In the Hall of the Martian King

by John Barnes

  “Or think about the Aerie—two billion people living fifteen centimeters from vacuum—or remember Africa, on Earth, how beautiful it is? Right in the middle of it is the capital of Uranium, and most of the continent belongs to the duchy, and when big trouble starts, everyone will be gunning for that. At the bottom of the deepest gravity well that human beings live in. There’ll be a second and a third and a two hundredth Bombardment, and then what happens to the grasslands and the wild horses and the elephants and all?

  “Don’t you see how much we’re about to lose? And that our whole bet—the whole Wager itself—is toktru lost? Ninety-five percent or so of humanity took the Wager, and it turns out, no, we were all wrong, it’s not the way to live, it’s not the likely pathway to a decent world, it’s a bitter joke! We don’t even have a decent religion or philosophy to get the human race through the nightmare that’s coming!”

  Dujuv had been leaning forward, fingers locked together, speaking very fast but not raising his voice at all, as if whispering the most dreadful secret of all time to Jak. Now he stopped as if switched off.

  The warm water and the relief of no longer being in the nightmare had relaxed Jak; he had sat and listened without reacting much, his soft comfortable muscles allowing his mind to just relax and accept his old tove’s words. Jak breathed deeply, three times, tongue resting lightly against the roof of his mouth, gently opening and filling his sinuses, the way Sib had taught him to do when you were trying to perceive something difficult and unclear; he let the relaxation wash over him and the knowledge of the situation come in after it.

  “Dujuv, maybe I’m toktru misreading you, and maybe this is completely wrong, but I have a feeling. I think there’s some weird way that you’re glad all that is coming, and you’re glad that the Principles turned out to be what they are, and you’re trying to talk yourself out of feeling that way, trying to make it feel like you don’t want all that upheaval, when I think another part of you really just can’t wait. And maybe you should tell me about that part before I try to say what I think about what you just said. Because I don’t think I should answer only half of what a toktru tove has to say, and especially not the half that he maybe doesn’t believe himself, or maybe he just won’t say what he really feels about it, or something.”

  Dujuv heaved a sigh and buried his face in his hands. “Nakasen, Jak, I thought I had a better act going than that. Was it that easy to see through it? This feels like a case of Principle 29: ‘If your friends see through your act, expect the blow from your enemies at any moment.’ ”

  “The only thing I’m seeing, old tove, is that you’re not telling me everything you’re thinking, and you’ve just made a long speech to avoid saying whatever it is that you toktru want to say.” Jak fiddled with the reheater, adjusting it slightly upward, and lay back to enjoy the warmth flowing in; he slowed his breathing and heart rate, the better to accept whatever Dujuv might be about to say.

  The warm brown of Dujuv’s bare head glinted in the soft indirect lights of the bathing room, but his face remained hidden in his hands for so long that Jak began to wonder if his oldest, most toktru of toves would ever speak. When he did, it was almost a whisper. “Yes, Jak, I think I am glad. I’ve seen people dying young of radzundslag, on Mercury, and I’ve seen the hopeless expressions on the faces of the children born into peonage. I’ve seen proud crewies with generations of deep-space experience converted to virtual slaves on their own ships by one minor accident or one clever trick of an insurance company. I’ve seen some of the best artistic, musical, and literary talents in the solar system wasted—and I mean wasted—in the Harmless Zone, recreating things that were old a thousand years ago, encouraged to dither and fiddle themselves away to nothing. I’ve seen that evil princess hold my best tove in thrall and torture him half out of his mind, and you and I both remember some of the things she was doing among her own people, and that still makes me sick. And I’ve seen my own nation help her do it.

  “And the whole time, I thought I was insane, Jak. Because we judge right and wrong by the Wager and you know, there’s not a word in the Wager against slavery or tyranny or war. There’s not a thing in the Wager to say that children should be loved and cherished, or should grow up to be free and strong and unafraid. Oh, the Wager sometimes urges us to be kind, because it’s an effective way to manipulate others, or brave, because it’s an effective way to get what you want—but, Jak, that’s all. I thought I was the only person who felt that way.

