The Praxis

by Walter Jon Williams

  The point was reinforced a few days later when Stoney was caught hijacking a cargo of fuel cells in Maranic Port. His trial was over two weeks later, and he was executed the following week. Because stealing private property was a crime against common law, not against the Praxis, he wasn’t subjected to the tortures reserved for those who transgressed against the ultimate law, but simply strapped into a chair and garotted.

  The execution was broadcast on the video channel reserved for punishments, and Lamey made his boys watch it. “To make them more careful,” he said simply.

  Gredel didn’t watch. She went to Caro’s instead and surprised herself by helping Caro drink a bottle of wine. Caro was delighted at this lapse on Gredel’s part, and was at her most charming all night, thanking Gredel effusively for everything she’d done for her. Gredel left with the wine singing in her veins. She had rarely felt so good.

  The euphoria lasted until she entered Nelda’s apartment. Antony was in full cry. A chair lay in pieces on the floor, and Nelda had a cut above her eye that wept red tears across her face. Gredel froze in the door as she came in, then tried to slip toward her room without attracting Antony’s attention.

  No such luck. He lunged toward her, grabbed her blouse by its shoulder. She felt the fabric tear. “Where’s the money?” he shouted. “Where’s the money you get by selling your tail?”

  Gredel held out her pocketbook in trembling hands. “Here!” she said. “Take it!”

  It was clear enough what was going on, it was Antony Scenario Number One. He needed cash for a drink, and he’d already taken everything Nelda had.

  He grabbed it and poured coins into his hand. Gredel could smell the juniper scent of the gin reeking off his pores. He looked at the coins dumbly, then threw the pocketbook to the floor and put the money in his pocket.

  “I’m going to put you on the street myself, right now,” he said, and seized her wrist in one huge hand. “I can get more money for you than this.”

  “No!” Gredel filled with terror, tried to pull away.

  Anger blazed in Antony’s eyes. He drew back his other hand.

  Gredel felt the impact not on her flesh but in her bones. Her teeth snapped together, her heels went out from under her, and she sat on the floor.

  Then Nelda was screaming, her hands clutching Antony’s forearm as she tried to keep him from hitting Gredel again. “Don’t hit the child!” she wailed.

  “Stupid bitch!” Antony growled, and turned to punch Nelda in the face. “Don’t ever step between me and her again!”

  Turning his back was Antony’s big mistake. Anger blazed in Gredel, an all-consuming blowtorch annihilating fury that sent her lunging for the nearest weapon, a chair leg that had been broken off when Antony smashed the chair in order to underscore one of his rhetorical points. Gredel kicked off her heels and rose to her feet and swung the chair leg two-handed for Antony’s head.

  Nelda gaped at her, her mouth an O, and wailed again. Antony took this as a warning and started to turn, but it was too late. The wooden chair leg caught him in the temple, and he fell to one knee. Made of compressed dedger fiber, the chair leg had broken raggedly, and the splintery end gouged his flesh.

  Gredel gave a shriek powered by fifteen years of pure, suppressed hatred and swung again. There was a solid crack as the chair leg connected with Antony’s bald skull, and the big man dropped to the floor like a bag of rocks. Gredel dropped her knees onto his barrel chest and swung again and again. She remembered the sound that Lamey’s boots made going into Moseley and wanted badly to make those sounds come from Antony. The ragged end of the chair leg tore long ribbons out of Antony’s flesh. Blood splashed the floor and walls.

  She only stopped when Nelda wrapped her arms around her and hauled her off the unconscious man. Gredel turned to swing at Nelda, and stopped only when she saw the older woman’s tears.

  Antony was making a bubbling sound as he breathed. A slow river of blood poured out of his mouth onto the floor. “What do we do?” Nelda wailed as she turned little helpless circles on the floor. “What do we do?”

  Gredel knew the answer to the question perfectly well. She got her phone out of her pocketbook, went to her room and called Lamey. He was there in twenty minutes with Panda and three other boys. He looked at the wrecked room, at Antony lying on the floor, at Gredel standing over the man with the bloody chair leg in her hand.

