In the Hall of the Martian King

by John Barnes

  “Sit over there and don’t say anything,” the King explained. Prince Cyx seemed to teleport into the chair. “Now,” King Witerio said, turning to his prisoners, “it seems to me that since I have already remanded this case to myself and I know all the evidence I care to know, there’s really very little point in hearing anyone’s arguments. It so happens that I know everything about the matter—”

  Jak tried. “Your Splendor, I will have to agree that we are guilty of very serious offenses, but there are a few things that you—”

  “If they are things Princess Shyf could tell me, then I am reasonably certain I’ve already been told,” Witerio said, smiling for the first time, not pleasantly.

  Jak was about to think of a response—he could feel it forming—when Shyf walked in with Kawib at her side. They were unguarded, unescorted, and obviously not prisoners.

  “Your Splendor,” she said, “I trust we have proven the friendship of Greenworld’s people toward yours, and the strength of our bond of royal friendship, by assisting the invincible guards of the Splendor”—(here the old gwonts to Jak’s left puffed out their chests)—“in preserving the lifelog where it rightfully belongs, in your hands. Let me offer you an alliance and a treaty, in which Greenworld will guarantee the security of the lifelog and you will retain it here; Green-world will pay all necessary expenses for its security and preservation, hire all the appropriate scientists and scholars, and create and fund the Karrinynya Center for the Study of the Nakasen Lifelog right here in Magnificiti.”

  “That is a very generous offer and one I am very inclined to accept,” Witerio said.

  Sibroillo cleared his throat and said, “Your Splendor, I know that we can be in no favor at all with you right now, and that you will not believe that I am any sort of friend, and yet I feel that it is my duty to point out that if you consider the heartless and calculated way in which this young woman betrayed old close friends, and an important ally, then surely you must realize—”

  “That she is apt to betray me?” Witerio asked. His mouth folded into a sardonic smile. “Of course. But she has betrayed you more recently than me, and she stands to profit more by being loyal to us. Besides, she betrayed you only because she was already working for us.”

  “But—” Waynong sputtered, “but, er, she said—I mean, I thought that—Shyf, can’t you explain—”

  Shyf smiled deeply at Clarbo Waynong, and approached him with that warm, seductive grin that always made Jak’s heart hammer. “Mister Waynong,” she said, “the fact that I smile and pretend to be fascinated with you really should not be taken to mean anything. In fact, since you are wealthy and of a good family, and rather easily deceived, you should be very wary when women smile like I’m smiling now. More so when it’s a princess. I would advise you to take the smile, the gaze, and the attention coming from a princess no more seriously than you do when they are coming from any good-looking little clerk from a nobody family, or from this ragamuffin child here.”

  Within the time of a heartbeat, a small drama happened to Jak’s right; Pikia seemed to speck whether she could move fast enough to kick Shyf before being restrained, and sadly dak she couldn’t.

  The Crown Princess of Greenworld stood close to Waynong and whispered tenderly, “By the way, you are easily the dullest man I have ever listened to for that length of time, and frankly, if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t.” She had been standing with her hands folded in front of her; faster than the eye could see, her top hand snapped out and slapped Waynong in the crotch, hard enough to double him and make him groan. For the first time, Jak thought, since I’ve known him, he doesn’t look happy. And once again Shyf is reserving all the really enjoyable parts of the evening for herself.

  “Now,” Shyf said to King Witerio, “do we have a deal?”

  Jak stammered, “But … Greenworld and the Hive have been allies for two hundred years … you can’t—”

  Shyf shrugged. “Of course we can. Didn’t you learn in your fancy PSA classes that the more essential ally gets away with whatever it wants? Well, who’s the most essential to whom? The Hive needs us to prevent the unification of the Aerie, which is vital, and you have no one but us for it. We only need a powerful backer from outside the Aerie, and aside from the Hive, we can turn to the Jovian League, or to Titan, or to any of the great monopolies—most especially Uranium—or even to the Rubahy. You won’t be happy, but even after this, you’ll beg for the chance to do us more favors, just to keep us as allies.”

