The Accidental War

by Walter Jon Williams

  Sula had been surprised to discover that she would have to pay for her staff out of her own resources. Convocates were supposed to be rich and easily able to afford a suite of servants and assistants. While Sula could afford a staff, it still bothered her that she would get precisely as much information and access as she was willing to pay for.

  She wondered if she could hire experts part-time. Zanshaa City had more than a dozen universities, and surely some of the professors, or their more promising students, would be willing to consult. Lawyers for cases before the Court of Honor, and economists for Banking and Exchange. The latter especially—she’d looked at a few of the Banking and Exchange reports, and they were written in a bewildering, arcane language that seemed designed to baffle comprehension. There were references to multitier practitioner-oriented collaboration on economic resilience and hyperbolic discounting and nonparametrics. A translation would seem to be in order.

  Or she could do the work herself, something few other convocates would have considered. But she had nothing better to do with her time, and she had always enjoyed research. The Banking and Exchange reports were too baffling, but the Court of Honor seemed to conduct its business in nonspecialized language. The archives were available, and so she’d spent the better part of two days trying to find out exactly what it was that got someone expelled from the Convocation.

  Not bribery, apparently. Numerous accusations were made that convocates had been offered money or gifts in order to sway their votes, but most of the cases had been dismissed. The majority of the remaining cases were so egregious that the convocates had often been caught, tried, and executed by the Legion of Diligence before the Court of Honor had got around to removing the accused from the rolls.

  Insolvency, on the other hand, would get a convocate ejected with relative speed. The one thing that alarmed the Convocation more than anything else was the sight of one of their number absolutely without money. Most of the fortunes behind the great families were so immense that it was hard to picture it all vanishing within a single lifetime, but the Naxid War had flattened the finances of at least sixteen convocates, all of whom were deprived of their seats. As for the rest who lost their money, Sula assumed that gambling on a vast scale was involved. She at least could understand the principle the Convocation seemed to invoke in these cases: if you couldn’t manage the colossal sums you inherited, surely you wouldn’t be much use in managing an empire.

  Convocates could also be ejected for lesser crimes that embarrassed their peers and endangered the dignity of the assembly. Assault. Intoxication to the point of losing your clothing and staggering in broad daylight down the Boulevard of the Praxis. Killing your children’s nanny with a shotgun while actually aiming at your spouse. Calling a fellow convocate a “lying sack of pus” on the floor of the assembly. Hiring an underage prostitute as your administrative assistant. Visiting a High City Peers’ academy and paying the boys to flog you, then after being discovered by the school’s chancellor, claiming you’d been kidnapped by a gang of twelve-year-olds. Filing false expense reports. Stealing from the Treasury, which of course also got you killed.

  Such actions, however, remained fairly rare. Most convocates who were purged were removed for “illness”—which seemed a polite euphemism for senility, madness, hopeless addiction, or catatonia. Convocates served for life, Sula found, or until they lost their minds. Or their livers.

  These researches explained why she was in her office to see Lady Tu-hon pass by her door. Lady Tu-hon was the presiding judge of the Court of Honor, and Sula thought she might as well introduce herself, and so she followed the Lai-own convocate down the corridor to another office. Sula was about to follow Tu-hon through the door when she heard a voice from the office, and the voice froze Sula in her tracks and set her nerves leaping in panic. She restrained the impulse to bolt.

  Gareth Martinez.

  Her feelings for Martinez were so very strong, and so very conflicted, that by far the easiest course was to never hear the voice again. He had made her love him, and then abandoned her for a command and the opportunity to be the next Lord Chen.

  Fury and frustration throbbed high in her throat, a deep ache with every beat of her heart. She despised him. Yet she had not found anyone who compared to him, and she could not stop thinking about him.

  “I’m pleased to see your ladyship,” said that familiar Laredo accent. “I know you spoke to Lady Gruum and Lord Minno.”

  “Yes,” said Tu-hon. “And I’ve spoken to my banker.”