  “What do you want done?” he asked Gredel. “We could put him on a train, I suppose. Or in the river.”

  “No!” Nelda jumped between Antony and Lamey. Tears brimmed from her eyes as she turned to Gredel. “Put him on the train. Please, honey, please.”

  “On the train,” Gredel repeated to Lamey.

  “We’ll wake him up long enough to tell him not to come back,” Lamey said. He and his boys picked up Antony’s heavy body and dragged it toward the door.

  “Where’s the freight elevator?” Lamey asked.

  “I’ll show you,” Gredel said.

  The tenants were working people who went to bed at a reasonable hour, and the building was silent at night and the halls empty. Lamey’s boys panted for breath as they hauled the heavy, inert carcass with its heavy bones and solid muscle. They reached the freight elevator doors, and the boys dumped Antony on the floor while they caught their breath.

  “Lamey,” Gredel said.

  He looked at her. “Yes?”

  She looked up at him, into his accepting blue eyes.

  “Put him in the river,” she said.

  Something floated by on the surface of the water, and Sula tried not to look at it. Martinez gathered her in his arms and began to kiss her. She kissed him back, briefly, distractedly. She jerked and gave a shiver as a fat raindrop spattered on the back of her hand.

  “Are you cold? Let me close the canopy.”

  Martinez pushed a lever, and the boat’s plastic canopy flapped forward, cutting off the breeze. Suddenly there was no air. Sula lunged forward and heaved the canopy back with a cry.

  “What’s wrong?” Martinez asked, startled.

  “Boat!” Sula commanded. “Go to the quay! Now!” Panic flapped in her chest like torn canvas flogging in the wind. Raindrops spattered on her face.

  Martinez took her by the hand. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

  “No!” she managed to shout, and wrenched her hand free. The boat slid against the quay and Sula launched herself for dry land. Pain jolted her shins as they barked against the stone quay, but after a brief scramble she was on her feet and walking briskly away. Martinez remained behind, his arms thrown out for balance, ridiculous in the swaying little boat.

  “What did I do wrong?” he called, bewildered.

  Rain hit her face in cold little slaps.

  “Nothing!” she answered over her shoulder, and increased her pace.

  SEVEN

  The catafalque of the last Great Master rolled past, moving at a silent, glacial glide along the length of the Boulevard of the Praxis, all the way from the Great Refuge at the peak of the city’s acropolis to the Couch of Eternity on the other end of the High City’s great rock. Atop the monstrous catafalque was an image of the last Shaa itself, twice life size. The massive body reclined amid sculpted folds of slack gray skin, its flat-topped, prow-shaped head erect, like some lonely butte in a distant desert country, and gazing ahead into a future that only those as wise as the Shaa could expect ever to see.

  Martinez had been standing under somber skies for what seemed hours. He wore parade mourning dress, with cape and brocade and epaulets and jackboots, and a tall black leather shako atop his head. Service colors were reversed in mourning garb, so instead of green tunic and trousers with silver buttons and braid, the tunic and trousers were the white of mourning, with green collar, cuffs, braid, buttons, and brocade. The cape was white and lined with green, and weighted at the corners to preserve its line.

  The uniform was stiff with starch and unfamiliarity, and the tall collar chafed the underside of Martine
z’s chin. The jackboots were hot and heavy, and the shako with its silver plate sat like a millstone on his skull. The scabbard of the sickle-shaped dress knife, with which he was entitled to slice the throats of subordinates who displeased him, banged against his thigh when he walked.

  The catafalque crept past, followed by a band—all Cree, with motorized booming kettledrums and double-reed flutes that wailed a weird, wild chant like the keening of some half-savage species from the dawn of time. These were followed by a float that held the various machines that rumor maintained had been connected to Anticipation of Victory during the latter portion of its life. These were covered with white shrouds, and would be burned along with the last Shaa, taking their secrets with them.

