.

  The Lithuanian, or his facsimile, looked back at her. “No,” he said. “Binkis and his conjugal partner are elsewhere. They have been of assistance, within their limitations, and will be given a more satisfactory environment. This is the most suitable interface for communication with you, and I have tapped and duplicated its data-storage and integration facilities; it should serve for this one occasion.”

  “One occasion?” Teyud said sharply.

  “The contamination is severe enough as it is. The primary supervisory pattern has been fully reactivated by the anomalous data. Contact with the True Source is overdue by—” a hesitation, and the bony face tilted a little, like a bird, or possibly a machine—“three thousand Martian solar periods. Six thousand of Earth’s.”

  “You’re that thing that was on Venus,” Jeremy said slowly.

  Teyud gestured impatiently; he’d told her that story. “No,” she said. “That was not a sentient entity, judging from the description. This apparently is.”

  Errrkkk! Jeremy thought. I suppose she’s used to the thought of artificial entities—all her ancestors and their main squeezes are just that, after all. Seriously icky and weird, though.

  The Binkis-interface nodded. “That was a subroutine of lower capacity. Primary storage was on Mars, with its greater geological stability.

  I”—he indicated his “body”—“am located beneath the Mountain, with a heat-tap as my primary energy source.”

  “Are you a sentient entity?” Teyud asked, curiously.

  And I feel like gibbering, Jeremy thought. Jesus, don’t I have enough on my plate already?

  “That is a matter which the semantics of this language, or the others your two species have created, are inadequate to address.”

  The Binkis-interface smiled stiffly. “To simplify: I was created to oversee a program of . . . the nearest analogue is studies. But I was intended to be under closer supervision. Again, there are semantic difficulties and what I have said is seriously misleading. Suffice it to say I must now make a decision at the very limits of my permitted autonomy.”

  There was a long pause. At last Teyud spoke: “And your decision is?”

  “Given the degree of intraplanetary interaction, I will proceed to the next stage.”

  “Next stage of what?” Jeremy blurted out.

  “That was strange,” Jeremy said several hours later, in the Imperial private quarters.

  “Private” was a matter of definition. He’d insisted that the De’ming servants usually on hand to pour drinks and fetch things be sent out; Teyud hadn’t seen the point, but hadn’t argued, either. Now she looked down at him, braced with her forearms on his chest. There were advantages to the lower gravity . . .

  The great bed rocked slowly, hung from the ceiling by its chains; the furs and silks were pushed down to the foot, and a flask of essence stood on a pillar of crystal by the sideboard. The light was low, starlight and moonlight collected by receptors at the summit of the Tower and channeled to this chamber. Music sounded in the background, soft and languorous.

  Teyud leaned down and kissed him on the nose. “Slightly strange, but I am becoming used to it,” she said. “And to think that only a few months ago, I had nothing to look forward to but ennui.”

  Then she tickled him. Martians didn’t get ticklish, and she found it fascinating. Things went on from there; when they’d settled down again, he said, “No, what happened in the throne room.”

  “Yes, but speculation is futile without further—”

  The door sang, breaking in on the birds and silencing them. They looked at each other in surprise; nobody was going to interrupt what amounted to the Emperor’s wedding night without a very, very good reason. They sighed together, rolled out of the bed and threw on robes. Teyud made a step toward her weapons belt and then left it; with the Invisible Crown, it wasn’t really necessary, not here.

  The door rolled open. Notaj sa-Soj stood there, his face pale beneath its natural olive. Even more surprisingly, Robert Holmegard was there, too.

  “Supremacy,” the guards’ commander said. “A strange phenomenon has . . . appeared. In Tharsis.”

  “That’s not the half of what’s happened off Bermuda,” the ambassador said. “And allowing for the lag in transmission time between here and Earth, at exactly the same moment. And on Venus, too. Your Majesty, we’d like an explanation.”

  Teyud’s brow went up; she gestured, and the lights brightened. Even then, Jeremy blushed a little; the tousled state of the bed was rather obvious. The Tollamune Emperor brushed through into the presence room that lay beyond the bedchamber.

  “Best you had explain first,” she said. Then she smiled. “I told my father that I was unlikely to be bored. It appears I was more correct than I anticipated.”

  Mars, Dvor Il-Adazar

  Moon-World, Initial Base

  July 19, 2000 AD

  “Well, that’s impressive,” Jeremy said.

