In the Hall of the Martian King

by John Barnes

  “So that’s where he became enemies with Bex Riveroma. He must have been about my age at the time—” Jak said.

  “About your age when he was at Paxhaven, yes. While they were there, the two of them were mostly friends, and for a long time very close friends. By the time they left they were fierce rivals. Enmity didn’t come for a while after that, but it came. Now that Sibroillo is dead, you’ll be free to learn something of your family and your origins, and you will find that that’s a pattern with Jinnaka men; intense friendship and intense enmity and nothing between.”

  They sat quietly for a while, before Jak said, “And was Sib happy while he was at Paxhaven?”

  “I can’t say for sure—I didn’t meet him till we were both past fifty—but he always said that the years at Paxhaven were the happiest in his life, and to judge by the way his eyes would light up when he talked of it, I think that was true.”

  Jak stared out the window at the sun-washed blue-green sea below, and said, “Well, then, if Sib liked it there, it will be a good place for him to have his funeral.” He sighed and added, “He and Kawib had sat and talked at dinner, not two days before. And now they’ve killed each other, in a quarrel over something that I don’t think either of them gave a fart in a windstorm about. I don’t know which one I feel sorrier for, Aunt Gweshira.”

  He had only rarely called her that since he had turned ten and understood that she wasn’t really his aunt; nowadays it was only when he felt close and wanted to remind her how important she was to him. The older woman leaned her head on his shoulder and let tears flow slowly into his tunic. “Everybody remembers that Principle 136 is one of the warrior’s principles,” she said. “ ‘It is useless to feel sorry for the dead but some things that are useless are good.’ But nobody ever seems to remember why it’s in there. Maybe it’s too painful to remember that.” She sighed and pressed her face harder against his arm; Jak held her hand, thought about how much he missed Sib, and thought about how much more she must be missing him. It was a long while before she spoke again.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “Social engineering is a violent art, and it’s what zybots are about, and I’ve seen many people die violently—caused it more than once, myself—and yet … this just seems like such a violation of the rules, Jak. The aristos kill each other, low-level grunts of all kinds die all the time, but the middle class is protected—that’s the basic rule of civilization, as Sib used to explain,” Gweshira said. “God I miss the fact that I’ll never hear him pointlessly explain that (or anything else) to people who already know it, again.”

  “I’d like to be told some obvious things myself,” Jak said, smiling a little at the memory. “And hear a lecture that goes on past my ‘okay’ ten or twelve times … he was the best, you know. Might as well have been my mother and my father.”

  “Do you remember them?”

  “My mother died in childbirth. You think of that as archaic, you know? As if she’d been eaten by a dinosaur. But childbirth is a big shock to the system, no matter how advanced medicine gets, and some people just don’t make it through … My dad was away as a merc for some Rubahy honor-group, fighting on the surface of Charon, and before I was one year old he had collected a bunch of medals, and before I was two there was white nitrogen frost on his dark grave, out where the sun is only the brightest star … that was what the Rubahy honor-verse about him said.”

  “You were quite the bigot against the Rubahy when you were younger—”

  “Another great thing about Sib. He never let me forget that my dad’s name was inscribed in Rubahy rolls of honor. And he made it obvious to me that he looked on the prejudices I picked up, from living in the Hive, as being something like picking my nose. Unappetizing, not permitted around him, something he hoped I’d outgrow, something he would always find obnoxious if I didn’t. So of course I clung to it while I was a teenager and then dropped it as soon as I really wanted to be an adult.”

  “He did worry that you wouldn’t outgrow it.”

  “That’s what I mean, that he was the best. He worried about the right stuff.” Jak looked out the window at the Boreal Ocean; a lovely crystal blue, absolutely transparent, and even from a few kilometers up, they could see down through the water to the pods of whales and the great schools of fish feasting. “It’s so beautiful,” Jak said, “that was something else Uncle Sib tried to teach me, to have my eyes open. And maybe he did a little. I learned more from him than he intended.”