  Martinez couldn’t help but think this was a pity. The Shaa had been very private where their anatomy and physiology were concerned, let alone their mentation. On their decease, each Shaa had been cremated along with their personal servants and gear, and the surviving Shaa had made certain that all proper procedures were followed. Whatever was going on beneath those folds of skin, or in those prow-shaped heads, remained a secret of the Shaa alone.

  But now there were no surviving Shaa to assure that the evidence was destroyed. This was a perfect opportunity for a postmortem if not an actual dissection. If Martinez had been in charge of arrangements, the funeral and its solemn procession would have been postponed for days if not months, while expert pathologists sought out every last secret of Shaa physiology, and the best cyberneticians examined the machines to determine if they were, in fact, repositories of Shaa memory.

  But Martinez was not in charge, and the secrets of the Shaa would die with the last of their kind.

  Following Anticipation of Victory and its machines came the senior mourners, all in their reversed mourning uniforms: the white and deep red of the lords convocate, the white and brown of the Civil Service, the white and green of the Fleet, each service organized by species, in order of the seniority of conquest. The Naxids were first, their long bodies curving right and left in order to maintain the slow pace, followed by the Terrans, the Torminel, and so on. The only species missing were the Yormaks, who centuries ago had received special dispensation never to leave their home world.

  Lord Pierre Ngeni was somewhere among the lords convocate, but Martinez didn’t see him. Amid the white uniforms of the Fleet, he saw Senior Fleet Commander Jarlath, the new commander of the Home Fleet. He was a Torminel, his large nocturnal eyes covered by shaded spectacles even on this gray day, his plump, furry body swathed to the chin in mourning white. The combination of fur and an elaborate uniform could result in deadly overheating in his species—in less formal circumstances, Torminel officers usually wore only vests and short pants—but Martinez suspected that there were refrigeration units in his uniform to keep his body cooled to a reasonable temperature. Many Torminel in official posts would bleach their gray and black fur white for the duration of the mourning period rather than to risk heat stroke every day.

  Martinez knew nothing of Fleet Commander Jarlath, and wished to know less. For Jarlath had replaced Fleet Commander Enderby, and after today Martinez would have to remove from his collar the red staff tabs that marked him as an officer of distinction.

  Following the mourners of the Fleet came the white and blue of the Exploration Service, then the black and gold of the Legion of Diligence. The Legion alone had no mourning dress, which symbolized the fact that even mourning could not interrupt their incessant search for the foes of the Praxis.

  After these came the bodies of those who had decided to follow the Great Master in death, first among them the Lady Senior of the Convocation, the highest-ranking individual in the empire not to have been born a Shaa. She moved past slowly on her catafalque, the wind whipping the scant feathery hair atop her hollow-boned body. Following the Lady Senior and other convocates came the biers of high-ranking civil servants. Each had taken massive doses of poison, and presumably died with their loyal family members worshipfully clustered about them—possibly to make certain they went through with it, or to pour the poison down their throats if they balked.

  For the first time in his life Martinez felt grateful that the Martinez clan wasn’t of the first rank. If his family were expected to offer up one of their own, he couldn’t help but wonder whether they wouldn’t have handed the cup to him. His brother Roland was the presumed heir to Laredo and too important to die, and his sisters were—for the most part, anyway—a united front against all adversity. Perhaps a family council would have decided that the unfortunate Gareth, employed uselessly with the Fleet and with few prospects for aiding the others in their projects, would have been the most expendable.

  Martinez was saved from further morbid thoughts by the sight of someone he knew—PJ Ngeni, dressed all in white, walking slowly in the procession with an unusually solemn look on his insipid face. He marched with other Ngenis behind the bier of one of their clan members, an elderly man with a distinguished white mustache who wore the uniform of a retired senior civil servant. Strange to think that the Ngenis would spare this one sooner than PJ.