  “And now, of all things, I find out Nakasen did. I find out he was making fun of the cruel petty tyrants of his day, writing out the guide to how they acted. And for the first time in my life, I really, truly, deeply wish I could have known Paj Nakasen, and served at his side.”

  “But I would have thought—”

  “I want to make a new Wager. I want to bet that Nakasen was right—that Bob Patterson was right—about us. Nobody writes satire for people who can’t get the joke. You don’t mock people for what they can’t help. But you do for what they can. And he believed that people could do better than following all those blind stupid pig aristos on through the centuries, losing the best parts of ourselves so that the aristos can be … amused.” He stared down at the floor for a long time, thinking of something or other. When he looked up at Jak, his voice was as neutral as a machine’s. “I bet you can’t dak what I’m feeling.”

  “Humanity tried democracy for a long time, Duj. Some places are still trying it. It spoiled and ruined most of the good things about life.”

  “Did it really? Or is that what they want us to believe?”

  “Oh, come on, Duj, you’re much too smart a heet to fall for conspiracy theories. Athens, where five percent of the people could vote, produced the Parthenon; they gave a lot of people the vote and they went down the tubes. The great cathedrals were built by kings and popes. The Taj Mahal was built by a monarch on a whim. Medieval America conquered a continent and gave us atomic bombs and reached the moon, then they freed the slaves and let women vote, and in no time at all they lost all their ambition and relied on the U.N. to protect them and got squished like bugs between the armies in the Quebec-Jamaica War. Now these are just facts, facts anyone knows from school. Oh, sure, a republic can work as long as not too many people have the vote—”

  “Jak, what I’m asking you is … how did those get to be the facts? Who wants us to believe all that?”

  “Facts are not true because people want us to believe them, they’re true because they’re true! Every democracy ends in ruin because there are so many worthless people and they vote themselves and their relatives into power and destroy all the beauty and glory—”

  Dujuv stood up. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, pizo. Keep up the deconditioning. I know it’s tough but I think it’s a good thing for you to be free of her. And if I hear you scream, I promise, solemn as a Rubahy, I’ll run in to help. But right now we shouldn’t talk more; we’re both getting angry, and I want to stay toves.” Dujuv grinned, so suddenly that it seemed as if a different man had been substituted for him at that instant, and added, “But you know, given that the solar system is producing twenty times the whole wealth of Charlemagne for every single human being—and yet we have hunger and people dying young—and this has been the way for five hundred years at least, I can’t help pointing out that maybe it would be more glorious to feed and house and take care of everyone decently, than it is to hold a really fine parade or have a really great-looking ruler. Just can’t help thinking that.”

  Jak shrugged. “I’d like to stay toves, too. But I can’t help it either; I think if you did that, you’d have a race of slugs with no ambition.”

  “Do you have no ambition?”

  Jak snorted. “Come on. You know me.”

  “And have you ever been hungry and not had access to food?”

  Dujuv turned and left before Jak could answer. Jak lay awake the rest of the night, growing more and more angry that he couldn’t think of the simple, obvi
ous reply that Dujuv’s cheap shot had demanded.

  The next day, when Jak saw Doctor Falimoraza, he finally mustered the courage to ask why so little of his deconditioning time seemed to be spent on the deconditioning itself.

  The doctor nodded a couple of times, leapt up onto a counter, and perched comfortably. “Well, what we do here in the treatment of anything is begin from the assumption that Paxhaven is a healing place. Things that come here get better—minds, bodies, friendships, marriages, even whole societies if enough of their members visit. So mostly we give you the good experiences you can have at Paxhaven, and encourage you to let Paxhaven work on you. For example, the conditioning itself is a trivial problem. The serious problem is that your personality has grown, more and more, to be the personality of a person who wants to be conditioned. So we need to get you past that. Healthy people, of course, don’t want to be conditioned … it closes off too many other possibilities in their lives.”

  “I wish it didn’t feel so much like love.”

