From where she stood on the Orsinate’s viewing platform, ziz would in a few hours be able to look through that gate and down those sweeping steps to the beach, to the pale turquoise water swelling beyond. She would never have admitted it to her sisters or brother, but sometimes she wished she just could open the Gate and gaze out at that calm expanse of white and green and gold. It was a terrible weakness on her part, ziz knew that. It distracted her, kept her from focusing on the business of ruling the city and dispatching the Aviators on their endless missions against the Balkhash Commonwealth and the Håbilis Emirate. Instead, over the years she had grown increasingly obsessed with her climatic chambers, the engines and programs that allowed her to create rain within the Four Hundredth Room, snow and sleet and even, by means of a series of brilliant lamps, a modest simulation of sunlight. And it was this obsession that had become the chink in her consciousness whereby the dream of the Green Country had burrowed, to haunt her restive nights and now stalk her even during Araboth’s false daylight.
She thought of all of these things as she watched the moujik crews finish polishing the Lahatiel Gate’s elaborate finials and hydrolically charged hinges. In a few hours they would gather here, all the levels of Araboth. As she was each Æstival Tide, she would be struck by how few of them there were, really. Perhaps ten thousand living humans in a city that had been designed to hold a million. And how many of that ten thousand were moujiks, tainted blood? Or sterile marabous like the morphodites? Add another thousand or so rasas , and the more intelligent of the geneslaves, and it still was not enough of a population to warrant the effort and energy expended by the Architects to maintain the Quincunx Domes.
Not to mention the energies of the woman who ruled it. ziz drew one cool white hand across her brow, and sighed. Each year there were the usual complaints from the cabinets, overeducated anthropologists and demographers who claimed the hecatombs of Æstival Tide were no longer justified. What had begun in the years following the Third Shining as a method of population control, combining elements of both circus and sacristy, had over the centuries degenerated into the timoria, the Feast of Fear. Even with the rasas toiling in the infernal flames and darkness of the refineries, there was scarcely enough of a human work force left to perform those services that were beyond the nearly omniscient powers of the Architects. And so learned persons suggested that it would be better for the city, Better For The People, if the feast was annulled, or its nature altered. There was even talk of doing away with the Redeemer—its terrible appetite could scarcely afford to be whetted on those rare occasions when it was roused from its nearly endless slumber. It was a grotesque pet, really, nothing more; the margravines themselves loathed it and always had, but it belonged to the Orsinate, had been their charge through the centuries like the city itself, and ziz could not truly imagine destroying it, no more than she could imagine a ten-year cycle without its Æstival Tide.
Because the Feast of Fear was more than an occasion for mere torment and bloodshed, sacral madness and terror. Without the overwhelming anxieties engendered by this brief glimpse of the world Outside, combined with the threat of the Compassionate Redeemer, what was there to keep the people of Araboth from rioting, even from attempting to flee the domes? The Orsinate had very carefully created the machinery of superstition and sacrifice, twisted scientific faith and religious belief in their powers to rule the city. They knew that the Architects were the true powers behind Araboth. Without them the air processors would fail. The tiny but deadly storms that sometimes erupted in the uppermost reaches of the domes would not be dispersed; the water filters would rust and decay. The surgical interventions that provided safe if unnatural childbirth and the rasas’ morbid nativities would become impossible. The Redeemer in its carefully monitored hibernation would wake and sing its demented aria; the geneslaves would turn upon their creators. And finally the domes themselves would crumble and collapse, exposing the city’s vulnerable heart to the firestorms and viral rains that raged Outside.
It was unthinkable, of course. Since the First Ascension there had been how many celebrations—forty? forty-three?—a small number, really. If each feast had been an individual, why there would scarcely be enough of them to fill a room! But they were precious individuals, like the margravines themselves, and their fates were not to be decided by monkish social scientists and religious fanatics.
ziz gripped the edge of the balustrade in front of her. Far below the viewing platform she could sense a rumbling, not another tremor but the Redeemer turning in its waning sleep. Already the smell of singed roses sweetened the medifac’s noisome air, and ziz fought the urge to go down to the creature’s cell. Soon enough, soon enough its scent would change, when, hunger appeased at last, it crept back into its cell, and the odor of burning roses faded into that of lilies (said to be the favorite of the Ascendant who had created the monster).