  “But you personally are under the guns of Deimos,” Dujuv pointed out, “and there are fifty thousand troops up there—”

  She laughed. “And our battlesphere is co-orbiting with Deimos. Every ship you have would have to come out of launch bays covered by our guns and move onto a loop that we could knock apart with a single shot. Right here, at the moment, you have the crew of one warshuttle, currently confined to Red Amber Magenta Green’s prisons. I suppose you could blow up the lifelog by hitting Magnificiti from Deimos (violating so many treaties that I doubt we could count them all), or even open fire on Rufus Karrinynya with Deimos’s heavy artillery … if it’s worth starting a major war. Or you could gracefully accept that you’ve lost.”

  “It doesn’t really matter whether they are graceful about it or not,” Witerio said. “Lock them up.”

  The holding cell for Red Amber Magenta Green’s prison was familiar by now. They were no sooner locked up in it than Clarbo Waynong said, “Now, here’s my plan. First we escape—”

  “Did you have a method in mind for that?” Jak asked, mildly, hoping to avoid Dujuv’s actually killing the young patrician.

  “Oh, probably through the ventilator shafts, that’s what it usually is in the viv games—”

  “Would that be those ventilators?” Jak pointed to the dozen openings in the ceiling, none of them any bigger in diameter than his own thumb, each covered with a grate with no visible means of attachment; the ceiling itself was just over a meter above their heads.

  “Well, now I didn’t say it was going to be easy, but if people are going to take a negative attitude—”

  Jak glanced around and gestured for Dujuv to press himself against the wall to the left of the main door; before he could signal Shadow on the Frost, the Rubahy had taken up a position to the right of the door. Sibroillo joined Dujuv and Gweshira joined Shadow.

  “What’s all this—” Clarbo began, but Jak said, “Now, explain to me one more time about the ventilator shafts because I’m sure you had a plan—”

  “Well, in one of my favorite vivs, No Truce with Terriers!— er, no offense, of course, Shadow—”

  “None that won’t eventually be avenged.”

  “Thank you, you’re very understanding—anyway, in the middle part it turns out that even though there are only little vents like those in the ceiling, behind the vents there are big wide—”

  Jak had been glancing around; as far as he could tell the main camera on the room was the one right over the door, probably a fish-eye lens, so this ought to work. “What if someone were screaming like she was being killed?” Jak asked. “Could they hear that through the ventilator shafts?”

  “That’s completely irrelevant—”

  Pikia shrieked in agony. Jak turned to face her, guiding her back against the wall, covering the camera’s view of her with his body. He whispered, “Lots of drama.”

  She always did tend to do more and better than he asked. He only wished he had earplugs. As he slammed his hand into the wall beside her head, over and over, Pikia emitted screams and wails that would have summoned pity from a block of ice, loud enough to hear over a warshuttle taking off. Anyone would have thought that at least a dozen Pikias were being killed.

  The two guards who had just locked them up were back within seconds. The door whooshed to its full dilation and they rushed in. Dujuv grabbed the guard on his side from behind, yanking his elbows back; Sib drove a thrust-kick into the man’s solar plexus. As the guard doubled in
Dujuv’s grip, Sib followed up with a brutal uppercut that made the guard’s head fly back and cracked his teeth together with a sound like a hammer breaking a castanet. Dujuv let the guard drop to the floor.

  Meanwhile, Shadow on the Frost snaked an arm behind his guard’s head, took a grip on the man’s long hair, and whipped him over in a circular motion—possible due to Rubahy strength, Martian gravity, and Shadow’s imagination. The guard flopped over with a scream that stopped when Gweshira administered a hard stomp to his belly; as the man clutched his gut and sat up, she spread her hands around the back of his head and yanked his face against her rising knee. The man sagged and lay still.

  “Are you people actually—” Waynong began as the rest of the party charged out the door.

  They raced through the hall to the pile of their purses on the front desk; the guards had not had time to lock them away before they had been drawn by Pikia’s screams. As they tugged their purses on, Jak noted regretfully that Clarbo Waynong had been quick enough not to be trapped in the cell when the door reconstricted—possibly the first time anyone had ever had cause to complain that Waynong was too quick.