  “It is love, Jak. Here’s a saying of Paj Nakasen that you won’t find in the Principles—‘Love manifests the good the way the face manifests the person.’ As we build up the good inside you, you’ll find you can love in better ways, and conditioned love won’t attract you much.”

  That evening, as Jak was drifting off to sleep, his door dilated suddenly. He sat up in bed and rolled toward fighting position, get time, get space, get room enough to work and see what’s going on—Dujuv and Pikia were both out for the night, Shadow was in the other wing, no help close by—

  A familiar voice said, “Calm love. Hard.” The door contracted behind Shyf; the lights came up. “I have been overridden,” Jak’s purse said, its voice tinny and twisted by the difficulty of getting even that much of a message out.

  Jak stared at the Crown Princess of Greenworld as a very small mongoose might stare at a very big cobra; wanting the fight but hating the odds. He was aroused, but not uncontrollably; her giving the “Calm love” command had soothed him but not dangerously so. He could not quite trust himself to do the right thing if he moved.

  Shyf took off her long nightgown in one smooth movement. She stretched out on the bed and said, “Hard, hard, hard, that’s good, now, hard rage.”

  It took less than a minute and Jak felt sick afterward. He was crawling toward the bathroom when behind him, as she was putting her gown back on, Shyf said, “Calm love. Calm love. You’re sleepy, you’re sleepy, you’re sleepy—” and the world slowed down and became fuzzy and soft-edged, a warm friendly place, and he just needed to rest on the floor here—

  His purse howled an alarm and then was choked back. The door dilated. Bex Riveroma walked in. Jak rolled as hard as he could, but he seemed to be at the bottom of a well filled with molasses, and Riveroma seemed to flash from point to point like a flea with hyperdrive. He bounded over Jak, landed behind him, hammerlocked him, and clapped a stunner onto Jak’s forehead. The last thing Jak heard was Shyf saying, “Remember you promised not to hurt him,” and Riveroma saying, “ ‘Unnecessarily,’ Your Utmost Grace, you always forget, ‘unnecessarily.’ ”

  CHAPTER 14

  All Right, What’s the Plan?

  When Jak awoke, the most astonishing thing was that he awoke. He knew plenty of good reasons Riveroma would have had to just kill him. But here he was, in his bed, flat on his back, with Gweshira bending over him and saying, “He’s waking up—”

  “Good,” Shyf said. She leaned into Jak’s field of view as well. “Takes a little while for the stunner to wear off,” she said. “You won’t be able to talk for another minute or so.”

  After a long time, Jak was able to form the words “What’s happening?” so that they could be understood. It was the most obvious possible thing, but then the situation seemed to call for obviousness.

  “Well,” Gweshira said, “it so happened that there was some old Greenworld business that Sib had been involved in, and that Her Utmost Grace and I were taking advantage of the chance to talk it over. And the subject of you came up. And I happened to have a visit with Bex Riveroma later that day, for quite different reasons—a little conversation about relations between Circle Four and Triangle One, actually, perhaps leading up to an armistice, because our two zybots have been feuding rather a long time with no gain to either. And between all the conversations, we realized that it was high time to just get rid of that sliver, which has been forever making a mess of your life, old pizo. It was Bex Riveroma’s chance to destroy it and to know it really was destroyed; your chance to have it removed with friends watching; my chance to put that whole intrigue to bed for Circle Four.”

  “And I had some personal reasons as well,” Shyf said.

  “We didn’t think Hive Intel would approve if we asked you in the presence of your purse. And it was better for you to be given no choice—that way you can’t be blamed. Anyway, except for a few millimeters of fresh scar, your liver is now just like anyone else’s, and you probably won’t ever need to see Bex Riveroma again.”

  “But what about Riveroma getting away, free as a bird, with all those crimes?”

  “Oh, he always was going to get away. That was never the question. He was a pro—he’d probably never have been arrested, or not prosecuted, or not convicted, or he’d have escaped—one way or another. And he knew that, about the five crimes whose files we had loaded into the sliver. We, and he, knew that all of it was things that no government anywhere would ever actually touch. Every one of them was crawling with nascent disasters for any polity stupid enough to prosecute Bex. And unless Clarbo Waynong becomes supreme dictator, there will never be a government that dumb.