  “May I offer your ladyship refreshment?”

  “Thank you. Perhaps a tisane?”

  And then the realization came: the Laredo accent belonged not to Gareth Martinez, but to his brother, Roland. Who not only resembled him physically but had nearly the same speaking voice and provincial accent. And, as a convocate, would of course have an office here.

  Now Sula directed the fury at herself. Mortification flamed across her face at the realization that she had allowed herself to be frightened by a phantom.

  “I have come here to express a deep personal chagrin,” said Lady Tu-hon. “While I should love to invest in Lady Gruum’s Rol-mar enterprise, and while my banker tells me that my finances are otherwise healthy, at present I am embarrassed for cash. Illiquid was a term he used, in my opinion a dreadfully vulgar word.”

  “I’m extremely disappointed to hear it,” said Roland. “Did your banker suggest remedies?”

  “I could take out a loan, of course. Though my interest payments would be so terribly close to the interest paid by the bonds that there would be precious little in the way of profit.”

  “Is there no friend to whom you might apply?”

  An herbal odor wafted from the door, accompanied by the clink of porcelain: Lady Tu-hon’s tisane was being poured. “I am desolated to report,” said Tu-hon, “that this illiquidity, if I may so term it, has become very common among my friends. All their cash reserves are employed in speculation. Some are experiencing difficulties in meeting their bills, not from want of resources, but because their resources are all . . . taken up.”

  There was a moment of silence while Roland and Tu-hon contemplated this desperate picture. Porcelain clinked. Sula fought to suppress the alarm and terror that had so foolishly seized her.

  “I hope I am not being presumptuous in suggesting a remedy,” Roland said finally.

  The throbbing pulse faded from Sula’s ears as she listened to what came next, a proposal by which Roland offered to loan Lady Tu-hon eighty-three thousand zeniths in order for her to purchase, at a special discount, a hundred and three thousand zeniths’ worth of Rol-mar bonds, the loan to be repaid when Tu-hon was in funds. The mathematician in Sula appreciated the employment of prime numbers, but what truly intrigued her was that the arrangement was an oral agreement only. Nothing was being written down, there were no terms for interest or repayment. There was only the word of the head of the Tu-hon clan that the loan existed, and that she would sooner or later have to pay it back.

  So that’s how it’s done, Sula thought. She knew that bribery existed, and she’d accepted presents herself from those who wanted to do business with the dockyard on Terra when she was in command there. But even though she’d accepted presents, she hadn’t considered herself under any obligation to do what her donors asked.

  But a hundred thousand gold-rated bonds, Sula imagined, were not handed out free of obligation. Roland had bought Lady Tu-hon’s vote, just as Lamey had bought Sula’s.

  As the chief judge of the Court of Honor offered well-bred thanks, Sula ghosted back down the hall to her own office, where she considered the matter while the debate over Tork’s battleships played over her console. After a few moments she saw Tu-hon pass by her door again, and again she rose and followed.

  “Lady Tu-hon?” she called.

  “Yes?”

  Lady Tu-hon was short for a Lai-own, and perhaps in compensation wore a tall hat on her flat, feathery head. Her eyes were orange, an
d she wore a matching body wrap beneath the gold-braided wine-red jacket of a convocate. Her jewelry was simple but exquisitely made, gold and rubies to echo the colors of her jacket.

  “I’m Lady Sula. Lord Saïd is assigning me to the Court of Honor, and since we’re going to be working together, I thought I’d introduce myself.”

  Tu-hon inclined her head. “I’m honored to meet such a celebrated warrior.”

  Sula looked at her. “I wonder if there’s any current business before the court? I haven’t been able to find any.”

  “There’s none at all.” She spoke in a tone of finality, as if she never expected any business to be brought before the court, ever.

  “I’m pleased to hear that virtue and prosperity reign so completely in the Convocation,” Sula said. Along with bribery, she thought.