  Shadow was studying the map of emergency evacuation routes; he raised a hand to indicate he had found the right one, and pointed down a corridor.

  Waynong started to say “What?” but it came out as a cough due to Pikia’s swift, accurate elbow. They all rushed after Shadow on the Frost, who ran up to the emergency box on the door and shouted into it, “Password Splendor! Ambulance for two men right away! Soft lockdown! Evacuate this corridor only!”

  The door swung open and they rushed through en masse into a broad parking area, devoid of vehicles. Phobos had risen not long before, so there was plenty of light.

  “Now that we can talk,” Jak said, “Shadow, exactly what did you just do?”

  “Created a diversion that I hope will give us at least an hour’s head start. The security system in that lockup is of Rubahy manufacture, and in fact a distant cousin—someone I am connected to mostly through my uncle-group for honor, but also through my mother’s commanding officer’s sex-partner, in a way that is rather complicated—was the chief designer. Like most things here in the Harmless Zone, it’s designed to be cheap and simple. So when I gave it that sequence of commands, it didn’t have a camera to look with or an AI to evaluate. It has now closed off the corridor we came through from the rest of the area, and flooded everywhere else with knockout gas. Now they’ll have to bring in troops in respirators to search the area, looking for us and the guards.”

  “And was calling the ambulance part of the diversion?” Sibroillo asked.

  “We knocked two men unconscious. They probably have concussions, perhaps more serious injuries. It did not occur to me that they ought to die to cover our escape.” It always amazed Jak that a creature with no facial expressions could so vividly express what he thought.

  Uncle Sib muttered something about never understanding Rubahy honor, and Shadow on the Frost quietly said, “This is not a matter of honor, but of ordinary pity. Like your Principle 8: ‘Do not do things to others that would seem spiteful, petty, vicious, or shameless if they were done to you.’ Is that a bad Principle?”

  “Of course not,” Sibroillo said, “and your point is made.”

  “One more question,” Dujuv asked. “How did you know the password?”

  “Well, it was the one I would have guessed. But no need to guess when they have it taped to the emergency evacuation box.”

  “Well, anyway,” Clarbo Waynong said, “if you people are done with all the chitchat, I think we have any number of things to get on with. But I’m afraid I really don’t think I should go with you, wherever you’re going.”

  “You don’t?” Jak asked, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say, and that was the most obvious way to find out what (or if) Waynong was thinking.

  “No, I don’t think I can continue to give you the benefits of my leadership without much more cooperation than you have all shown up till now,” Waynong said. “In any case, there are procedures to be followed, which I should look up—”

  “If you try to use your purse here,” Jak said, “you will be spotted right away. At least wait to use it till you’re out in open country and it can call through multiple routings.”

  Waynong’s purse spoke up, “From a security standpoint, Mister Jinnaka is right.”

  “Oh, very well.” Waynong stamped away like a petulant small child, talking to his purse. After about fifty meters he seemed to straighten up and pick a destination, somewhere on the opposite side of the prison complex, for he headed along the fence as if looking for a way around.

  “I’m afraid we’ve ruined his trip,” Sibroillo said.

  “I can’t say that makes me unhappy,” Dujuv said.

  “I didn’t say I was unhappy. I said I was afraid. A powerful idiot is still powerful.”

  “And an idiot.”

  “Stipulated.”

  They decided that the simplest procedure, since it was likely that their escape would not be detected for some hours (unless Waynong made some fresh mess, in which case with any luck he would draw off the pursuit toward himself), would be to walk across the desert to the nearest Pertrans line and simply take a long-range taxi (expensive, but they were all on expense accounts after all) to Freehold, the capital of Magenta Yellow Amber Cyan, about forty kilometers away. But after they had walked no more than two hundred meters, Shadow on the Frost said, “I am struck by a thought.”

  He stood still in the bright Phobos-light, his silhouette like a scraggly feathered monument to an extraordinarily ugly philosopher.

  “What is it?” Dujuv asked, after a long pause.

  “Should we not proceed at once to resteal the lifelog? It would wipe out every blot on all our honor, accomplish the mission’s main objective, incidentally prevent a positive outcome for Clarbo Waynong—”

  “There’s a lot to like about the idea,” Jak admitted.