But ziz’s concerns were not with the Redeemer. She was thinking of what Sajur Panggang had said before he died: that he had programmed the destruction of the city. That, like their Imperator, the Architects had at last turned against the Orsinate; and—like his—that betrayal would be their last.
It did not seem possible. For nearly five centuries the city had stood, impervious to the buffets of gales and waves Outside. Why, not even a drop of rain had ever made its way beneath the Quincunx Domes—
Though it seemed perhaps that was to change. From the floor far beneath her echoed the crash of something falling. A moujik cried out; the viewing balcony shook, and flakes of metal drifted past her. In the uneven light spilling from lanterns high overhead the flakes looked green. They fell in a slow unbroken rain upon ziz’s head.
Sudden tears seared the margravine’s eyes. She bowed, pressed her head against her hands. It could happen, of course. Sajur was certainly dead, and frightful events had shaken them all in the last few days. There were precedents for this sort of thing— Pompeii choked by Vesuvius, Hiroshima a cindery shadow against the distant mountains, San Francisco swallowed by the no-longer pacific ocean. Cries echoed from far below her, and she clutched the balustrade as it swung, as beneath her feet the flooring whipped as though it were a carpet being shaken. After a moment it subsided, only to tremble again; and at this ziz wept.
To think these were its final hours: the Holy City of the Americas, the last place upon the continent where the glories of Science still held thrall. She bowed her head against her hands and cried softly, thinking of all that would disappear forever, if Araboth fell.
But after a little while she stopped. She couldn’t afford to waste time like this, sobbing like her sister Shiyung after the execution of one of her lovers. Wiping her eyes, she left, hurried past the Redeemer’s cell and toward the gravator that would bring her to Seraphim’s hangars, where the Aviators guarded their fougas and Gryphons.
Not all the glories of the Orsinate would perish with their city.
Before her imprisonment, Reive had never been on Principalities—she didn’t count the brief excursion from the Virtues gravator to the Lahatiel Gate at Æstival Tide. The level’s very name had always been enough to make her shiver, with its intimations of the Emirate’s ruling legions imprisoned to languish in the fiery darkness. Now she and Rudyard Planck were hurried past tall grim buildings of blackened limestone, quarried when Araboth was still being built by masons recruited from the Eastern Provinces of Colorado and Nevada, the huge stone blocks then dragged up to Level Three by android slaves and work teams from the Emirate. The sight of those windowless fortresses was even worse than the imagining of them. Millions of fossil shells and crinoids were embedded in the limestone, smutted by centuries of smoke rising from the refineries and the caustic airs released by the medifacs themselves. Beneath her feet the ground was cold stone, and there too she saw the imprints of shells and soft tubes, things like ferns and creatures that were all vertebrae or carapace. Reive shuddered, wondering if that was what the ocean was like, Outside, teeming with these worms and larval thi
ngs, and seashells like eyes closing upon the eternal twilight. In front of her Rudyard Planck ignored the buildings. He padded after their guards in his soft-soled boots and stared resolutely at the ground. The sound of their passage was swallowed by the roar of the medifac engines, their relentless thud-thud broken by the occasional shrieks of steam escaping from a huge valve. Several times deafening reports shook the entire level, and bits of rubble came crashing down from far overhead, spraying them with dust and grit. The floor would shake, and once Reive screamed as an entire huge block of stone reared up from the ground, shearing through a wooden building as though it were made of rice paper. Through the resulting gap in the floor flames streamed upward, and even their guards shouted and fled, dragging Reive and Rudyard after them.
At least, she thought, at least Ceryl was spared this.