  The Tollamune Emperor simply nodded. If this does not impress, then the mind observing it is immune to the sensation. Mine is fully engaged with sentiments of awe and wonder.

  From the airship they could see the outline of the Gate simply by the cloud that resulted instantly when denser, warmer, moister air pushed through into the thin cold atmosphere of Tharsis. That was magnificent enough, with the setting sun turning it ruddy and gold, an arch three miles high and six across at surface level, as if a giant invisible oval had been pushed down into the ground to its midpoint. From the other, eastern side it was an impervious blankness. From the west . . . things came through. Came through from somewhere absolutely else.

  “Things such as that river,” she murmured.

  Though it did not fill the entire gate, it was still vast, bigger than the Grand Canal at its greatest extent and of considerably greater flow—Jeremy had compared it to the Amazon. Already at Teyud’s command thousands were at work channeling the torrent that poured through, De’ming and laborers and turtle-shaped earthmoving machines puffing and grunting a thousand feet below. There was a long stretch—five hundred miles—before the course of the land would take it into the Great Northern Sea. Her mind whirled at the thought of the life the superb, low-mineral water could bring to that stretch of the Deep Beyond, when properly canalized.

  Though perhaps my mind is merely showing its parochial limits, she thought, and her hand crept into Jeremy’s.

  He linked his fingers with hers. “Shall we?” he said.

  “At the appointed time . . . ah, yes.”

  An airship came through the fogbank; it was the Questing Dhwar, a fast scout of the Imperial fleet.

  “All . . . clear . . .” she read, as a signal lamp flickered from its bow. “No . . . new . . . hazards . . . encountered . . . fascinating . . . phenomenon . . . in . . . excessive . . . abundance . . .”

  She felt bitter envy for a moment that Notaj had been first to visit, but it was illogical and politically impossible for the reigning Tollamune to take irresponsible risks. She was stretching the boundaries of the permissible by taking herself and the consort through now, weeks later.

  “The savants are having a field day with the life forms coming through,” Jeremy said. He cocked an eyebrow. “Nothing dangerous so far, and much that is quite compatible. I particularly liked those fish, done in asu-batter.”

  She took a deep breath, savoring the ozone and lubricant smells of the control gondola. And the fish had been delicious, even if Jeremy insisted on calling them “silent immature canids” for some reason.

  “Forward,” she said.

  The crew were Thoughtful Grace of the Household; despite their palpable excitement, they kept to a disciplined sequence of essential comments as the T
ollamune Rebirth turned and headed into the stiff headwind coming out of the . . . artifact. The engines panted, but this hull and power system were derived from a warcraft designed to operate during storms, and the airspeed indicator writhed to show a ground speed of more than fifty miles an hour. Clouds closed in, and she could see veritable beads of water appearing on the windows. Teyud had seen actual rain once or twice, on the slopes of the Mountain, but it still seemed unnatural.

  Then everything lurched. “Valve ballast!” Adwa sa-Soj said crisply. “Maintain neutral buoyancy!”

  Sand rumbled out into the air from the keel. Not too much, for though the pull of this place was heavier than that of the Real World, the denser air also improved the efficiency of the hydrogen tanks. Paiteng flew well here, too.

  “The air of another world,” she said softly.

  Everything felt heavier; a little more than ten percent heavier, no great matter for a Thoughtful Grace, and tolerable for a standard form.

  Perhaps we will use tembst to adjust colonists, she thought. Or perhaps it will not be worth the trouble.

  Below her, the river shone in the light of a sun smaller that that of the Real World and with a slightly greenish tinge to its yellow. That was not the only light in the sky; there were two moons, far larger than those she’d been born under, and also a great banded giant that covered a third of the sky, yellow and white and more . . . and this new world revolved around it, not the primary.

  As they turned and rose, she could see the vast stretch of mud where the natural course of the river had been; from six thousand feet, it ran glistening to a sea on the edge of sight. On either side were lush forests of unfamiliar, olive green trees, some hundreds of feet tall; beyond natural levees rolled parkland, covered with a low-growing stuff whose reddish-green tint was the only homelike thing about them. Far and far in the distance was a line of dreamlike white, mountains far lower than the Mountain but large enough for year-round snows. The precise seasonal rhythms here were as yet unknown, and they would be complex. The gas giant gave off a significant quantity of heat itself and calculations were still under way as to the precise orbits involved.