  “He was a natural teacher—in fact his biggest problem was that he knew that and he’d teach when there wasn’t any reason to.”

  Jak laughed. It was only a little sighing of breath, a small squeeze in the chest, but it seemed to come from far down inside him, from more than twenty years of memories, and then he felt something break, like the face of a mighty dam giving way around a crack you could have bridged with your hand, and he was laughing and crying all at once, grateful for the old man’s having graced his life, miserable for the loss, and when he really thought about Sibroillo Jinnaka, unable to stop laughing. “You know,” he said, “one thing toktru I loved about Sib was how he could be so dignified and defensive about it, the way he wanted his respect, one millisecond, and the next microsecond, he’d be realizing that he had made a fool of himself and he’d just roar with laughter. Like a geyser under an ice pond, you know? Always forming a new crust and always blasting it apart.”

  “And then muttering to me about that silly kid, afterward,” Gweshira said, smearing the back of her hand across her eyes.

  “Toktru. I speck he was mad at me three-quarters of the time but still he just always seemed glad I was around; every so often his hand was on my shoulder when I really needed it, and I’ll never forget that.” Jak drifted off into the memory of the sharp glint in Sib’s eye—as if he were expecting a good punch line or a fierce battle—whenever Jak showed any evidence of brains or ambition (that one probably hadn’t happened as much as it should have). He was trying to get an exact picture of that expression in his head when Gweshira said, “If you don’t mind my saying it, he was always very patient with you.” She seemed to be trying to draw things out of him; perhaps she thought Jak needed to talk, or perhaps she wanted confirmation of her own memory.

  “Oh, toktru masen! He needed to be. It was either be patient with me or drop me out an airlock. But that was Sib. He didn’t just teach patiently, he taught patience,” Jak said. “I remember when I was about ten, I got it into my head that I was going to be a Maniples genius, that I had the talent to be a Master or a Great Master and a child prodigy at it, so I entered a tournament at a level that was toktru far beyond me. Triple elimination, so I had to go through three successive stompings, and seeded-on-the-fly so each stomping got worse than the last. I came home feeling like the biggest loser and fool in the world. And Sib never said a word, even though I knew he’d been watching the tournament in real time and knew exactly what had happened. Instead, he told me to suit up for Disciplines practice. I thought it was going to be a punishment session, one of those times when he just took me into the practice room and beat the snot out of me (which he only did when I had a real excess of snot, which happens in young kids). Because toktru I knew I’d puffed myself up with pride and gotten arrogant and disgraced myself.

  “So I went in there scared out of my mind, and he asked me to show him all the training forms, all the kihons that they start little kids on, and he kept asking me to remember how hard they had been for me and how bad I had been at them when I started. And I thought I was getting his point … so he started knocking me down and dumping me on my butt, and I thought this was my punishment … but every time he knocked me down, he’d make me stop, practice my breathing, focus, try to do better, and then he’d do it again. It was all afternoon, but finally I dakked it all singing-on.

  “He didn’t care whether I’d won or lost. I was a kid, I was supposed to lose. He didn’t even care if I was good at it yet, I was just learning, just starting to learn,
how could good-or-not matter yet? What he wanted me to see was that the whole job was getting knocked down and getting back up again, always seeing if you can make it work this time, until one time it works, then until sometimes it works, then until it works more often than not, then until it works every time. You just look and say, I won, I lost, I screwed up, I did well, and you draw a breath and draw a lesson and go on and try again. You don’t throw a party when you get it right and you don’t hold a funeral when you screw up.”

