In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (15 page)

Reluctantly, she went on, “The Eastbloc base is at Dvor Il-Adazar; that’s where the Kings Beneath the Mountain started from and it was the capital throughout the Imperial period. If any place on Mars has preserved the records of the very earliest era of the Tollamunes, it’s under Mons Olympus.”

Jeremy’s brows went up. “You think the rulers there are telling the truth when they claim to be the lineal descendants of the Crimson Dynasty?”

She nodded. “The Eastbloc investigators think so. What’s more, they’re worried about what’s happened to their mission. They’ve stopped obeying all their orders, and our sources say that it’s stranger than that, that it’s as if they don’t
know
that they’re not obeying all their orders.”

“And they haven’t done anything about it?”

“At the end of a hundred-and-eighty-day round trip, with a ship twice a year? Even laser messages take hours. And every new guy they send out starts doing the same shit. That thing on Venus, the Diadem of the Eye . . . it apparently could do things to your mind, or so Marc Vitrac always swore, and he had some evidence for it. It was working when he found it.”

Jeremy felt his brows trying to climb up into his hairline, and his lips shaped a silent whistle.

“The Diadem of the Eye doesn’t do anything these days but sit there and baffle analysis. They think there are functioning artifacts from two hundred million years ago at Dvor Il-Adazar?”

She shook her head. “From thirty or forty thousand years ago, at least. Jeremy, the Diadem of the Eye
was
something like what the natives and Vitrac said it was. And we’ve been studying it for twelve years and we still can’t even tell definitely whether it’s made of matter or just looks like it is. But it was functional for a long time, and the Ancients showed the locals how to use it.”

He nodded. “And the USASF—”

“The president and the NSC and the commonwealth people and the OAS,” she amplified grimly.

“The president and the National Security Council and our wonderful allies think that there may be Ancient artifacts
here
? That the Lords of Creation gave the Tollamunes . . . things . . . and showed them how to use them?”

“Yup. And there’s as good a chance of finding that stuff here as anywhere outside Dvor Il-Adazar, and if there are Ancient artifacts they won’t be affected by the passage of time. That’s what suddenly rang bells on your research grant proposal. It crosschecked with a lot of what our historical research people said. Something
happened
here, back toward the end of the Imperial period, just before the era of the Civil Wars.”

“The Dissonance, the Martians call it. There’s not much chance of finding functioning stuff,” he warned.

Lay people keep forgetting that what archaeologists find is usually junk. Informative junk, but still junk
.

“It’s a chance we can’t take. If the Eastbloc were ever to get control of ancient technology, we’d be . . . how shall I put it delicately . . . totally ass-fucked. Those people, or whatever the hell they were, could alter
planets
like Play-Doh. If they weren’t gods, they were close enough for government work. I wouldn’t want
our
government to get that much power—and I work for them! The Eastbloc . . .”

She shuddered, and Jeremy nodded thoughtfully. “But right now, it looks like the technology, if it’s there, has control of
them
.”

“There is that.”

He went on, “And according to
my
specialty, the Crimson Dynasty’s experts could do a lot of mind tricks too, even more than modern Martian drugs can—and those are scary enough. Maybe the rulers of Dvor Il-Adazar have some of that . . .
tembst
. . . of their own still handy, and they’ve been using it on the Eastblockers. Just what they deserve, too.”

“Which could be nearly as bad. Remember what the Eastbloc base has on hand in the way of weapons systems.”

“We do, too.”

“Right, but we—and they—just use it for deterrent purposes, like the subs and silos and orbital lasers back home. Imagine Martians getting their hands on it. We don’t sell them weapons, and being careful about that was a big reason we put our base here, way out in the boonies.”

“Then why did the Eastbloc put
theirs
right next to Mons Olympus?”

“Hubris, we think. I told you back in Zar-tu-Kan we couldn’t do the beads-booze-and-blank-treaty-form thing here. Our best bet is that the Eastblockers thought they
could
, and now it’s biting them in the butt.”