  There was a moment of silence as the orange eyes sharpened. “Come join me,” Tu-hon said, and walked with Sula to her own office. Tu-hon rated an office of three large rooms, with soft lighting, furniture that gleamed softly with leather and metal, and yellow celadon vases that held the bright golden faces of marigolds—marigolds that formed a deliberate contrast with the lavender vases, over which drooped the exotic blossoms of irises. Sonorous chiming noises rang over the sound system. A staff of seven moved between the outer two rooms with silent efficiency.

  “May I offer you something, my lady?” Tu-hon said. “Coffee, tea, wine?”

  “Tea would be nice, thank you.”

  Tu-hon’s personal office was decorated with more flowers and the usual portraits of ancestors. Tu-hon sat beneath a picture of an ancient, obese figure in a convocate’s jacket. Behind the grandee were flowing draperies parted to reveal a tropical landscape, and on his lap was the plan of a city, presumably one he’d built or had named after him.

  All this wealth on display . . . and yet none in Tu-hon’s pocket.

  Sula took it all in and decided she might as well make an effort to influence the upcoming vote.

  “I was listening to the debate in the assembly,” she said. “Lord Tork’s battleships. A very bad idea.”

  “The Fleet is a bad idea,” said Lady Tu-hon. “We’re spending all this money, and for what?”

  Sula was so surprised that it took her a moment to formulate a reply. “The Fleet managed to protect the empire from the Naxids,” she said.

  “The Naxids weren’t invaders,” said Tu-hon, “they were mutineers. They couldn’t have seized any ships from the Fleet if there weren’t a Fleet to begin with.”

  Again Sula hesitated. “That’s an interesting point of view,” she said finally.

  “Please understand,” said Lady Tu-hon, “that I say nothing against your own skill or courage, or those of the other brave officers who sacrificed so much in the name of the Praxis. I know enough about you to know that you earned every one of your decorations—the whole empire knows it.”

  All except Tork, Sula thought.

  “But,” Tu-hon said, “I find the Fleet to be a ridiculous, expensive anachronism. A thousand ships? To guard us against what, exactly?” She waved a hand. “Where does it end?”

  Sula grinned. “With battleships, apparently.”

  Lady Tu-hon waved her hand again. Peg teeth flashed in her muzzle. “Let Tork have his ridiculous floating palaces. They’re as useless as the rest. At least the expansion will soon be over, and we can try to bring things back to normal.”

  The tea arrived, wheeled into the room in a complicated metal machine that hissed and gave off a cloying herbal scent. The tea itself was green and frothy, and Sula tasted it cautiously. It was bitter, and she looked for sweetener but didn’t find it.

  Tu-hon sipped her tea, then placed her cup emphatically on her desk. “I will be very pleased to vote to bring you into the Convocation, Lady Sula,” she said. “You bear one of the great old names, and I’m sure you are gratified that your traditional privileges have been restored.”

  “I am,” said Sula, “though I seem to have been doing pretty well without them.”

  “Breeding tells,” said Lady Tu-hon. “Your family’s history is one of mastery and greatness. Of course you have been a success.”

  Sula rubbed the scar tissue on her right thumb. “Your ladyship is very kind,” she said.

  “And once the Fleet is built up to strength, I hope we can do without all the unnecessary emergency regulations.”

  Sula looked at her in surprise. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but of course I was with the Fleet during the war, and I don’t know what ordinances were passed. Are any of the emergency regulations still in effect?”

  “They mainly have to do with commerce,” Tu-hon said. “So much of our trade was captured or destroyed by the Naxids that the Convocation wished to rebuild. So as an emergency measure, and in large part to cover the expenses of the rearmament, the Convocation removed the tax on commerce and replaced it with a tax on equity.”

  “Yes,” Sula said. And she understood immediately: This bitch just doesn’t want to pay her taxes. Her taxes, which would include any profit on her hundred-thousand-zenith bribe.

  “One percent,” Sula said. “A tax of one percent.”

  “An outrage,” said Lady Tu-hon. “Where in the Praxis does it authorize such a tax? No such tax was ever permitted by the Great Masters while they lived.”