  He felt what he had said, and Gweshira smiled and squeezed his arm. “But sometimes you do hold a funeral when you screw up. You know Sib would have told you that he took a classic example of a bad position, just that one time. No covered escape. Couldn’t just shoot and scoot. And then he fired at a bad target, three times, before he got a clear shot. Those bad shots gave his position away and that’s why he got hit with the grenade.” She sighed. “That happens. You follow your sword through life, and one day you aren’t quick enough or you lose your grip or you’re just unlucky, and you have followed your sword all the way to your death. It’s the way we live, Jak.” Her hand tightened on his arm. “And it’s the way he chose to live, and maybe even the way he chose to die. I don’t think he wanted to spend his last fifteen years hooked up to life support, visiting his friends through the viv and wandering around in a waking dream, waiting for something out in the physical world to cave in faster than they could patch up, so that he’d just go out like a song when you switch it off.” Her eyes flooded and her cheeks were drenched, but both her hands were clenched on Jak’s forearm, squeezing the muscles painfully hard.

  With his free hand, Jak gently drew his handkerchief and wiped Gweshira’s face. “You knew him better than I did,” he said, “even though I knew him all my life. And you’re right. I’m sure it hurt and I’m sure the instant when the grenade landed, before it blew, and Sib dakked that he’d screwed up, was bad … but that was the death his whole life was pointing to, masen?”

  “Toktru.” Gweshira curled around to put her hand on Jak’s shoulder, still keeping her grip; she was so still and quiet that Jak only knew when she had gone to sleep by the sudden release of pressure on his arm. They crossed the North Pole, where a few rafts of ice, left over from winter, still shone in the polar sunlight, and on down into the wedge of night, the sea growing black beneath them. After a long time, in which Jak just sat and breathed and remembered, the statisaucer, still utterly silent and smooth in its flight, began a descent, and ahead of him he could see the sharp spires and rocky rim of Korolev Atoll, a wide crater rim that stuck up above the polar sea, forming a circle of curving mountainous islands, each honeycombed with the excavated dwellings of the Paxhavians, and gloriously spattered with the lights of their pavilions, terraces, and plazas. Sib would have loved this sight—had loved it, apparently. Jak tried to settle his mind to let it move him, as it had moved Sib, as Sib would have wanted.

  * * *

  They had kept Jak under, using a mild medical version of the stunner, until his body worked its way around to the cycle for local time. By the clock he had slept more than twenty hours, by his brain wave function map he had slept deeply and well, and by the way his gritty eyes ached and his sore throat craved water, he had barely slept at all. He got that drink of water from the dispenser and consumed it in restful quiet. He had barely glanced at this room last night and now he realized he had seen everything then; it might have been any hotel room since a thousand years before the Wager.

  He pulled on his purse and turned it on.

  “Do you want to be awake?” it asked.

  “I guess so.”

  “I have a message for you, but it is supposed to wait until after you have had a shower and something to eat.”

  “Those both sound kind of good.”

  “Take a long shower; there is a food order already, and I shall activate it and have it here when you are dry.”

  The shower seemed to help, and the meal was his favorite, traditional-style Lunar Greek baked hamster and glutles, warm and comforting. After he had wiped up and dressed, his purse asked, “Shall I give you the message I’ve been holding for you?”

  “Yes, please.”

  It was simple text message: please notify two representatives of the Paxhaven Fighting Academy whenever he felt up to talking, as they would need some hours of his time to prepare for Sib’s memorial service. Jak told his purse to send a reply, poured himself another glass of water, and deopaqued the windows.

  The outside was as spectacular as the inside was bland. Korolev was not a Bombardment crater—it was far too large for that—but it had something of the same shape for some of the same reasons, an impact by something relatively small moving at unusually high velocity. Whatever had formed Crater Korolev had come in almost at right angles to the orbits of the planets, and socked into Mars up close to the North Pole and nearly perpendicular to its surface, at a velocity that was high even for a meteor. The crater was almost perfectly round and its sharp-sloping wall stuck far up above the surrounding plain. When, after a few years of the Bombardment, the polar ice cap had melted and the water had flowed north from the mud-ocean underlying Chryse, the rising water of the resurrected Boreal Ocean had first surrounded Korolev, and then lapped over the low spots in the wall, forming a deep, beautiful lagoon, surrounded by a circular string of mountainous islands.