“That’s a pretty unpalatable pair of alternatives you’ve got there, Captain Yamashita,” Jeremy said. “Either the Eastblockers have found the powers of gods and are planning on using them—”

“Which means we have to discover the equivalent here. This is our best bet.”

Jeremy nodded. “Or if we’re lucky, the rulers of Dvor Il-Adazar have messed with the Eastblockers’ heads enough to take control of their weaponry.” He chuckled. “At least that wouldn’t be my responsibility, no?”

“No, just the government’s. And they would have to try to deter whoever’s running Dvor Il-Adazar . . . or watch them nuke and burn their way back to a planetary empire, in which case they’d have a planetary government with access to our technologies,
including space travel
. Or to stop that, we’d have to give equivalent weapons to their enemies.”

“That’s assuming they’d go right ahead and use what they took.”

“Have you ever met a Martian who’d hesitate for a second?”

“Hey, that’s a stereotype. Like the unemotional half-Martian Science Officer on the Federation Starship
New Frontier
. . .”

His peace offering was ignored, even though they’d happily discussed favorite episodes over the winter at Kennedy Base. Sally went on doggedly: “Stereotypes get to be stereotypical because they’ve usually got a big kernel of truth. The only reason Martians don’t fight more wars between their city-states is that they’ve learned that it isn’t likely to produce results.”

“That wouldn’t stop
us
, judging by Earth’s history.”

“Yes, they’re more sensible than us.”

He smiled. “Hell, they’re so sensible sometimes they decide wars by having the leaders play a game of chess instead!”

“
Atanj
, not chess. And only when the force on both sides is about equal. Then the rulers or generals play with living pieces.”

“Yeah, but the losing side actually
accepts
the result when they
do that. And only a few die, instead of thousands. That’s strength of character!”

“No, it’s just being cold-bloodedly smart—it’s a war game, after all, and the result probably would be the same if they actually fought the war. And the leaders accept the result because the
followers
are smart, too.”

Jeremy frowned in puzzlement. “How so?”

“They don’t have more geniuses than we do, because they don’t deviate from the mean as much, but their average IQ is about 125, which means they’ve got a hell of a lot fewer hopeless sub-one-hundred chuckleheads. If they ever get a really scientific worldview and a technology that isn’t limited to biological sources of energy—”

“We might have some very useful friends,” Jeremy said. “There’s something to be said for
Sh’u Maz
, you know. It gave them peace for a long time

Sally laughed. “Oh, you
are
a round-eye, aren’t you?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” he asked, baffled. “And hell, you’re half round-eye yourself.”

“More than half, but I’m East Asian enough to know that what
Sustained Harmony
actually means is everyone doing what they’re told, and filling out the forms and standing in line and then doing it all over again . . . over and over and over . . . with Grandfather as official Tin God . . . which is the sort of Confucian claptrap my ancestors left Hiroshima Prefecture to get away from. And we didn’t have it as bad as the Chinese, and even the Chinese didn’t have as bad a case as the Martians.”

Jeremy went on, “They’re smart enough not to fight much, anyway.
That
sort of Sustained Harmony doen’t sound so bad.”

“No, they’re smart enough not to fight if it doesn’t look like a good idea. If they had weapons that gave an overwhelming advantage, they’d—sensibly and intelligently—use ’em. These are the people who think infecting criminals with parasitic grubs is model penology and funny as hell to watch, too, and who use the same word for ‘cop’ and ‘bandit’ and ‘soldier.’ And the same words for ‘ruler’ and ‘despot.’ And the closest you can come to saying ‘liberty’ in Demotic is ‘not subject to official sanction.’ ”

Jeremy winced. “Well, Teyud’s a good sort; I like her. Quite a bit, in fact.”

“Teyud’s an honest mercenary. She stays bought. And she’s got more of a sense of humor than any other Martian I’ve met, and she’s interested in things. That doesn’t mean she’d be safe with a hundred-megawatt orbital laser or a thermonuke. Hell,
we’re
not safe with that stuff and Terrans average a lot higher on the milk-of-human-kindness quotient than Martians do; we just got too obsessed with space travel to kill each other off. So far. If the ancients hadn’t given us an interesting couple of planets to explore and squabble over—”

“And the ancients themselves to worry about,” he put in.