Finally they reached the end of the medifacs, the last long low buildings with their hook-hung scaffoldings like gallows thrust against the gray walls. There were greasy black stains on the ground near the railing, where heaps of rubble were dusted with black ash. Tremors continued to shake the entire level, and faint cries and shrieks followed each round of explosions. A little ways down the hallway she glimpsed people milling about the dark entrances of a number of gravators.
Another smell permeated the air here. Roses, thought Reive, but something else as well—like the faint odor of carrion that rose from Zalophus’s tank, or the scent of corruption that hung about a chamber where timoring had recently taken place. She felt a powerful urge to run away, to find the source of that smell for herself—and that was when she recalled the Compassionate Redeemer.
They were nearing its cage. She had managed to avoid thinking of it—easy enough when it seemed at any moment they might be killed by falling stone, or swallowed by some gaping rift. But now they were very close to their final destination, and the thought of what awaited them there made her shudder.
There really was no way out. They really were going to die. She thought of all the tales she had ever heard about the Redeemer, about executions, about Æstival Tide. She felt light-headed, almost giddy: to think that her life had come to this! A month ago she was wandering the halls of Dominations, thinking about scrounging a meal; now she was herself to be offered to the Redeemer as the festival sacrifice. She scratched her head, feeling where the mullah had nicked her scalp. She felt a wave of sorrow for Rudyard Planck, plodding along a few feet ahead of her, his collar pulled up so that tufts of red hair sprouted from it. He was innocent, really; if only she hadn’t met him that day in the sculpture garden!
But then another explosion rocked the city, and she thought of Ceryl’s dream, of the margravine’s and her own; and she knew that there was no escape now, for any of them. Only Zalophus—perhaps he at last had found a way out. Her eyes watered and she sniffed loudly. She thought of running away—it couldn’t possibly be any worse, to die now rather than an hour later—but then she heard a guard shouting at her.
“Hurry up,” he cried, grabbing her arm. “The margravines will be waiting and they can’t begin until you get there.”
They had reached the gravators. Reive craned her neck to see above the heads of the guards pressing close to her, protecting her from the people spilling from the gravators as the doors opened. ’Filers from Powers, heads bowed beneath the weight of their equipment; biotechs from the vivariums in their yolk-yellow smocks, trimmed with green ribbons for the festival. Low-level diplomats and cabal members, trying not to look put out that they had to travel this way, rather than on the Orsinate’s private conveyances. Gynanders and marabous and slack-lipped mantics stepped from Virtues, blinking in the gloom. And, walking slowly through the crowd, rasas from Archangels, silent and pale, their hollow eyes glowing in the dusky light. All of them touched with green: ivy and leaves plastered to hats and vocoders, robes and trousers specially tailored with emerald brocade or grass-green trim, deep green stripes showing against the black uniforms of the Reception Committee. Even the rasas wore bits of finery, remnants of their earlier lives—jade beads rattling around one’s neck, a pale scarf fluttering from another. Reive cried out softly and buried her face in the guard’s shoulder, her small hands clutching at his back. She did not see, therefore, the doors that opened before them—great narrow bronze doors, inlaid with steel studs and spikes and guarded by a phalanx of Aviators.
Rudyard Planck was not so easily disturbed by the crowd, and so he did see the doors, though not for the first time. As an intimate of Sajur Panggang’s he had been this way a decade earlier—although the thought of what waited there made him want to hide his head as well. As the doors swung open the guards padded in, carrying Reive and Rudyard. The Aviators turned and followed them, into a long corridor with walls and floor and ceiling of copper-colored metal, hung with electrified green-glass lanterns that shone like the eyes of great malign insects. Joss sticks were set into small brass burners, gray streams of rose scent snaking through the air. Some of the Aviators stopped and turned their hands in the smoke, raising their enhancers to rub it onto their cheeks. As they passed beneath the electric lanterns Reive heard a faint high buzzing sound, a monotonous counterpoint to the even crack of the Aviators’ boots upon the floor. Perhaps inspired by the funereal atmosphere, Rudyard Planck began very softly to recite the Orison Acherontic. Reive could feel the floor trembling beneath the feet of her guard. Once or twice the electric lanterns flickered, but there was nothing else to hint that the Architects after their long servitude were failing their masters.