  PJ’s sojourn in the Shelley Palace garden with Sempronia had proved successful—certainly more successful than his own boat ride with Sula—and now that he and Sempronia had paid their obligatory visit to the Peers’ Gene Bank, Martinez was now obliged to treat PJ as a future brother-in-law. Had he not known that the whole thing was a sham, he would have been deeply offended, but as it was, he found himself almost genial around PJ.

  Which was more than could be said for Sempronia, who was clearly keeping her fiancé at arm’s length. What PJ thought about being engaged to a girl who was doing her best to avoid his presence had not, so far, come to Martinez’s ears.

  After the civil servants came the biers of the Fleet. Fleet Commander Enderby, without the fierce rigidity that animated him in life, looked shrunken and mournful in death. Martinez felt a surge of sadness at the sight.

  He should have followed my advice, Martinez thought.

  Enderby’s daughter, looking trim in the white and brown of the Civil Service, stepped from her place near Martinez and walked to the tail of her father’s bier. She held her own daughter, a child of nine or ten, by the hand.

  The famous wife was nowhere in evidence.

  “Party—forward!” called the senior captain on Martinez’s right, and he stepped out with the others of Enderby’s family and staff. The small formation, Enderby’s official family, performed a left wheel and placed themselves into the procession behind Enderby’s daughter and granddaughter, his chief mourners.

  Other formations placed themselves in the procession. Among them, Martinez saw Cadet Foote. Apparently the Footes had sacrificed one of their own to the glory of their clan, though the solemnity of the occasion had done nothing to tame Foote’s cowlick.

  Martinez was pleased to be moving, even if it was at this glacial pace. The solemnity of the death march meant that each foot had to hang in the air for a beat or two before it could be placed on the ground. The polished jackboots looked dashing and romantic, but were very heavy when suspended that way. The rest of the uniform had its disadvantages as well: when the procession moved into gaps between the palaces that lined the road, the wind caught at his tall hat and whipped the cape of the next in line into his face.

  He blinked and adjusted his hat, which earned a frown from the captain on his right.

  The procession crept on. The scabbard of the curved knife banged against his right thigh with every step. Formations of cadets lined the road to keep order, and Martinez found himself searching for the bright hair and brilliant eyes of Cadet Sula. He failed to find her, and then reprimanded himself for looking for her in the first place.

  He had been angry enough when she bolted and left him standing foolishly in the excursion boat. His temper hadn’t improved when he returned to his apartment and found the cold supper that Alikhan had left for two, and which Martinez unceremoniously shoved into the fridge on his
way to bed.

  His anger had faded to annoyance by morning, and faded yet again when he received a message from Sula. It was written on her datapad in a precise, uniform hand, and sent without being recorded on video. Perhaps she was embarrassed to be seen by him, even on a screen.

  It’s entirely my fault, she’d written. Since I’m not fit company for man nor beast, I’m going to spend the rest of my furlough away from the capital, studying for my exams.

  It had been a few hours before his ire faded to the point where he returned her message, scrawling her a note—this handwriting was contagious—to the effect that he’d be happy to speak with her whenever she felt like talking.

  Apparently, she didn’t feel much like conversation, because he hadn’t heard from her again. He’d managed to console himself somewhat with Amanda Taen, who by this point he was finding refreshingly uncomplicated.

  He didn’t see Sula at any point during the long, slow march, but that wasn’t surprising. Every cadet, every officer, every warrant and petty officer, and every recruit was on duty at this hour, and only a minority of them in the High City. Also on alert was every member of the Legion, every member of every police force, and even the few remaining members of the Exploration Service. All public areas were guarded, and a platoon of armed troops kept watch at each skyhook terminal. They were all as ready as they could be for…well, for something.

  As Martinez saw it, no one knew what to expect after the death of the last member of the order that had ruled with such terror and absolute unquestioning certainty for the last ten thousand years. Despair and panic were widely predicted. Projections included mass suicides, riots, and insurrections. Lord Commander Enderby and the other senior officers had redeployed half the Fleet to make sure that warships were available to intervene anywhere in the empire at short notice.