  Sibroillo said, “And since we have to keep our purses silent, we can always claim we could get no orders and just misjudged what their priorities were. Shadow, you are utterly right. Shame on me for not having thought of it myself. It’s quite possible that nobody even knows we’ve escaped yet. There will never be another chance as good as this one—it’s almost as good as the one we threw away earlier tonight.”

  “Precisely,” Shadow said. “Surprise. Probably our last chance for it. A great human thinker once said that the first punch is worth fifteen kilos. An unexpected kick in the head from behind is beyond price.”

  Dujuv clapped his hands together softly, and clicked his tongue with approval. “Toktru masen! How soon can we hit them? And do we know where they’re keeping the lifelog?”

  “On the Princess’s yacht,” Gweshira said.

  “How do you know that?” Jak asked.

  His uncle’s demmy shrugged. “Where would she most prefer it to be? And did you see the way the King and the Prince were looking at her? Allow another hour for her to work on them, since, and where does the Nakasen lifelog have to be?”

  Jak winced as he nodded. It made painful sense. “The landing field is an hour’s walk, going around Magnificiti. None of us dares use a purse or our credit. Is there any way to steal transportation or spoof a taxi?”

  No one had any ideas, so they started walking. Phobos, which circles Mars faster than the planet rotates, hurtled across the sky above them, waning as it went. It was halfway down toward the east, and they were most of the way to the landing field, when Sibroillo drifted back to walk beside Jak. For a while he said nothing, just walking beside his nephew as if they were out for a companionable stroll together. It made Jak think how constantly he had been with Sib when he was younger, and how much of what he thought was things his uncle had told him. It felt strange to be on his own, an adult, in command, and yet have the gaunt, goateed old man striding along beside him, as vigorous as ever and yet as if returned from a time trip to the anci
ent world.

  Finally Sib spoke. “I imagine you are wondering how I feel about following the sword, when the sword follows an idiot.”

  “Well, toktru, you silly old gwont. Especially when the purpose seems to be for the sword to help the idiot take power, and to preserve the fool from the consequences of his folly.”

  Their boots crunched on the crusty, broken soil, and Sib was quiet. “Sometimes the right action is to show deference to a fool.”

  “Um, sir,” Dujuv said, “I’ve learned a lot from you over the years, and I have a lot of respect for things you say, um …”

  “Well, Dujuv,” he said, his voice soft, a little raspy with his two hundred years, but calm and confident as if it were his voice that called the dark hills in the distance into being. After a few steps, he began again. “Well, then, let me try to explain it. I know that it seems as if the world would be a much more reasonable place if we didn’t have to look after the arbitrary privileges of well-born fools. I felt that way myself for, oh, I don’t know, about a week. When I was about twenty. But look at every time human beings have tried being ‘reasonable’—the periods when people were trying to be equal and make sure everyone got taken care of.

  “There were some whole centuries like that in Late Medieval times. And the result was invariable—malaise, ennui, art that petered out into experiments in meaninglessness, religion that demanded nothing of people but vague good intentions, wages so high that anyone could get into the best places, wars that dragged on forever, politics like one vast rug market, and a population so demoralized that you couldn’t get it to do much of anything about much of anything. One disaster after another as the human soul rotted away.

  “I know your hobby is reading ancient languages. Look up ‘leisure class,’ ‘welfare state,’ or ‘consumer society.’ You can see what the absence of real leadership does to people.”

  “Well, I notice what the absence of Waynong’s leadership is doing to us,” Jak ventured.

  Sib laughed. “All right. Very fair, very fair.” He chuckled again. “Very nearly the perfect retort. Yet you know as well as I do that if—as you suggested to your superiors, Jak—we had just sent Dujuv (with perhaps Xlini Copermisr) to acquire the lifelog, it would all be done by now, there would be no noise of any kind about it, and in consequence there would be no glory, no achievement, nothing to say other than ‘that’s taken care of.’ The biggest religious event of the last few hundred years, marked by a procedure as ordinary as checking a thumbprint for a visa.”