Reive found that now, slung over her guard like a naughty child, her terror had eased. A cool and resigned expectation replaced it. She recalled all she knew of the Compassionate Redeemer. Its image crudely drawn in hand-tinted images on long scrolls of rice paper; the many types of sacrificial incense that bore its name, from cheap acrid-smelling joss sticks and incense blocks to rose-stamped lozenges and those elaborate coils dusted with silver nitrate that fizzed and popped and sometimes badly burned the unwary. She was too young to remember much from the last Æstival Tide. She recalled only how she and the other morphodites from the Virtues creche were marched to the head of the Gate and made to sit in a relatively sheltered spot, where there was less chance of them being trampled or thrown down the steps in the festival frenzy. There she had sucked on a marzipan image of the monster, until its sweetness made her teeth hurt and she tossed it down the steps.
Now she turned her head so that the rough cloth of her guard’s uniform wouldn’t chafe so at her cheek. In the distance ahead of them a narrow orange rectangle grew larger and brighter as they approached it. Reive wished she had used her time in prison more wisely, and questioned Rudyard Planck about the protocol of offerings to the Redeemer. The rectangle blazed now, the Aviators’ silhouettes dead-black against it, and resolved into a great door that seemed to open onto a flaming pyre. One by one as they stepped through the doorway the Aviators were swallowed by the blaze. A few feet ahead of her Rudyard Planck raised one small pudgy hand in farewell as his guard carried him over the threshold. Then it was Reive’s turn. As she blinked and tried to shade her eyes from the incendiary light, she thought without irony how strange it was that she was embarking upon a very intense and personal experience of the Feast of Fear, and yet she was no longer afraid.
The Gryphons were housed on the same level as the Lahatiel Gate, on a long spur that hung above the sands below. A worn concrete walkway led to where the aircraft were lined up on a ledge overlooking nothing but endless blue: deep greenish-blue below, pale cloud-scarred blue above. Even with the filters the light was blinding, and ziz bowed her head to keep from gazing out upon the sea.
It was one of the only parts of Araboth where the domes were clear enough to see through. This was to enable the Aviators to gauge the weather for themselves. A totally unnecessary precaution—a Gryphon had only to extend one of its filaments to measure wind velocity, barometric pressure, precipitation, radiation, atmospheric conditions ranging from the chance of h
ail to, the varying levels of hydrogen in the stratosphere, possible exposure to mutagens, presence of enemy airships or -craft, and evidence of radioactivity in the Null Zones. The Aviators, however, being proud to the point of hubris, claimed to be able to determine all of these things merely by gazing at the open air.
ziz made no such claims upon the world Outside. The sight—the very thought —of the ocean looming outside the meniscus made her tremble. To counteract this weakness, on her way here she had pricked her throat with an ampule of andrenoleen. If she was going to travel as an Aviator travels, she would have to control her emotions. Now, as the drug took hold of her, she could feel the blood racing through her heart, and a fiery confidence replaced the fear that usually accompanied her few visits to the Aviators’ stronghold. With the Gryphons, it was most important not to be afraid. A few feet from where they stood she raised her head, teeth clenched so that a skeleton’s grin racked her thin face, and squinted through the brilliance at the aircraft.
There were twelve of them. Each faced the outside of the dome, where the translucent polymer was etched with spray and salt, and the outlines of the skygates glowed cobalt against the bright sky. Once there had been hundreds of these biotic aircraft, a fleet powerful enough to subdue entire continents. Over the centuries, provincial rebellions and incursions by the Emirate and Balkhash Commonwealth had destroyed many of them. The bibliochlasm alone had resulted in a score being torched like mayflies to burn in the skies above Memphis.
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