  Sula strove to recall the Praxis Theory she had studied for the ideology section on her lieutenant’s exams. “The Praxis says nothing about types of taxes,” she said, “but only requires they fall on all citizens equally.”

  “It falls unjustly on Peers,” Tu-hon said. “We are required to do so much as it is—we build roads, hospitals, schools. We are expected to support our clients, to look after them when they’re sick or find them jobs when they’re out of work.”

  “It seems to me that’s an element of our privilege,” Sula said. She was beginning to enjoy the debate, though she wished it were with a personage more substantial than this short-legged, overdressed whore. “We have the privilege of looking after our clients—much better than having the state doing it, after all.”

  “Even better if the taxes fall where they fell before,” said Lady Tu-hon. “On the miserable peddlers who ship goods from one star system to the next. Fifteen percent on all, from the moment the cargo touches the ring station.”

  “Wouldn’t that be taxing the people who contribute most to prosperity? It’s not cheap, after all, to ship goods from one star to the next.”

  “Each world should be self-sufficient in goods anyway,” Lady Tu-hon said. “That is in the Praxis. And if you ask me, interstellar commerce is generating far too many profits, and entirely for the wrong people.” Her lips drew back from her peg teeth, a silent snarl. “Have you seen some of them? No breeding, no elegance. Some little jumped-up Cree approached me the other day with a ridiculous offer to buy my palace at an inflated sum—the palace that has belonged to my family for twelve hundred years.”

  “If imperial commerce is taxed into submission,” Sula said, “then there are going to be a great many people out of work. I hope your ladyship will be willing to support them.”

  “Any who are my clients will receive my full attention,” said Tu-hon. “And the rest can sell their overpriced High City palaces and go into some other line of work.”

  Well, that was interesting, Sula thought as she returned to her office. She wondered if Lady Tu-hon was quite stable, or whether the tea contained some kind of Lai-own intoxicant.

  Probably, she thought, Tu-hon was just very passionate on the subject of conserving her money.

  She decided she should find out as much as possible about Lady Tu-hon and had just made herself tea and settled into her office chair to begin her research when there was a knock on the door.

  “Good afternoon, my lady,” said Lamey. “I brought you a gift for your office.”

  He was dressed in white, with discreet gold braiding. He glided into the room and placed a vase on her desk.

  “Meiss
en,” Sula said.

  “That’s what the fellow at the salesroom said.”

  Her fingers itched to take hold of the vase, but she didn’t want to lunge for it. Any gift from Lamey would of course come with strings attached, and she didn’t want to get her fingers tangled up in those strings without knowing where they led.

  Instead she told the terminal to lower the volume on the battleship debate.

  “Go ahead,” Lamey said, looking at the vase. “You know you want to touch it.”

  Sula leaned back in her chair and viewed him with what she hoped was cool objectivity. “What’s this for?”

  Lamey’s brows arched. “I can’t give you a simple present?”

  “You don’t give simple presents. Not that a vase millennia old is simple.”

  Lamey shrugged. “There’s a vote coming up after your swearing-in, concerning awarding contracts for cooling systems on the ring station on Zarafan. We’d be obliged if you’d vote in the affirmative.”

  Sula laughed. “The Convocation votes on that sort of thing? I would have imagined that the Ministry of Contracts and Works would let the contracts.”

  Lamey pulled a chair in front of Sula’s desk and sat. “The minister has his favorites. We have ours.”

  “And if our side wins, the cooling systems will actually get built?”

  Lamey’s brows came together. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” Sula said, “the systems won’t be substandard crap that will break down or poison anyone or cook them alive or kill them?”

  “I—”

  “Because I’ve been on those stations, and on ships, and my life has depended on whether such systems functioned as designed.”

  Lamey spread his hands. “The systems will be up to spec. They’ll be inspected before and after. The question is whether a crony of the minister gets the job, or one of our friends.”

  “Well,” said Sula, as she reached for the vase. “Long live friendship.”