  “That was always the whole point, Jak. He had kidnapped Princess Shyf on behalf of the Duke of Uranium. That was a pretty normal crime, as crimes between aristos go. Not a big deal. We needed to make Bex want to release her more than he wanted to keep her. So we needed some leverage, some threat that would make him change his mind, especially if he forced us to carry out our threat. That was all there ever was to it.

  “So we made the sliver and stuck it in you and threatened him, but what we were threatening him with were things that would inconvenience him, make him do some running and hiding, force him to change some identities and abandon some schemes. The idea was that we’d threaten to put a kink in his hose for a couple of decades, that was all. It was never about killing him or locking him up, and still less about bringing him to justice (as if that idea meant anything!).”

  “But he’s ruined people’s lives and messed up all of history—”

  “We all have, silly boy. It’s what we do. Now, I’m going to get out of here because you and Shyf have things to talk about.” She got up and left. Shyf waited a moment. She drew a breath and gently ran a hand over Jak’s face. “No doubt your purse is recording this and relaying it back to Doctor Mejitarian at Hive Intel.”

  Jak sat straight up struck as if by a kick to his solar plexus.

  “Of course I know, silly,” Shyf said. “I discuss it now and then with some of the Hive Intel psych people, keeping the right balance, making sure you don’t become either too independent or too dependent, things like that, masen? Think about it. That big monkey Dujuv that you’re so fond of was panth-bonded to Myx, and I also had Dujuv conditioned to me, and after just a few weeks of deconditioning, he’s been completely free of his bonding to either of us. And he’s a panth. The genies have programmed twenty generations of that bloodline to imprint and bond deeply, he’s naturally the most loyal lover and friend you could have, the singing-on essence of the tove for life, and yet deconditioning worked on him in less than three months. You’re an unmodified native-stock human, you get sessions a couple of times a week and at-home treatment too, and it still hasn’t worked on you?”

  “But I get deconditioned all the time! After every message from you! Plus I see Doctor Mejitarian twice a week and he puts me under and—”

  “Jak, how do you know that what’s being done is deconditionin
g? Conditioning wears off naturally. I have to rework all the Royal Palace Guards all the time. Conditioning wouldn’t last anything like as long as it has lasted in you, all by itself. And the messages I’ve been sending you haven’t been the reason. It’s nearly impossible to condition someone—at least someone who doesn’t want to be conditioned—at a distance, and non-interactively. At least some big part of Doctor Mejitarian’s ‘deconditioning’ has been ‘reconditioning.’ You didn’t realize? Too bad. Of course it was all at my request, as you might guess. Greenworld and the Hive are old allies, masen?”

  Jak gaped at her, as shivering-cold as if a bucket of ice water had been dumped over him. Shyf was certainly a skilled enough liar, but it was undismissably likely that at least some of what she was saying was true. “But why would they—”

  “Oh, Mejitarian can explain all that much better than I can. And Dean Caccitepe better still.” She dismissed the entire issue with a captivating little wave of her perfect, elegant fingers.

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because I don’t want you conditioned to me anymore, Jak. I had to use the conditioning, one more time, to get that sliver out of you, but these nice people at Paxhaven have been working with you on deconditioning, and with me on—well, never mind, that’s complicated. Anyway, I prefer you free to conditioned. So I am returning the toy Hive Intel gave me, and I’m maybe telling him I’d rather he didn’t let Hive Intel play so rough with him anymore.

  “It’s obvious, Jak, that all men are not created equal. Not even close. But a few men are crated eagles. And I’m the one that crated you, and your crate-er has just decided to endow you with your unalienable rights. Sorry to give you your freedom in a series of bad puns, but that’s the way it goes, sometimes, important gifts show up wrapped in old newspapers, masen? Send me a message or something sometime, if you like, but I’d rather hear about you in the headlines and the gossip channels. Go fly. Make me proud.” She got up, bent to kiss him, her mouth already opening … then stopped herself. She asked him, “May I shake your hand?”