  If there were a spot of level ground anywhere that wasn’t man-made, Jak couldn’t see where it would be. Each of the knife-blade narrow, curving islands reared up out of the sea as if it were lunging to grab the stars; their jagged tops bore ice, even this far into summer, and between the twisted and battered trees that clung to their red-rock sides, innumerable strands of waterfalls poured down over them, little lines and bows of silver in the sun. The islands farther away seemed to sink into the sea, and from Jak’s high window, looking out over the deep blue lagoon, he could just see little snowcaps, barely peeking out of the water, framing the horizon.

  The lagoon itself was filled with sailboats; some must be for pleasure, some perhaps for fishing or cargo, but everywhere within the lagoon the white and silver sails moved silently and majestically. Jak wondered if any of them took passengers.

  Leaning out the window to see, Jak discovered that his hotel—if he was in a hotel—was built into the side of one of the great craggy islands. When he looked right and left, the smooth walls ended in ridges of what appeared to be natural stone.

  Below him there were red tile rooftops and narrow alleys between buildings, and then the deep blue lagoon; the shadow of this island reached a quarter of the way to the horizon, darkening and smoothing the waters and letting Jak see down into them a little way, to where a school of fish, each twice the length of divers hanging onto their fins, was swimming slowly in toward the island.

  He could see why Sib had liked it here.

  There was a soft ping from his purse and it said, “The representatives of the Paxhaven Fighting Academy are here.”

  “Dilate the door.” Jak turned. The two men who came in were in their late teens or early twenties, younger than Jak but not much younger, and dressed in what Jak thought of as the “Paxhaven uniform”: a soft shirt in a bright color (both wore a vivid deep blue), the jacket, pants, and belt of an ancient martial arts gi (on both of these men it was in pastel blue), and a long cloak (black) over it. The smaller of the two men said, “Hello, I’m Rej Waramez, and this is my partner Maruk Sebaskawa. We are here on orders of our teachers, partly as a matter of compassion and pity, but also as trainees, to acquire the story of a fallen warrior of our school.”

  “It is the belief of our teachers that you need to and we need to tell the story of your uncle and we need to listen to it,” Maruk added.

  Jak nodded. “Well, I need to talk, and I suppose students always need to listen. Shall we sit down? May I offer you anything?”

  “We were going to suggest that it’s a beautiful day,” Maruk said, “and you’ve been in this room for a lo
ng time. Perhaps it would help to get out and walk a bit?”

  When they had told him they thought they might walk around a farm for a while, he had had visions of something like the farms he had visited in Africa, on Earth, or that perhaps this would be one of those dreary countries where they want you to look at the sewage-to-hydroponics plant. He had not expected that it would be a tremendous array of brick planters, wedged against the natural rock into every possible crevice, and linked by catwalks, all over the seaward side of the island. It was a calm day, and the big, slow, low-gravity swells came in from the southeast as if their procession might grind to a halt at any moment. The sunward side of the island was if anything steeper than the lagoon side, and the catwalks were narrow, but since his companions seemed comfortable, Jak resolved to let himself get used to the height … though looking twenty meters straight down into the heaving, chopping, foaming water, this was easier resolved than done.

  The many planters were crowded with broccoli, tomatoes, endive, and many plants that Jak was sure he had eaten but wouldn’t happen to recognize. After a time they came around to a wider ledge with benches, where brightly colored flowers bounced in the sea breeze. “Nasturtiums,” Maruk said. “They’re edible, but I prefer to think we overproduce them just because they’re pretty. That would explain why we’re always getting a couple on the plate at every meal at every restaurant, and why now and then I find that some bartender has dropped one into my martini.”

  Jak chuckled. “That seems strange. Somehow the clothing, and the setting, and so forth, made me think this place would be ascetic.”

  “Only to the extent that it brings us pleasure,” Rej said, grinning.

  “I speck I dak some of what Sib loved about this place.”

  “That’s very flattering,” Maruk said. “Well. We won’t be interrupted here (we’ve reserved this platform for an important official duty) so I suppose we should get started, if you’re ready.”