“—and that, odds are we’d have destroyed Earth by now.”

Jeremy looked back toward the ruins. Suddenly his abstract love of knowledge looked as if it had unpleasantly practical applications.

Mars, The Lost City of Rema-Dza
May 11, 2000 AD

Teyud watched as the winch groaned, hauling the
Traveler
stern-first through the gap in the great russet wall. It had taken some searching to find a suitable building with a break big enough to take the landship without being enlarged, but this was perfect; the interior was large enough that they didn’t have to dismount the mast, and the street outside was broad and aligned with the prevailing east-west winds, so they could scoot away quickly at need. The intact roof made it easy to exclude predators.

At a guess it had been a gas storage tank; the simple building was similar to those used for that purpose even today, a square exterior with a hollow cylinder inside, topped by a movable dome, and the interior was utterly bare except for a layer of drifted sand. Probably an explosion after it was abandoned had broken a wall, one of which was usually left a little weaker than the others, to focus the effects of any such accident.

And there was an intact thousand-foot tower nearby, one that didn’t have a
dhwar
rookery; that would do for a lookout. She wished for a moment that she could hand her viewer over for the scouts she planned to keep on duty up there every hour of the night and day, but it would take far too long to familiarize it with a new user of a distinct genetic pattern, and be too stressful for the recipient.

Possibly fatal, in fact, and they had already had annoying crew losses; more would depress morale. This was similar to an
atanj
game, where you had to reach the Victory Conditions without driving your pieces to defection . . . but then, it
was
known as the Game of Life. They would have to make do with the cheaper, less capable commercial systems.

When the landship was well within, the crew trotted back out, carrying a heavy cable over their shoulders. Baid tu-Or oversaw its anchoring to a thick stub of solid wall across the abandoned boulevard, and its covering with sand. With that in place they could use the engine-driven winch to pull the ship out into the street in a matter of moments.

That done, Teyud personally supervised those assigned to mask the tracks of the
Traveler
’s wheels, easy enough with sand as fine and friable as that of the Deep Beyond. It would be impossible to conceal that the landship had headed into the ruined city, but they could mask which streets and turns it had taken.

I do not believe those two ships abandoned the chase. Not unless they destroyed each other over the prospect of seizing our possessions, and randomness seldom falls out so conveniently
.

Jeremy came up to her, still sweating from the effort he’d put into helping, even though the temperature was mild—quite close to the freezing point of water. He sank down on a piece of wall, and she squatted on her haunches; that put their heads near enough on a level for easy conversation.

Her nostrils twitched. His scent was strong, yes, but also oddly mild in a musky sort of way—less salty than that of a Real Worlder. He swigged thirstily from a vessel, and offered it to her. She accepted and sipped politely though the water was bland, of low mineral content as Terrans preferred. But water was, after all, water; to despise it was to despise life, and that was to welcome death. When she returned the flask, she looked at his face and blinked; they had seldom approached this closely.

“Permission for contact?” she said.

Granted
, he replied with a side-flick of his gaze; execution of the gesture was flawless, save for the twitch that his small immobile ears could not perform.

Teyud reached out and touched the side of his cheek briefly;
there was a bristly sensation, not quite like anything she’d felt before. Not exactly unpleasant, but . . . strange.

“Fascinating,” she said. “I had heard that this was so, but never observed it. There is
hair
growing on your
face
. Hair of easily perceptible size, nearly equivalent to your scalp.”

He nodded. “It’s common to Terrans.” He gave a wry grimace that she couldn’t quite place. “And similar hair grows on other parts of our bodies, as well.”

“Fascinating,” she repeated for emphasis.

And slightly grotesque
, she thought: Her own people had only the finest down anywhere but the head.
Grotesque but interesting. So is his manner of speech. His Demotic is fluent, but this English influences his usage, as the High Tongue does mine
.